The Jungle
make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would
soon find out his error—for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good
work. You could lay that down for a rule—if you met a man who was
rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to
Jurgis’ father by the boss, _he_ would rise; the man who told tales and
spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own
business and did his work—why, they would “speed him up” till they had
worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.
Jurgis went home with his head buzzing. Yet he could not bring himself
to believe such things—no, it could not be so. Tamoszius was simply
another of the grumblers. He was a man who spent all his time fiddling;
and he would go to parties at night and not get home till sunrise, and
so of course he did not feel like work. Then, too, he was a puny little
chap; and so he had been left behind in the race, and that was why he
was sore. And yet so many strange things kept coming to Jurgis’ notice
every day!
He tried to persuade his father to have nothing to do with the offer.
But old Antanas had begged until he was worn out, and all his courage
was gone; he wanted a job, any sort of a job. So the next day he went
and found the man who had spoken to him, and promised to bring him a
third of all he earned; and that same day he was put to work in
Durham’s cellars. It was a “pickle room,” where there was never a dry
spot to stand upon, and so he had to take nearly the whole of his first
week’s earnings to buy him a pair of heavy-soled boots. He was a
“squeedgie” man; his job was to go about all day with a long-handled
mop, swabbing up the floor. Except that it was damp and dark, it was
not an unpleasant job, in summer.
Now Antanas Rudkus was the meekest man that God ever put on earth; and
so Jurgis found it a striking confirmation of what the men all said,
that his father had been at work only two days before he came home as
bitter as any of them, and cursing Durham’s with all the power of his
soul. For they had set him to cleaning out the traps; and the family
sat round and listened in wonder while he told them what that meant. It
seemed that he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef
for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men
with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken
to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach,
they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the
balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they
set Antanas with his mop slopping the “pickle” into a hole that
connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever;
and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all
the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every
few days it was the old man’s task to clean these out, and shovel their
contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!
This was the experience of Antanas; and then there came also Jonas and
Marija with tales to tell. Marija was working for one of the
independent packers, and was quite beside herself and outrageous with
triumph over the sums of money she was making as a painter of cans. But
one day she walked home with a pale-faced little woman who worked
opposite to her, Jadvyga Marcinkus by name, and Jadvyga told her how
she, Marija, had chanced to get her job. She had taken the place of an
Irishwoman who had been working in that factory ever since any one
could remember. For over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary Dennis
was her name, and a long time ago she had been seduced, and had a
little boy; he was a cripple, and an epileptic, but still he was all
that she had in the world to love, and they had lived in a little room
alone somewhere back of Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had
had consumption, and all day long you might hear her coughing as she
worked; of late she had been going all to pieces, and when Marija came,
the “forelady” had suddenly decided to turn her off. The forelady had
to come up to a certain standard herself, and could not stop for sick
people, Jadvyga explained. The fact that Mary had been there so long
had not made any difference to her—it was doubtful if she even knew
that, for both the forelady and the superintendent were new people,
having only been there two or three years themselves. Jadvyga did not
know what had become of the poor creature; she would have gone to see
her, but had been sick herself. She had pains in her back all the time,
Jadvyga explained, and feared that she had womb trouble. It was not fit
work for a woman, handling fourteen-pound cans all day.
It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by
the misfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with
hams from the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing
rooms. The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about
threescore hams on each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a
ton. On the uneven floor it was a task for a man to start one of these
trucks, unless he was a giant; and when it was once started he
naturally tried his best to keep it going. There was always the boss
prowling about, and if there was a second’s delay he would fall to
cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such, who could not understand
what was said to them, the bosses were wont to kick about the place
like so many dogs. Therefore these trucks went for the most part on the
run; and the predecessor of Jonas had been jammed against the wall by
one and crushed in a horrible and nameless manner.
All of these were sinister incidents; but they were trifles compared to
what Jurgis saw with his own eyes before long. One curious thing he had
noticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts;
which was the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to
come a “slunk” calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows
that the flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is
not fit for food. A good many of these came every day to the packing
houses—and, of course, if they had chosen, it would have been an easy
matter for the packers to keep them till they were fit for food. But
for the saving of time and fodder, it was the law that cows of that
sort came along with the others, and whoever noticed it would tell the
boss, and the boss would start up a conversation with the government
inspector, and the two would stroll away. So in a trice the carcass of
the cow would be cleaned out, and entrails would have vanished; it was
Jurgis’ task to slide them into the trap, calves and all, and on the
floor below they took out these “slunk” calves, and butchered them for
meat, and used even the skins of them.
One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the
last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,
Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this
injured man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the
government inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two
of men on the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand
cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains from far states,
and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and
some with gored sides; there were some that had died, from what cause
no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness
and silence. “Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had
a special elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds,
where the gang proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike
nonchalance which said plainer than any words that it was a matter of
everyday routine. It took a couple of hours to get them out of the way,
and in the end Jurgis saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest
of the meat, being carefully scattered here and there so that they
could not be identified. When he came home that night he was in a very
somber mood, having begun to see at last how those might be right who
had laughed at him for his faith in America.
CHAPTER VI
Jurgis and Ona were very much in love; they had waited a long time—it
was now well into the second year, and Jurgis judged everything by the
criterion of its helping or hindering their union. All his thoughts
were there; he accepted the family because it was a part of Ona. And he
was interested in the house because it was to be Ona’s home. Even the
tricks and cruelties he saw at Durham’s had little meaning for him just
then, save as they might happen to affect his future with Ona.
The marriage would have been at once, if they had had their way; but
this would mean that they would have to do without any wedding feast,
and when they suggested this they came into conflict with the old
people. To Teta Elzbieta especially the very suggestion was an
affliction. What! she would cry. To be married on the roadside like a
parcel of beggars! No! No!—Elzbieta had some traditions behind her; she
had been a person of importance in her girlhood—had lived on a big
estate and had servants, and might have married well and been a lady,
but for the fact that there had been nine daughters and no sons in the
family. Even so, however, she knew what was decent, and clung to her
traditions with desperation. They were not going to lose all caste,
even if they had come to be unskilled laborers in Packingtown; and that
Ona had even talked of omitting a _veselija_ was enough to keep her
stepmother lying awake all night. It was in vain for them to say that
they had so few friends; they were bound to have friends in time, and
then the friends would talk about it. They must not give up what was
right for a little money—if they did, the money would never do them any
good, they could depend upon that. And Elzbieta would call upon Dede
Antanas to support her; there was a fear in the souls of these two,
lest this journey to a new country might somehow undermine the old home
virtues of their children. The very first Sunday they had all been
taken to mass; and poor as they were, Elzbieta had felt it advisable to
invest a little of her resources in a representation of the babe of
Bethlehem, made in plaster, and painted in brilliant colors. Though it
was only a foot high, there was a shrine with four snow-white steeples,
and the Virgin standing with her child in her arms, and the kings and
shepherds and wise men bowing down before him. It had cost fifty cents;
but Elzbieta had a feeling that money spent for such things was not to
be counted too closely, it would come back in hidden ways. The piece
was beautiful on the parlor mantel, and one could not have a home
without some sort of ornament.
The cost of the wedding feast would, of course, be returned to them;
but the problem was to raise it even temporarily. They had been in the
neighborhood so short a time that they could not get much credit, and
there was no one except Szedvilas from whom they could borrow even a
little. Evening after evening Jurgis and Ona would sit and figure the
expenses, calculating the term of their separation. They could not
possibly manage it decently for less than two hundred dollars, and even
though they were welcome to count in the whole of the earnings of
Marija and Jonas, as a loan, they could not hope to raise this sum in
less than four or five months. So Ona began thinking of seeking
employment herself, saying that if she had even ordinarily good luck,
she might be able to take two months off the time. They were just
beginning to adjust themselves to this necessity, when out of the clear
sky there fell a thunderbolt upon them—a calamity that scattered all