The Jungle
for instance, that the business of carrying satchels for railroad
passengers was a pre-empted one—whenever he essayed it, eight or ten
men and boys would fall upon him and force him to run for his life.
They always had the policeman “squared,” and so there was no use in
expecting protection.
That Jurgis did not starve to death was due solely to the pittance the
children brought him. And even this was never certain. For one thing
the cold was almost more than the children could bear; and then they,
too, were in perpetual peril from rivals who plundered and beat them.
The law was against them, too—little Vilimas, who was really eleven,
but did not look to be eight, was stopped on the streets by a severe
old lady in spectacles, who told him that he was too young to be
working and that if he did not stop selling papers she would send a
truant officer after him. Also one night a strange man caught little
Kotrina by the arm and tried to persuade her into a dark cellar-way, an
experience which filled her with such terror that she was hardly to be
kept at work.
At last, on a Sunday, as there was no use looking for work, Jurgis went
home by stealing rides on the cars. He found that they had been waiting
for him for three days—there was a chance of a job for him.
It was quite a story. Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger
these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself. Juozapas had
only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a little child, but
he had got himself a broomstick, which he put under his arm for a
crutch. He had fallen in with some other children and found the way to
Mike Scully’s dump, which lay three or four blocks away. To this place
there came every day many hundreds of wagon-loads of garbage and trash
from the lake front, where the rich people lived; and in the heaps the
children raked for food—there were hunks of bread and potato peelings
and apple cores and meat bones, all of it half frozen and quite
unspoiled. Little Juozapas gorged himself, and came home with a
newspaper full, which he was feeding to Antanas when his mother came
in. Elzbieta was horrified, for she did not believe that the food out
of the dumps was fit to eat. The next day, however, when no harm came
of it and Juozapas began to cry with hunger, she gave in and said that
he might go again. And that afternoon he came home with a story of how
while he had been digging away with a stick, a lady upon the street had
called him. A real fine lady, the little boy explained, a beautiful
lady; and she wanted to know all about him, and whether he got the
garbage for chickens, and why he walked with a broomstick, and why Ona
had died, and how Jurgis had come to go to jail, and what was the
matter with Marija, and everything. In the end she had asked where he
lived, and said that she was coming to see him, and bring him a new
crutch to walk with. She had on a hat with a bird upon it, Juozapas
added, and a long fur snake around her neck.
She really came, the very next morning, and climbed the ladder to the
garret, and stood and stared about her, turning pale at the sight of
the blood stains on the floor where Ona had died. She was a “settlement
worker,” she explained to Elzbieta—she lived around on Ashland Avenue.
Elzbieta knew the place, over a feed store; somebody had wanted her to
go there, but she had not cared to, for she thought that it must have
something to do with religion, and the priest did not like her to have
anything to do with strange religions. They were rich people who came
to live there to find out about the poor people; but what good they
expected it would do them to know, one could not imagine. So spoke
Elzbieta, naïvely, and the young lady laughed and was rather at a loss
for an answer—she stood and gazed about her, and thought of a cynical
remark that had been made to her, that she was standing upon the brink
of the pit of hell and throwing in snowballs to lower the temperature.
Elzbieta was glad to have somebody to listen, and she told all their
woes—what had happened to Ona, and the jail, and the loss of their
home, and Marija’s accident, and how Ona had died, and how Jurgis could
get no work. As she listened the pretty young lady’s eyes filled with
tears, and in the midst of it she burst into weeping and hid her face
on Elzbieta’s shoulder, quite regardless of the fact that the woman had
on a dirty old wrapper and that the garret was full of fleas. Poor
Elzbieta was ashamed of herself for having told so woeful a tale, and
the other had to beg and plead with her to get her to go on. The end of
it was that the young lady sent them a basket of things to eat, and
left a letter that Jurgis was to take to a gentleman who was
superintendent in one of the mills of the great steelworks in South
Chicago. “He will get Jurgis something to do,” the young lady had said,
and added, smiling through her tears—“If he doesn’t, he will never
marry me.”
The steel-works were fifteen miles away, and as usual it was so
contrived that one had to pay two fares to get there. Far and wide the
sky was flaring with the red glare that leaped from rows of towering
chimneys—for it was pitch dark when Jurgis arrived. The vast works, a
city in themselves, were surrounded by a stockade; and already a full
hundred men were waiting at the gate where new hands were taken on.
Soon after daybreak whistles began to blow, and then suddenly thousands
of men appeared, streaming from saloons and boardinghouses across the
way, leaping from trolley cars that passed—it seemed as if they rose
out of the ground, in the dim gray light. A river of them poured in
through the gate—and then gradually ebbed away again, until there were
only a few late ones running, and the watchman pacing up and down, and
the hungry strangers stamping and shivering.
Jurgis presented his precious letter. The gatekeeper was surly, and put
him through a catechism, but he insisted that he knew nothing, and as
he had taken the precaution to seal his letter, there was nothing for
the gatekeeper to do but send it to the person to whom it was
addressed. A messenger came back to say that Jurgis should wait, and so
he came inside of the gate, perhaps not sorry enough that there were
others less fortunate watching him with greedy eyes. The great mills
were getting under way—one could hear a vast stirring, a rolling and
rumbling and hammering. Little by little the scene grew plain:
towering, black buildings here and there, long rows of shops and sheds,
little railways branching everywhere, bare gray cinders underfoot and
oceans of billowing black smoke above. On one side of the grounds ran a
railroad with a dozen tracks, and on the other side lay the lake, where
steamers came to load.
Jurgis had time enough to stare and speculate, for it was two hours
before he was summoned. He went into the office building, where a
company timekeeper interviewed him. The superintendent was busy, he
said, but he (the timekeeper) would try to find Jurgis a job. He had
never worked in a steel mill before? But he was ready for anything?
Well, then, they would go and see.
So they began a tour, among sights that made Jurgis stare amazed. He
wondered if ever he could get used to working in a place like this,
where the air shook with deafening thunder, and whistles shrieked
warnings on all sides of him at once; where miniature steam engines
came rushing upon him, and sizzling, quivering, white-hot masses of
metal sped past him, and explosions of fire and flaming sparks dazzled
him and scorched his face. The men in these mills were all black with
soot, and hollow-eyed and gaunt; they worked with fierce intensity,
rushing here and there, and never lifting their eyes from their tasks.
Jurgis clung to his guide like a scared child to its nurse, and while
the latter hailed one foreman after another to ask if they could use
another unskilled man, he stared about him and marveled.
He was taken to the Bessemer furnace, where they made billets of
steel—a dome-like building, the size of a big theater. Jurgis stood
where the balcony of the theater would have been, and opposite, by the
stage, he saw three giant caldrons, big enough for all the devils of
hell to brew their broth in, full of something white and blinding,
bubbling and splashing, roaring as if volcanoes were blowing through
it—one had to shout to be heard in the place. Liquid fire would leap
from these caldrons and scatter like bombs below—and men were working
there, seeming careless, so that Jurgis caught his breath with fright.
Then a whistle would toot, and across the curtain of the theater would
come a little engine with a carload of something to be dumped into one
of the receptacles; and then another whistle would toot, down by the
stage, and another train would back up—and suddenly, without an
instant’s warning, one of the giant kettles began to tilt and topple,
flinging out a jet of hissing, roaring flame. Jurgis shrank back
appalled, for he thought it was an accident; there fell a pillar of
white flame, dazzling as the sun, swishing like a huge tree falling in
the forest. A torrent of sparks swept all the way across the building,
overwhelming everything, hiding it from sight; and then Jurgis looked
through the fingers of his hands, and saw pouring out of the caldron a
cascade of living, leaping fire, white with a whiteness not of earth,
scorching the eyeballs. Incandescent rainbows shone above it, blue,
red, and golden lights played about it; but the stream itself was
white, ineffable. Out of regions of wonder it streamed, the very river
of life; and the soul leaped up at the sight of it, fled back upon it,
swift and resistless, back into far-off lands, where beauty and terror
dwell. Then the great caldron tilted back again, empty, and Jurgis saw
to his relief that no one was hurt, and turned and followed his guide
out into the sunlight.
They went through the blast furnaces, through rolling mills where bars
of steel were tossed about and chopped like bits of cheese. All around
and above giant machine arms were flying, giant wheels were turning,
great hammers crashing; traveling cranes creaked and groaned overhead,
reaching down iron hands and seizing iron prey—it was like standing in
the center of the earth, where the machinery of time was revolving.
By and by they came to the place where steel rails were made; and
Jurgis heard a toot behind him, and jumped out of the way of a car with
a white-hot ingot upon it, the size of a man’s body. There was a sudden
crash and the car came to a halt, and the ingot toppled out upon a
moving platform, where steel fingers and arms seized hold of it,
punching it and prodding it into place, and hurrying it into the grip
of huge rollers. Then it came out upon the other side, and there were
more crashings and clatterings, and over it was flopped, like a pancake
on a gridiron, and seized again and rushed back at you through another
squeezer. So amid deafening uproar it clattered to and fro, growing
thinner and flatter and longer. The ingot seemed almost a living thing;
it did not want to run this mad course, but it was in the grip of fate,
it was tumbled on, screeching and clanking and shivering in protest. By
and by it was long and thin, a great red snake escaped from purgatory;
and then, as it slid through the rollers, you would have sworn that it
was alive—it writhed and squirmed, and wriggles and shudders passed out
through its tail, all but flinging it off by their violence. There was
no rest for it until it was cold and black—and then it needed only to
be cut and straightened to be ready for a railroad.
It was at the end of this rail’s progress that Jurgis got his chance.
They had to be moved by men with crowbars, and the boss here could use