The Jungle
“Yes, she’s been selling papers, too. She does best, because she’s a
girl. Only the cold is so bad—it’s terrible coming home at night,
Jurgis. Sometimes they can’t come home at all—I’m going to try to find
them tonight and sleep where they do, it’s so late and it’s such a long
ways home. I’ve had to walk, and I didn’t know where it was—I don’t
know how to get back, either. Only mother said I must come, because you
would want to know, and maybe somebody would help your family when they
had put you in jail so you couldn’t work. And I walked all day to get
here—and I only had a piece of bread for breakfast, Jurgis. Mother
hasn’t any work either, because the sausage department is shut down;
and she goes and begs at houses with a basket, and people give her
food. Only she didn’t get much yesterday; it was too cold for her
fingers, and today she was crying—”
So little Stanislovas went on, sobbing as he talked; and Jurgis stood,
gripping the table tightly, saying not a word, but feeling that his
head would burst; it was like having weights piled upon him, one after
another, crushing the life out of him. He struggled and fought within
himself—as if in some terrible nightmare, in which a man suffers an
agony, and cannot lift his hand, nor cry out, but feels that he is
going mad, that his brain is on fire—
Just when it seemed to him that another turn of the screw would kill
him, little Stanislovas stopped. “You cannot help us?” he said weakly.
Jurgis shook his head.
“They won’t give you anything here?”
He shook it again.
“When are you coming out?”
“Three weeks yet,” Jurgis answered.
And the boy gazed around him uncertainly. “Then I might as well go,” he
said.
Jurgis nodded. Then, suddenly recollecting, he put his hand into his
pocket and drew it out, shaking. “Here,” he said, holding out the
fourteen cents. “Take this to them.”
And Stanislovas took it, and after a little more hesitation, started
for the door. “Good-by, Jurgis,” he said, and the other noticed that he
walked unsteadily as he passed out of sight.
For a minute or so Jurgis stood clinging to his chair, reeling and
swaying; then the keeper touched him on the arm, and he turned and went
back to breaking stone.
CHAPTER XVIII
Jurgis did not get out of the Bridewell quite as soon as he had
expected. To his sentence there were added “court costs” of a dollar
and a half—he was supposed to pay for the trouble of putting him in
jail, and not having the money, was obliged to work it off by three
days more of toil. Nobody had taken the trouble to tell him this—only
after counting the days and looking forward to the end in an agony of
impatience, when the hour came that he expected to be free he found
himself still set at the stone heap, and laughed at when he ventured to
protest. Then he concluded he must have counted wrong; but as another
day passed, he gave up all hope—and was sunk in the depths of despair,
when one morning after breakfast a keeper came to him with the word
that his time was up at last. So he doffed his prison garb, and put on
his old fertilizer clothing, and heard the door of the prison clang
behind him.
He stood upon the steps, bewildered; he could hardly believe that it
was true,—that the sky was above him again and the open street before
him; that he was a free man. But then the cold began to strike through
his clothes, and he started quickly away.
There had been a heavy snow, and now a thaw had set in; fine sleety
rain was falling, driven by a wind that pierced Jurgis to the bone. He
had not stopped for his-overcoat when he set out to “do up” Connor, and
so his rides in the patrol wagons had been cruel experiences; his
clothing was old and worn thin, and it never had been very warm. Now as
he trudged on the rain soon wet it through; there were six inches of
watery slush on the sidewalks, so that his feet would soon have been
soaked, even had there been no holes in his shoes.
Jurgis had had enough to eat in the jail, and the work had been the
least trying of any that he had done since he came to Chicago; but even
so, he had not grown strong—the fear and grief that had preyed upon his
mind had worn him thin. Now he shivered and shrunk from the rain,
hiding his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders together.
The Bridewell grounds were on the outskirts of the city and the country
around them was unsettled and wild—on one side was the big drainage
canal, and on the other a maze of railroad tracks, and so the wind had
full sweep.
After walking a ways, Jurgis met a little ragamuffin whom he hailed:
“Hey, sonny!” The boy cocked one eye at him—he knew that Jurgis was a
“jailbird” by his shaven head. “Wot yer want?” he queried.
“How do you go to the stockyards?” Jurgis demanded.
“I don’t go,” replied the boy.
Jurgis hesitated a moment, nonplussed. Then he said, “I mean which is
the way?”
“Why don’t yer say so then?” was the response, and the boy pointed to
the northwest, across the tracks. “That way.”
“How far is it?” Jurgis asked. “I dunno,” said the other. “Mebbe twenty
miles or so.”
“Twenty miles!” Jurgis echoed, and his face fell. He had to walk every
foot of it, for they had turned him out of jail without a penny in his
pockets.
Yet, when he once got started, and his blood had warmed with walking,
he forgot everything in the fever of his thoughts. All the dreadful
imaginations that had haunted him in his cell now rushed into his mind
at once. The agony was almost over—he was going to find out; and he
clenched his hands in his pockets as he strode, following his flying
desire, almost at a run. Ona—the baby—the family—the house—he would
know the truth about them all! And he was coming to the rescue—he was
free again! His hands were his own, and he could help them, he could do
battle for them against the world.
For an hour or so he walked thus, and then he began to look about him.
He seemed to be leaving the city altogether. The street was turning
into a country road, leading out to the westward; there were
snow-covered fields on either side of him. Soon he met a farmer driving
a two-horse wagon loaded with straw, and he stopped him.
“Is this the way to the stockyards?” he asked.
The farmer scratched his head. “I dunno jest where they be,” he said.
“But they’re in the city somewhere, and you’re going dead away from it
now.”
Jurgis looked dazed. “I was told this was the way,” he said.
“Who told you?”
“A boy.”
“Well, mebbe he was playing a joke on ye. The best thing ye kin do is
to go back, and when ye git into town ask a policeman. I’d take ye in,
only I’ve come a long ways an’ I’m loaded heavy. Git up!”
So Jurgis turned and followed, and toward the end of the morning he
began to see Chicago again. Past endless blocks of two-story shanties
he walked, along wooden sidewalks and unpaved pathways treacherous with
deep slush holes. Every few blocks there would be a railroad crossing
on the level with the sidewalk, a deathtrap for the unwary; long
freight trains would be passing, the cars clanking and crashing
together, and Jurgis would pace about waiting, burning up with a fever
of impatience. Occasionally the cars would stop for some minutes, and
wagons and streetcars would crowd together waiting, the drivers
swearing at each other, or hiding beneath umbrellas out of the rain; at
such times Jurgis would dodge under the gates and run across the tracks
and between the cars, taking his life into his hands.
He crossed a long bridge over a river frozen solid and covered with
slush. Not even on the river bank was the snow white—the rain which
fell was a diluted solution of smoke, and Jurgis’ hands and face were
streaked with black. Then he came into the business part of the city,
where the streets were sewers of inky blackness, with horses sleeping
and plunging, and women and children flying across in panic-stricken
droves. These streets were huge canyons formed by towering black
buildings, echoing with the clang of car gongs and the shouts of
drivers; the people who swarmed in them were as busy as ants—all
hurrying breathlessly, never stopping to look at anything nor at each
other. The solitary trampish-looking foreigner, with water-soaked
clothing and haggard face and anxious eyes, was as much alone as he
hurried past them, as much unheeded and as lost, as if he had been a
thousand miles deep in a wilderness.
A policeman gave him his direction and told him that he had five miles
to go. He came again to the slum districts, to avenues of saloons and
cheap stores, with long dingy red factory buildings, and coal-yards and
railroad tracks; and then Jurgis lifted up his head and began to sniff
the air like a startled animal—scenting the far-off odor of home. It
was late afternoon then, and he was hungry, but the dinner invitations
hung out of the saloons were not for him.
So he came at last to the stockyards, to the black volcanoes of smoke
and the lowing cattle and the stench. Then, seeing a crowded car, his
impatience got the better of him and he jumped aboard, hiding behind
another man, unnoticed by the conductor. In ten minutes more he had
reached his street, and home.
He was half running as he came round the corner. There was the house,
at any rate—and then suddenly he stopped and stared. What was the
matter with the house?
Jurgis looked twice, bewildered; then he glanced at the house next door
and at the one beyond—then at the saloon on the corner. Yes, it was the
right place, quite certainly—he had not made any mistake. But the
house—the house was a different color!
He came a couple of steps nearer. Yes; it had been gray and now it was
yellow! The trimmings around the windows had been red, and now they
were green! It was all newly painted! How strange it made it seem!
Jurgis went closer yet, but keeping on the other side of the street. A
sudden and horrible spasm of fear had come over him. His knees were
shaking beneath him, and his mind was in a whirl. New paint on the
house, and new weatherboards, where the old had begun to rot off, and
the agent had got after them! New shingles over the hole in the roof,
too, the hole that had for six months been the bane of his soul—he
having no money to have it fixed and no time to fix it himself, and the
rain leaking in, and overflowing the pots and pans he put to catch it,
and flooding the attic and loosening the plaster. And now it was fixed!
And the broken windowpane replaced! And curtains in the windows! New,
white curtains, stiff and shiny!
Then suddenly the front door opened. Jurgis stood, his chest heaving as
he struggled to catch his breath. A boy had come out, a stranger to
him; a big, fat, rosy-cheeked youngster, such as had never been seen in
his home before.
Jurgis stared at the boy, fascinated. He came down the steps whistling,
kicking off the snow. He stopped at the foot, and picked up some, and
then leaned against the railing, making a snowball. A moment later he
looked around and saw Jurgis, and their eyes met; it was a hostile
glance, the boy evidently thinking that the other had suspicions of the
snowball. When Jurgis started slowly across the street toward him, he
gave a quick glance about, meditating retreat, but then he concluded to
stand his ground.
Jurgis took hold of the railing of the steps, for he was a little
unsteady. “What—what are you doing here?” he managed to gasp.
“Go on!” said the boy.
“You—” Jurgis tried again. “What do you want here?”
“Me?” answered the boy, angrily. “I live here.”
“You live here!” Jurgis panted. He turned white and clung more tightly
to the railing. “You live here! Then where’s my family?”
The boy looked surprised. “Your family!” he echoed.
And Jurgis started toward him. “I—this is my house!” he cried.