A Copper Kettle

ONE day, the smelter naryadtchik, or foreman, walked into our office and said that he noticed signs of restlessness among the Kirghiz furnace men and that he believed they were preparing for a strike.

‘You are silly,’ I said; ‘the idea is absurd; in the first place, the Kirghiz do not want anything which they have not already, and, secondly, they are quite incapable of organizing for any concerted action.’

‘That sounds all right,’ said the foreman, ‘and would be all right in ordinary times, but they have been very much upset by the example of the Russians during the last year, and I think they feel they ought to be in the fashion, and call a strike themselves. Bad example is very contagious.’

The Kirghiz were employed around the smelter for the rough unskilled work. The word ‘unskilled’ is the word usually employed for this class of work, but in reality no work is ‘unskilled,’ strictly speaking. Some work requires less judgment than other; but in any work, no matter how rough, the difference between practiced laborers and raw hands makes the whole difference between success and failure, no matter how watchful the foreman may be.

The presence of the Kirghiz at the works, at all, was an anomaly in the Kirghiz régime, for, by nature, the Kirghiz hate manual work, hate to dirty their hands, hate regular hours, hate discipline, will have nothing to do with it. But the works had been in operation for fifty years and more, and there had grown up with it and in it a body of Kirghiz who had adopted the life and to whom it seemed a natural mode of existence. At the start they were no doubt very poor, probably considered undesirables by their own kin, and life was very hard for them; I suppose that the idea of a regular supply of tallow and brick tea appeared very attractive, and they succumbed to the temptation and put their names on the payroll. With their brother Kirghiz they lost caste; but, as the works grew in age and size, they became used to it and their children grew up in it, and gradually more and more of them joined the ranks, until, with furnace men, copper-miners, coal-miners, limeburners, brick-makers, and carriers, there were over five thousand of them working for us. Especially since our arrival and the development of the works on a much enlarged scale, the working Kirghiz had grown in number and power and in respect for the dignity of work for work’s sake. They were actually beginning to take a pride in their technical responsibilities, and in some respects their fidelity was extraordinary.

The fidelity of the carriers was especially remarkable. Once a Kirghiz (unable of course to read or write) has touched the pen with which you sign his name at the bottom of a bill of lading, the goods you have entrusted to him are as safe as if they were in the vault of a modern bank building. Poor ragged bundle of cotton batting, he stands outside the office door waiting for his precious bill of lading, he and his party of five or six ragged bundles like himself, with a string of forty or fifty camels. Each camel is tied to a light wooden sled pinned together with wooden pins. They have just come up from the copper room, where each sled has been loaded with bar copper wrapped in fibre matting, and made fast with rope or rawhide. The animals are huge and unwieldy, desperately hard to control; no one but a Kirghiz can do anything with them at all; but one virtue they have — they can look a blizzard in the face without blinking an eye; and this is very useful in a country where the winter is seven or eight months long. In fact, but for the camel, the Kirghiz would be helpless in the winter; horses must be fed, and they have no oats; cattle are quite useless, and the camel saves the situation; he yells horribly and spits often while the shafts are being fastened to his shoulders but he finally moves off and faces the storm, and with a few wisps of hay and a few pints of water he will reach the railway in the end.

The bill of lading is now ready and you call the carrier into your office. The bill calls for the delivery of twelve hundred bars of copper to the agent at Petropavlovsk within thirty days — a distance of nearly five hundred miles. You pay him the stipulated advance, he touches the pen while you sign for him, he folds the document, places it in his wallet, tucks the wallet into one of the many folds of wadded clothing which cover him, puts on his malachai (huge fur bonnet), which entirely covers his head and neck and as much of his face as possible, still leaving the eyes free, looks round, says, ‘Kosh, Bai,’ (good-bye, master), and joins his companions outside. They are waiting for him unconcernedly in the driving snow which cuts into you like glass, and slowly the cavalcade moves off. It is growing dark and you are almost afraid to try to find your way in the storm to your house, which is not more than two hundred yards down the road; but these men drift away in the gathering dusk, into the desert where every track is swept away by the storm, straight into the eye of the wind, with their five-hundred-mile walk before them. But they will reach the end somehow, — their faces scarred by the cruel wind, it is true; they will arrive within the allotted time, and they will deliver their precious tale of bars to the agent, and the number will be found correct. Of the hundred thousand bars which we dispatched we lost only two, and for those two the carriers paid in full in cash. This is a loss of two thousandths of one per cent and the loss was immediately made good. If any of our Western transportation systems can show a record of this kind, it has not been my good fortune to discover it.

Our case was not exceptional; through the whole vast expanse of Siberia, similar caravans are crawling across the interminable spaces. The railway has only recently been built, and even now there is only one. If you have not a large business of your own, you can employ one of the forwarding companies; they will accept your goods anywhere and forward them anywhere; if there is loss or damage, it will occur when your goods are on the Western railroad, but not when they are in the hands of these extraordinary carriers.

The quality of fidelity is curiously exhibited in the system of watchmen. If you have any property lying loose anywhere, an unoccupied house or any unprotected property, everything will quickly disappear; but if you put a man at four dollars a month to watch it, everything will be perfectly safe even from the watchman himself. The result is that every one has at least one Kirghiz watchman outside his house at night. Our old watchman was a decrepit old man, with a pleasant smile. He was provided with a rattle which he rattled vigorously if you appeared at night. ‘Smeet nieto’ (I do not sleep), he used to say, as we passed, the only two words of Russian he knew. Most of us used to give him little presents from time to time, so small as to be almost microscopic. Sometimes a stranger might be with us, who did not know our custom, and so passed him by; then the little smiling ‘Smeet nieto’ would murmur rapidly, ‘There goes a rich man, but he does not give me anything’; but he said it in Kirghiz, and of course our friend did not understand a word of it, and the watchman went back to his seat, grunting and mumbling.

The actual pay of the Kirghiz furnace men was twenty-five cents a day, with free quarters, coal, and water. They worked in two shifts of twelve hours each, and our furnaces were of such a form that the work was very real. There were no mechanical laborsaving devices; what we succeeded in doing we accomplished, as our foreman used to say, ‘by main strength and awkwardness.’ The Kirghiz supplied the main strength and we supplied the awkwardness. It may be that they were growing tired of this division of labor; more probably, they were simply demoralized by the unsettling times through which we had lately passed. When the spirit of anarchy is in the air, a certain section of humanity abandons logic and reason, and becomes a prey to any impulse which may catch its fancy. The impulse at this particular moment was to pommel somebody, and we half-a-dozen foreigners seemed to be the nearest vulnerable target.

One very cold morning, no one appeared at the furnaces. The foreman went to the men’s quarters; they refused to move; the strike was on. They then sent up a demand for an increase from their present pay of twenty-five cents per diem to one dollar. This demand was as good as any other to make, and as good as any other to refuse. As strikers, it was impossible to take the Kirghiz seriously, and yet the situation was serious, for the furnaces would soon freeze if not attended to. With two or three others I walked down to their quarters. As soon as we arrived, I saw we had misjudged the situation and had made a mistake. We were instantly surrounded by a yelling mob of impervious, very animated cotton batting. The Kirghiz dresses himself in the winter with layer after layer of quilted cotton, with heavy felt boots up to his thighs, which are further incased in leather boots; his head and neck and most of his face are enveloped in his malachai. In such armor, nothing short of an axe can make any impression on him. He is further protected by a prodigious smell of tallow and wet wool, which is pleasant to his senses, as is the smell of violets to ours. You feel very helpless when a quarter of an acre of such odoriferous tallow perfume hems you in. Especially the mob-particles nearest to you seem to be irritated by your presence; they begin to pull and push and hustle you; they have lost all their attributes of human beings; if you wore to stumble and fall they would pass over you and not know that you were under their feet. If you were to meet any individual of these wriggling units alone on the Steppe, it would go through fire and water to help you; but, as part of the mob, it shows no more sign of intelligence than the units of the armies of locusts which sometimes invade our western plains. Step by step, we managed to steer the mob toward the works, from which poured a little army of men armed with axes, and the mob fled.

When we were back in our own quarters, the head men of the furnaces came in a deputation to see us.

‘Why did you stop work this morning,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know that the furnaces are growing cold?’

‘We want one dollar a day instead of twenty-five cents,’ they said.

‘Well; go back to work first and then come and tell us what you want; if you don’t go back very soon, there will be no work for you to go back to.’

‘The Bai forgets that we are on strike; you cannot go back to work if you are striking; but we want the Bai to give an order that we shall have some credit on our wage-books, so that we can buy some tallow and tea; we don’t want much credit, just enough to last us while we are on strike.’

‘You know you are talking nonsense; go back to your people and tell them to go to work.’

‘The Bai knows best, but our people will be very disappointed when they hear the Bai will neither raise our pay, nor give us credit at the store.

They left; but it was not very long before they appeared again.

‘Bai,’ they said, ‘perhaps we asked for too much when we asked for one dollar a day; we will be satisfied with fifty cents a day.’

‘You are now receiving double the wages you used to get before we came to the works, and we cannot pay any more than we are paying; besides, I do not want to talk to you until you have gone back to work.’

They came back again later.

‘Bai,’ they said, ‘it is very unfortunate and very awkward that during a strike we can get nothing to eat.’

‘It is your own fault,’ I said; ‘go back to work and you will again receive credits on your books.’

‘ But the coal is so bad which the coal carriers leave for us, there is very little of it, and it is full of slate; we are cold and we cannot cook our fat.’

Our ears were deaf to this appeal also, and the next morning they appeared again in a melancholy mood.

‘Bai,’ they said, ‘you see the furnaces are working very badly; Izkak cannot even keep his settler clean of slag. Why don’t you give us what we want?’

‘ I have told you again and again that I will give you nothing until you all go back to work.’

‘At least the Bai will promise to put in a floor in our quarters, so that we do not have to lie on the cold ground.’

‘ I will do nothing until you have all gone back to work.’

They were quite dejected when they left, and quickly returned.

‘At least,’ they said, ‘the Bai will grant us this request. Our copper kettle is quite worn out; will the Bai give us an order for a new kettle?’

It is impossible to maintain a consistent and stern attitude toward such helpless and amiable people. The hustling, pushing mob is forgotten; the frozen furnaces are forgotten; the longplanned strike has come down to a request for a copper kettle.

The order was signed, and they quickly went and bought their kettle and showed it to me in triumph.

‘You have won your strike, have you not?’ I said.

‘Yes, Bai, we are now going back to work.’

‘Well, next time you all want a day off, tell me beforehand and you will not have to go through the trouble of a strike to get it.’

‘Tairjilgassin, djaksi Bai, kosh.’

(Thank you, thank you; the master is very good; good-bye.)