The Jungle
union—Jurgis had stuck to the union through all this—and begged them to
speak a word for him. He went to every one he knew, asking for a
chance, there or anywhere. He wandered all day through the buildings;
and in a week or two, when he had been all over the yards, and into
every room to which he had access, and learned that there was not a job
anywhere, he persuaded himself that there might have been a change in
the places he had first visited, and began the round all over; till
finally the watchmen and the “spotters” of the companies came to know
him by sight and to order him out with threats. Then there was nothing
more for him to do but go with the crowd in the morning, and keep in
the front row and look eager, and when he failed, go back home, and
play with little Kotrina and the baby.
The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the
meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he
had gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged
article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best
of him—they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their
carelessness, and now they had thrown him away! And Jurgis would make
the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men and find that they
had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had
wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills;
there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for instance,
who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The vast
majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great
merciless packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the
pace, some of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had
come when they could not keep up with it any more. Some had been
frankly told that they were too old, that a sprier man was needed;
others had given occasion, by some act of carelessness or incompetence;
with most, however, the occasion had been the same as with Jurgis. They
had been overworked and underfed so long, and finally some disease had
laid them on their backs; or they had cut themselves, and had blood
poisoning, or met with some other accident. When a man came back after
that, he would get his place back only by the courtesy of the boss. To
this there was no exception, save when the accident was one for which
the firm was liable; in that case they would send a slippery lawyer to
see him, first to try to get him to sign away his claims, but if he was
too smart for that, to promise him that he and his should always be
provided with work. This promise they would keep, strictly and to the
letter—for two years. Two years was the “statute of limitations,” and
after that the victim could not sue.
What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon the
circumstances. If he were of the highly skilled workers, he would
probably have enough saved up to tide him over. The best paid men, the
“splitters,” made fifty cents an hour, which would be five or six
dollars a day in the rush seasons, and one or two in the dullest. A man
could live and save on that; but then there were only half a dozen
splitters in each place, and one of them that Jurgis knew had a family
of twenty-two children, all hoping to grow up to be splitters like
their father. For an unskilled man, who made ten dollars a week in the
rush seasons and five in the dull, it all depended upon his age and the
number he had dependent upon him. An unmarried man could save, if he
did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish—that is, if he paid no
heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and
sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the
members of his union, and his chums, and the people who might be
starving to death next door.
CHAPTER XIII
During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of
little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both
Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having
lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital
dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk.
He was the last of Teta Elzbieta’s children, and perhaps he had been
intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate
he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though
he was over three years old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child of
one. All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little
dress, whining and fretting; because the floor was full of drafts he
was always catching cold, and snuffling because his nose ran. This made
him a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family. For his
mother, with unnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children,
and made a perpetual fuss over him—would let him do anything
undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting drove Jurgis
wild.
And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that
morning—which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork
that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after
eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he
was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was
all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a
doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one
was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have
to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at
this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands
and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a
pauper’s grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said
without protesting! It was enough to make Ona’s father rise up out of
his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to this, they might as well
give up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . . In the end
Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being
still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the
neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white
plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to
mark the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that;
the mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about
would make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little
fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only
she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great
doctor to cure him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was
told, a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great
European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease
from which Kristoforas had suffered. And because this surgeon had to
have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he would treat the
children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papers
became quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers, and no
one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then they would
not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait upon the
surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child.
All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow
hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the
pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching
the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown,
and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a
place that waits for the lowest man—the fertilizer plant!
The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more than one
in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented
themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There
were some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask
Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis would
debate the matter with himself. As poor as they were, and making all
the sacrifices that they were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work
that was offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would he
dare to go home and eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and
complaining as she was, knowing that he had been given a chance, and
had not had the nerve to take it?—And yet he might argue that way with
himself all day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer works would send
him away again shuddering. He was a man, and he would do his duty; he
went and made application—but surely he was not also required to hope
for success!
The fertilizer works of Durham’s lay away from the rest of the plant.
Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking
like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell.
To this part of the yards came all the “tankage” and the waste products
of all sorts; here they dried out the bones,—and in suffocating cellars
where the daylight never came you might see men and women and children
bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts
of shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to
die, every one of them, within a certain definite time. Here they made
the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things
still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was
done you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the
dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off
twinkling stars—red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the
color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of
these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but
there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his
courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming
under water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to
cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find
his head beginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb,
until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia
fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.
On top of this were the rooms where they dried the “tankage,” the mass
of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the
carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried
material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had
mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which
they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that
purpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to
the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone
phosphate. And then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would
buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn;
and for several days after the operation the fields would have a strong
odor, and the farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled
it would all have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure,
instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on
several acres under the open sky, there are hundreds and thousands of
tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in haystack piles,
covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a
choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.
It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an
unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and his