The Jungle
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 woman 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