“Yes, he says it is just as it should be.” And Jurgis, in his relief,
sank down into a chair.
“Are you sure of it?” he gasped, and made Szedvilas translate question
after question. He could not hear it often enough; he could not ask
with enough variations. Yes, they had bought the house, they had really
bought it. It belonged to them, they had only to pay the money and it
would be all right. Then Jurgis covered his face with his hands, for
there were tears in his eyes, and he felt like a fool. But he had had
such a horrible fright; strong man as he was, it left him almost too
weak to stand up.
The lawyer explained that the rental was a form—the property was said
to be merely rented until the last payment had been made, the purpose
being to make it easier to turn the party out if he did not make the
payments. So long as they paid, however, they had nothing to fear, the
house was all theirs.
Jurgis was so grateful that he paid the half dollar the lawyer asked
without winking an eyelash, and then rushed home to tell the news to
the family. He found Ona in a faint and the babies screaming, and the
whole house in an uproar—for it had been believed by all that he had
gone to murder the agent. It was hours before the excitement could be
calmed; and all through that cruel night Jurgis would wake up now and
then and hear Ona and her stepmother in the next room, sobbing softly
to themselves.
CHAPTER V
They had bought their home. It was hard for them to realize that the
wonderful house was theirs to move into whenever they chose. They spent
all their time thinking about it, and what they were going to put into
it. As their week with Aniele was up in three days, they lost no time
in getting ready. They had to make some shift to furnish it, and every
instant of their leisure was given to discussing this.
A person who had such a task before him would not need to look very far
in Packingtown—he had only to walk up the avenue and read the signs, or
get into a streetcar, to obtain full information as to pretty much
everything a human creature could need. It was quite touching, the zeal
of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for. Did
the person wish to smoke? There was a little discourse about cigars,
showing him exactly why the Thomas Jefferson Five-cent Perfecto was the
only cigar worthy of the name. Had he, on the other hand, smoked too
much? Here was a remedy for the smoking habit, twenty-five doses for a
quarter, and a cure absolutely guaranteed in ten doses. In innumerable
ways such as this, the traveler found that somebody had been busied to
make smooth his paths through the world, and to let him know what had
been done for him. In Packingtown the advertisements had a style all of
their own, adapted to the peculiar population. One would be tenderly
solicitous. “Is your wife pale?” it would inquire. “Is she discouraged,
does she drag herself about the house and find fault with everything?
Why do you not tell her to try Dr. Lanahan’s Life Preservers?” Another
would be jocular in tone, slapping you on the back, so to speak. “Don’t
be a chump!” it would exclaim. “Go and get the Goliath Bunion Cure.”
“Get a move on you!” would chime in another. “It’s easy, if you wear
the Eureka Two-fifty Shoe.”
Among these importunate signs was one that had caught the attention of
the family by its pictures. It showed two very pretty little birds
building themselves a home; and Marija had asked an acquaintance to
read it to her, and told them that it related to the furnishing of a
house. “Feather your nest,” it ran—and went on to say that it could
furnish all the necessary feathers for a four-room nest for the
ludicrously small sum of seventy-five dollars. The particularly
important thing about this offer was that only a small part of the
money need be had at once—the rest one might pay a few dollars every
month. Our friends had to have some furniture, there was no getting
away from that; but their little fund of money had sunk so low that
they could hardly get to sleep at night, and so they fled to this as
their deliverance. There was more agony and another paper for Elzbieta
to sign, and then one night when Jurgis came home, he was told the
breathless tidings that the furniture had arrived and was safely stowed
in the house: a parlor set of four pieces, a bedroom set of three
pieces, a dining room table and four chairs, a toilet set with
beautiful pink roses painted all over it, an assortment of crockery,
also with pink roses—and so on. One of the plates in the set had been
found broken when they unpacked it, and Ona was going to the store the
first thing in the morning to make them change it; also they had
promised three saucepans, and there had only two come, and did Jurgis
think that they were trying to cheat them?
The next day they went to the house; and when the men came from work
they ate a few hurried mouthfuls at Aniele’s, and then set to work at
the task of carrying their belongings to their new home. The distance
was in reality over two miles, but Jurgis made two trips that night,
each time with a huge pile of mattresses and bedding on his head, with
bundles of clothing and bags and things tied up inside. Anywhere else
in Chicago he would have stood a good chance of being arrested; but the
policemen in Packingtown were apparently used to these informal
movings, and contented themselves with a cursory examination now and
then. It was quite wonderful to see how fine the house looked, with all
the things in it, even by the dim light of a lamp: it was really home,
and almost as exciting as the placard had described it. Ona was fairly
dancing, and she and Cousin Marija took Jurgis by the arm and escorted
him from room to room, sitting in each chair by turns, and then
insisting that he should do the same. One chair squeaked with his great
weight, and they screamed with fright, and woke the baby and brought
everybody running. Altogether it was a great day; and tired as they
were, Jurgis and Ona sat up late, contented simply to hold each other
and gaze in rapture about the room. They were going to be married as
soon as they could get everything settled, and a little spare money put
by; and this was to be their home—that little room yonder would be
theirs!
It was in truth a never-ending delight, the fixing up of this house.
They had no money to spend for the pleasure of spending, but there were
a few absolutely necessary things, and the buying of these was a
perpetual adventure for Ona. It must always be done at night, so that
Jurgis could go along; and even if it were only a pepper cruet, or half
a dozen glasses for ten cents, that was enough for an expedition. On
Saturday night they came home with a great basketful of things, and
spread them out on the table, while every one stood round, and the
children climbed up on the chairs, or howled to be lifted up to see.
There were sugar and salt and tea and crackers, and a can of lard and a
milk pail, and a scrubbing brush, and a pair of shoes for the second
oldest boy, and a can of oil, and a tack hammer, and a pound of nails.
These last were to be driven into the walls of the kitchen and the
bedrooms, to hang things on; and there was a family discussion as to
the place where each one was to be driven. Then Jurgis would try to
hammer, and hit his fingers because the hammer was too small, and get
mad because Ona had refused to let him pay fifteen cents more and get a
bigger hammer; and Ona would be invited to try it herself, and hurt her
thumb, and cry out, which necessitated the thumb’s being kissed by
Jurgis. Finally, after every one had had a try, the nails would be
driven, and something hung up. Jurgis had come home with a big packing
box on his head, and he sent Jonas to get another that he had bought.
He meant to take one side out of these tomorrow, and put shelves in
them, and make them into bureaus and places to keep things for the
bedrooms. The nest which had been advertised had not included feathers
for quite so many birds as there were in this family.
They had, of course, put their dining table in the kitchen, and the
dining room was used as the bedroom of Teta Elzbieta and five of her
children. She and the two youngest slept in the only bed, and the other
three had a mattress on the floor. Ona and her cousin dragged a
mattress into the parlor and slept at night, and the three men and the
oldest boy slept in the other room, having nothing but the very level
floor to rest on for the present. Even so, however, they slept
soundly—it was necessary for Teta Elzbieta to pound more than once on
the door at a quarter past five every morning. She would have ready a
great pot full of steaming black coffee, and oatmeal and bread and
smoked sausages; and then she would fix them their dinner pails with
more thick slices of bread with lard between them—they could not afford
butter—and some onions and a piece of cheese, and so they would tramp
away to work.
This was the first time in his life that he had ever really worked, it
seemed to Jurgis; it was the first time that he had ever had anything
to do which took all he had in him. Jurgis had stood with the rest up
in the gallery and watched the men on the killing beds, marveling at
their speed and power as if they had been wonderful machines; it
somehow never occurred to one to think of the flesh-and-blood side of
it—that is, not until he actually got down into the pit and took off
his coat. Then he saw things in a different light, he got at the inside
of them. The pace they set here, it was one that called for every
faculty of a man—from the instant the first steer fell till the
sounding of the noon whistle, and again from half-past twelve till
heaven only knew what hour in the late afternoon or evening, there was
never one instant’s rest for a man, for his hand or his eye or his
brain. Jurgis saw how they managed it; there were portions of the work
which determined the pace of the rest, and for these they had picked
men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed frequently. You
might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked under the eye
of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called
“speeding up the gang,” and if any man could not keep up with the pace,
there were hundreds outside begging to try.
Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It saved him the
necessity of flinging his arms about and fidgeting as he did in most
work. He would laugh to himself as he ran down the line, darting a
glance now and then at the man ahead of him. It was not the pleasantest
work one could think of, but it was necessary work; and what more had a
man the right to ask than a chance to do something useful, and to get
good pay for doing it?
So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free way; very much to
his surprise, he found that it had a tendency to get him into trouble.
For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing.
He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out—that most of
the men _hated_ their work. It seemed strange, it was even terrible,
when you came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it was
certainly the fact—they hated their work. They hated the bosses and
they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole
neighborhood—even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter
and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it;
it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten. When Jurgis would
ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and
content themselves with saying, “Never mind, you stay here and see for
yourself.”
One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he
was told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question
would only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a
fool. There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union who came to
see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and
the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of
Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end
Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it
would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by
little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop
to the habit of “speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a
lessening of the pace, for there were some, they said, who could not
keep up with it, whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with
such ideas as this—he could do the work himself, and so could the rest
of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t
do it, let them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books,
and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he
had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for
himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to
listen to him holler.
Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by
Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned
the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart
because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the
yards begging for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a
worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from home when he was
twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to read. And he
was a faithful man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a
month, if only you had made him understand what you wanted him to do in
the meantime. And now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with
no more place in the world than a sick dog. He had his home, as it
happened, and some one who would care for him if he never got a job;
but his son could not help thinking, suppose this had not been the
case. Antanas Rudkus had been into every building in Packingtown by
this time, and into nearly every room; he had stood mornings among the
crowd of applicants till the very policemen had come to know his face
and to tell him to go home and give it up. He had been likewise to all
the stores and saloons for a mile about, begging for some little thing
to do; and everywhere they had ordered him out, sometimes with curses,
and not once even stopping to ask him a question.
So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis’ faith
in things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was
hunting a job—and it was yet wider when he finally got it. For one
evening the old man came home in a great state of excitement, with the
tale that he had been approached by a man in one of the corridors of
the pickle rooms of Durham’s, and asked what he would pay to get a job.
He had not known what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on
with matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get him a job,
provided that he were willing to pay one-third of his wages for it. Was
he a boss? Antanas had asked; to which the man had replied that that
was nobody’s business, but that he could do what he said.
Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them
and asked what this meant. The friend, who was named Tamoszius
Kuszleika, was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds,
and he listened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all
surprised. They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft.
It was simply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income.
After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were
simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—the bosses grafted off
the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the
superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft
off the boss. Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the
situation. Here was Durham’s, for instance, owned by a man who was
trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in
the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades
like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one
driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much
work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against
each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man
lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than
he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of
jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about
it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a
dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any
honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old
Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant
had left to his son, along with his millions.
Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there long
enough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so there
was no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and did
like all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to
make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would
soon find out his error—for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good
work. You could lay that down for a rule—if you met a man who was
rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to
Jurgis’ father by the boss, _he_ would rise; the man who told tales and
spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own
business and did his work—why, they would “speed him up” till they had
worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.
Jurgis went home with his head buzzing. Yet he could not bring himself
to believe such things—no, it could not be so. Tamoszius was simply
another of the grumblers. He was a man who spent all his time fiddling;
and he would go to parties at night and not get home till sunrise, and
so of course he did not feel like work. Then, too, he was a puny little
chap; and so he had been left behind in the race, and that was why he
was sore. And yet so many strange things kept coming to Jurgis’ notice
every day!
He tried to persuade his father to have nothing to do with the offer.
But old Antanas had begged until he was worn out, and all his courage
was gone; he wanted a job, any sort of a job. So the next day he went
and found the man who had spoken to him, and promised to bring him a
third of all he earned; and that same day he was put to work in
Durham’s cellars. It was a “pickle room,” where there was never a dry
spot to stand upon, and so he had to take nearly the whole of his first
week’s earnings to buy him a pair of heavy-soled boots. He was a
“squeedgie” man; his job was to go about all day with a long-handled
mop, swabbing up the floor. Except that it was damp and dark, it was
not an unpleasant job, in summer.
Now Antanas Rudkus was the meekest man that God ever put on earth; and
so Jurgis found it a striking confirmation of what the men all said,
that his father had been at work only two days before he came home as
bitter as any of them, and cursing Durham’s with all the power of his
soul. For they had set him to cleaning out the traps; and the family
sat round and listened in wonder while he told them what that meant. It
seemed that he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef
for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men
with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken
to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach,
they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the
balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they
set Antanas with his mop slopping the “pickle” into a hole that
connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever;
and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all
the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every
few days it was the old man’s task to clean these out, and shovel their
contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!
This was the experience of Antanas; and then there came also Jonas and
Marija with tales to tell. Marija was working for one of the
independent packers, and was quite beside herself and outrageous with
triumph over the sums of money she was making as a painter of cans. But
one day she walked home with a pale-faced little woman who worked
opposite to her, Jadvyga Marcinkus by name, and Jadvyga told her how
she, Marija, had chanced to get her job. She had taken the place of an
Irishwoman who had been working in that factory ever since any one
could remember. For over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary Dennis
was her name, and a long time ago she had been seduced, and had a
little boy; he was a cripple, and an epileptic, but still he was all
that she had in the world to love, and they had lived in a little room
alone somewhere back of Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had
had consumption, and all day long you might hear her coughing as she
worked; of late she had been going all to pieces, and when Marija came,
the “forelady” had suddenly decided to turn her off. The forelady had
to come up to a certain standard herself, and could not stop for sick
people, Jadvyga explained. The fact that Mary had been there so long
had not made any difference to her—it was doubtful if she even knew
that, for both the forelady and the superintendent were new people,
having only been there two or three years themselves. Jadvyga did not
know what had become of the poor creature; she would have gone to see
her, but had been sick herself. She had pains in her back all the time,
Jadvyga explained, and feared that she had womb trouble. It was not fit
work for a woman, handling fourteen-pound cans all day.
It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by
the misfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with
hams from the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing
rooms. The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about
threescore hams on each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a
ton. On the uneven floor it was a task for a man to start one of these
trucks, unless he was a giant; and when it was once started he
naturally tried his best to keep it going. There was always the boss
prowling about, and if there was a second’s delay he would fall to
cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such, who could not understand
what was said to them, the bosses were wont to kick about the place
like so many dogs. Therefore these trucks went for the most part on the
run; and the predecessor of Jonas had been jammed against the wall by
one and crushed in a horrible and nameless manner.
All of these were sinister incidents; but they were trifles compared to
what Jurgis saw with his own eyes before long. One curious thing he had
noticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts;
which was the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to
come a “slunk” calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows
that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is
not fit for food. A good many of these came every day to the packing
houses—and, of course, if they had chosen, it would have been an easy
matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food. But
for the saving of time and fodder, it was the law that cows of that
sort came along with the others, and whoever noticed it would tell the
boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government
inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of
the cow would be cleaned out, and entrails would have vanished; it was
Jurgis’ task to slide them into the trap, calves and all, and on the
floor below they took out these “slunk” calves, and butchered them for
meat, and used even the skins of them.
One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the
last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,
Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this
injured man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the
government inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two
of men on the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand
cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains from far states,
and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and
some with gored sides; there were some that had died, from what cause
no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness
and silence. “Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had
a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds,
where the gang proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike
nonchalance which said plainer than any words that it was a matter of
everyday routine. It took a couple of hours to get them out of the way,
and in the end Jurgis saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest
of the meat, being carefully scattered here and there so that they
could not be identified. When he came home that night he was in a very
somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who
had laughed at him for his faith in America.
CHAPTER VI
Jurgis and Ona were very much in love; they had waited a long time—it
was now well into the second year, and Jurgis judged everything by the
criterion of its helping or hindering their union. All his thoughts
were there; he accepted the family because it was a part of Ona. And he
was interested in the house because it was to be Ona’s home. Even the
tricks and cruelties he saw at Durham’s had little meaning for him just
then, save as they might happen to affect his future with Ona.
The marriage would have been at once, if they had had their way; but
this would mean that they would have to do without any wedding feast,
and when they suggested this they came into conflict with the old
people. To Teta Elzbieta especially the very suggestion was an
affliction. What! she would cry. To be married on the roadside like a
parcel of beggars! No! No!—Elzbieta had some traditions behind her; she
had been a person of importance in her girlhood—had lived on a big
estate and had servants, and might have married well and been a lady,
but for the fact that there had been nine daughters and no sons in the
family. Even so, however, she knew what was decent, and clung to her
traditions with desperation. They were not going to lose all caste,
even if they had come to be unskilled laborers in Packingtown; and that
Ona had even talked of omitting a _veselija_ was enough to keep her
stepmother lying awake all night. It was in vain for them to say that
they had so few friends; they were bound to have friends in time, and
then the friends would talk about it. They must not give up what was
right for a little money—if they did, the money would never do them any
good, they could depend upon that. And Elzbieta would call upon Dede
Antanas to support her; there was a fear in the souls of these two,
lest this journey to a new country might somehow undermine the old home
virtues of their children. The very first Sunday they had all been
taken to mass; and poor as they were, Elzbieta had felt it advisable to
invest a little of her resources in a representation of the babe of
Bethlehem, made in plaster, and painted in brilliant colors. Though it
was only a foot high, there was a shrine with four snow-white steeples,
and the Virgin standing with her child in her arms, and the kings and
shepherds and wise men bowing down before him. It had cost fifty cents;
but Elzbieta had a feeling that money spent for such things was not to
be counted too closely, it would come back in hidden ways. The piece
was beautiful on the parlor mantel, and one could not have a home
without some sort of ornament.
The cost of the wedding feast would, of course, be returned to them;
but the problem was to raise it even temporarily. They had been in the
neighborhood so short a time that they could not get much credit, and
there was no one except Szedvilas from whom they could borrow even a
little. Evening after evening Jurgis and Ona would sit and figure the
expenses, calculating the term of their separation. They could not
possibly manage it decently for less than two hundred dollars, and even
though they were welcome to count in the whole of the earnings of
Marija and Jonas, as a loan, they could not hope to raise this sum in
less than four or five months. So Ona began thinking of seeking
employment herself, saying that if she had even ordinarily good luck,
she might be able to take two months off the time. They were just
beginning to adjust themselves to this necessity, when out of the clear
sky there fell a thunderbolt upon them—a calamity that scattered all
their hopes to the four winds.
About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family,
consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was
Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before
long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first
subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its
history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called,
proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their
blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage—she must have been
eighty—and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums,
she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived
in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element,
and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people
might about weddings and holidays.
The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they had
bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about
fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint,
which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The
house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed
to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen
hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred,
when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son
belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up
exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest
material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about
nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word
as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all—she
and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had
fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as
high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not
to marry, they had been able to pay for the house.
Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this
remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was “fooling
the company.” Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the
houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought
them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed—if it were
only by a single month—they would lose the house and all that they had
paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they
often get a chance to do that? _Dieve!_ (Grandmother Majauszkiene
raised her hands.) They did it—how often no one could say, but
certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew
anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here
ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it.
And had it ever been sold before? _Susimilkie!_ Why, since it had been
built, no less than four families that their informant could name had
tried to buy it and failed. She would tell them a little about it.
The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of
different nationalities—there had been a representative of several
races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother
Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as
she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district;
the workers had all been Germans then—skilled cattle butchers that the
packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as
cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the
Irish—there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a
regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here,
enough to run all the unions and the police force and get all the
graft; but most of those who were working in the packing houses had
gone away at the next drop in wages—after the big strike. The Bohemians
had come then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man
Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn
that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never
again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every
city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work
and high wages at the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and
old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and
grinding them to pieces and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had
come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the
Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks.
Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother
Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear.
It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher, and it
was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that
everything else was higher too. They were like rats in a trap, that was
the truth; and more of them were piling in every day. By and by they
would have their revenge, though, for the thing was getting beyond
human endurance, and the people would rise and murder the packers.
Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some such strange thing;
another son of hers was working in the mines of Siberia, and the old
lady herself had made speeches in her time—which made her seem all the
more terrible to her present auditors.
They called her back to the story of the house. The German family had
been a good sort. To be sure there had been a great many of them, which
was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the
father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half
paid for the house. But he had been killed in an elevator accident in
Durham’s.
Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too;
the husband drank and beat the children—the neighbors could hear them
shrieking any night. They were behind with their rent all the time, but
the company was good to them; there was some politics back of that,
Grandmother Majauszkiene could not say just what, but the Laffertys had
belonged to the “War Whoop League,” which was a sort of political club
of all the thugs and rowdies in the district; and if you belonged to
that, you could never be arrested for anything. Once upon a time old
Lafferty had been caught with a gang that had stolen cows from several
of the poor people of the neighborhood and butchered them in an old
shanty back of the yards and sold them. He had been in jail only three
days for it, and had come out laughing, and had not even lost his place
in the packing house. He had gone all to ruin with the drink, however,
and lost his power; one of his sons, who was a good man, had kept him
and the family up for a year or two, but then he had got sick with
consumption.
That was another thing, Grandmother Majauszkiene interrupted
herself—this house was unlucky. Every family that lived in it, some one
was sure to get consumption. Nobody could tell why that was; there must
be something about the house, or the way it was built—some folks said
it was because the building had been begun in the dark of the moon.
There were dozens of houses that way in Packingtown. Sometimes there
would be a particular room that you could point out—if anybody slept in
that room he was just as good as dead. With this house it had been the
Irish first; and then a Bohemian family had lost a child of it—though,
to be sure, that was uncertain, since it was hard to tell what was the
matter with children who worked in the yards. In those days there had
been no law about the age of children—the packers had worked all but
the babies. At this remark the family looked puzzled, and Grandmother
Majauszkiene again had to make an explanation—that it was against the
law for children to work before they were sixteen. What was the sense
of that? they asked. They had been thinking of letting little
Stanislovas go to work. Well, there was no need to worry, Grandmother
Majauszkiene said—the law made no difference except that it forced
people to lie about the ages of their children. One would like to know
what the lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no
possible means of support except the children, and the law provided
them no other way of getting a living. Very often a man could get no
work in Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place
easily; there was always some new machine, by which the packers could
get as much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a
man, and for a third of the pay.
To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family
that had died. That was after they had been there nearly four years,
and this woman had had twins regularly every year—and there had been
more than you could count when they moved in. After she died the man
would go to work all day and leave them to shift for themselves—the
neighbors would help them now and then, for they would almost freeze to
death. At the end there were three days that they were alone, before it
was found out that the father was dead. He was a “floorsman” at
Jones’s, and a wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a
pillar. Then the children had been taken away, and the company had sold
the house that very same week to a party of emigrants.
So this grim old woman went on with her tale of horrors. How much of it
was exaggeration—who could tell? It was only too plausible. There was
that about consumption, for instance. They knew nothing about
consumption whatever, except that it made people cough; and for two
weeks they had been worrying about a coughing-spell of Antanas. It
seemed to shake him all over, and it never stopped; you could see a red
stain wherever he had spit upon the floor.
And yet all these things were as nothing to what came a little later.
They had begun to question the old lady as to why one family had been
unable to pay, trying to show her by figures that it ought to have been
possible; and Grandmother Majauszkiene had disputed their figures—“You
say twelve dollars a month; but that does not include the interest.”
Then they stared at her. “Interest!” they cried.
“Interest on the money you still owe,” she answered.
“But we don’t have to pay any interest!” they exclaimed, three or four
at once. “We only have to pay twelve dollars each month.”
And for this she laughed at them. “You are like all the rest,” she
said; “they trick you and eat you alive. They never sell the houses
without interest. Get your deed, and see.”
Then, with a horrible sinking of the heart, Teta Elzbieta unlocked her
bureau and brought out the paper that had already caused them so many
agonies. Now they sat round, scarcely breathing, while the old lady,
who could read English, ran over it. “Yes,” she said, finally, “here it
is, of course: ‘With interest thereon monthly, at the rate of seven per
cent per annum.’”
And there followed a dead silence. “What does that mean?” asked Jurgis
finally, almost in a whisper.
“That means,” replied the other, “that you have to pay them seven
dollars next month, as well as the twelve dollars.”
Then again there was not a sound. It was sickening, like a nightmare,
in which suddenly something gives way beneath you, and you feel
yourself sinking, sinking, down into bottomless abysses. As if in a
flash of lightning they saw themselves—victims of a relentless fate,
cornered, trapped, in the grip of destruction. All the fair structure
of their hopes came crashing about their ears.—And all the time the old
woman was going on talking. They wished that she would be still; her
voice sounded like the croaking of some dismal raven. Jurgis sat with
his hands clenched and beads of perspiration on his forehead, and there
was a great lump in Ona’s throat, choking her. Then suddenly Teta
Elzbieta broke the silence with a wail, and Marija began to wring her
hands and sob, “_Ai! Ai! Beda man!_”
All their outcry did them no good, of course. There sat Grandmother
Majauszkiene, unrelenting, typifying fate. No, of course it was not
fair, but then fairness had nothing to do with it. And of course they
had not known it. They had not been intended to know it. But it was in
the deed, and that was all that was necessary, as they would find when
the time came.
Somehow or other they got rid of their guest, and then they passed a
night of lamentation. The children woke up and found out that something
was wrong, and they wailed and would not be comforted. In the morning,
of course, most of them had to go to work, the packing houses would not
stop for their sorrows; but by seven o’clock Ona and her stepmother
were standing at the door of the office of the agent. Yes, he told
them, when he came, it was quite true that they would have to pay
interest. And then Teta Elzbieta broke forth into protestations and
reproaches, so that the people outside stopped and peered in at the
window. The agent was as bland as ever. He was deeply pained, he said.
He had not told them, simply because he had supposed they would
understand that they had to pay interest upon their debt, as a matter
of course.
So they came away, and Ona went down to the yards, and at noontime saw
Jurgis and told him. Jurgis took it stolidly—he had made up his mind to
it by this time. It was part of fate; they would manage it somehow—he
made his usual answer, “I will work harder.” It would upset their plans
for a time; and it would perhaps be necessary for Ona to get work after
all. Then Ona added that Teta Elzbieta had decided that little
Stanislovas would have to work too. It was not fair to let Jurgis and
her support the family—the family would have to help as it could.
Previously Jurgis had scouted this idea, but now knit his brows and
nodded his head slowly—yes, perhaps it would be best; they would all
have to make some sacrifices now.
So Ona set out that day to hunt for work; and at night Marija came home
saying that she had met a girl named Jasaityte who had a friend that
worked in one of the wrapping rooms in Brown’s, and might get a place
for Ona there; only the forelady was the kind that takes presents—it
was no use for any one to ask her for a place unless at the same time
they slipped a ten-dollar bill into her hand. Jurgis was not in the
least surprised at this now—he merely asked what the wages of the place
would be. So negotiations were opened, and after an interview Ona came
home and reported that the forelady seemed to like her, and had said
that, while she was not sure, she thought she might be able to put her
at work sewing covers on hams, a job at which she would earn as much as
eight or ten dollars a week. That was a bid, so Marija reported, after
consulting her friend; and then there was an anxious conference at
home. The work was done in one of the cellars, and Jurgis did not want
Ona to work in such a place; but then it was easy work, and one could
not have everything. So in the end Ona, with a ten-dollar bill burning
a hole in her palm, had another interview with the forelady.
Meantime Teta Elzbieta had taken Stanislovas to the priest and gotten a
certificate to the effect that he was two years older than he was; and
with it the little boy now sallied forth to make his fortune in the
world. It chanced that Durham had just put in a wonderful new lard
machine, and when the special policeman in front of the time station
saw Stanislovas and his document, he smiled to himself and told him to
go—“Czia! Czia!” pointing. And so Stanislovas went down a long stone
corridor, and up a flight of stairs, which took him into a room lighted
by electricity, with the new machines for filling lard cans at work in
it. The lard was finished on the floor above, and it came in little
jets, like beautiful, wriggling, snow-white snakes of unpleasant odor.
There were several kinds and sizes of jets, and after a certain precise
quantity had come out, each stopped automatically, and the wonderful
machine made a turn, and took the can under another jet, and so on,
until it was filled neatly to the brim, and pressed tightly, and
smoothed off. To attend to all this and fill several hundred cans of
lard per hour, there were necessary two human creatures, one of whom
knew how to place an empty lard can on a certain spot every few
seconds, and the other of whom knew how to take a full lard can off a
certain spot every few seconds and set it upon a tray.
And so, after little Stanislovas had stood gazing timidly about him for
a few minutes, a man approached him, and asked what he wanted, to which
Stanislovas said, “Job.” Then the man said “How old?” and Stanislovas
answered, “Sixtin.” Once or twice every year a state inspector would
come wandering through the packing plants, asking a child here and
there how old he was; and so the packers were very careful to comply
with the law, which cost them as much trouble as was now involved in
the boss’s taking the document from the little boy, and glancing at it,
and then sending it to the office to be filed away. Then he set some
one else at a different job, and showed the lad how to place a lard can
every time the empty arm of the remorseless machine came to him; and so
was decided the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his
destiny till the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year
after year, it was fated that he should stand upon a certain square
foot of floor from seven in the morning until noon, and again from
half-past twelve till half-past five, making never a motion and
thinking never a thought, save for the setting of lard cans. In summer
the stench of the warm lard would be nauseating, and in winter the cans
would all but freeze to his naked little fingers in the unheated
cellar. Half the year it would be dark as night when he went in to
work, and dark as night again when he came out, and so he would never
know what the sun looked like on weekdays. And for this, at the end of
the week, he would carry home three dollars to his family, being his
pay at the rate of five cents per hour—just about his proper share of
the total earnings of the million and three-quarters of children who
are now engaged in earning their livings in the United States.
And meantime, because they were young, and hope is not to be stifled
before its time, Jurgis and Ona were again calculating; for they had
discovered that the wages of Stanislovas would a little more than pay
the interest, which left them just about as they had been before! It
would be but fair to them to say that the little boy was delighted with
his work, and at the idea of earning a lot of money; and also that the
two were very much in love with each other.
CHAPTER VII
All summer long the family toiled, and in the fall they had money
enough for Jurgis and Ona to be married according to home traditions of
decency. In the latter part of November they hired a hall, and invited
all their new acquaintances, who came and left them over a hundred
dollars in debt.
It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it plunged them into an agony
of despair. Such a time, of all times, for them to have it, when their
hearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for their
married life; they loved each other so, and they could not have the
briefest respite! It was a time when everything cried out to them that
they ought to be happy; when wonder burned in their hearts, and leaped
into flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depths of
them, with the awe of love realized—and was it so very weak of them
that they cried out for a little peace? They had opened their hearts,
like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen
upon them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the
world had been so crushed and trampled!
Over them, relentless and savage, there cracked the lash of want; the
morning after the wedding it sought them as they slept, and drove them
out before daybreak to work. Ona was scarcely able to stand with
exhaustion; but if she were to lose her place they would be ruined, and
she would surely lose it if she were not on time that day. They all had
to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence in
sausages and sarsaparilla. All that day he stood at his lard machine,
rocking unsteadily, his eyes closing in spite of him; and he all but
lost his place even so, for the foreman booted him twice to waken him.
It was fully a week before they were all normal again, and meantime,
with whining children and cross adults, the house was not a pleasant
place to live in. Jurgis lost his temper very little, however, all
things considered. It was because of Ona; the least glance at her was
always enough to make him control himself. She was so sensitive—she was
not fitted for such a life as this; and a hundred times a day, when he
thought of her, he would clench his hands and fling himself again at
the task before him. She was too good for him, he told himself, and he
was afraid, because she was his. So long he had hungered to possess
her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the
right; that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no
virtue of his. But he was resolved that she should never find this out,
and so was always on the watch to see that he did not betray any of his
ugly self; he would take care even in little matters, such as his
manners, and his habit of swearing when things went wrong. The tears
came so easily into Ona’s eyes, and she would look at him so
appealingly—it kept Jurgis quite busy making resolutions, in addition
to all the other things he had on his mind. It was true that more
things were going on at this time in the mind of Jurgis than ever had
in all his life before.
He had to protect her, to do battle for her against the horror he saw
about them. He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed she
would be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide her
from the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was
a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not
give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you.
You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you
understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying
to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps
with. The store-keepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of
lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and
telegraph poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation
which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top
to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.
So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful,
for the struggle was so unfair—some had so much the advantage! Here he
was, for instance, vowing upon his knees that he would save Ona from
harm, and only a week later she was suffering atrociously, and from the
blow of an enemy that he could not possibly have thwarted. There came a
day when the rain fell in torrents; and it being December, to be wet
with it and have to sit all day long in one of the cold cellars of
Brown’s was no laughing matter. Ona was a working girl, and did not own
waterproofs and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her on the
streetcar. Now it chanced that this car line was owned by gentlemen who
were trying to make money. And the city having passed an ordinance
requiring them to give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and
first they had made a rule that transfers could be had only when the
fare was paid; and later, growing still uglier, they had made
another—that the passenger must ask for the transfer, the conductor was
not allowed to offer it. Now Ona had been told that she was to get a
transfer; but it was not her way to speak up, and so she merely waited,
following the conductor about with her eyes, wondering when he would
think of her. When at last the time came for her to get out, she asked
for the transfer, and was refused. Not knowing what to make of this,
she began to argue with the conductor, in a language of which he did
not understand a word. After warning her several times, he pulled the
bell and the car went on—at which Ona burst into tears. At the next
corner she got out, of course; and as she had no more money, she had to
walk the rest of the way to the yards in the pouring rain. And so all
day long she sat shivering, and came home at night with her teeth
chattering and pains in her head and back. For two weeks afterward she
suffered cruelly—and yet every day she had to drag herself to her work.
The forewoman was especially severe with Ona, because she believed that
she was obstinate on account of having been refused a holiday the day
after her wedding. Ona had an idea that her “forelady” did not like to
have her girls marry—perhaps because she was old and ugly and unmarried
herself.
There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them.
Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could
they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage
of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that
the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and
doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at
home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was
obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know
that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea
and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned
peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with
aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have
done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any
other sort was to be had? The bitter winter was coming, and they had to
save money to get more clothing and bedding; but it would not matter in
the least how much they saved, they could not get anything to keep them
warm. All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of
cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and
weaving the fiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get
frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not
obtain for love nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas’, recently come
from abroad, had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he
narrated with glee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting
countryman by his boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm
clock, and the boss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that
the price of one was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five.
Upon being asked what the difference was, the man had wound up the
first halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how
the latter made twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked
that he was a sound sleeper, and had better take the more expensive
clock!
There is a poet who sings that
“Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died.”
But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that
comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet
so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the
slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish
that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not
admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told
in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to
excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family
found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and
inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned
money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation
and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect
powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent
gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of
course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had
the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards
set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of
this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up
and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days.
Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he
worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all
day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man’s
cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever
stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a
still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where
his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had
eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet,
and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or
there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it,
and learned that it was a regular thing—it was the saltpeter. Every one
felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for
that sort of work. The sores would never heal—in the end his toes would
drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw
the suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to
get a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and
coughing, until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap,
like the One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him
on the floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor
old man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the
end, he never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and
cough, day and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a
time when there was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke
through—which was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one
night he had a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his
mouth. The family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a
dollar to be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the
doctor did not say this so that the old man could hear, for he was
still clinging to the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be
better, and could go back to his job. The company had sent word to him
that they would keep it for him—or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the
men to come one Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas
continued to believe it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at
last one morning they found him stiff and cold. Things were not going
well with them then, and though it nearly broke Teta Elzbieta’s heart,
they were forced to dispense with nearly all the decencies of a
funeral; they had only a hearse, and one hack for the women and
children; and Jurgis, who was learning things fast, spent all Sunday
making a bargain for these, and he made it in the presence of
witnesses, so that when the man tried to charge him for all sorts of
incidentals, he did not have to pay. For twenty-five years old Antanas
Rudkus and his son had dwelt in the forest together, and it was hard to
part in this way; perhaps it was just as well that Jurgis had to give
all his attention to the task of having a funeral without being
bankrupted, and so had no time to indulge in memories and grief.
Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summer
long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them
lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow
and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it
was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle
that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes.
All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing
machine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the
replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking
among them, seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual
harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came
cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing
relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or
later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and
then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there
was a chance for a new hand.
The new hands were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the
packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came,
literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each
other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to
them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before the
sun rose, an hour before the work began. Sometimes their faces froze,
sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all
together—but still they came, for they had no other place to go. One
day Durham advertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and
all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging
through the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night
forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards
district—they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other’s laps, toboggan
fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the
police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow,
before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham’s, and the police
reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot. Then Durham’s bosses
picked out twenty of the biggest; the “two hundred” proved to have been
a printer’s error.
Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the
bitter winds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten
or twenty degrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets
would be piled with snowdrifts up to the first-floor windows. The
streets through which our friends had to go to their work were all
unpaved and full of deep holes and gullies; in summer, when it rained
hard, a man might have to wade to his waist to get to his house; and
now in winter it was no joke getting through these places, before light
in the morning and after dark at night. They would wrap up in all they
owned, but they could not wrap up against exhaustion; and many a man
gave out in these battles with the snowdrifts, and lay down and fell
asleep.
And if it was bad for the men, one may imagine how the women and
children fared. Some would ride in the cars, if the cars were running;
but when you are making only five cents an hour, as was little
Stanislovas, you do not like to spend that much to ride two miles. The
children would come to the yards with great shawls about their ears,
and so tied up that you could hardly find them—and still there would be
accidents. One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at
the lard machine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and
screaming with pain. They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously
rubbing his ears; and as they were frozen stiff, it took only two or
three rubs to break them short off. As a result of this, little
Stanislovas conceived a terror of the cold that was almost a mania.
Every morning, when it came time to start for the yards, he would begin
to cry and protest. Nobody knew quite how to manage him, for threats
did no good—it seemed to be something that he could not control, and
they feared sometimes that he would go into convulsions. In the end it
had to be arranged that he always went with Jurgis, and came home with
him again; and often, when the snow was deep, the man would carry him
the whole way on his shoulders. Sometimes Jurgis would be working until
late at night, and then it was pitiful, for there was no place for the
little fellow to wait, save in the doorways or in a corner of the
killing beds, and he would all but fall asleep there, and freeze to
death.
There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well
have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very
little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places—and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had
to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above
the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were
apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned
against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand
upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your
skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old
sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked
again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great
lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the
bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and
ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across
the room to the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that
nearly all of them—all of those who used knives—were unable to wear
gloves, and their arms would be white with frost and their hands would
grow numb, and then of course there would be accidents. Also the air
would be full of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that
you could not see five feet before you; and then, with men rushing
about at the speed they kept up on the killing beds, and all with
butcher knives, like razors, in their hands—well, it was to be counted
as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle.
And yet all this inconvenience they might have put up with, if only it
had not been for one thing—if only there had been some place where they
might eat. Jurgis had either to eat his dinner amid the stench in which
he had worked, or else to rush, as did all his companions, to any one
of the hundreds of liquor stores which stretched out their arms to him.
To the west of the yards ran Ashland Avenue, and here was an unbroken
line of saloons—“Whiskey Row,” they called it; to the north was
Forty-seventh Street, where there were half a dozen to the block, and
at the angle of the two was “Whiskey Point,” a space of fifteen or
twenty acres, and containing one glue factory and about two hundred
saloons.
One might walk among these and take his choice: “Hot pea-soup and
boiled cabbage today.” “Sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Walk in.”
“Bean soup and stewed lamb. Welcome.” All of these things were printed
in many languages, as were also the names of the resorts, which were
infinite in their variety and appeal. There was the “Home Circle” and
the “Cosey Corner”; there were “Firesides” and “Hearthstones” and
“Pleasure Palaces” and “Wonderlands” and “Dream Castles” and “Love’s
Delights.” Whatever else they were called, they were sure to be called
“Union Headquarters,” and to hold out a welcome to workingmen; and
there was always a warm stove, and a chair near it, and some friends to
laugh and talk with. There was only one condition attached,—you must
drink. If you went in not intending to drink, you would be put out in
no time, and if you were slow about going, like as not you would get
your head split open with a beer bottle in the bargain. But all of the
men understood the convention and drank; they believed that by it they
were getting something for nothing—for they did not need to take more
than one drink, and upon the strength of it they might fill themselves
up with a good hot dinner. This did not always work out in practice,
however, for there was pretty sure to be a friend who would treat you,
and then you would have to treat him. Then some one else would come
in—and, anyhow, a few drinks were good for a man who worked hard. As he
went back he did not shiver so, he had more courage for his task; the
deadly brutalizing monotony of it did not afflict him so,—he had ideas
while he worked, and took a more cheerful view of his circumstances. On
the way home, however, the shivering was apt to come on him again; and
so he would have to stop once or twice to warm up against the cruel
cold. As there were hot things to eat in this saloon too, he might get
home late to his supper, or he might not get home at all. And then his
wife might set out to look for him, and she too would feel the cold;
and perhaps she would have some of the children with her—and so a whole
family would drift into drinking, as the current of a river drifts
downstream. As if to complete the chain, the packers all paid their men
in checks, refusing all requests to pay in coin; and where in
Packingtown could a man go to have his check cashed but to a saloon,
where he could pay for the favor by spending a part of the money?
From all of these things Jurgis was saved because of Ona. He never
would take but the one drink at noontime; and so he got the reputation
of being a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons, and
had to drift about from one to another. Then at night he would go
straight home, helping Ona and Stanislovas, or often putting the former
on a car. And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudge several
blocks, and come staggering back through the snowdrifts with a bag of
coal upon his shoulder. Home was not a very attractive place—at least
not this winter. They had only been able to buy one stove, and this was
a small one, and proved not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the
bitterest weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all day, and for
the children when they could not get to school. At night they would sit
huddled round this stove, while they ate their supper off their laps;
and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after which they would
all crawl into their beds to get warm, after putting out the fire to
save the coal. Then they would have some frightful experiences with the
cold. They would sleep with all their clothes on, including their
overcoats, and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing they
owned; the children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yet even
so they could not keep warm. The outside ones would be shivering and
sobbing, crawling over the others and trying to get down into the
center, and causing a fight. This old house with the leaky
weatherboards was a very different thing from their cabins at home,
with great thick walls plastered inside and outside with mud; and the
cold which came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the
room. They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything was
black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside, or perhaps there
would be deathlike stillness—and that would be worse yet. They could
feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them
with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower,
and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come;
a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power
primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to
chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they
would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear
them if they cried out; there would be no help, no mercy. And so on
until morning—when they would go out to another day of toil, a little
weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be
shaken from the tree.
CHAPTER VIII
Yet even by this deadly winter the germ of hope was not to be kept from
sprouting in their hearts. It was just at this time that the great
adventure befell Marija.
The victim was Tamoszius Kuszleika, who played the violin. Everybody
laughed at them, for Tamoszius was petite and frail, and Marija could
have picked him up and carried him off under one arm. But perhaps that
was why she fascinated him; the sheer volume of Marija’s energy was
overwhelming. That first night at the wedding Tamoszius had hardly
taken his eyes off her; and later on, when he came to find that she had
really the heart of a baby, her voice and her violence ceased to
terrify him, and he got the habit of coming to pay her visits on Sunday
afternoons. There was no place to entertain company except in the
kitchen, in the midst of the family, and Tamoszius would sit there with
his hat between his knees, never saying more than half a dozen words at
a time, and turning red in the face before he managed to say those;
until finally Jurgis would clap him upon the back, in his hearty way,
crying, “Come now, brother, give us a tune.” And then Tamoszius’ face
would light up and he would get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin,
and play. And forthwith the soul of him would flame up and become
eloquent—it was almost an impropriety, for all the while his gaze would
be fixed upon Marija’s face, until she would begin to turn red and
lower her eyes. There was no resisting the music of Tamoszius, however;
even the children would sit awed and wondering, and the tears would run
down Teta Elzbieta’s cheeks. A wonderful privilege it was to be thus
admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the
ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life.
Then there were other benefits accruing to Marija from this
friendship—benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamoszius
big money to come and make music on state occasions; and also they
would invite him to parties and festivals, knowing well that he was too
good-natured to come without his fiddle, and that having brought it, he
could be made to play while others danced. Once he made bold to ask
Marija to accompany him to such a party, and Marija accepted, to his
great delight—after which he never went anywhere without her, while if
the celebration were given by friends of his, he would invite the rest
of the family also. In any case Marija would bring back a huge
pocketful of cakes and sandwiches for the children, and stories of all
the good things she herself had managed to consume. She was compelled,
at these parties, to spend most of her time at the refreshment table,
for she could not dance with anybody except other women and very old
men; Tamoszius was of an excitable temperament, and afflicted with a
frantic jealousy, and any unmarried man who ventured to put his arm
about the ample waist of Marija would be certain to throw the orchestra
out of tune.
It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able
to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights. The
family was too poor and too hardworked to make many acquaintances; in
Packingtown, as a rule, people know only their near neighbors and
shopmates, and so the place is like a myriad of little country
villages. But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to
travel and widen her horizon; and so each week there would be new
personalities to talk about,—how so-and-so was dressed, and where she
worked, and what she got, and whom she was in love with; and how this
man had jilted his girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl,
and what had passed between them; and how another man beat his wife,
and spent all her earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes.
Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to
talk about what one knows.
It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding,
that Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin case in the
street and spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms.
She told them all about it the next day, and fairly cried with
happiness, for she said that Tamoszius was a lovely man. After that he
no longer made love to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for
hours in the kitchen, blissfully happy in each other’s arms; it was the
tacit convention of the family to know nothing of what was going on in
that corner.
They were planning to be married in the spring, and have the garret of
the house fixed up, and live there. Tamoszius made good wages; and
little by little the family were paying back their debt to Marija, so
she ought soon to have enough to start life upon—only, with her
preposterous softheartedness, she would insist upon spending a good
part of her money every week for things which she saw they needed.
Marija was really the capitalist of the party, for she had become an
expert can painter by this time—she was getting fourteen cents for
every hundred and ten cans, and she could paint more than two cans
every minute. Marija felt, so to speak, that she had her hand on the
throttle, and the neighborhood was vocal with her rejoicings.
Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow; one
could not count upon such good fortune forever—there were accidents
that always happened. But Marija was not to be prevailed upon, and went
on planning and dreaming of all the treasures she was going to have for
her home; and so, when the crash did come, her grief was painful to
see.
For her canning factory shut down! Marija would about as soon have
expected to see the sun shut down—the huge establishment had been to
her a thing akin to the planets and the seasons. But now it was shut!
And they had not given her any explanation, they had not even given her
a day’s warning; they had simply posted a notice one Saturday that all
hands would be paid off that afternoon, and would not resume work for
at least a month! And that was all that there was to it—her job was
gone!
It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to
Marija’s inquiries; after that there was always a slack. Sometimes the
factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no
telling—it had been known to stay closed until way into the summer. The
prospects were bad at present, for truckmen who worked in the
storerooms said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the
firm could not have found room for another week’s output of cans. And
they had turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still
worse sign, since it meant that there were no orders to be filled. It
was all a swindle, can-painting, said the girls—you were crazy with
delight because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and
saving half of it; but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you
were out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought.
Marija came home, and because she was a person who could not rest
without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and
then she set out to search Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As
nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls
hunting work, it will be readily understood that Marija did not find
any. Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this
failed she even traveled over into the far-distant regions near the
lake front, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged
there for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not
know English.
The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They
had always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for
work at seven o’clock, although there was almost never any work to be
done till the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some
cattle had come over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven
o’clock, which was bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack
season, they would perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till
late in the afternoon. And so they would have to loaf around, in a
place where the thermometer might be twenty degrees below zero! At
first one would see them running about, or skylarking with each other,
trying to keep warm; but before the day was over they would become
quite chilled through and exhausted, and, when the cattle finally came,
so near frozen that to move was an agony. And then suddenly the place
would spring into activity, and the merciless “speeding-up” would
begin!
There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours’ work to his credit—which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general
average was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a
week; and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the
killing bed till one o’clock, or perhaps even three or four o’clock, in
the afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the
very end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they
went home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even
twelve or one o’clock, and without a single instant for a bite of
supper. The men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers
would be holding off for better prices—if they could scare the shippers
into thinking that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get
their own terms. For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the
yards was much above the market price—and you were not allowed to bring
your own fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in
the day, now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers
would buy their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would
come into play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the
same day they were bought. There was no use kicking about this—there
had been one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only
to be told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest
chance of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked
till nearly one o’clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on
the killing bed at seven o’clock.
All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work
the balance of the hour—he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And
on the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for
that—though often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen
minutes before the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to
the end of the day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour—for
“broken time.” A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no
work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of
every day was a sort of lottery—a struggle, all but breaking into open
war between the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job
through and the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the
bosses for this, though the truth to be told it was not always their
fault; for the packers kept them frightened for their lives—and when
one was in danger of falling behind the standard, what was easier than
to catch up by making the gang work awhile “for the church”? This was a
savage witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to
him. Old man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so
whenever they were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men
would wink at each other and say, “Now we’re working for the church!”
One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers’ union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this of
the men—that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America,
he got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase “a free country.”
The delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to
get every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis
signified that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was
by, all the working members of his family had union cards, and wore
their union buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they
were quite blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant
an end to all their troubles.
But only ten days after she had joined, Marija’s canning factory closed
down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why
the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended a
meeting Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; she said what was in her, and all the pounding of the
chairman’s gavel and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not
prevail. Quite apart from her own troubles she was boiling over with a
general sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of
the packers, and what she thought of a world where such things were
allowed to happen; and then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the
shock of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and
the meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the
election of a recording secretary.
Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis had gone with the desire to
get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done; but this
attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a
victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little Irishman, with big staring eyes and
a wild aspect, a “hoister” by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back
in the far-distant past Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience,
and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he
had done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked he
caught his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer
and closer—which was trying, because his teeth were so bad. Jurgis did
not mind that, only he was frightened. The method of operation of the
higher intelligences was Tom Finnegan’s theme, and he desired to find
out if Jurgis had ever considered that the representation of things in
their present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more
elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the
developing of these things; and then, becoming confidential, Mr.
Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. “If ye have
iver had onything to do wid shperrits,” said he, and looked inquiringly
at Jurgis, who kept shaking his head. “Niver mind, niver mind,”
continued the other, “but their influences may be operatin’ upon ye;
it’s shure as I’m tellin’ ye, it’s them that has the reference to the
immejit surroundin’s that has the most of power. It was vouchsafed to
me in me youthful days to be acquainted with shperrits” and so Tommy
Finnegan went on, expounding a system of philosophy, while the
perspiration came out on Jurgis’ forehead, so great was his agitation
and embarrassment. In the end one of the men, seeing his plight, came
over and rescued him; but it was some time before he was able to find
any one to explain things to him, and meanwhile his fear lest the
strange little Irishman should get him cornered again was enough to
keep him dodging about the room the whole evening.
He never missed a meeting, however. He had picked up a few words of
English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They
were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men declaiming at
once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all
desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he
understood that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the
time of his disillusionment, Jurgis had sworn to trust no man, except
in his own family; but here he discovered that he had brothers in
affliction, and allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so
the struggle became a kind of crusade. Jurgis had always been a member
of the church, because it was the right thing to be, but the church had
never touched him, he left all that for the women. Here, however, was a
new religion—one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of
him; and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a
missionary. There were many nonunion men among the Lithuanians, and
with these he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them
the right. Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and
Jurgis, alas, was not always patient! He forgot how he himself had been
blind, a short time ago—after the fashion of all crusaders since the
original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force
of arms.
CHAPTER IX
One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that
Jurgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was
going on at the meetings, and to be able to take part in them, and so
he began to look about him, and to try to pick up words. The children,
who were at school, and learning fast, would teach him a few; and a
friend loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read
them to him. Then Jurgis became sorry that he could not read himself;
and later on in the winter, when some one told him that there was a
night school that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every
evening that he got home from the yards in time, he would go to the
school; he would go even if he were in time for only half an hour. They
were teaching him both to read and to speak English—and they would have
taught him other things, if only he had had a little time.
Also the union made another great difference with him—it made him begin
to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with
him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic; its
affairs were every man’s affairs, and every man had a real say about
them. In other words, in the union Jurgis learned to talk politics. In
the place where he had come from there had not been any politics—in
Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the
lightning and the hail. “Duck, little brother, duck,” the wise old
peasants would whisper; “everything passes away.” And when Jurgis had
first come to America he had supposed that it was the same. He had
heard people say that it was a free country—but what did that mean? He
found that here, precisely as in Russia, there were rich men who owned
everything; and if one could not find any work, was not the hunger he
began to feel the same sort of hunger?
When Jurgis had been working about three weeks at Brown’s, there had
come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman,
and who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization
papers and become a citizen. Jurgis did not know what that meant, but
the man explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost
him anything, and it would get him half a day off, with his pay just
the same; and then when election time came he would be able to vote—and
there was something in that. Jurgis was naturally glad to accept, and
so the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused
for the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get
married he could not get it; and as for a holiday with pay just the
same—what power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew! However, he
went with the man, who picked up several other newly landed immigrants,
Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks, and took them all outside, where stood
a great four-horse tallyho coach, with fifteen or twenty men already in
it. It was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party
had a merry time, with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they
drove downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building, in
which they interviewed an official, who had the papers all ready, with
only the names to be filled in. So each man in turn took an oath of
which he did not understand a word, and then was presented with a
handsome ornamented document with a big red seal and the shield of the
United States upon it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the
Republic and the equal of the President himself.
A month or two later Jurgis had another interview with this same man,
who told him where to go to “register.” And then finally, when election
day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to
vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night
watchman took Jurgis and the rest of his flock into the back room of a
saloon, and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and
then gave each two dollars, and took them to the polling place, where
there was a policeman on duty especially to see that they got through
all right. Jurgis felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home
and met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him,
offering to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been
accepted.
And now in the union Jurgis met men who explained all this mystery to
him; and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its
government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who
ruled it, and got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there
were two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the
one got the office which bought the most votes. Now and then, the
election was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In
the stockyards this was only in national and state elections, for in
local elections the Democratic Party always carried everything. The
ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little
Irishman named Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in
the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said; it was
his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an
enormously rich man—he had a hand in all the big graft in the
neighborhood. It was Scully, for instance, who owned that dump which
Jurgis and Ona had seen the first day of their arrival. Not only did he
own the dump, but he owned the brick factory as well, and first he took
out the clay and made it into bricks, and then he had the city bring
garbage to fill up the hole, so that he could build houses to sell to
the people. Then, too, he sold the bricks to the city, at his own
price, and the city came and got them in its own wagons. And also he
owned the other hole near by, where the stagnant water was; and it was
he who cut the ice and sold it; and what was more, if the men told
truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the water, and he had built
the ice-house out of city lumber, and had not had to pay anything for
that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and there had been a
scandal; but Scully had hired somebody to confess and take all the
blame, and then skip the country. It was said, too, that he had built
his brick-kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on the city
payroll while they did it; however, one had to press closely to get
these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike
Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal
to a job any time at the packing houses; and also he employed a good
many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them
the highest wages. This gave him many friends—all of whom he had gotten
together into the “War Whoop League,” whose clubhouse you might see
just outside of the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the
biggest club, in all Chicago; and they had prizefights every now and
then, and cockfights and even dogfights. The policemen in the district
all belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they
sold tickets for them. The man that had taken Jurgis to be naturalized
was one of these “Indians,” as they were called; and on election day
there would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in
their pockets and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was
another thing, the men said—all the saloon-keepers had to be “Indians,”
and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on
Sundays, nor have any gambling at all. In the same way Scully had all
the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of
the city graft in the stockyards district; he was building a block of
flats somewhere up on Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it
for him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city
inspector of water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but
somebody was still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was
a barkeeper at the War Whoop Café—and maybe he could make it
uncomfortable for any tradesman who did not stand in with Scully!
Even the packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them
pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people’s man, and
boasted of it boldly when election day came. The packers had wanted a
bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till
they had seen Scully; and it was the same with “Bubbly Creek,” which
the city had threatened to make the packers cover over, till Scully had
come to their aid. “Bubbly Creek” is an arm of the Chicago River, and
forms the southern boundary of the yards: all the drainage of the
square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a
great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is
blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and
chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange
transformations, which are the cause of its name; it is constantly in
motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans
disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will
rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide.
Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek
looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many
times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished
temporarily. The packers used to leave the creek that way, till every
now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and
the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however,
an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scows,
to make lard out of; then the packers took the cue, and got out an
injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it themselves. The banks
of “Bubbly Creek” are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the
packers gather and clean.
And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip
of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole
billions of gallons of the city’s water. The newspapers had been full
of this scandal—once there had even been an investigation, and an
actual uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the
thing went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry,
with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government
inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they
were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these
hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of
the packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to
certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no
authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the
city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three
henchmen of the local political machine![2] And shortly afterward one
of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers
which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors,
and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were
left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and
so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of
kerosene—and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the
packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the
whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even
a pretense of any interference with the graft. There was said to be two
thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone;
and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the
trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and
hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a
fancy grade of lard.
[2] Rules and Regulations for the Inspection of Livestock and Their
Products. United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal
Industries, Order No. 125:—
Section 1. Proprietors of slaughterhouses, canning, salting,
packing, or rendering establishments engaged in the slaughtering of
cattle, sheep, or swine, or the packing of any of their products,
_the carcasses or products of which are to become subjects of
interstate or foreign commerce_, shall make application to the
Secretary of Agriculture for inspection of said animals and their
products....
Section 15. Such rejected or condemned animals shall at once be
removed by the owners from the pens containing animals which have
been inspected and found to be free from disease and fit for human
food, and _shall be disposed of in accordance with the laws,
ordinances, and regulations of the state and municipality in which
said rejected or condemned animals are located_....
Section 25. A microscopic examination for trichinae shall be made
of all swine products exported to countries requiring such
examination. _No microscopic examination will be made of hogs
slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination shall be
confined to those intended for the export trade._
Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those
who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met
a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new
crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher
for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning
only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place
would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they
must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled
and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed
on “whisky-malt,” the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the
men called “steerly”—which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job
killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would
burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man’s
sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was
he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It
was stuff such as this that made the “embalmed beef” that had killed
several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the
Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was
old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.
Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen
stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and
who worked in the canning rooms at Durham’s; and so Jurgis learned a
few things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had
become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at
Durham’s; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it
did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised “potted
chicken,”—and it was like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers,
through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a
secret process for making chickens chemically—who knows? said Jurgis’
friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat
of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends
of veal, when they had any. They put these up in several grades, and
sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out
of the same hopper. And then there was “potted game” and “potted
grouse,” “potted ham,” and “deviled ham”—de-vyled, as the men called
it. “De-vyled” ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that
were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with
chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and
corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard
cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All
this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make
it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had
been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis’ informant; but it
was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits
had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the
cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly; and
where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery
stores of a continent, and “oxidized” it by a forced-air process, to
take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks
in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill
horses in the yards—ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation
the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses
were being canned. Now it was against the law to kill horses in
Packingtown, and the law was really complied with—for the present, at
any rate. Any day, however, one might see sharp-horned and
shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and yet what a job you
would have to get the public to believe that a good part of what it
buys for lamb and mutton is really goat’s flesh!
There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might
have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the
workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with
Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the
things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the
lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each
one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its
way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them
all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And
the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he
could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of
them about on his own person—generally he had only to hold out his
hand.
There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas
had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of
horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a
truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him
out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the
acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it
had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be
criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count
them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off
pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread
out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the
midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms
the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was
renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried
two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind
of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out
the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in
the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time
limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five
years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even
sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had
to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had
to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten
their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned
meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut
represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping
machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the
pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part
of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were
called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead
cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down
through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not
built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every
few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the
one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in
a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any,
however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking
rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of
a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards,
and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and
in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor,
their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they
were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth
exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but
the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!
CHAPTER X
During the early part of the winter the family had had money enough to
live and a little over to pay their debts with; but when the earnings
of Jurgis fell from nine or ten dollars a week to five or six, there
was no longer anything to spare. The winter went, and the spring came,
and found them still living thus from hand to mouth, hanging on day by
day, with literally not a month’s wages between them and starvation.
Marija was in despair, for there was still no word about the reopening
of the canning factory, and her savings were almost entirely gone. She
had had to give up all idea of marrying then; the family could not get
along without her—though for that matter she was likely soon to become
a burden even upon them, for when her money was all gone, they would
have to pay back what they owed her in board. So Jurgis and Ona and
Teta Elzbieta would hold anxious conferences until late at night,
trying to figure how they could manage this too without starving.
Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they
might never have nor expect a single instant’s respite from worry, a
single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money.
They would no sooner escape, as by a miracle, from one difficulty, than
a new one would come into view. In addition to all their physical
hardships, there was thus a constant strain upon their minds; they were
harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear. This was in
truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it
was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all
the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to
keep alive?
There seemed never to be an end to the things they had to buy and to
the unforeseen contingencies. Once their water pipes froze and burst;
and when, in their ignorance, they thawed them out, they had a
terrifying flood in their house. It happened while the men were away,
and poor Elzbieta rushed out into the street screaming for help, for
she did not even know whether the flood could be stopped, or whether
they were ruined for life. It was nearly as bad as the latter, they
found in the end, for the plumber charged them seventy-five cents an
hour, and seventy-five cents for another man who had stood and watched
him, and included all the time the two had been going and coming, and
also a charge for all sorts of material and extras. And then again,
when they went to pay their January’s installment on the house, the
agent terrified them by asking them if they had had the insurance
attended to yet. In answer to their inquiry he showed them a clause in
the deed which provided that they were to keep the house insured for
one thousand dollars, as soon as the present policy ran out, which
would happen in a few days. Poor Elzbieta, upon whom again fell the
blow, demanded how much it would cost them. Seven dollars, the man
said; and that night came Jurgis, grim and determined, requesting that
the agent would be good enough to inform him, once for all, as to all
the expenses they were liable for. The deed was signed now, he said,
with sarcasm proper to the new way of life he had learned—the deed was
signed, and so the agent had no longer anything to gain by keeping
quiet. And Jurgis looked the fellow squarely in the eye, and so the
fellow wasted no time in conventional protests, but read him the deed.
They would have to renew the insurance every year; they would have to
pay the taxes, about ten dollars a year; they would have to pay the
water tax, about six dollars a year—(Jurgis silently resolved to shut
off the hydrant). This, besides the interest and the monthly
installments, would be all—unless by chance the city should happen to
decide to put in a sewer or to lay a sidewalk. Yes, said the agent,
they would have to have these, whether they wanted them or not, if the
city said so. The sewer would cost them about twenty-two dollars, and
the sidewalk fifteen if it were wood, twenty-five if it were cement.
So Jurgis went home again; it was a relief to know the worst, at any
rate, so that he could no more be surprised by fresh demands. He saw
now how they had been plundered; but they were in for it, there was no
turning back. They could only go on and make the fight and win—for
defeat was a thing that could not even be thought of.
When the springtime came, they were delivered from the dreadful cold,
and that was a great deal; but in addition they had counted on the
money they would not have to pay for coal—and it was just at this time
that Marija’s board began to fail. Then, too, the warm weather brought
trials of its own; each season had its trials, as they found. In the
spring there were cold rains, that turned the streets into canals and
bogs; the mud would be so deep that wagons would sink up to the hubs,
so that half a dozen horses could not move them. Then, of course, it
was impossible for any one to get to work with dry feet; and this was
bad for men that were poorly clad and shod, and still worse for women
and children. Later came midsummer, with the stifling heat, when the
dingy killing beds of Durham’s became a very purgatory; one time, in a
single day, three men fell dead from sunstroke. All day long the rivers
of hot blood poured forth, until, with the sun beating down, and the
air motionless, the stench was enough to knock a man over; all the old
smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat—for there was
never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were
caked with the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing
beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of
them fifty feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent,
the most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in
uncleanness. There was not even a place where a man could wash his
hands, and the men ate as much raw blood as food at dinnertime. When
they were at work they could not even wipe off their faces—they were as
helpless as newly born babes in that respect; and it may seem like a
small matter, but when the sweat began to run down their necks and
tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a torture like being
burned alive. Whether it was the slaughterhouses or the dumps that were
responsible, one could not say, but with the hot weather there
descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies; there
could be no describing this—the houses would be black with them. There
was no escaping; you might provide all your doors and windows with
screens, but their buzzing outside would be like the swarming of bees,
and whenever you opened the door they would rush in as if a storm of
wind were driving them.
Perhaps the summertime suggests to you thoughts of the country, visions
of green fields and mountains and sparkling lakes. It had no such
suggestion for the people in the yards. The great packing machine
ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men
and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing,
not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue
waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have
been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then
they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing
machine, and tied to it for life. The managers and superintendents and
clerks of Packingtown were all recruited from another class, and never
from the workers; they scorned the workers, the very meanest of them. A
poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in Durham’s for twenty
years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for
twenty more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman,
as far removed as the poles from the most skilled worker on the killing
beds; he would dress differently, and live in another part of the town,
and come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make
sure that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was
due to the repulsiveness of the work; at any rate, the people who
worked with their hands were a class apart, and were made to feel it.
In the late spring the canning factory started up again, and so once
more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on
a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however; for a month or
two later a dreadful calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three
days after she had begun work as a can-painter, she lost her job.
It was a long story. Marija insisted that it was because of her
activity in the union. The packers, of course, had spies in all the
unions, and in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain
number of the union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So
every week they received reports as to what was going on, and often
they knew things before the members of the union knew them. Any one who
was considered to be dangerous by them would find that he was not a
favorite with his boss; and Marija had been a great hand for going
after the foreign people and preaching to them. However that might be,
the known facts were that a few weeks before the factory closed, Marija
had been cheated out of her pay for three hundred cans. The girls
worked at a long table, and behind them walked a woman with pencil and
notebook, keeping count of the number they finished. This woman was, of
course, only human, and sometimes made mistakes; when this happened,
there was no redress—if on Saturday you got less money than you had
earned, you had to make the best of it. But Marija did not understand
this, and made a disturbance. Marija’s disturbances did not mean
anything, and while she had known only Lithuanian and Polish, they had
done no harm, for people only laughed at her and made her cry. But now
Marija was able to call names in English, and so she got the woman who
made the mistake to disliking her. Probably, as Marija claimed, she
made mistakes on purpose after that; at any rate, she made them, and
the third time it happened Marija went on the warpath and took the
matter first to the forelady, and when she got no satisfaction there,
to the superintendent. This was unheard-of presumption, but the
superintendent said he would see about it, which Marija took to mean
that she was going to get her money; after waiting three days, she went
to see the superintendent again. This time the man frowned, and said
that he had not had time to attend to it; and when Marija, against the
advice and warning of every one, tried it once more, he ordered her
back to her work in a passion. Just how things happened after that
Marija was not sure, but that afternoon the forelady told her that her
services would not be any longer required. Poor Marija could not have
been more dumfounded had the woman knocked her over the head; at first
she could not believe what she heard, and then she grew furious and
swore that she would come anyway, that her place belonged to her. In
the end she sat down in the middle of the floor and wept and wailed.
It was a cruel lesson; but then Marija was headstrong—she should have
listened to those who had had experience. The next time she would know
her place, as the forelady expressed it; and so Marija went out, and
the family faced the problem of an existence again.