The Jungle
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