The Jungle
everybody running. Altogether it was a great day; and tired as they
were, Jurgis and Ona sat up late, contented simply to hold each other
and gaze in rapture about the room. They were going to be married as
soon as they could get everything settled, and a little spare money put
by; and this was to be their home—that little room yonder would be
theirs!
It was in truth a never-ending delight, the fixing up of this house.
They had no money to spend for the pleasure of spending, but there were
a few absolutely necessary things, and the buying of these was a
perpetual adventure for Ona. It must always be done at night, so that
Jurgis could go along; and even if it were only a pepper cruet, or half
a dozen glasses for ten cents, that was enough for an expedition. On
Saturday night they came home with a great basketful of things, and
spread them out on the table, while every one stood round, and the
children climbed up on the chairs, or howled to be lifted up to see.
There were sugar and salt and tea and crackers, and a can of lard and a
milk pail, and a scrubbing brush, and a pair of shoes for the second
oldest boy, and a can of oil, and a tack hammer, and a pound of nails.
These last were to be driven into the walls of the kitchen and the
bedrooms, to hang things on; and there was a family discussion as to
the place where each one was to be driven. Then Jurgis would try to
hammer, and hit his fingers because the hammer was too small, and get
mad because Ona had refused to let him pay fifteen cents more and get a
bigger hammer; and Ona would be invited to try it herself, and hurt her
thumb, and cry out, which necessitated the thumb’s being kissed by
Jurgis. Finally, after every one had had a try, the nails would be
driven, and something hung up. Jurgis had come home with a big packing
box on his head, and he sent Jonas to get another that he had bought.
He meant to take one side out of these tomorrow, and put shelves in
them, and make them into bureaus and places to keep things for the
bedrooms. The nest which had been advertised had not included feathers
for quite so many birds as there were in this family.
They had, of course, put their dining table in the kitchen, and the
dining room was used as the bedroom of Teta Elzbieta and five of her
children. She and the two youngest slept in the only bed, and the other
three had a mattress on the floor. Ona and her cousin dragged a
mattress into the parlor and slept at night, and the three men and the
oldest boy slept in the other room, having nothing but the very level
floor to rest on for the present. Even so, however, they slept
soundly—it was necessary for Teta Elzbieta to pound more than once on
the door at a quarter past five every morning. She would have ready a
great pot full of steaming black coffee, and oatmeal and bread and
smoked sausages; and then she would fix them their dinner pails with
more thick slices of bread with lard between them—they could not afford
butter—and some onions and a piece of cheese, and so they would tramp
away to work.
This was the first time in his life that he had ever really worked, it
seemed to Jurgis; it was the first time that he had ever had anything
to do which took all he had in him. Jurgis had stood with the rest up
in the gallery and watched the men on the killing beds, marveling at
their speed and power as if they had been wonderful machines; it
somehow never occurred to one to think of the flesh-and-blood side of
it—that is, not until he actually got down into the pit and took off
his coat. Then he saw things in a different light, he got at the inside
of them. The pace they set here, it was one that called for every
faculty of a man—from the instant the first steer fell till the
sounding of the noon whistle, and again from half-past twelve till
heaven only knew what hour in the late afternoon or evening, there was
never one instant’s rest for a man, for his hand or his eye or his
brain. Jurgis saw how they managed it; there were portions of the work
which determined the pace of the rest, and for these they had picked
men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed frequently. You
might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked under the eye
of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called
“speeding up the gang,” and if any man could not keep up with the pace,
there were hundreds outside begging to try.
Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It saved him the
necessity of flinging his arms about and fidgeting as he did in most
work. He would laugh to himself as he ran down the line, darting a
glance now and then at the man ahead of him. It was not the pleasantest
work one could think of, but it was necessary work; and what more had a
man the right to ask than a chance to do something useful, and to get
good pay for doing it?
So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free way; very much to
his surprise, he found that it had a tendency to get him into trouble.
For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing.
He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out—that most of
the men _hated_ their work. It seemed strange, it was even terrible,
when you came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it was
certainly the fact—they hated their work. They hated the bosses and
they hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole
neighborhood—even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter
and fierce. Women and little children would fall to cursing about it;
it was rotten, rotten as hell—everything was rotten. When Jurgis would
ask them what they meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and
content themselves with saying, “Never mind, you stay here and see for
yourself.”
One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he
was told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question
would only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a
fool. There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers’ union who came to
see Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and
the delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of
Lithuanian, lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end
Jurgis got into a fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it
would take more than one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by
little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop
to the habit of “speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a
lessening of the pace, for there were some, they said, who could not
keep up with it, whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with
such ideas as this—he could do the work himself, and so could the rest
of them, he declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn’t
do it, let them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books,
and he would not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he
had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for
himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to
listen to him holler.
Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by
Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned
the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart
because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the
yards begging for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a
worker ever since he was a child; he had run away from home when he was
twelve, because his father beat him for trying to learn to read. And he
was a faithful man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a
month, if only you had made him understand what you wanted him to do in
the meantime. And now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with
no more place in the world than a sick dog. He had his home, as it
happened, and some one who would care for him if he never got a job;
but his son could not help thinking, suppose this had not been the
case. Antanas Rudkus had been into every building in Packingtown by
this time, and into nearly every room; he had stood mornings among the
crowd of applicants till the very policemen had come to know his face
and to tell him to go home and give it up. He had been likewise to all
the stores and saloons for a mile about, begging for some little thing
to do; and everywhere they had ordered him out, sometimes with curses,
and not once even stopping to ask him a question.
So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis’ faith
in things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was
hunting a job—and it was yet wider when he finally got it. For one
evening the old man came home in a great state of excitement, with the
tale that he had been approached by a man in one of the corridors of
the pickle rooms of Durham’s, and asked what he would pay to get a job.
He had not known what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on
with matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get him a job,
provided that he were willing to pay one-third of his wages for it. Was
he a boss? Antanas had asked; to which the man had replied that that
was nobody’s business, but that he could do what he said.
Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them
and asked what this meant. The friend, who was named Tamoszius
Kuszleika, was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds,
and he listened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all
surprised. They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft.
It was simply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income.
After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were
simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort—the bosses grafted off
the men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the
superintendent would find out about the boss, and then he would graft
off the boss. Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the
situation. Here was Durham’s, for instance, owned by a man who was
trying to make as much money out of it as he could, and did not care in
the least how he did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades
like an army, were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one
driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much
work as possible. And all the men of the same rank were pitted against
each other; the accounts of each were kept separately, and every man
lived in terror of losing his job, if another made a better record than
he. So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething caldron of
jealousies and hatreds; there was no loyalty or decency anywhere about
it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a
dollar. And worse than there being no decency, there was not even any
honesty. The reason for that? Who could say? It must have been old
Durham in the beginning; it was a heritage which the self-made merchant
had left to his son, along with his millions.
Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there long
enough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so there
was no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and did
like all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to