The cost of the wedding feast would, of course, be returned to them;
but the problem was to raise it even temporarily. They had been in the
neighborhood so short a time that they could not get much credit, and
there was no one except Szedvilas from whom they could borrow even a
little. Evening after evening Jurgis and Ona would sit and figure the
expenses, calculating the term of their separation. They could not
possibly manage it decently for less than two hundred dollars, and even
though they were welcome to count in the whole of the earnings of Marija
and Jonas, as a loan, they could not hope to raise this sum in less
than four or five months. So Ona began thinking of seeking employment
herself, saying that if she had even ordinarily good luck, she might be
able to take two months off the time. They were just beginning to adjust
themselves to this necessity, when out of the clear sky there fell a
thunderbolt upon them--a calamity that scattered all their hopes to the
four winds.

About a block away from them there lived another Lithuanian family,
consisting of an elderly widow and one grown son; their name was
Majauszkis, and our friends struck up an acquaintance with them before
long. One evening they came over for a visit, and naturally the first
subject upon which the conversation turned was the neighborhood and its
history; and then Grandmother Majauszkiene, as the old lady was called,
proceeded to recite to them a string of horrors that fairly froze their
blood. She was a wrinkled-up and wizened personage--she must have been
eighty--and as she mumbled the grim story through her toothless gums,
she seemed a very old witch to them. Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived
in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element,
and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people
might about weddings and holidays.

The thing came gradually. In the first place as to the house they
had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about
fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint,
which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The
house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed
to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen
hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred,
when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son
belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up
exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material;
they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at
all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the
trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her
son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the
company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a
hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry,
they had been able to pay for the house.

Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this
remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the
company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses
were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would
not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a
single month--they would lose the house and all that they had paid on
it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often
get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her
hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than
half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about
Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house
was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been
sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four
families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed.
She would tell them a little about it.

The first family had been Germans. The families had all been of
different nationalities--there had been a representative of several
races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother
Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when so far as
she knew there was only one other Lithuanian family in the district;
the workers had all been Germans then--skilled cattle butchers that the
packers had brought from abroad to start the business. Afterward, as
cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the
Irish--there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a
regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough
to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but
most of those who were working in the packing houses had gone away at
the next drop in wages--after the big strike. The Bohemians had come
then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself
was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix
the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike
on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in
Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the
stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed
them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces
and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands,
had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians
were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable
than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers
would find them, never fear. It was easy to bring them, for wages were
really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor
people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like
rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in
every day. By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the
thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and
murder the packers. Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some
such strange thing; another son of hers was working in the mines of
Siberia, and the old lady herself had made speeches in her time--which
made her seem all the more terrible to her present auditors.

They called her back to the story of the house. The German family had
been a good sort. To be sure there had been a great many of them, which
was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the
father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half
paid for the house. But he had been killed in an elevator accident in
Durham's.

Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too;
the husband drank and beat the children--the neighbors could hear them
shrieking any night. They were behind with their rent all the time,
but the company was good to them; there was some politics back of that,
Grandmother Majauszkiene could not say just what, but the Laffertys had
belonged to the "War Whoop League," which was a sort of political club
of all the thugs and rowdies in the district; and if you belonged to
that, you could never be arrested for anything. Once upon a time old
Lafferty had been caught with a gang that had stolen cows from several
of the poor people of the neighborhood and butchered them in an old
shanty back of the yards and sold them. He had been in jail only three
days for it, and had come out laughing, and had not even lost his place
in the packing house. He had gone all to ruin with the drink, however,
and lost his power; one of his sons, who was a good man, had kept him
and the family up for a year or two, but then he had got sick with
consumption.

That was another thing, Grandmother Majauszkiene interrupted
herself--this house was unlucky. Every family that lived in it, some one
was sure to get consumption. Nobody could tell why that was; there must
be something about the house, or the way it was built--some folks said
it was because the building had been begun in the dark of the moon.
There were dozens of houses that way in Packingtown. Sometimes there
would be a particular room that you could point out--if anybody slept in
that room he was just as good as dead. With this house it had been the
Irish first; and then a Bohemian family had lost a child of it--though,
to be sure, that was uncertain, since it was hard to tell what was the
matter with children who worked in the yards. In those days there had
been no law about the age of children--the packers had worked all but
the babies. At this remark the family looked puzzled, and Grandmother
Majauszkiene again had to make an explanation--that it was against the
law for children to work before they were sixteen. What was the sense of
that? they asked. They had been thinking of letting little Stanislovas
go to work. Well, there was no need to worry, Grandmother Majauszkiene
said--the law made no difference except that it forced people to lie
about the ages of their children. One would like to know what the
lawmakers expected them to do; there were families that had no possible
means of support except the children, and the law provided them no
other way of getting a living. Very often a man could get no work in
Packingtown for months, while a child could go and get a place easily;
there was always some new machine, by which the packers could get as
much work out of a child as they had been able to get out of a man, and
for a third of the pay.

To come back to the house again, it was the woman of the next family
that had died. That was after they had been there nearly four years, and
this woman had had twins regularly every year--and there had been more
than you could count when they moved in. After she died the man would
go to work all day and leave them to shift for themselves--the neighbors
would help them now and then, for they would almost freeze to death. At
the end there were three days that they were alone, before it was found
out that the father was dead. He was a "floorsman" at Jones's, and a
wounded steer had broken loose and mashed him against a pillar. Then the
children had been taken away, and the company had sold the house that
very same week to a party of emigrants.

So this grim old women went on with her tale of horrors. How much of it
was exaggeration--who could tell? It was only too plausible. There
was that about consumption, for instance. They knew nothing about
consumption whatever, except that it made people cough; and for two
weeks they had been worrying about a coughing-spell of Antanas. It
seemed to shake him all over, and it never stopped; you could see a red
stain wherever he had spit upon the floor.

And yet all these things were as nothing to what came a little later.
They had begun to question the old lady as to why one family had been
unable to pay, trying to show her by figures that it ought to have been
possible; and Grandmother Majauszkiene had disputed their figures--"You
say twelve dollars a month; but that does not include the interest."

Then they stared at her. "Interest!" they cried.

"Interest on the money you still owe," she answered.

"But we don't have to pay any interest!" they exclaimed, three or four
at once. "We only have to pay twelve dollars each month."

And for this she laughed at them. "You are like all the rest," she said;
"they trick you and eat you alive. They never sell the houses without
interest. Get your deed, and see."

Then, with a horrible sinking of the heart, Teta Elzbieta unlocked her
bureau and brought out the paper that had already caused them so many
agonies. Now they sat round, scarcely breathing, while the old lady, who
could read English, ran over it. "Yes," she said, finally, "here it is,
of course: 'With interest thereon monthly, at the rate of seven per cent
per annum.'"

And there followed a dead silence. "What does that mean?" asked Jurgis
finally, almost in a whisper.

"That means," replied the other, "that you have to pay them seven
dollars next month, as well as the twelve dollars."

Then again there was not a sound. It was sickening, like a nightmare,
in which suddenly something gives way beneath you, and you feel yourself
sinking, sinking, down into bottomless abysses. As if in a flash of
lightning they saw themselves--victims of a relentless fate, cornered,
trapped, in the grip of destruction. All the fair structure of their
hopes came crashing about their ears.--And all the time the old woman
was going on talking. They wished that she would be still; her voice
sounded like the croaking of some dismal raven. Jurgis sat with his
hands clenched and beads of perspiration on his forehead, and there was
a great lump in Ona's throat, choking her. Then suddenly Teta Elzbieta
broke the silence with a wail, and Marija began to wring her hands and
sob, "Ai! Ai! Beda man!"

All their outcry did them no good, of course. There sat Grandmother
Majauszkiene, unrelenting, typifying fate. No, of course it was not
fair, but then fairness had nothing to do with it. And of course they
had not known it. They had not been intended to know it. But it was in
the deed, and that was all that was necessary, as they would find when
the time came.

Somehow or other they got rid of their guest, and then they passed a
night of lamentation. The children woke up and found out that something
was wrong, and they wailed and would not be comforted. In the morning,
of course, most of them had to go to work, the packing houses would not
stop for their sorrows; but by seven o'clock Ona and her stepmother were
standing at the door of the office of the agent. Yes, he told them, when
he came, it was quite true that they would have to pay interest. And
then Teta Elzbieta broke forth into protestations and reproaches, so
that the people outside stopped and peered in at the window. The agent
was as bland as ever. He was deeply pained, he said. He had not told
them, simply because he had supposed they would understand that they had
to pay interest upon their debt, as a matter of course.

So they came away, and Ona went down to the yards, and at noontime saw
Jurgis and told him. Jurgis took it stolidly--he had made up his mind to
it by this time. It was part of fate; they would manage it somehow--he
made his usual answer, "I will work harder." It would upset their plans
for a time; and it would perhaps be necessary for Ona to get work
after all. Then Ona added that Teta Elzbieta had decided that little
Stanislovas would have to work too. It was not fair to let Jurgis and
her support the family--the family would have to help as it could.
Previously Jurgis had scouted this idea, but now knit his brows and
nodded his head slowly--yes, perhaps it would be best; they would all
have to make some sacrifices now.

So Ona set out that day to hunt for work; and at night Marija came home
saying that she had met a girl named Jasaityte who had a friend that
worked in one of the wrapping rooms in Brown's, and might get a place
for Ona there; only the forelady was the kind that takes presents--it
was no use for any one to ask her for a place unless at the same time
they slipped a ten-dollar bill into her hand. Jurgis was not in the
least surprised at this now--he merely asked what the wages of the place
would be. So negotiations were opened, and after an interview Ona came
home and reported that the forelady seemed to like her, and had said
that, while she was not sure, she thought she might be able to put her
at work sewing covers on hams, a job at which she would earn as much as
eight or ten dollars a week. That was a bid, so Marija reported, after
consulting her friend; and then there was an anxious conference at home.
The work was done in one of the cellars, and Jurgis did not want Ona to
work in such a place; but then it was easy work, and one could not have
everything. So in the end Ona, with a ten-dollar bill burning a hole in
her palm, had another interview with the forelady.

Meantime Teta Elzbieta had taken Stanislovas to the priest and gotten a
certificate to the effect that he was two years older than he was; and
with it the little boy now sallied forth to make his fortune in the
world. It chanced that Durham had just put in a wonderful new lard
machine, and when the special policeman in front of the time station
saw Stanislovas and his document, he smiled to himself and told him to
go--"Czia! Czia!" pointing. And so Stanislovas went down a long stone
corridor, and up a flight of stairs, which took him into a room lighted
by electricity, with the new machines for filling lard cans at work
in it. The lard was finished on the floor above, and it came in little
jets, like beautiful, wriggling, snow-white snakes of unpleasant odor.
There were several kinds and sizes of jets, and after a certain precise
quantity had come out, each stopped automatically, and the wonderful
machine made a turn, and took the can under another jet, and so on,
until it was filled neatly to the brim, and pressed tightly, and
smoothed off. To attend to all this and fill several hundred cans of
lard per hour, there were necessary two human creatures, one of whom
knew how to place an empty lard can on a certain spot every few seconds,
and the other of whom knew how to take a full lard can off a certain
spot every few seconds and set it upon a tray.

And so, after little Stanislovas had stood gazing timidly about him for
a few minutes, a man approached him, and asked what he wanted, to which
Stanislovas said, "Job." Then the man said "How old?" and Stanislovas
answered, "Sixtin." Once or twice every year a state inspector would
come wandering through the packing plants, asking a child here and there
how old he was; and so the packers were very careful to comply with the
law, which cost them as much trouble as was now involved in the boss's
taking the document from the little boy, and glancing at it, and then
sending it to the office to be filed away. Then he set some one else at
a different job, and showed the lad how to place a lard can every time
the empty arm of the remorseless machine came to him; and so was decided
the place in the universe of little Stanislovas, and his destiny till
the end of his days. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, it
was fated that he should stand upon a certain square foot of floor from
seven in the morning until noon, and again from half-past twelve till
half-past five, making never a motion and thinking never a thought,
save for the setting of lard cans. In summer the stench of the warm lard
would be nauseating, and in winter the cans would all but freeze to his
naked little fingers in the unheated cellar. Half the year it would be
dark as night when he went in to work, and dark as night again when
he came out, and so he would never know what the sun looked like on
weekdays. And for this, at the end of the week, he would carry home
three dollars to his family, being his pay at the rate of five cents per
hour--just about his proper share of the total earnings of the million
and three-quarters of children who are now engaged in earning their
livings in the United States.

And meantime, because they were young, and hope is not to be stifled
before its time, Jurgis and Ona were again calculating; for they had
discovered that the wages of Stanislovas would a little more than pay
the interest, which left them just about as they had been before! It
would be but fair to them to say that the little boy was delighted with
his work, and at the idea of earning a lot of money; and also that the
two were very much in love with each other.



Chapter 7


All summer long the family toiled, and in the fall they had money
enough for Jurgis and Ona to be married according to home traditions of
decency. In the latter part of November they hired a hall, and invited
all their new acquaintances, who came and left them over a hundred
dollars in debt.

It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it plunged them into an agony
of despair. Such a time, of all times, for them to have it, when their
hearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for their
married life; they loved each other so, and they could not have the
briefest respite! It was a time when everything cried out to them that
they ought to be happy; when wonder burned in their hearts, and leaped
into flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depths of
them, with the awe of love realized--and was it so very weak of them
that they cried out for a little peace? They had opened their hearts,
like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon
them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had
been so crushed and trampled!

Over them, relentless and savage, there cracked the lash of want; the
morning after the wedding it sought them as they slept, and drove
them out before daybreak to work. Ona was scarcely able to stand with
exhaustion; but if she were to lose her place they would be ruined, and
she would surely lose it if she were not on time that day. They all
had to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence in
sausages and sarsaparilla. All that day he stood at his lard machine,
rocking unsteadily, his eyes closing in spite of him; and he all but
lost his place even so, for the foreman booted him twice to waken him.

It was fully a week before they were all normal again, and meantime,
with whining children and cross adults, the house was not a pleasant
place to live in. Jurgis lost his temper very little, however, all
things considered. It was because of Ona; the least glance at her was
always enough to make him control himself. She was so sensitive--she was
not fitted for such a life as this; and a hundred times a day, when he
thought of her, he would clench his hands and fling himself again at the
task before him. She was too good for him, he told himself, and he was
afraid, because she was his. So long he had hungered to possess her,
but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the right;
that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no virtue
of his. But he was resolved that she should never find this out, and so
was always on the watch to see that he did not betray any of his ugly
self; he would take care even in little matters, such as his manners,
and his habit of swearing when things went wrong. The tears came so
easily into Ona's eyes, and she would look at him so appealingly--it
kept Jurgis quite busy making resolutions, in addition to all the other
things he had on his mind. It was true that more things were going on at
this time in the mind of Jurgis than ever had in all his life before.

He had to protect her, to do battle for her against the horror he saw
about them. He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed she
would be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide her
from the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was
a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not
give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to
you. You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you
understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to
get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with.
The store-keepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to
entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and telegraph
poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed
you lied to you, and lied to the whole country--from top to bottom it
was nothing but one gigantic lie.

So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful, for
the struggle was so unfair--some had so much the advantage! Here he was,
for instance, vowing upon his knees that he would save Ona from harm,
and only a week later she was suffering atrociously, and from the blow
of an enemy that he could not possibly have thwarted. There came a day
when the rain fell in torrents; and it being December, to be wet with it
and have to sit all day long in one of the cold cellars of Brown's was
no laughing matter. Ona was a working girl, and did not own waterproofs
and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her on the streetcar.
Now it chanced that this car line was owned by gentlemen who were trying
to make money. And the city having passed an ordinance requiring them to
give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and first they had made a
rule that transfers could be had only when the fare was paid; and later,
growing still uglier, they had made another--that the passenger must ask
for the transfer, the conductor was not allowed to offer it. Now Ona
had been told that she was to get a transfer; but it was not her way to
speak up, and so she merely waited, following the conductor about with
her eyes, wondering when he would think of her. When at last the time
came for her to get out, she asked for the transfer, and was refused.
Not knowing what to make of this, she began to argue with the conductor,
in a language of which he did not understand a word. After warning her
several times, he pulled the bell and the car went on--at which Ona
burst into tears. At the next corner she got out, of course; and as she
had no more money, she had to walk the rest of the way to the yards in
the pouring rain. And so all day long she sat shivering, and came home
at night with her teeth chattering and pains in her head and back. For
two weeks afterward she suffered cruelly--and yet every day she had to
drag herself to her work. The forewoman was especially severe with Ona,
because she believed that she was obstinate on account of having been
refused a holiday the day after her wedding. Ona had an idea that her
"forelady" did not like to have her girls marry--perhaps because she was
old and ugly and unmarried herself.

There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them.
Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could
they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage
of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that
the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and
doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well
at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was
obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts--and how was she to know
that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea
and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned
peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with
aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have
done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other
sort was to be had? The bitter winter was coming, and they had to save
money to get more clothing and bedding; but it would not matter in the
least how much they saved, they could not get anything to keep them
warm. All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of
cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and
weaving the fiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get
frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not
obtain for love nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas', recently come
from abroad, had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he
narrated with glee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting
countryman by his boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm
clock, and the boss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that
the price of one was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five.
Upon being asked what the difference was, the man had wound up the first
halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how the
latter made twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked that
he was a sound sleeper, and had better take the more expensive clock!

There is a poet who sings that

     "Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
     Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died."

But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that
comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and
yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating--unredeemed by the
slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish
that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted
into the vocabulary of poets--the details of it cannot be told in
polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite
sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found
their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience
and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent,
in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty
they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder--a patent
preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless
earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not
the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to
drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating
of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more
money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one
more misery for the rest of their days.

Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he
worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all
day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man's
cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever
stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a
still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where
his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had
eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet,
and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or
there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it,
and learned that it was a regular thing--it was the saltpeter. Every one
felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for
that sort of work. The sores would never heal--in the end his toes would
drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw the
suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to get
a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and coughing,
until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap, like the
One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him on the
floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor old man
was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the end, he
never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and cough, day
and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a time when there
was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke through--which
was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one night he had
a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his mouth. The
family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a dollar to
be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the doctor did not
say this so that the old man could hear, for he was still clinging to
the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be better, and could go
back to his job. The company had sent word to him that they would keep
it for him--or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the men to come one
Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas continued to believe
it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they
found him stiff and cold. Things were not going well with them then,
and though it nearly broke Teta Elzbieta's heart, they were forced to
dispense with nearly all the decencies of a funeral; they had only a
hearse, and one hack for the women and children; and Jurgis, who was
learning things fast, spent all Sunday making a bargain for these, and
he made it in the presence of witnesses, so that when the man tried to
charge him for all sorts of incidentals, he did not have to pay. For
twenty-five years old Antanas Rudkus and his son had dwelt in the forest
together, and it was hard to part in this way; perhaps it was just as
well that Jurgis had to give all his attention to the task of having
a funeral without being bankrupted, and so had no time to indulge in
memories and grief.


Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summer
long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them
lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow
and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it
was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle
that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes.
All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing
machine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the
replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking
among them, seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual
harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came
cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing
relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later
came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and then, with
no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there was a chance
for a new hand.

The new hands were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the
packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came,
literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each
other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to
them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before the
sun rose, an hour before the work began. Sometimes their faces
froze, sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all
together--but still they came, for they had no other place to go. One
day Durham advertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and
all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging through
the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night
forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards
district--they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other's laps, toboggan
fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the
police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow,
before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham's, and the police
reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot. Then Durham's bosses
picked out twenty of the biggest; the "two hundred" proved to have been
a printer's error.

Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the
bitter winds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten or
twenty degrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets would
be piled with snowdrifts up to the first-floor windows. The streets
through which our friends had to go to their work were all unpaved and
full of deep holes and gullies; in summer, when it rained hard, a man
might have to wade to his waist to get to his house; and now in winter
it was no joke getting through these places, before light in the morning
and after dark at night. They would wrap up in all they owned, but they
could not wrap up against exhaustion; and many a man gave out in these
battles with the snowdrifts, and lay down and fell asleep.

And if it was bad for the men, one may imagine how the women and
children fared. Some would ride in the cars, if the cars were running;
but when you are making only five cents an hour, as was little
Stanislovas, you do not like to spend that much to ride two miles. The
children would come to the yards with great shawls about their ears,
and so tied up that you could hardly find them--and still there would be
accidents. One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at
the lard machine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and screaming
with pain. They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously rubbing his
ears; and as they were frozen stiff, it took only two or three rubs to
break them short off. As a result of this, little Stanislovas conceived
a terror of the cold that was almost a mania. Every morning, when it
came time to start for the yards, he would begin to cry and protest.
Nobody knew quite how to manage him, for threats did no good--it seemed
to be something that he could not control, and they feared sometimes
that he would go into convulsions. In the end it had to be arranged that
he always went with Jurgis, and came home with him again; and often,
when the snow was deep, the man would carry him the whole way on his
shoulders. Sometimes Jurgis would be working until late at night, and
then it was pitiful, for there was no place for the little fellow to
wait, save in the doorways or in a corner of the killing beds, and he
would all but fall asleep there, and freeze to death.

There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well
have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very
little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places--and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had
to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above
the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were
apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned
against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand
upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your
skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks,
and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again,
and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great lumps the
size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosses were
not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles into the
steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to
the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that nearly all of
them--all of those who used knives--were unable to wear gloves, and
their arms would be white with frost and their hands would grow numb,
and then of course there would be accidents. Also the air would be full
of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that you could not
see five feet before you; and then, with men rushing about at the speed
they kept up on the killing beds, and all with butcher knives, like
razors, in their hands--well, it was to be counted as a wonder that
there were not more men slaughtered than cattle.

And yet all this inconvenience they might have put up with, if only it
had not been for one thing--if only there had been some place where they
might eat. Jurgis had either to eat his dinner amid the stench in which
he had worked, or else to rush, as did all his companions, to any one of
the hundreds of liquor stores which stretched out their arms to him. To
the west of the yards ran Ashland Avenue, and here was an unbroken
line of saloons--"Whiskey Row," they called it; to the north was
Forty-seventh Street, where there were half a dozen to the block, and at
the angle of the two was "Whiskey Point," a space of fifteen or twenty
acres, and containing one glue factory and about two hundred saloons.

One might walk among these and take his choice: "Hot pea-soup and boiled
cabbage today." "Sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Walk in." "Bean soup
and stewed lamb. Welcome." All of these things were printed in many
languages, as were also the names of the resorts, which were infinite
in their variety and appeal. There was the "Home Circle" and the
"Cosey Corner"; there were "Firesides" and "Hearthstones" and "Pleasure
Palaces" and "Wonderlands" and "Dream Castles" and "Love's Delights."
Whatever else they were called, they were sure to be called "Union
Headquarters," and to hold out a welcome to workingmen; and there was
always a warm stove, and a chair near it, and some friends to laugh and
talk with. There was only one condition attached,--you must drink. If
you went in not intending to drink, you would be put out in no time, and
if you were slow about going, like as not you would get your head split
open with a beer bottle in the bargain. But all of the men understood
the convention and drank; they believed that by it they were getting
something for nothing--for they did not need to take more than one
drink, and upon the strength of it they might fill themselves up with a
good hot dinner. This did not always work out in practice, however, for
there was pretty sure to be a friend who would treat you, and then you
would have to treat him. Then some one else would come in--and, anyhow,
a few drinks were good for a man who worked hard. As he went back he did
not shiver so, he had more courage for his task; the deadly brutalizing
monotony of it did not afflict him so,--he had ideas while he worked,
and took a more cheerful view of his circumstances. On the way home,
however, the shivering was apt to come on him again; and so he would
have to stop once or twice to warm up against the cruel cold. As there
were hot things to eat in this saloon too, he might get home late to his
supper, or he might not get home at all. And then his wife might set out
to look for him, and she too would feel the cold; and perhaps she would
have some of the children with her--and so a whole family would drift
into drinking, as the current of a river drifts downstream. As if to
complete the chain, the packers all paid their men in checks, refusing
all requests to pay in coin; and where in Packingtown could a man go to
have his check cashed but to a saloon, where he could pay for the favor
by spending a part of the money?

From all of these things Jurgis was saved because of Ona. He never would
take but the one drink at noontime; and so he got the reputation of
being a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons, and had
to drift about from one to another. Then at night he would go straight
home, helping Ona and Stanislovas, or often putting the former on a car.
And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudge several blocks, and
come staggering back through the snowdrifts with a bag of coal upon
his shoulder. Home was not a very attractive place--at least not this
winter. They had only been able to buy one stove, and this was a small
one, and proved not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the bitterest
weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all day, and for the
children when they could not get to school. At night they would sit
huddled round this stove, while they ate their supper off their laps;
and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after which they would all
crawl into their beds to get warm, after putting out the fire to save
the coal. Then they would have some frightful experiences with the cold.
They would sleep with all their clothes on, including their overcoats,
and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing they owned; the
children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yet even so they
could not keep warm. The outside ones would be shivering and sobbing,
crawling over the others and trying to get down into the center, and
causing a fight. This old house with the leaky weatherboards was a
very different thing from their cabins at home, with great thick walls
plastered inside and outside with mud; and the cold which came upon them
was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room. They would waken in
the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps they would hear
it yelling outside, or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness--and
that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept in through
the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers;
and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain.
It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in
the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the
tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was
cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp,
alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out;
there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning--when they
would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little nearer to
the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree.



Chapter 8


Yet even by this deadly winter the germ of hope was not to be kept
from sprouting in their hearts. It was just at this time that the great
adventure befell Marija.

The victim was Tamoszius Kuszleika, who played the violin. Everybody
laughed at them, for Tamoszius was petite and frail, and Marija could
have picked him up and carried him off under one arm. But perhaps that
was why she fascinated him; the sheer volume of Marija's energy was
overwhelming. That first night at the wedding Tamoszius had hardly taken
his eyes off her; and later on, when he came to find that she had really
the heart of a baby, her voice and her violence ceased to terrify him,
and he got the habit of coming to pay her visits on Sunday afternoons.
There was no place to entertain company except in the kitchen, in the
midst of the family, and Tamoszius would sit there with his hat between
his knees, never saying more than half a dozen words at a time, and
turning red in the face before he managed to say those; until finally
Jurgis would clap him upon the back, in his hearty way, crying, "Come
now, brother, give us a tune." And then Tamoszius' face would light up
and he would get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin, and play. And
forthwith the soul of him would flame up and become eloquent--it was
almost an impropriety, for all the while his gaze would be fixed upon
Marija's face, until she would begin to turn red and lower her eyes.
There was no resisting the music of Tamoszius, however; even the
children would sit awed and wondering, and the tears would run down Teta
Elzbieta's cheeks. A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into
the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and
the agonies of his inmost life.

Then there were other benefits accruing to Marija from this
friendship--benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamoszius
big money to come and make music on state occasions; and also they
would invite him to parties and festivals, knowing well that he was too
good-natured to come without his fiddle, and that having brought it,
he could be made to play while others danced. Once he made bold to ask
Marija to accompany him to such a party, and Marija accepted, to his
great delight--after which he never went anywhere without her, while if
the celebration were given by friends of his, he would invite the rest
of the family also. In any case Marija would bring back a huge pocketful
of cakes and sandwiches for the children, and stories of all the good
things she herself had managed to consume. She was compelled, at these
parties, to spend most of her time at the refreshment table, for she
could not dance with anybody except other women and very old men;
Tamoszius was of an excitable temperament, and afflicted with a frantic
jealousy, and any unmarried man who ventured to put his arm about the
ample waist of Marija would be certain to throw the orchestra out of
tune.

It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able
to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights. The
family was too poor and too hardworked to make many acquaintances;
in Packingtown, as a rule, people know only their near neighbors and
shopmates, and so the place is like a myriad of little country villages.
But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to travel and
widen her horizon; and so each week there would be new personalities to
talk about,--how so-and-so was dressed, and where she worked, and what
she got, and whom she was in love with; and how this man had jilted his
girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl, and what had passed
between them; and how another man beat his wife, and spent all her
earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes. Some people would have
scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to talk about what one
knows.

It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding, that
Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin case in the street and
spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms. She told them
all about it the next day, and fairly cried with happiness, for she said
that Tamoszius was a lovely man. After that he no longer made love
to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for hours in the kitchen,
blissfully happy in each other's arms; it was the tacit convention of
the family to know nothing of what was going on in that corner.

They were planning to be married in the spring, and have the garret
of the house fixed up, and live there. Tamoszius made good wages; and
little by little the family were paying back their debt to Marija,
so she ought soon to have enough to start life upon--only, with her
preposterous softheartedness, she would insist upon spending a good part
of her money every week for things which she saw they needed. Marija
was really the capitalist of the party, for she had become an expert can
painter by this time--she was getting fourteen cents for every hundred
and ten cans, and she could paint more than two cans every minute.
Marija felt, so to speak, that she had her hand on the throttle, and the
neighborhood was vocal with her rejoicings.