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 11


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
medieval 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 naively, 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 melee 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 melees 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 clothesbasket 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 agelong 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 12


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 13


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.