The Jungle
secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a
record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the
fertilizer mill.
The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and
had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about
two o’clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain
shoot through him—the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis
had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together and
gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!
His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was one of the
vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground—rushing
forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung
forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen
others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That
others were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he
sometimes collided with them; otherwise they might as well not have
been there, for in the blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet
in front of his face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope
around him until another came, and if there was none on hand he
continued to grope till one arrived. In five minutes he was, of course,
a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they gave him a sponge to tie
over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the sponge did not
prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with it and his ears from
filling solid. He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—from hair to
shoes he became the color of the building and of everything in it, and
for that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building had to be left
open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of
fertilizer.
Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a
hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis’ skin,
and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed.
The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing; there
was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly
control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months’ siege
behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an
hour later he began to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his
inwards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the
fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it;
but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his
stomach.
At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to
catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his
bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a
saloon—they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one
class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could only make
his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor,
and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to
board a streetcar and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill
to notice it—how the people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to
put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious
glances. Jurgis only knew that a man in front of him immediately got up
and gave him a seat; and that half a minute later the two people on
each side of him got up; and that in a full minute the crowded car was
nearly empty—those passengers who could not get room on the platform
having gotten out to walk.
Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute
after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole
system was full of it, and it would have taken a week not merely of
scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was,
he could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest
discovery of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an
unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminished in power.
He smelled so that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the
whole family to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he could
keep anything upon his stomach—he might wash his hands, and use a knife
and fork, but were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?
And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches he would
stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once more, and begin to
shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And so at the end of the week he
was a fertilizer man for life—he was able to eat again, and though his
head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not
work.
So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over
the country, and the country ate generously of packing house products,
and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the
packers’ efforts to keep a superfluity of labor. They were again able
to pay their debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there were
one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long—it
was too bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age. It
was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without
knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment. They
were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick
up cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling
with pennies and dice and cigarette cards; they were learning the
location of all the houses of prostitution on the “Lêvée,” and the
names of the “madames” who kept them, and the days when they gave their
state banquets, which the police captains and the big politicians all
attended. If a visiting “country customer” were to ask them, they could
show him which was “Hinkydink’s” famous saloon, and could even point
out to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and “hold-up men”
who made the place their headquarters. And worse yet, the boys were
getting out of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use,
they would ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible carfare
riding out to the stockyards every night when the weather was pleasant
and they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep
exactly as well? So long as they brought home a half dollar for each
day, what mattered it when they brought it? But Jurgis declared that
from this to ceasing to come at all would not be a very long step, and
so it was decided that Vilimas and Nikalojus should return to school in
the fall, and that instead Elzbieta should go out and get some work,
her place at home being taken by her younger daughter.
Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made
old; she had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and
also of the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and
clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the
evening. She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all
this without a murmur; and her mother went out, and after trudging a
couple of days about the yards, settled down as a servant of a “sausage
machine.”
Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for
the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven
o’clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from one till
half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she could
not stand it—she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the
fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling.
Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric
light, and the dampness, too, was deadly—there were always puddles of
water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room.
The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature,
whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of
snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a
stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who
worked in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh
country sausage” they made.
The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three
minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines
were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably
sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be
interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these
inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men
shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great
bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute,
and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour,
and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on
the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was
a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would
take a long string of “casing” and put the end over the nozzle and then
work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove.
This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would
have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press
a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking the
casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear,
miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of
incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures,
and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted
them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work
of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an
endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her
hands a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was
quite like the feat of a prestidigitator—for the woman worked so fast
that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist
of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst
of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set
face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly
pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was
time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed right
there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage
links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have
a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had
arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did,
with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance
at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as
at some wild beast in a menagerie.
CHAPTER XIV
With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a
sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great
majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what
had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they
could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside,
and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that
they use everything of the pig except the squeal.
Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would
often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take
away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of