It was especially hard this time, for Ona was to be confined before

long, and Jurgis was trying hard to save up money for this. He had

heard dreadful stories of the midwives, who grow as thick as fleas in

Packingtown; and he had made up his mind that Ona must have a

man-doctor. Jurgis could be very obstinate when he wanted to, and he

was in this case, much to the dismay of the women, who felt that a

man-doctor was an impropriety, and that the matter really belonged to

them. The cheapest doctor they could find would charge them fifteen

dollars, and perhaps more when the bill came in; and here was Jurgis,

declaring that he would pay it, even if he had to stop eating in the

meantime!

Marija had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she

wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of

finding it. Marija could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she

was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would

come home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time,

poor creature; she learned it ten times over. All the family learned it

along with her—that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you

hang on to it, come what will.

Four weeks Marija hunted, and half of a fifth week. Of course she

stopped paying her dues to the union. She lost all interest in the

union, and cursed herself for a fool that she had ever been dragged

into one. She had about made up her mind that she was a lost soul, when

somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got a place as a

“beef-trimmer.” She got this because the boss saw that she had the

muscles of a man, and so he discharged a man and put Marija to do his

work, paying her a little more than half what he had been paying

before.

When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would have scorned such work

as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work was to trim

the meat of those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been told about not

long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people

seldom saw the daylight; beneath her were the chilling rooms, where the

meat was frozen, and above her were the cooking rooms; and so she stood

on an ice-cold floor, while her head was often so hot that she could

scarcely breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred-weight,

while standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy

boots on and the floor always damp and full of puddles, liable to be

thrown out of work indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade,

liable again to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and be worked till

she trembled in every nerve and lost her grip on her slimy knife, and

gave herself a poisoned wound—that was the new life that unfolded

itself before Marija. But because Marija was a human horse she merely

laughed and went at it; it would enable her to pay her board again, and

keep the family going. And as for Tamoszius—well, they had waited a

long time, and they could wait a little longer. They could not possibly

get along upon his wages alone, and the family could not live without

hers. He could come and visit her, and sit in the kitchen and hold her

hand, and he must manage to be content with that. But day by day the

music of Tamoszius’ violin became more passionate and heartbreaking;

and Marija would sit with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all

her body a-tremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the

unborn generations which cried out in her for life.

Marija’s lesson came just in time to save Ona from a similar fate. Ona,

too, was dissatisfied with her place, and had far more reason than

Marija. She did not tell half of her story at home, because she saw it

was a torment to Jurgis, and she was afraid of what he might do. For a

long time Ona had seen that Miss Henderson, the forelady in her

department, did not like her. At first she thought it was the old-time

mistake she had made in asking for a holiday to get married. Then she

concluded it must be because she did not give the forelady a present

occasionally—she was the kind that took presents from the girls, Ona

learned, and made all sorts of discriminations in favor of those who

gave them. In the end, however, Ona discovered that it was even worse

than that. Miss Henderson was a newcomer, and it was some time before

rumor made her out; but finally it transpired that she was a kept

woman, the former mistress of the superintendent of a department in the

same building. He had put her there to keep her quiet, it seemed—and

that not altogether with success, for once or twice they had been heard

quarreling. She had the temper of a hyena, and soon the place she ran

was a witch’s caldron. There were some of the girls who were of her own

sort, who were willing to toady to her and flatter her; and these would

carry tales about the rest, and so the furies were unchained in the

place. Worse than this, the woman lived in a bawdy-house downtown, with

a coarse, red-faced Irishman named Connor, who was the boss of the

loading-gang outside, and would make free with the girls as they went

to and from their work. In the slack seasons some of them would go with

Miss Henderson to this house downtown—in fact, it would not be too much

to say that she managed her department at Brown’s in conjunction with

it. Sometimes women from the house would be given places alongside of

decent girls, and after other decent girls had been turned off to make

room for them. When you worked in this woman’s department the house

downtown was never out of your thoughts all day—there were always

whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the Packingtown rendering

plants at night, when the wind shifted suddenly. There would be stories

about it going the rounds; the girls opposite you would be telling them

and winking at you. In such a place Ona would not have stayed a day,

but for starvation; and, as it was, she was never sure that she could

stay the next day. She understood now that the real reason that Miss

Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and she

knew that the talebearers and the toadies hated her for the same

reason, and were doing their best to make her life miserable.

But there was no place a girl could go in Packingtown, if she was

particular about things of this sort; there was no place in it where a

prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl. Here was a

population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge

of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the

whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave

drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable,

and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery. Things

that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing houses all the

time, and were taken for granted by everybody; only they did not show,

as in the old slavery times, because there was no difference in color

between master and slave.

One morning Ona stayed home, and Jurgis had the man-doctor, according

to his whim, and she was safely delivered of a fine baby. It was an

enormous big boy, and Ona was such a tiny creature herself, that it

seemed quite incredible. Jurgis would stand and gaze at the stranger by

the hour, unable to believe that it had really happened.

The coming of this boy was a decisive event with Jurgis. It made him

irrevocably a family man; it killed the last lingering impulse that he

might have had to go out in the evenings and sit and talk with the men

in the saloons. There was nothing he cared for now so much as to sit

and look at the baby. This was very curious, for Jurgis had never been

interested in babies before. But then, this was a very unusual sort of

a baby. He had the brightest little black eyes, and little black

ringlets all over his head; he was the living image of his father,

everybody said—and Jurgis found this a fascinating circumstance. It was

sufficiently perplexing that this tiny mite of life should have come

into the world at all in the manner that it had; that it should have

come with a comical imitation of its father’s nose was simply uncanny.

Perhaps, Jurgis thought, this was intended to signify that it was his

baby; that it was his and Ona’s, to care for all its life. Jurgis had

never possessed anything nearly so interesting—a baby was, when you

came to think about it, assuredly a marvelous possession. It would grow

up to be a man, a human soul, with a personality all its own, a will of

its own! Such thoughts would keep haunting Jurgis, filling him with all

sorts of strange and almost painful excitements. He was wonderfully

proud of little Antanas; he was curious about all the details of

him—the washing and the dressing and the eating and the sleeping of

him, and asked all sorts of absurd questions. It took him quite a while

to get over his alarm at the incredible shortness of the little

creature’s legs.

Jurgis had, alas, very little time to see his baby; he never felt the

chains about him more than just then. When he came home at night, the

baby would be asleep, and it would be the merest chance if he awoke

before Jurgis had to go to sleep himself. Then in the morning there was

no time to look at him, so really the only chance the father had was on

Sundays. This was more cruel yet for Ona, who ought to have stayed home

and nursed him, the doctor said, for her own health as well as the

baby’s; but Ona had to go to work, and leave him for Teta Elzbieta to

feed upon the pale blue poison that was called milk at the corner

grocery. Ona’s confinement lost her only a week’s wages—she would go to

the factory the second Monday, and the best that Jurgis could persuade

her was to ride in the car, and let him run along behind and help her

to Brown’s when she alighted. After that it would be all right, said

Ona, it was no strain sitting still sewing hams all day; and if she

waited longer she might find that her dreadful forelady had put some

one else in her place. That would be a greater calamity than ever now,

Ona continued, on account of the baby. They would all have to work

harder now on his account. It was such a responsibility—they must not

have the baby grow up to suffer as they had. And this indeed had been

the first thing that Jurgis had thought of himself—he had clenched his

hands and braced himself anew for the struggle, for the sake of that

tiny mite of human possibility.

And so Ona went back to Brown’s and saved her place and a week’s wages;

and so she gave herself some one of the thousand ailments that women

group under the title of “womb trouble,” and was never again a well

person as long as she lived. It is difficult to convey in words all

that this meant to Ona; it seemed such a slight offense, and the

punishment was so out of all proportion, that neither she nor any one

else ever connected the two. “Womb trouble” to Ona did not mean a

specialist’s diagnosis, and a course of treatment, and perhaps an

operation or two; it meant simply headaches and pains in the back, and

depression and heartsickness, and neuralgia when she had to go to work

in the rain. The great majority of the women who worked in Packingtown

suffered in the same way, and from the same cause, so it was not deemed

a thing to see the doctor about; instead Ona would try patent

medicines, one after another, as her friends told her about them. As

these all contained alcohol, or some other stimulant, she found that

they all did her good while she took them; and so she was always

chasing the phantom of good health, and losing it because she was too

poor to continue.

CHAPTER XI

During the summer the packing houses were in full activity again, and

Jurgis made more money. He did not make so much, however, as he had the

previous summer, for the packers took on more hands. There were new men

every week, it seemed—it was a regular system; and this number they

would keep over to the next slack season, so that every one would have

less than ever. Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the

floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work. And how very

cunning a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands, who would

some day come and break their strike; and meantime they were kept so

poor that they could not prepare for the trial!

But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees meant easier

work for any one! On the contrary, the speeding-up seemed to be growing

more savage all the time; they were continually inventing new devices

to crowd the work on—it was for all the world like the thumbscrew of

the mediæval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay

them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery—it was said

that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was

determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day.

In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a

shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers

had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate

of payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this

so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly

desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two

years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break

any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the

canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the

girls’ earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the

indignation at this that they marched out without even a parley, and

organized in the street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere

that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so

they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A

new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike

went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the

end of it the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a

position in a great department store, at a salary of two dollars and a

half a week.

Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no

telling when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been

rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to

fifteen cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn

would come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was

really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef

Trust. And every week the managers of it got together and compared

notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one

standard of efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price

they would pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat

in the country; but that was something he did not understand or care

about.

The only one who was not afraid of a cut was Marija, who congratulated

herself, somewhat naïvely, that there had been one in her place only a

short time before she came. Marija was getting to be a skilled

beef-trimmer, and was mounting to the heights again. During the summer

and fall Jurgis and Ona managed to pay her back the last penny they

owed her, and so she began to have a bank account. Tamoszius had a bank

account also, and they ran a race, and began to figure upon household

expenses once more.

The possession of vast wealth entails cares and responsibilities,

however, as poor Marija found out. She had taken the advice of a friend

and invested her savings in a bank on Ashland Avenue. Of course she

knew nothing about it, except that it was big and imposing—what

possible chance has a poor foreign working girl to understand the

banking business, as it is conducted in this land of frenzied finance?

So Marija lived in a continual dread lest something should happen to

her bank, and would go out of her way mornings to make sure that it was

still there. Her principal thought was of fire, for she had deposited

her money in bills, and was afraid that if they were burned up the bank

would not give her any others. Jurgis made fun of her for this, for he

was a man and was proud of his superior knowledge, telling her that the

bank had fireproof vaults, and all its millions of dollars hidden

safely away in them.

However, one morning Marija took her usual detour, and, to her horror

and dismay, saw a crowd of people in front of the bank, filling the

avenue solid for half a block. All the blood went out of her face for

terror. She broke into a run, shouting to the people to ask what was

the matter, but not stopping to hear what they answered, till she had

come to where the throng was so dense that she could no longer advance.

There was a “run on the bank,” they told her then, but she did not know

what that was, and turned from one person to another, trying in an

agony of fear to make out what they meant. Had something gone wrong

with the bank? Nobody was sure, but they thought so. Couldn’t she get

her money? There was no telling; the people were afraid not, and they

were all trying to get it. It was too early yet to tell anything—the

bank would not open for nearly three hours. So in a frenzy of despair

Marija began to claw her way toward the doors of this building, through

a throng of men, women, and children, all as excited as herself. It was

a scene of wild confusion, women shrieking and wringing their hands and

fainting, and men fighting and trampling down everything in their way.

In the midst of the mêlée Marija recollected that she did not have her

bankbook, and could not get her money anyway, so she fought her way out

and started on a run for home. This was fortunate for her, for a few

minutes later the police reserves arrived.

In half an hour Marija was back, Teta Elzbieta with her, both of them

breathless with running and sick with fear. The crowd was now formed in

a line, extending for several blocks, with half a hundred policemen

keeping guard, and so there was nothing for them to do but to take

their places at the end of it. At nine o’clock the bank opened and

began to pay the waiting throng; but then, what good did that do

Marija, who saw three thousand people before her—enough to take out the

last penny of a dozen banks?

To make matters worse a drizzling rain came up, and soaked them to the

skin; yet all the morning they stood there, creeping slowly toward the

goal—all the afternoon they stood there, heartsick, seeing that the

hour of closing was coming, and that they were going to be left out.

Marija made up her mind that, come what might, she would stay there and

keep her place; but as nearly all did the same, all through the long,

cold night, she got very little closer to the bank for that. Toward

evening Jurgis came; he had heard the story from the children, and he

brought some food and dry wraps, which made it a little easier.

The next morning, before daybreak, came a bigger crowd than ever, and

more policemen from downtown. Marija held on like grim death, and

toward afternoon she got into the bank and got her money—all in big

silver dollars, a handkerchief full. When she had once got her hands on

them her fear vanished, and she wanted to put them back again; but the

man at the window was savage, and said that the bank would receive no

more deposits from those who had taken part in the run. So Marija was

forced to take her dollars home with her, watching to right and left,

expecting every instant that some one would try to rob her; and when

she got home she was not much better off. Until she could find another

bank there was nothing to do but sew them up in her clothes, and so

Marija went about for a week or more, loaded down with bullion, and

afraid to cross the street in front of the house, because Jurgis told

her she would sink out of sight in the mud. Weighted this way she made

her way to the yards, again in fear, this time to see if she had lost

her place; but fortunately about ten per cent of the working people of

Packingtown had been depositors in that bank, and it was not convenient

to discharge that many at once. The cause of the panic had been the

attempt of a policeman to arrest a drunken man in a saloon next door,

which had drawn a crowd at the hour the people were on their way to

work, and so started the “run.”

About this time Jurgis and Ona also began a bank account. Besides

having paid Jonas and Marija, they had almost paid for their furniture,

and could have that little sum to count on. So long as each of them

could bring home nine or ten dollars a week, they were able to get

along finely. Also election day came round again, and Jurgis made half

a week’s wages out of that, all net profit. It was a very close

election that year, and the echoes of the battle reached even to

Packingtown. The two rival sets of grafters hired halls and set off

fireworks and made speeches, to try to get the people interested in the

matter. Although Jurgis did not understand it all, he knew enough by

this time to realize that it was not supposed to be right to sell your

vote. However, as every one did it, and his refusal to join would not

have made the slightest difference in the results, the idea of refusing

would have seemed absurd, had it ever come into his head.

Now chill winds and shortening days began to warn them that the winter

was coming again. It seemed as if the respite had been too short—they

had not had time enough to get ready for it; but still it came,

inexorably, and the hunted look began to come back into the eyes of

little Stanislovas. The prospect struck fear to the heart of Jurgis

also, for he knew that Ona was not fit to face the cold and the

snowdrifts this year. And suppose that some day when a blizzard struck

them and the cars were not running, Ona should have to give up, and

should come the next day to find that her place had been given to some

one who lived nearer and could be depended on?

It was the week before Christmas that the first storm came, and then

the soul of Jurgis rose up within him like a sleeping lion. There were

four days that the Ashland Avenue cars were stalled, and in those days,

for the first time in his life, Jurgis knew what it was to be really

opposed. He had faced difficulties before, but they had been child’s

play; now there was a death struggle, and all the furies were unchained

within him. The first morning they set out two hours before dawn, Ona

wrapped all in blankets and tossed upon his shoulder like a sack of

meal, and the little boy, bundled nearly out of sight, hanging by his

coat-tails. There was a raging blast beating in his face, and the

thermometer stood below zero; the snow was never short of his knees,

and in some of the drifts it was nearly up to his armpits. It would

catch his feet and try to trip him; it would build itself into a wall

before him to beat him back; and he would fling himself into it,

plunging like a wounded buffalo, puffing and snorting in rage. So foot

by foot he drove his way, and when at last he came to Durham’s he was

staggering and almost blind, and leaned against a pillar, gasping, and

thanking God that the cattle came late to the killing beds that day. In

the evening the same thing had to be done again; and because Jurgis

could not tell what hour of the night he would get off, he got a

saloon-keeper to let Ona sit and wait for him in a corner. Once it was

eleven o’clock at night, and black as the pit, but still they got home.

That blizzard knocked many a man out, for the crowd outside begging for

work was never greater, and the packers would not wait long for any

one. When it was over, the soul of Jurgis was a song, for he had met

the enemy and conquered, and felt himself the master of his fate.—So it

might be with some monarch of the forest that has vanquished his foes

in fair fight, and then falls into some cowardly trap in the

night-time.

A time of peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose.

Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the

animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get

upon its feet and run amuck. Then there would be a yell of warning—the

men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping

here and there on the floor, and tumbling over each other. This was bad

enough in the summer, when a man could see; in wintertime it was enough

to make your hair stand up, for the room would be so full of steam that

you could not make anything out five feet in front of you. To be sure,

the steer was generally blind and frantic, and not especially bent on

hurting any one; but think of the chances of running upon a knife,

while nearly every man had one in his hand! And then, to cap the

climax, the floor boss would come rushing up with a rifle and begin

blazing away!

It was in one of these mêlées that Jurgis fell into his trap. That is

the only word to describe it; it was so cruel, and so utterly not to be

foreseen. At first he hardly noticed it, it was such a slight

accident—simply that in leaping out of the way he turned his ankle.

There was a twinge of pain, but Jurgis was used to pain, and did not

coddle himself. When he came to walk home, however, he realized that it

was hurting him a great deal; and in the morning his ankle was swollen

out nearly double its size, and he could not get his foot into his

shoe. Still, even then, he did nothing more than swear a little, and

wrapped his foot in old rags, and hobbled out to take the car. It

chanced to be a rush day at Durham’s, and all the long morning he

limped about with his aching foot; by noontime the pain was so great

that it made him faint, and after a couple of hours in the afternoon he

was fairly beaten, and had to tell the boss. They sent for the company

doctor, and he examined the foot and told Jurgis to go home to bed,

adding that he had probably laid himself up for months by his folly.

The injury was not one that Durham and Company could be held

responsible for, and so that was all there was to it, so far as the

doctor was concerned.

Jurgis got home somehow, scarcely able to see for the pain, and with an

awful terror in his soul, Elzbieta helped him into bed and bandaged his

injured foot with cold water and tried hard not to let him see her

dismay; when the rest came home at night she met them outside and told

them, and they, too, put on a cheerful face, saying it would only be

for a week or two, and that they would pull him through.

When they had gotten him to sleep, however, they sat by the kitchen

fire and talked it over in frightened whispers. They were in for a

siege, that was plainly to be seen. Jurgis had only about sixty dollars

in the bank, and the slack season was upon them. Both Jonas and Marija

might soon be earning no more than enough to pay their board, and

besides that there were only the wages of Ona and the pittance of the

little boy. There was the rent to pay, and still some on the furniture;

there was the insurance just due, and every month there was sack after

sack of coal. It was January, midwinter, an awful time to have to face

privation. Deep snows would come again, and who would carry Ona to her

work now? She might lose her place—she was almost certain to lose it.

And then little Stanislovas began to whimper—who would take care of

him?

It was dreadful that an accident of this sort, that no man can help,

should have meant such suffering. The bitterness of it was the daily

food and drink of Jurgis. It was of no use for them to try to deceive

him; he knew as much about the situation as they did, and he knew that

the family might literally starve to death. The worry of it fairly ate

him up—he began to look haggard the first two or three days of it. In

truth, it was almost maddening for a strong man like him, a fighter, to

have to lie there helpless on his back. It was for all the world the

old story of Prometheus bound. As Jurgis lay on his bed, hour after

hour there came to him emotions that he had never known before. Before

this he had met life with a welcome—it had its trials, but none that a

man could not face. But now, in the nighttime, when he lay tossing

about, there would come stalking into his chamber a grisly phantom, the

sight of which made his flesh curl and his hair to bristle up. It was

like seeing the world fall away from underneath his feet; like plunging

down into a bottomless abyss into yawning caverns of despair. It might

be true, then, after all, what others had told him about life, that the

best powers of a man might not be equal to it! It might be true that,

strive as he would, toil as he would, he might fail, and go down and be

destroyed! The thought of this was like an icy hand at his heart; the

thought that here, in this ghastly home of all horror, he and all those

who were dear to him might lie and perish of starvation and cold, and

there would be no ear to hear their cry, no hand to help them! It was

true, it was true,—that here in this huge city, with its stores of

heaped-up wealth, human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed by

the wild-beast powers of nature, just as truly as ever they were in the

days of the cave men!

Ona was now making about thirty dollars a month, and Stanislovas about

thirteen. To add to this there was the board of Jonas and Marija, about

forty-five dollars. Deducting from this the rent, interest, and

installments on the furniture, they had left sixty dollars, and

deducting the coal, they had fifty. They did without everything that

human beings could do without; they went in old and ragged clothing,

that left them at the mercy of the cold, and when the children’s shoes

wore out, they tied them up with string. Half invalid as she was, Ona

would do herself harm by walking in the rain and cold when she ought to

have ridden; they bought literally nothing but food—and still they

could not keep alive on fifty dollars a month. They might have done it,

if only they could have gotten pure food, and at fair prices; or if

only they had known what to get—if they had not been so pitifully

ignorant! But they had come to a new country, where everything was

different, including the food. They had always been accustomed to eat a

great deal of smoked sausage, and how could they know that what they

bought in America was not the same—that its color was made by

chemicals, and its smoky flavor by more chemicals, and that it was full

of “potato flour” besides? Potato flour is the waste of potato after

the starch and alcohol have been extracted; it has no more food value

than so much wood, and as its use as a food adulterant is a penal

offense in Europe, thousands of tons of it are shipped to America every

year. It was amazing what quantities of food such as this were needed

every day, by eleven hungry persons. A dollar sixty-five a day was

simply not enough to feed them, and there was no use trying; and so

each week they made an inroad upon the pitiful little bank account that

Ona had begun. Because the account was in her name, it was possible for

her to keep this a secret from her husband, and to keep the

heartsickness of it for her own.

It would have been better if Jurgis had been really ill; if he had not

been able to think. For he had no resources such as most invalids have;

all he could do was to lie there and toss about from side to side. Now

and then he would break into cursing, regardless of everything; and now

and then his impatience would get the better of him, and he would try

to get up, and poor Teta Elzbieta would have to plead with him in a

frenzy. Elzbieta was all alone with him the greater part of the time.

She would sit and smooth his forehead by the hour, and talk to him and

try to make him forget. Sometimes it would be too cold for the children

to go to school, and they would have to play in the kitchen, where

Jurgis was, because it was the only room that was half warm. These were

dreadful times, for Jurgis would get as cross as any bear; he was

scarcely to be blamed, for he had enough to worry him, and it was hard

when he was trying to take a nap to be kept awake by noisy and peevish

children.

Elzbieta’s only resource in those times was little Antanas; indeed, it

would be hard to say how they could have gotten along at all if it had

not been for little Antanas. It was the one consolation of Jurgis’ long

imprisonment that now he had time to look at his baby. Teta Elzbieta

would put the clothes-basket in which the baby slept alongside of his

mattress, and Jurgis would lie upon one elbow and watch him by the

hour, imagining things. Then little Antanas would open his eyes—he was

beginning to take notice of things now; and he would smile—how he would

smile! So Jurgis would begin to forget and be happy because he was in a

world where there was a thing so beautiful as the smile of little

Antanas, and because such a world could not but be good at the heart of

it. He looked more like his father every hour, Elzbieta would say, and

said it many times a day, because she saw that it pleased Jurgis; the

poor little terror-stricken woman was planning all day and all night to

soothe the prisoned giant who was intrusted to her care. Jurgis, who

knew nothing about the age-long and everlasting hypocrisy of woman,

would take the bait and grin with delight; and then he would hold his

finger in front of little Antanas’ eyes, and move it this way and that,

and laugh with glee to see the baby follow it. There is no pet quite so

fascinating as a baby; he would look into Jurgis’ face with such

uncanny seriousness, and Jurgis would start and cry: “_Palauk!_ Look,

Muma, he knows his papa! He does, he does! _Tu mano szirdele_, the

little rascal!”

CHAPTER XII

For three weeks after his injury Jurgis never got up from bed. It was a

very obstinate sprain; the swelling would not go down, and the pain

still continued. At the end of that time, however, he could contain

himself no longer, and began trying to walk a little every day,

laboring to persuade himself that he was better. No arguments could

stop him, and three or four days later he declared that he was going

back to work. He limped to the cars and got to Brown’s, where he found

that the boss had kept his place—that is, was willing to turn out into

the snow the poor devil he had hired in the meantime. Every now and

then the pain would force Jurgis to stop work, but he stuck it out till

nearly an hour before closing. Then he was forced to acknowledge that

he could not go on without fainting; it almost broke his heart to do

it, and he stood leaning against a pillar and weeping like a child. Two

of the men had to help him to the car, and when he got out he had to

sit down and wait in the snow till some one came along.

So they put him to bed again, and sent for the doctor, as they ought to

have done in the beginning. It transpired that he had twisted a tendon

out of place, and could never have gotten well without attention. Then

he gripped the sides of the bed, and shut his teeth together, and

turned white with agony, while the doctor pulled and wrenched away at

his swollen ankle. When finally the doctor left, he told him that he

would have to lie quiet for two months, and that if he went to work

before that time he might lame himself for life.

Three days later there came another heavy snowstorm, and Jonas and

Marija and Ona and little Stanislovas all set out together, an hour

before daybreak, to try to get to the yards. About noon the last two

came back, the boy screaming with pain. His fingers were all frosted,

it seemed. They had had to give up trying to get to the yards, and had

nearly perished in a drift. All that they knew how to do was to hold

the frozen fingers near the fire, and so little Stanislovas spent most

of the day dancing about in horrible agony, till Jurgis flew into a

passion of nervous rage and swore like a madman, declaring that he

would kill him if he did not stop. All that day and night the family

was half-crazed with fear that Ona and the boy had lost their places;

and in the morning they set out earlier than ever, after the little

fellow had been beaten with a stick by Jurgis. There could be no

trifling in a case like this, it was a matter of life and death; little

Stanislovas could not be expected to realize that he might a great deal

better freeze in the snowdrift than lose his job at the lard machine.

Ona was quite certain that she would find her place gone, and was all

unnerved when she finally got to Brown’s, and found that the forelady

herself had failed to come, and was therefore compelled to be lenient.

One of the consequences of this episode was that the first joints of

three of the little boy’s fingers were permanently disabled, and

another that thereafter he always had to be beaten before he set out to

work, whenever there was fresh snow on the ground. Jurgis was called

upon to do the beating, and as it hurt his foot he did it with a

vengeance; but it did not tend to add to the sweetness of his temper.

They say that the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all

the time, and it was the same with the man; he had not a thing to do

all day but lie and curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted to

curse everything.

This was never for very long, however, for when Ona began to cry,

Jurgis could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless

ghost, with his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling

into his eyes; he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his

appearance. His muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft

and flabby. He had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him

with delicacies. It was better, he said, that he should not eat, it was

a saving. About the end of March he had got hold of Ona’s bankbook, and

learned that there was only three dollars left to them in the world.

But perhaps the worst of the consequences of this long siege was that

they lost another member of their family; Brother Jonas disappeared.

One Saturday night he did not come home, and thereafter all their

efforts to get trace of him were futile. It was said by the boss at

Durham’s that he had gotten his week’s money and left there. That might

not be true, of course, for sometimes they would say that when a man

had been killed; it was the easiest way out of it for all concerned.

When, for instance, a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks

and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there

was no use letting the fact out and making his family unhappy. More

probable, however, was the theory that Jonas had deserted them, and

gone on the road, seeking happiness. He had been discontented for a

long time, and not without some cause. He paid good board, and was yet

obliged to live in a family where nobody had enough to eat. And Marija

would keep giving them all her money, and of course he could not but

feel that he was called upon to do the same. Then there were crying

brats, and all sorts of misery; a man would have had to be a good deal

of a hero to stand it all without grumbling, and Jonas was not in the

least a hero—he was simply a weatherbeaten old fellow who liked to have

a good supper and sit in the corner by the fire and smoke his pipe in

peace before he went to bed. Here there was not room by the fire, and

through the winter the kitchen had seldom been warm enough for comfort.

So, with the springtime, what was more likely than that the wild idea

of escaping had come to him? Two years he had been yoked like a horse

to a half-ton truck in Durham’s dark cellars, with never a rest, save

on Sundays and four holidays in the year, and with never a word of

thanks—only kicks and blows and curses, such as no decent dog would

have stood. And now the winter was over, and the spring winds were

blowing—and with a day’s walk a man might put the smoke of Packingtown

behind him forever, and be where the grass was green and the flowers

all the colors of the rainbow!

But now the income of the family was cut down more than one-third, and

the food demand was cut only one-eleventh, so that they were worse off

than ever. Also they were borrowing money from Marija, and eating up

her bank account, and spoiling once again her hopes of marriage and

happiness. And they were even going into debt to Tamoszius Kuszleika

and letting him impoverish himself. Poor Tamoszius was a man without

any relatives, and with a wonderful talent besides, and he ought to

have made money and prospered; but he had fallen in love, and so given

hostages to fortune, and was doomed to be dragged down too.

So it was finally decided that two more of the children would have to

leave school. Next to Stanislovas, who was now fifteen, there was a

girl, little Kotrina, who was two years younger, and then two boys,

Vilimas, who was eleven, and Nikalojus, who was ten. Both of these last

were bright boys, and there was no reason why their family should

starve when tens of thousands of children no older were earning their

own livings. So one morning they were given a quarter apiece and a roll

with a sausage in it, and, with their minds top-heavy with good advice,

were sent out to make their way to the city and learn to sell

newspapers. They came back late at night in tears, having walked for

the five or six miles to report that a man had offered to take them to

a place where they sold newspapers, and had taken their money and gone

into a store to get them, and nevermore been seen. So they both

received a whipping, and the next morning set out again. This time they

found the newspaper place, and procured their stock; and after

wandering about till nearly noontime, saying “Paper?” to every one they

saw, they had all their stock taken away and received a thrashing

besides from a big newsman upon whose territory they had trespassed.

Fortunately, however, they had already sold some papers, and came back

with nearly as much as they started with.

After a week of mishaps such as these, the two little fellows began to

learn the ways of the trade—the names of the different papers, and how

many of each to get, and what sort of people to offer them to, and

where to go and where to stay away from. After this, leaving home at

four o’clock in the morning, and running about the streets, first with

morning papers and then with evening, they might come home late at

night with twenty or thirty cents apiece—possibly as much as forty

cents. From this they had to deduct their carfare, since the distance

was so great; but after a while they made friends, and learned still

more, and then they would save their carfare. They would get on a car

when the conductor was not looking, and hide in the crowd; and three

times out of four he would not ask for their fares, either not seeing

them, or thinking they had already paid; or if he did ask, they would

hunt through their pockets, and then begin to cry, and either have

their fares paid by some kind old lady, or else try the trick again on

a new car. All this was fair play, they felt. Whose fault was it that

at the hours when workingmen were going to their work and back, the

cars were so crowded that the conductors could not collect all the

fares? And besides, the companies were thieves, people said—had stolen

all their franchises with the help of scoundrelly politicians!

Now that the winter was by, and there was no more danger of snow, and

no more coal to buy, and another room warm enough to put the children

into when they cried, and enough money to get along from week to week

with, Jurgis was less terrible than he had been. A man can get used to

anything in the course of time, and Jurgis had gotten used to lying

about the house. Ona saw this, and was very careful not to destroy his

peace of mind, by letting him know how very much pain she was

suffering. It was now the time of the spring rains, and Ona had often

to ride to her work, in spite of the expense; she was getting paler

every day, and sometimes, in spite of her good resolutions, it pained

her that Jurgis did not notice it. She wondered if he cared for her as

much as ever, if all this misery was not wearing out his love. She had

to be away from him all the time, and bear her own troubles while he

was bearing his; and then, when she came home, she was so worn out; and

whenever they talked they had only their worries to talk of—truly it

was hard, in such a life, to keep any sentiment alive. The woe of this

would flame up in Ona sometimes—at night she would suddenly clasp her

big husband in her arms and break into passionate weeping, demanding to

know if he really loved her. Poor Jurgis, who had in truth grown more

matter-of-fact, under the endless pressure of penury, would not know

what to make of these things, and could only try to recollect when he

had last been cross; and so Ona would have to forgive him and sob

herself to sleep.

The latter part of April Jurgis went to see the doctor, and was given a

bandage to lace about his ankle, and told that he might go back to

work. It needed more than the permission of the doctor, however, for

when he showed up on the killing floor of Brown’s, he was told by the

foreman that it had not been possible to keep his job for him. Jurgis

knew that this meant simply that the foreman had found some one else to

do the work as well and did not want to bother to make a change. He

stood in the doorway, looking mournfully on, seeing his friends and

companions at work, and feeling like an outcast. Then he went out and

took his place with the mob of the unemployed.

This time, however, Jurgis did not have the same fine confidence, nor

the same reason for it. He was no longer the finest-looking man in the

throng, and the bosses no longer made for him; he was thin and haggard,

and his clothes were seedy, and he looked miserable. And there were

hundreds who looked and felt just like him, and who had been wandering

about Packingtown for months begging for work. This was a critical time

in Jurgis’ life, and if he had been a weaker man he would have gone the

way the rest did. Those out-of-work wretches would stand about the

packing houses every morning till the police drove them away, and then

they would scatter among the saloons. Very few of them had the nerve to

face the rebuffs that they would encounter by trying to get into the

buildings to interview the bosses; if they did not get a chance in the

morning, there would be nothing to do but hang about the saloons the

rest of the day and night. Jurgis was saved from all this—partly, to be

sure, because it was pleasant weather, and there was no need to be

indoors; but mainly because he carried with him always the pitiful

little face of his wife. He must get work, he told himself, fighting

the battle with despair every hour of the day. He must get work! He

must have a place again and some money saved up, before the next winter

came.

But there was no work for him. He sought out all the members of his

union—Jurgis had stuck to the union through all this—and begged them to

speak a word for him. He went to every one he knew, asking for a

chance, there or anywhere. He wandered all day through the buildings;

and in a week or two, when he had been all over the yards, and into

every room to which he had access, and learned that there was not a job

anywhere, he persuaded himself that there might have been a change in

the places he had first visited, and began the round all over; till

finally the watchmen and the “spotters” of the companies came to know

him by sight and to order him out with threats. Then there was nothing

more for him to do but go with the crowd in the morning, and keep in

the front row and look eager, and when he failed, go back home, and

play with little Kotrina and the baby.

The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the

meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he

had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged

article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best

of him—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their

carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! And Jurgis would make

the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they

had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had

wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills;

there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for instance,

who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The vast

majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great

merciless packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the

pace, some of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had

come when they could not keep up with it any more. Some had been

frankly told that they were too old, that a sprier man was needed;

others had given occasion, by some act of carelessness or incompetence;

with most, however, the occasion had been the same as with Jurgis. They

had been overworked and underfed so long, and finally some disease had

laid them on their backs; or they had cut themselves, and had blood

poisoning, or met with some other accident. When a man came back after

that, he would get his place back only by the courtesy of the boss. To

this there was no exception, save when the accident was one for which

the firm was liable; in that case they would send a slippery lawyer to

see him, first to try to get him to sign away his claims, but if he was

too smart for that, to promise him that he and his should always be

provided with work. This promise they would keep, strictly and to the

letter—for two years. Two years was the “statute of limitations,” and

after that the victim could not sue.

What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon the

circumstances. If he were of the highly skilled workers, he would

probably have enough saved up to tide him over. The best paid men, the

“splitters,” made fifty cents an hour, which would be five or six

dollars a day in the rush seasons, and one or two in the dullest. A man

could live and save on that; but then there were only half a dozen

splitters in each place, and one of them that Jurgis knew had a family

of twenty-two children, all hoping to grow up to be splitters like

their father. For an unskilled man, who made ten dollars a week in the

rush seasons and five in the dull, it all depended upon his age and the

number he had dependent upon him. An unmarried man could save, if he

did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish—that is, if he paid no

heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and

sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the

members of his union, and his chums, and the people who might be

starving to death next door.

CHAPTER XIII

During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of

little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both

Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having

lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital

dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk.

He was the last of Teta Elzbieta’s children, and perhaps he had been

intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate

he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though

he was over three years old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child of

one. All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little

dress, whining and fretting; because the floor was full of drafts he

was always catching cold, and snuffling because his nose ran. This made

him a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family. For his

mother, with unnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children,

and made a perpetual fuss over him—would let him do anything

undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting drove Jurgis

wild.

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that

morning—which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork

that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after

eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he

was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was

all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a

doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one

was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.

Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have

to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at

this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands

and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a

pauper’s grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said

without protesting! It was enough to make Ona’s father rise up out of

his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to this, they might as well

give up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . . In the end

Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being

still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the

neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white

plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to

mark the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that;

the mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about

would make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little

fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only

she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great

doctor to cure him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was

told, a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great

European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease

from which Kristoforas had suffered. And because this surgeon had to

have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he would treat the

children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papers

became quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers, and no

one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then they would

not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait upon the

surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow

hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the

pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching

the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown,

and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a

place that waits for the lowest man—the fertilizer plant!

The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more than one

in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented

themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There

were some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask

Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis would

debate the matter with himself. As poor as they were, and making all

the sacrifices that they were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work

that was offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would he

dare to go home and eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and

complaining as she was, knowing that he had been given a chance, and

had not had the nerve to take it?—And yet he might argue that way with

himself all day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer works would send

him away again shuddering. He was a man, and he would do his duty; he

went and made application—but surely he was not also required to hope

for success!

The fertilizer works of Durham’s lay away from the rest of the plant.

Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking

like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell.

To this part of the yards came all the “tankage” and the waste products

of all sorts; here they dried out the bones,—and in suffocating cellars

where the daylight never came you might see men and women and children

bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts

of shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to

die, every one of them, within a certain definite time. Here they made

the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things

still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was

done you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the

dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off

twinkling stars—red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the

color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of

these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but

there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his

courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming

under water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to

cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find

his head beginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb,

until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia

fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the “tankage,” the mass

of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the

carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried

material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had

mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which

they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that

purpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to

the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone

phosphate. And then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would

buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn;

and for several days after the operation the fields would have a strong

odor, and the farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled

it would all have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure,

instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on

several acres under the open sky, there are hundreds and thousands of

tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in haystack piles,

covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a

choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an

unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and his

secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a

record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the

fertilizer mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and

had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about

two o’clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain

shoot through him—the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis

had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together and

gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was one of the

vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground—rushing

forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung

forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen

others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That

others were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he

sometimes collided with them; otherwise they might as well not have

been there, for in the blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet

in front of his face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope

around him until another came, and if there was none on hand he

continued to grope till one arrived. In five minutes he was, of course,

a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they gave him a sponge to tie

over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the sponge did not

prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with it and his ears from

filling solid. He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—from hair to

shoes he became the color of the building and of everything in it, and

for that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building had to be left

open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of

fertilizer.

Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a

hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis’ skin,

and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed.

The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing; there

was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly

control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months’ siege

behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an

hour later he began to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his

inwards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the

fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it;

but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his

stomach.

At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to

catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his

bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a

saloon—they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one

class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could only make

his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor,

and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to

board a streetcar and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill

to notice it—how the people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to

put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious

glances. Jurgis only knew that a man in front of him immediately got up

and gave him a seat; and that half a minute later the two people on

each side of him got up; and that in a full minute the crowded car was

nearly empty—those passengers who could not get room on the platform

having gotten out to walk.

Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute

after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole

system was full of it, and it would have taken a week not merely of

scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was,

he could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest

discovery of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an

unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminished in power.

He smelled so that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the

whole family to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he could

keep anything upon his stomach—he might wash his hands, and use a knife

and fork, but were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?

And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches he would

stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once more, and begin to

shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And so at the end of the week he

was a fertilizer man for life—he was able to eat again, and though his

head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not

work.

So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over

the country, and the country ate generously of packing house products,

and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the

packers’ efforts to keep a superfluity of labor. They were again able

to pay their debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there were

one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long—it

was too bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age. It

was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without

knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment. They

were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick

up cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling

with pennies and dice and cigarette cards; they were learning the

location of all the houses of prostitution on the “Lêvée,” and the

names of the “madames” who kept them, and the days when they gave their

state banquets, which the police captains and the big politicians all

attended. If a visiting “country customer” were to ask them, they could

show him which was “Hinkydink’s” famous saloon, and could even point

out to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and “hold-up men”

who made the place their headquarters. And worse yet, the boys were

getting out of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use,

they would ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible carfare

riding out to the stockyards every night when the weather was pleasant

and they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep

exactly as well? So long as they brought home a half dollar for each

day, what mattered it when they brought it? But Jurgis declared that

from this to ceasing to come at all would not be a very long step, and

so it was decided that Vilimas and Nikalojus should return to school in

the fall, and that instead Elzbieta should go out and get some work,

her place at home being taken by her younger daughter.

Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made

old; she had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and

also of the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and

clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the

evening. She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all

this without a murmur; and her mother went out, and after trudging a

couple of days about the yards, settled down as a servant of a “sausage

machine.”

Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for

the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven

o’clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from one till

half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she could

not stand it—she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the

fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling.

Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric

light, and the dampness, too, was deadly—there were always puddles of

water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room.

The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature,

whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of

snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a

stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who

worked in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh

country sausage” they made.

The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three

minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines

were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably

sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be

interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these

inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men

shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great

bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute,

and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour,

and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on

the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was

a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would

take a long string of “casing” and put the end over the nozzle and then

work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove.

This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would

have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press

a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking the

casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear,

miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of

incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures,

and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted

them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work

of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the

wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an

endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her

hands a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was

quite like the feat of a prestidigitator—for the woman worked so fast

that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist

of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst

of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set

face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly

pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was

time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed right

there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage

links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have

a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had

arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did,

with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance

at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as

at some wild beast in a menagerie.

CHAPTER XIV

With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a

sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great

majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,

whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything

else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what

had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they

could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside,

and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that

they use everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would

often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take

away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of

all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort

of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor

and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious

apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the

plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by

plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man

could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of

this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so

bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump

into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which

destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them

thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be

found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as

“Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a

new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad

part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this

invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there

was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such

schemes—they had what they called “boneless hams,” which were all the

odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and “California hams,”

which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the

meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the oldest

hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy

them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled

“head cheese!”

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the

department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute

flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was

in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention

paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back

from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and

white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the

hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat

that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the

workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs.

There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from

leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about

on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man

could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of

the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers

would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats,

bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy

story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man

who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he

saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with

which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to

wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a

practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the

sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of

corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that

would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under

the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some

jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was

the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in

the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and

cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the

hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some

of it they would make into “smoked” sausage—but as the smoking took

time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry

department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to

make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when

they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for

this they would charge two cents more a pound.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such

was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing

work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was

part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed

for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was

only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of

insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent.

She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk

home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into

a habit of silence—Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird.

She was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength

enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to

eat, and afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of,

they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until

it was time to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to

the machines. They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much

from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran

short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead—the souls of none of them were dead,

but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were

cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch

out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and

they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its

forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it;

but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It

was a thing scarcely to be spoken—a thing never spoken by all the

world, that will not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was

not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with

wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a

chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean,

to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone—it

would never be! They had played the game and they had lost. Six years

more of toil they had to face before they could expect the least

respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how cruelly

certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as

they were living! They were lost, they were going down—and there was no

deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast

city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness,

a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the

nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the

beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old

primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was

tired and cross. After that she learned to weep silently—their moods so

seldom came together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in

separate graves.

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter

following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one

else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself.

Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had—and once or

twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.

He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after

week—until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work

without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day

and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went

down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a

respite, a deliverance—he could drink! He could forget the pain, he

could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be

master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would

stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with

his companions—he would be a man again, and master of his life.

It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three

drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade

himself that that was economy; with the second he could eat another

meal—but there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to

pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the

age-long instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he

took the plunge, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went

home half “piped,” as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had

been in a year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not

last, he was savage, too with those who would wreck it, and with the

world, and with his life; and then again, beneath this, he was sick

with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his

family, and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears came into his

eyes, and he began the long battle with the specter.

It was a battle that had no end, that never could have one. But Jurgis

did not realize that very clearly; he was not given much time for

reflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped in

misery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street was to be

put upon the rack. There was surely a saloon on the corner—perhaps on

all four corners, and some in the middle of the block as well; and each

one stretched out a hand to him each one had a personality of its own,

allurements unlike any other. Going and coming—before sunrise and after

dark—there was warmth and a glow of light, and the steam of hot food,

and perhaps music, or a friendly face, and a word of good cheer. Jurgis

developed a fondness for having Ona on his arm whenever he went out on

the street, and he would hold her tightly, and walk fast. It was

pitiful to have Ona know of this—it drove him wild to think of it; the

thing was not fair, for Ona had never tasted drink, and so could not

understand. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself

wishing that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be

ashamed in her presence. They might drink together, and escape from the

horror—escape for a while, come what would.

So there came a time when nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis

consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. He would have ugly

moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family, because they stood in

his way. He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, had

made himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he

was compelled to stay in the yards; if it had not been for that he

might have gone off like Jonas, and to hell with the packers. There

were few single men in the fertilizer mill—and those few were working

only for a chance to escape. Meantime, too, they had something to think

about while they worked,—they had the memory of the last time they had

been drunk, and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again. As

for Jurgis, he was expected to bring home every penny; he could not

even go with the men at noontime—he was supposed to sit down and eat

his dinner on a pile of fertilizer dust.

This was not always his mood, of course; he still loved his family. But

just now was a time of trial. Poor little Antanas, for instance—who had

never failed to win him with a smile—little Antanas was not smiling

just now, being a mass of fiery red pimples. He had had all the

diseases that babies are heir to, in quick succession, scarlet fever,

mumps, and whooping cough in the first year, and now he was down with

the measles. There was no one to attend him but Kotrina; there was no

doctor to help him, because they were too poor, and children did not

die of the measles—at least not often. Now and then Kotrina would find

time to sob over his woes, but for the greater part of the time he had

to be left alone, barricaded upon the bed. The floor was full of

drafts, and if he caught cold he would die. At night he was tied down,

lest he should kick the covers off him, while the family lay in their

stupor of exhaustion. He would lie and scream for hours, almost in

convulsions; and then, when he was worn out, he would lie whimpering

and wailing in his torment. He was burning up with fever, and his eyes

were running sores; in the daytime he was a thing uncanny and impish to

behold, a plaster of pimples and sweat, a great purple lump of misery.

Yet all this was not really as cruel as it sounds, for, sick as he was,

little Antanas was the least unfortunate member of that family. He was

quite able to bear his sufferings—it was as if he had all these

complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was. He was the child of

his parents’ youth and joy; he grew up like the conjurer’s rosebush,

and all the world was his oyster. In general, he toddled around the

kitchen all day with a lean and hungry look—the portion of the family’s

allowance that fell to him was not enough, and he was unrestrainable in

his demand for more. Antanas was but little over a year old, and

already no one but his father could manage him.

It seemed as if he had taken all of his mother’s strength—had left

nothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with child again

now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate; even Jurgis, dumb and

despairing as he was, could not but understand that yet other agonies

were on the way, and shudder at the thought of them.

For Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she was

developing a cough, like the one that had killed old Dede Antanas. She

had had a trace of it ever since that fatal morning when the greedy

streetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain; but now it was

beginning to grow serious, and to wake her up at night. Even worse than

that was the fearful nervousness from which she suffered; she would

have frightful headaches and fits of aimless weeping; and sometimes she

would come home at night shuddering and moaning, and would fling

herself down upon the bed and burst into tears. Several times she was

quite beside herself and hysterical; and then Jurgis would go half-mad

with fright. Elzbieta would explain to him that it could not be helped,

that a woman was subject to such things when she was pregnant; but he

was hardly to be persuaded, and would beg and plead to know what had

happened. She had never been like this before, he would argue—it was

monstrous and unthinkable. It was the life she had to live, the

accursed work she had to do, that was killing her by inches. She was

not fitted for it—no woman was fitted for it, no woman ought to be

allowed to do such work; if the world could not keep them alive any

other way it ought to kill them at once and be done with it. They ought

not to marry, to have children; no workingman ought to marry—if he,

Jurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes

torn out first. So he would carry on, becoming half hysterical himself,

which was an unbearable thing to see in a big man; Ona would pull

herself together and fling herself into his arms, begging him to stop,

to be still, that she would be better, it would be all right. So she

would lie and sob out her grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at

her, as helpless as a wounded animal, the target of unseen enemies.

CHAPTER XV

The beginning of these perplexing things was in the summer; and each

time Ona would promise him with terror in her voice that it would not

happen again—but in vain. Each crisis would leave Jurgis more and more

frightened, more disposed to distrust Elzbieta’s consolations, and to

believe that there was some terrible thing about all this that he was

not allowed to know. Once or twice in these outbreaks he caught Ona’s

eye, and it seemed to him like the eye of a hunted animal; there were

broken phrases of anguish and despair now and then, amid her frantic

weeping. It was only because he was so numb and beaten himself that

Jurgis did not worry more about this. But he never thought of it,

except when he was dragged to it—he lived like a dumb beast of burden,

knowing only the moment in which he was.

The winter was coming on again, more menacing and cruel than ever. It

was October, and the holiday rush had begun. It was necessary for the

packing machines to grind till late at night to provide food that would

be eaten at Christmas breakfasts; and Marija and Elzbieta and Ona, as

part of the machine, began working fifteen or sixteen hours a day.

There was no choice about this—whatever work there was to be done they

had to do, if they wished to keep their places; besides that, it added

another pittance to their incomes. So they staggered on with the awful

load. They would start work every morning at seven, and eat their

dinners at noon, and then work until ten or eleven at night without

another mouthful of food. Jurgis wanted to wait for them, to help them

home at night, but they would not think of this; the fertilizer mill

was not running overtime, and there was no place for him to wait save

in a saloon. Each would stagger out into the darkness, and make her way

to the corner, where they met; or if the others had already gone, would

get into a car, and begin a painful struggle to keep awake. When they

got home they were always too tired either to eat or to undress; they

would crawl into bed with their shoes on, and lie like logs. If they

should fail, they would certainly be lost; if they held out, they might

have enough coal for the winter.

A day or two before Thanksgiving Day there came a snowstorm. It began

in the afternoon, and by evening two inches had fallen. Jurgis tried to

wait for the women, but went into a saloon to get warm, and took two

drinks, and came out and ran home to escape from the demon; there he

lay down to wait for them, and instantly fell asleep. When he opened

his eyes again he was in the midst of a nightmare, and found Elzbieta

shaking him and crying out. At first he could not realize what she was

saying—Ona had not come home. What time was it, he asked. It was

morning—time to be up. Ona had not been home that night! And it was

bitter cold, and a foot of snow on the ground.

Jurgis sat up with a start. Marija was crying with fright and the

children were wailing in sympathy—little Stanislovas in addition,

because the terror of the snow was upon him. Jurgis had nothing to put

on but his shoes and his coat, and in half a minute he was out of the

door. Then, however, he realized that there was no need of haste, that

he had no idea where to go. It was still dark as midnight, and the

thick snowflakes were sifting down—everything was so silent that he

could hear the rustle of them as they fell. In the few seconds that he

stood there hesitating he was covered white.

He set off at a run for the yards, stopping by the way to inquire in

the saloons that were open. Ona might have been overcome on the way; or

else she might have met with an accident in the machines. When he got

to the place where she worked he inquired of one of the watchmen—there

had not been any accident, so far as the man had heard. At the time

office, which he found already open, the clerk told him that Ona’s

check had been turned in the night before, showing that she had left

her work.

After that there was nothing for him to do but wait, pacing back and

forth in the snow, meantime, to keep from freezing. Already the yards

were full of activity; cattle were being unloaded from the cars in the

distance, and across the way the “beef-luggers” were toiling in the

darkness, carrying two-hundred-pound quarters of bullocks into the

refrigerator cars. Before the first streaks of daylight there came the

crowding throngs of workingmen, shivering, and swinging their dinner

pails as they hurried by. Jurgis took up his stand by the time-office

window, where alone there was light enough for him to see; the snow

fell so quick that it was only by peering closely that he could make

sure that Ona did not pass him.

Seven o’clock came, the hour when the great packing machine began to

move. Jurgis ought to have been at his place in the fertilizer mill;

but instead he was waiting, in an agony of fear, for Ona. It was

fifteen minutes after the hour when he saw a form emerge from the snow

mist, and sprang toward it with a cry. It was she, running swiftly; as

she saw him, she staggered forward, and half fell into his outstretched

arms.

“What has been the matter?” he cried, anxiously. “Where have you been?”

It was several seconds before she could get breath to answer him. “I

couldn’t get home,” she exclaimed. “The snow—the cars had stopped.”

“But where were you then?” he demanded.

“I had to go home with a friend,” she panted—“with Jadvyga.”

Jurgis drew a deep breath; but then he noticed that she was sobbing and

trembling—as if in one of those nervous crises that he dreaded so. “But

what’s the matter?” he cried. “What has happened?”

“Oh, Jurgis, I was so frightened!” she said, clinging to him wildly. “I

have been so worried!”

They were near the time station window, and people were staring at

them. Jurgis led her away. “How do you mean?” he asked, in perplexity.

“I was afraid—I was just afraid!” sobbed Ona. “I knew you wouldn’t know

where I was, and I didn’t know what you might do. I tried to get home,

but I was so tired. Oh, Jurgis, Jurgis!”

He was so glad to get her back that he could not think clearly about

anything else. It did not seem strange to him that she should be so

very much upset; all her fright and incoherent protestations did not

matter since he had her back. He let her cry away her tears; and then,

because it was nearly eight o’clock, and they would lose another hour

if they delayed, he left her at the packing house door, with her

ghastly white face and her haunted eyes of terror.

There was another brief interval. Christmas was almost come; and

because the snow still held, and the searching cold, morning after

morning Jurgis half carried his wife to her post, staggering with her

through the darkness; until at last, one night, came the end.

It lacked but three days of the holidays. About midnight Marija and

Elzbieta came home, exclaiming in alarm when they found that Ona had

not come. The two had agreed to meet her; and, after waiting, had gone

to the room where she worked; only to find that the ham-wrapping girls

had quit work an hour before, and left. There was no snow that night,

nor was it especially cold; and still Ona had not come! Something more

serious must be wrong this time.

They aroused Jurgis, and he sat up and listened crossly to the story.

She must have gone home again with Jadvyga, he said; Jadvyga lived only

two blocks from the yards, and perhaps she had been tired. Nothing

could have happened to her—and even if there had, there was nothing

could be done about it until morning. Jurgis turned over in his bed,

and was snoring again before the two had closed the door.

In the morning, however, he was up and out nearly an hour before the

usual time. Jadvyga Marcinkus lived on the other side of the yards,

beyond Halsted Street, with her mother and sisters, in a single

basement room—for Mikolas had recently lost one hand from blood

poisoning, and their marriage had been put off forever. The door of the

room was in the rear, reached by a narrow court, and Jurgis saw a light

in the window and heard something frying as he passed; he knocked, half

expecting that Ona would answer.

Instead there was one of Jadvyga’s little sisters, who gazed at him

through a crack in the door. “Where’s Ona?” he demanded; and the child

looked at him in perplexity. “Ona?” she said.

“Yes,” said Jurgis, “isn’t she here?”

“No,” said the child, and Jurgis gave a start. A moment later came

Jadvyga, peering over the child’s head. When she saw who it was, she

slid around out of sight, for she was not quite dressed. Jurgis must

excuse her, she began, her mother was very ill—

“Ona isn’t here?” Jurgis demanded, too alarmed to wait for her to

finish.

“Why, no,” said Jadvyga. “What made you think she would be here? Had

she said she was coming?”

“No,” he answered. “But she hasn’t come home—and I thought she would be

here the same as before.”

“As before?” echoed Jadvyga, in perplexity.

“The time she spent the night here,” said Jurgis.

“There must be some mistake,” she answered, quickly. “Ona has never

spent the night here.”

He was only half able to realize the words. “Why—why—” he exclaimed.

“Two weeks ago. Jadvyga! She told me so the night it snowed, and she

could not get home.”

“There must be some mistake,” declared the girl, again; “she didn’t

come here.”

He steadied himself by the door-sill; and Jadvyga in her anxiety—for

she was fond of Ona—opened the door wide, holding her jacket across her

throat. “Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand her?” she cried. “She

must have meant somewhere else. She—”

“She said here,” insisted Jurgis. “She told me all about you, and how

you were, and what you said. Are you sure? You haven’t forgotten? You

weren’t away?”

“No, no!” she exclaimed—and then came a peevish voice—“Jadvyga, you are

giving the baby a cold. Shut the door!” Jurgis stood for half a minute

more, stammering his perplexity through an eighth of an inch of crack;

and then, as there was really nothing more to be said, he excused

himself and went away.

He walked on half dazed, without knowing where he went. Ona had

deceived him! She had lied to him! And what could it mean—where had she

been? Where was she now? He could hardly grasp the thing—much less try

to solve it; but a hundred wild surmises came to him, a sense of

impending calamity overwhelmed him.

Because there was nothing else to do, he went back to the time office

to watch again. He waited until nearly an hour after seven, and then

went to the room where Ona worked to make inquiries of Ona’s

“forelady.” The “forelady,” he found, had not yet come; all the lines

of cars that came from downtown were stalled—there had been an accident

in the powerhouse, and no cars had been running since last night.

Meantime, however, the ham-wrappers were working away, with some one

else in charge of them. The girl who answered Jurgis was busy, and as

she talked she looked to see if she were being watched. Then a man came

up, wheeling a truck; he knew Jurgis for Ona’s husband, and was curious

about the mystery.

“Maybe the cars had something to do with it,” he suggested—“maybe she

had gone down-town.”

“No,” said Jurgis, “she never went down-town.”

“Perhaps not,” said the man. Jurgis thought he saw him exchange a swift

glance with the girl as he spoke, and he demanded quickly. “What do you

know about it?”

But the man had seen that the boss was watching him; he started on

again, pushing his truck. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said,

over his shoulder. “How should I know where your wife goes?”

Then Jurgis went out again and paced up and down before the building.

All the morning he stayed there, with no thought of his work. About

noon he went to the police station to make inquiries, and then came

back again for another anxious vigil. Finally, toward the middle of the

afternoon, he set out for home once more.

He was walking out Ashland Avenue. The streetcars had begun running

again, and several passed him, packed to the steps with people. The

sight of them set Jurgis to thinking again of the man’s sarcastic

remark; and half involuntarily he found himself watching the cars—with

the result that he gave a sudden startled exclamation, and stopped

short in his tracks.

Then he broke into a run. For a whole block he tore after the car, only

a little ways behind. That rusty black hat with the drooping red

flower, it might not be Ona’s, but there was very little likelihood of

it. He would know for certain very soon, for she would get out two

blocks ahead. He slowed down, and let the car go on.

She got out: and as soon as she was out of sight on the side street

Jurgis broke into a run. Suspicion was rife in him now, and he was not

ashamed to shadow her: he saw her turn the corner near their home, and

then he ran again, and saw her as she went up the porch steps of the

house. After that he turned back, and for five minutes paced up and

down, his hands clenched tightly and his lips set, his mind in a

turmoil. Then he went home and entered.

As he opened the door, he saw Elzbieta, who had also been looking for

Ona, and had come home again. She was now on tiptoe, and had a finger

on her lips. Jurgis waited until she was close to him.

“Don’t make any noise,” she whispered, hurriedly.

“What’s the matter’?” he asked. “Ona is asleep,” she panted. “She’s

been very ill. I’m afraid her mind’s been wandering, Jurgis. She was

lost on the street all night, and I’ve only just succeeded in getting

her quiet.”

“When did she come in?” he asked.

“Soon after you left this morning,” said Elzbieta.

“And has she been out since?”

“No, of course not. She’s so weak, Jurgis, she—”

And he set his teeth hard together. “You are lying to me,” he said.

Elzbieta started, and turned pale. “Why!” she gasped. “What do you

mean?”

But Jurgis did not answer. He pushed her aside, and strode to the

bedroom door and opened it.

Ona was sitting on the bed. She turned a startled look upon him as he

entered. He closed the door in Elzbieta’s face, and went toward his

wife. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

She had her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and he saw that her face

was as white as paper, and drawn with pain. She gasped once or twice as

she tried to answer him, and then began, speaking low, and swiftly.

“Jurgis, I—I think I have been out of my mind. I started to come last

night, and I could not find the way. I walked—I walked all night, I

think, and—and I only got home—this morning.”

“You needed a rest,” he said, in a hard tone. “Why did you go out

again?”

He was looking her fairly in the face, and he could read the sudden

fear and wild uncertainty that leaped into her eyes. “I—I had to go

to—to the store,” she gasped, almost in a whisper, “I had to go—”

“You are lying to me,” said Jurgis. Then he clenched his hands and took

a step toward her. “Why do you lie to me?” he cried, fiercely. “What

are you doing that you have to lie to me?”

“Jurgis!” she exclaimed, starting up in fright. “Oh, Jurgis, how can

you?”

“You have lied to me, I say!” he cried. “You told me you had been to

Jadvyga’s house that other night, and you hadn’t. You had been where

you were last night—somewheres downtown, for I saw you get off the car.

Where were you?”

It was as if he had struck a knife into her. She seemed to go all to

pieces. For half a second she stood, reeling and swaying, staring at

him with horror in her eyes; then, with a cry of anguish, she tottered

forward, stretching out her arms to him. But he stepped aside,

deliberately, and let her fall. She caught herself at the side of the

bed, and then sank down, burying her face in her hands and bursting

into frantic weeping.

There came one of those hysterical crises that had so often dismayed

him. Ona sobbed and wept, her fear and anguish building themselves up

into long climaxes. Furious gusts of emotion would come sweeping over

her, shaking her as the tempest shakes the trees upon the hills; all

her frame would quiver and throb with them—it was as if some dreadful

thing rose up within her and took possession of her, torturing her,

tearing her. This thing had been wont to set Jurgis quite beside

himself; but now he stood with his lips set tightly and his hands

clenched—she might weep till she killed herself, but she should not

move him this time—not an inch, not an inch. Because the sounds she

made set his blood to running cold and his lips to quivering in spite

of himself, he was glad of the diversion when Teta Elzbieta, pale with

fright, opened the door and rushed in; yet he turned upon her with an

oath. “Go out!” he cried, “go out!” And then, as she stood hesitating,

about to speak, he seized her by the arm, and half flung her from the

room, slamming the door and barring it with a table. Then he turned

again and faced Ona, crying—“Now, answer me!”

Yet she did not hear him—she was still in the grip of the fiend. Jurgis

could see her outstretched hands, shaking and twitching, roaming here

and there over the bed at will, like living things; he could see

convulsive shudderings start in her body and run through her limbs. She

was sobbing and choking—it was as if there were too many sounds for one

throat, they came chasing each other, like waves upon the sea. Then her

voice would begin to rise into screams, louder and louder until it

broke in wild, horrible peals of laughter. Jurgis bore it until he

could bear it no longer, and then he sprang at her, seizing her by the

shoulders and shaking her, shouting into her ear: “Stop it, I say! Stop

it!”

She looked up at him, out of her agony; then she fell forward at his

feet. She caught them in her hands, in spite of his efforts to step

aside, and with her face upon the floor lay writhing. It made a choking

in Jurgis’ throat to hear her, and he cried again, more savagely than

before: “Stop it, I say!”

This time she heeded him, and caught her breath and lay silent, save

for the gasping sobs that wrenched all her frame. For a long minute she

lay there, perfectly motionless, until a cold fear seized her husband,

thinking that she was dying. Suddenly, however, he heard her voice,

faintly: “Jurgis! Jurgis!”

“What is it?” he said.

He had to bend down to her, she was so weak. She was pleading with him,

in broken phrases, painfully uttered: “Have faith in me! Believe me!”

“Believe what?” he cried.

“Believe that I—that I know best—that I love you! And do not ask

me—what you did. Oh, Jurgis, please, please! It is for the best—it is—”

He started to speak again, but she rushed on frantically, heading him

off. “If you will only do it! If you will only—only believe me! It

wasn’t my fault—I couldn’t help it—it will be all right—it is

nothing—it is no harm. Oh, Jurgis—please, please!”

She had hold of him, and was trying to raise herself to look at him; he

could feel the palsied shaking of her hands and the heaving of the

bosom she pressed against him. She managed to catch one of his hands

and gripped it convulsively, drawing it to her face, and bathing it in

her tears. “Oh, believe me, believe me!” she wailed again; and he

shouted in fury, “I will not!”

But still she clung to him, wailing aloud in her despair: “Oh, Jurgis,

think what you are doing! It will ruin us—it will ruin us! Oh, no, you

must not do it! No, don’t, don’t do it. You must not do it! It will

drive me mad—it will kill me—no, no, Jurgis, I am crazy—it is nothing.

You do not really need to know. We can be happy—we can love each other

just the same. Oh, please, please, believe me!”

Her words fairly drove him wild. He tore his hands loose, and flung her

off. “Answer me,” he cried. “God damn it, I say—answer me!”

She sank down upon the floor, beginning to cry again. It was like

listening to the moan of a damned soul, and Jurgis could not stand it.

He smote his fist upon the table by his side, and shouted again at her,

“Answer me!”

She began to scream aloud, her voice like the voice of some wild beast:

“Ah! Ah! I can’t! I can’t do it!”

“Why can’t you do it?” he shouted.

“I don’t know how!”

He sprang and caught her by the arm, lifting her up, and glaring into

her face. “Tell me where you were last night!” he panted. “Quick, out

with it!”

Then she began to whisper, one word at a time: “I—was in—a

house—downtown—”

“What house? What do you mean?”

She tried to hide her eyes away, but he held her. “Miss Henderson’s

house,” she gasped. He did not understand at first. “Miss Henderson’s

house,” he echoed. And then suddenly, as in an explosion, the horrible

truth burst over him, and he reeled and staggered back with a scream.

He caught himself against the wall, and put his hand to his forehead,

staring about him, and whispering, “Jesus! Jesus!”

An instant later he leaped at her, as she lay groveling at his feet. He

seized her by the throat. “Tell me!” he gasped, hoarsely. “Quick! Who

took you to that place?”

She tried to get away, making him furious; he thought it was fear, of

the pain of his clutch—he did not understand that it was the agony of

her shame. Still she answered him, “Connor.”

“Connor,” he gasped. “Who is Connor?”

“The boss,” she answered. “The man—”

He tightened his grip, in his frenzy, and only when he saw her eyes

closing did he realize that he was choking her. Then he relaxed his

fingers, and crouched, waiting, until she opened her lids again. His

breath beat hot into her face.

“Tell me,” he whispered, at last, “tell me about it.”

She lay perfectly motionless, and he had to hold his breath to catch

her words. “I did not want—to do it,” she said; “I tried—I tried not to

do it. I only did it—to save us. It was our only chance.”

Again, for a space, there was no sound but his panting. Ona’s eyes

closed and when she spoke again she did not open them. “He told me—he

would have me turned off. He told me he would—we would all of us lose

our places. We could never get anything to do—here—again. He—he meant

it—he would have ruined us.”

Jurgis’ arms were shaking so that he could scarcely hold himself up,

and lurched forward now and then as he listened. “When—when did this

begin?” he gasped.

“At the very first,” she said. She spoke as if in a trance. “It was

all—it was their plot—Miss Henderson’s plot. She hated me. And he—he

wanted me. He used to speak to me—out on the platform. Then he began

to—to make love to me. He offered me money. He begged me—he said he

loved me. Then he threatened me. He knew all about us, he knew we would

starve. He knew your boss—he knew Marija’s. He would hound us to death,

he said—then he said if I would—if I—we would all of us be sure of

work—always. Then one day he caught hold of me—he would not let

go—he—he—”

“Where was this?”

“In the hallway—at night—after every one had gone. I could not help it.

I thought of you—of the baby—of mother and the children. I was afraid

of him—afraid to cry out.”

A moment ago her face had been ashen gray, now it was scarlet. She was

beginning to breathe hard again. Jurgis made not a sound.

“That was two months ago. Then he wanted me to come—to that house. He

wanted me to stay there. He said all of us—that we would not have to

work. He made me come there—in the evenings. I told you—you thought I

was at the factory. Then—one night it snowed, and I couldn’t get back.

And last night—the cars were stopped. It was such a little thing—to

ruin us all. I tried to walk, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to

know. It would have—it would have been all right. We could have gone

on—just the same—you need never have known about it. He was getting

tired of me—he would have let me alone soon. I am going to have a

baby—I am getting ugly. He told me that—twice, he told me, last night.

He kicked me—last night—too. And now you will kill him—you—you will

kill him—and we shall die.”

All this she had said without a quiver; she lay still as death, not an

eyelid moving. And Jurgis, too, said not a word. He lifted himself by

the bed, and stood up. He did not stop for another glance at her, but

went to the door and opened it. He did not see Elzbieta, crouching

terrified in the corner. He went out, hatless, leaving the street door

open behind him. The instant his feet were on the sidewalk he broke

into a run.

He ran like one possessed, blindly, furiously, looking neither to the

right nor left. He was on Ashland Avenue before exhaustion compelled

him to slow down, and then, noticing a car, he made a dart for it and

drew himself aboard. His eyes were wild and his hair flying, and he was

breathing hoarsely, like a wounded bull; but the people on the car did

not notice this particularly—perhaps it seemed natural to them that a

man who smelled as Jurgis smelled should exhibit an aspect to

correspond. They began to give way before him as usual. The conductor

took his nickel gingerly, with the tips of his fingers, and then left

him with the platform to himself. Jurgis did not even notice it—his

thoughts were far away. Within his soul it was like a roaring furnace;

he stood waiting, waiting, crouching as if for a spring.

He had some of his breath back when the car came to the entrance of the

yards, and so he leaped off and started again, racing at full speed.

People turned and stared at him, but he saw no one—there was the

factory, and he bounded through the doorway and down the corridor. He

knew the room where Ona worked, and he knew Connor, the boss of the

loading-gang outside. He looked for the man as he sprang into the room.

The truckmen were hard at work, loading the freshly packed boxes and

barrels upon the cars. Jurgis shot one swift glance up and down the

platform—the man was not on it. But then suddenly he heard a voice in

the corridor, and started for it with a bound. In an instant more he

fronted the boss.

He was a big, red-faced Irishman, coarse-featured, and smelling of

liquor. He saw Jurgis as he crossed the threshold, and turned white. He

hesitated one second, as if meaning to run; and in the next his

assailant was upon him. He put up his hands to protect his face, but

Jurgis, lunging with all the power of his arm and body, struck him

fairly between the eyes and knocked him backward. The next moment he

was on top of him, burying his fingers in his throat.

To Jurgis this man’s whole presence reeked of the crime he had

committed; the touch of his body was madness to him—it set every nerve

of him a-tremble, it aroused all the demon in his soul. It had worked

its will upon Ona, this great beast—and now he had it, he had it! It

was his turn now! Things swam blood before him, and he screamed aloud

in his fury, lifting his victim and smashing his head upon the floor.

The place, of course, was in an uproar; women fainting and shrieking,

and men rushing in. Jurgis was so bent upon his task that he knew

nothing of this, and scarcely realized that people were trying to

interfere with him; it was only when half a dozen men had seized him by

the legs and shoulders and were pulling at him, that he understood that

he was losing his prey. In a flash he had bent down and sunk his teeth

into the man’s cheek; and when they tore him away he was dripping with

blood, and little ribbons of skin were hanging in his mouth.

They got him down upon the floor, clinging to him by his arms and legs,

and still they could hardly hold him. He fought like a tiger, writhing

and twisting, half flinging them off, and starting toward his

unconscious enemy. But yet others rushed in, until there was a little

mountain of twisted limbs and bodies, heaving and tossing, and working

its way about the room. In the end, by their sheer weight, they choked

the breath out of him, and then they carried him to the company police

station, where he lay still until they had summoned a patrol wagon to

take him away.

CHAPTER XVI

When Jurgis got up again he went quietly enough. He was exhausted and

half-dazed, and besides he saw the blue uniforms of the policemen. He

drove in a patrol wagon with half a dozen of them watching him; keeping

as far away as possible, however, on account of the fertilizer. Then he

stood before the sergeant’s desk and gave his name and address, and saw

a charge of assault and battery entered against him. On his way to his

cell a burly policeman cursed him because he started down the wrong

corridor, and then added a kick when he was not quick enough;

nevertheless, Jurgis did not even lift his eyes—he had lived two years

and a half in Packingtown, and he knew what the police were. It was as

much as a man’s very life was worth to anger them, here in their inmost

lair; like as not a dozen would pile on to him at once, and pound his

face into a pulp. It would be nothing unusual if he got his skull

cracked in the mêlée—in which case they would report that he had been

drunk and had fallen down, and there would be no one to know the

difference or to care.

So a barred door clanged upon Jurgis and he sat down upon a bench and

buried his face in his hands. He was alone; he had the afternoon and

all of the night to himself.

At first he was like a wild beast that has glutted itself; he was in a

dull stupor of satisfaction. He had done up the scoundrel pretty

well—not as well as he would have if they had given him a minute more,

but pretty well, all the same; the ends of his fingers were still

tingling from their contact with the fellow’s throat. But then, little

by little, as his strength came back and his senses cleared, he began

to see beyond his momentary gratification; that he had nearly killed

the boss would not help Ona—not the horrors that she had borne, nor the

memory that would haunt her all her days. It would not help to feed her

and her child; she would certainly lose her place, while he—what was to

happen to him God only knew.

Half the night he paced the floor, wrestling with this nightmare; and

when he was exhausted he lay down, trying to sleep, but finding

instead, for the first time in his life, that his brain was too much

for him. In the cell next to him was a drunken wife-beater and in the

one beyond a yelling maniac. At midnight they opened the station house

to the homeless wanderers who were crowded about the door, shivering in

the winter blast, and they thronged into the corridor outside of the

cells. Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor

and fell to snoring, others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and

quarreling. The air was fetid with their breath, yet in spite of this

some of them smelled Jurgis and called down the torments of hell upon

him, while he lay in a far corner of his cell, counting the throbbings

of the blood in his forehead.

They had brought him his supper, which was “duffers and dope”—being

hunks of dry bread on a tin plate, and coffee, called “dope” because it

was drugged to keep the prisoners quiet. Jurgis had not known this, or

he would have swallowed the stuff in desperation; as it was, every

nerve of him was a-quiver with shame and rage. Toward morning the place

fell silent, and he got up and began to pace his cell; and then within

the soul of him there rose up a fiend, red-eyed and cruel, and tore out

the strings of his heart.