The Jungle
listened to those who had had experience. The next time she would know
her place, as the forelady expressed it; and so Marija went out, and
the family faced the problem of an existence again.
It was especially hard this time, for Ona was to be confined before
long, and Jurgis was trying hard to save up money for this. He had
heard dreadful stories of the midwives, who grow as thick as fleas in
Packingtown; and he had made up his mind that Ona must have a
man-doctor. Jurgis could be very obstinate when he wanted to, and he
was in this case, much to the dismay of the women, who felt that a
man-doctor was an impropriety, and that the matter really belonged to
them. The cheapest doctor they could find would charge them fifteen
dollars, and perhaps more when the bill came in; and here was Jurgis,
declaring that he would pay it, even if he had to stop eating in the
meantime!
Marija had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she
wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of
finding it. Marija could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she
was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would
come home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time,
poor creature; she learned it ten times over. All the family learned it
along with her—that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you
hang on to it, come what will.
Four weeks Marija hunted, and half of a fifth week. Of course she
stopped paying her dues to the union. She lost all interest in the
union, and cursed herself for a fool that she had ever been dragged
into one. She had about made up her mind that she was a lost soul, when
somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got a place as a
“beef-trimmer.” She got this because the boss saw that she had the
muscles of a man, and so he discharged a man and put Marija to do his
work, paying her a little more than half what he had been paying
before.
When she first came to Packingtown, Marija would have scorned such work
as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work was to trim
the meat of those diseased cattle that Jurgis had been told about not
long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people
seldom saw the daylight; beneath her were the chilling rooms, where the
meat was frozen, and above her were the cooking rooms; and so she stood
on an ice-cold floor, while her head was often so hot that she could
scarcely breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred-weight,
while standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy
boots on and the floor always damp and full of puddles, liable to be
thrown out of work indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade,
liable again to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and be worked till
she trembled in every nerve and lost her grip on her slimy knife, and
gave herself a poisoned wound—that was the new life that unfolded
itself before Marija. But because Marija was a human horse she merely
laughed and went at it; it would enable her to pay her board again, and
keep the family going. And as for Tamoszius—well, they had waited a
long time, and they could wait a little longer. They could not possibly
get along upon his wages alone, and the family could not live without
hers. He could come and visit her, and sit in the kitchen and hold her
hand, and he must manage to be content with that. But day by day the
music of Tamoszius’ violin became more passionate and heartbreaking;
and Marija would sit with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all
her body a-tremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the
unborn generations which cried out in her for life.
Marija’s lesson came just in time to save Ona from a similar fate. Ona,
too, was dissatisfied with her place, and had far more reason than
Marija. She did not tell half of her story at home, because she saw it
was a torment to Jurgis, and she was afraid of what he might do. For a
long time Ona had seen that Miss Henderson, the forelady in her
department, did not like her. At first she thought it was the old-time
mistake she had made in asking for a holiday to get married. Then she
concluded it must be because she did not give the forelady a present
occasionally—she was the kind that took presents from the girls, Ona
learned, and made all sorts of discriminations in favor of those who
gave them. In the end, however, Ona discovered that it was even worse
than that. Miss Henderson was a newcomer, and it was some time before
rumor made her out; but finally it transpired that she was a kept
woman, the former mistress of the superintendent of a department in the
same building. He had put her there to keep her quiet, it seemed—and
that not altogether with success, for once or twice they had been heard
quarreling. She had the temper of a hyena, and soon the place she ran
was a witch’s caldron. There were some of the girls who were of her own
sort, who were willing to toady to her and flatter her; and these would
carry tales about the rest, and so the furies were unchained in the
place. Worse than this, the woman lived in a bawdy-house downtown, with
a coarse, red-faced Irishman named Connor, who was the boss of the
loading-gang outside, and would make free with the girls as they went
to and from their work. In the slack seasons some of them would go with
Miss Henderson to this house downtown—in fact, it would not be too much
to say that she managed her department at Brown’s in conjunction with
it. Sometimes women from the house would be given places alongside of
decent girls, and after other decent girls had been turned off to make
room for them. When you worked in this woman’s department the house
downtown was never out of your thoughts all day—there were always
whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the Packingtown rendering
plants at night, when the wind shifted suddenly. There would be stories
about it going the rounds; the girls opposite you would be telling them
and winking at you. In such a place Ona would not have stayed a day,
but for starvation; and, as it was, she was never sure that she could
stay the next day. She understood now that the real reason that Miss
Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl; and she
knew that the talebearers and the toadies hated her for the same
reason, and were doing their best to make her life miserable.
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