The Jungle
lived in the same city or worked at the same trade, they might sit down
at a table and spend an hour or two in talk—and before they got through
the saloon-keeper would have taken in a dollar. All of this might seem
diabolical, but the saloon-keeper was in no wise to blame for it. He
was in the same plight as the manufacturer who has to adulterate and
misrepresent his product. If he does not, some one else will; and the
saloon-keeper, unless he is also an alderman, is apt to be in debt to
the big brewers, and on the verge of being sold out.
The market for “sitters” was glutted that afternoon, however, and there
was no place for Jurgis. In all he had to spend six nickels in keeping
a shelter over him that frightful day, and then it was just dark, and
the station houses would not open until midnight! At the last place,
however, there was a bartender who knew him and liked him, and let him
doze at one of the tables until the boss came back; and also, as he was
going out, the man gave him a tip—on the next block there was a
religious revival of some sort, with preaching and singing, and
hundreds of hoboes would go there for the shelter and warmth.
Jurgis went straightway, and saw a sign hung out, saying that the door
would open at seven-thirty; then he walked, or half ran, a block, and
hid awhile in a doorway and then ran again, and so on until the hour.
At the end he was all but frozen, and fought his way in with the rest
of the throng (at the risk of having his arm broken again), and got
close to the big stove.
By eight o’clock the place was so crowded that the speakers ought to
have been flattered; the aisles were filled halfway up, and at the door
men were packed tight enough to walk upon. There were three elderly
gentlemen in black upon the platform, and a young lady who played the
piano in front. First they sang a hymn, and then one of the three, a
tall, smooth-shaven man, very thin, and wearing black spectacles, began
an address. Jurgis heard smatterings of it, for the reason that terror
kept him awake—he knew that he snored abominably, and to have been put
out just then would have been like a sentence of death to him.
The evangelist was preaching “sin and redemption,” the infinite grace
of God and His pardon for human frailty. He was very much in earnest,
and he meant well, but Jurgis, as he listened, found his soul filled
with hatred. What did he know about sin and suffering—with his smooth,
black coat and his neatly starched collar, his body warm, and his belly
full, and money in his pocket—and lecturing men who were struggling for
their lives, men at the death grapple with the demon powers of hunger
and cold!—This, of course, was unfair; but Jurgis felt that these men
were out of touch with the life they discussed, that they were unfitted
to solve its problems; nay, they themselves were part of the
problem—they were part of the order established that was crushing men
down and beating them! They were of the triumphant and insolent
possessors; they had a hall, and a fire, and food and clothing and
money, and so they might preach to hungry men, and the hungry men must
be humble and listen! They were trying to save their souls—and who but
a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls
was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their
bodies?
At eleven the meeting closed, and the desolate audience filed out into
the snow, muttering curses upon the few traitors who had got repentance
and gone up on the platform. It was yet an hour before the station
house would open, and Jurgis had no overcoat—and was weak from a long
illness. During that hour he nearly perished. He was obliged to run
hard to keep his blood moving at all—and then he came back to the
station house and found a crowd blocking the street before the door!
This was in the month of January, 1904, when the country was on the
verge of “hard times,” and the newspapers were reporting the shutting
down of factories every day—it was estimated that a million and a half
men were thrown out of work before the spring. So all the hiding places
of the city were crowded, and before that station house door men fought
and tore each other like savage beasts. When at last the place was
jammed and they shut the doors, half the crowd was still outside; and
Jurgis, with his helpless arm, was among them. There was no choice then
but to go to a lodging-house and spend another dime. It really broke
his heart to do this, at half-past twelve o’clock, after he had wasted
the night at the meeting and on the street. He would be turned out of
the lodging-house promptly at seven—they had the shelves which served
as bunks so contrived that they could be dropped, and any man who was
slow about obeying orders could be tumbled to the floor.
This was one day, and the cold spell lasted for fourteen of them. At
the end of six days every cent of Jurgis’ money was gone; and then he
went out on the streets to beg for his life.
He would begin as soon as the business of the city was moving. He would
sally forth from a saloon, and, after making sure there was no
policeman in sight, would approach every likely-looking person who
passed him, telling his woeful story and pleading for a nickel or a
dime. Then when he got one, he would dart round the corner and return
to his base to get warm; and his victim, seeing him do this, would go
away, vowing that he would never give a cent to a beggar again. The
victim never paused to ask where else Jurgis could have gone under the
circumstances—where he, the victim, would have gone. At the saloon
Jurgis could not only get more food and better food than he could buy
in any restaurant for the same money, but a drink in the bargain to
warm him up. Also he could find a comfortable seat by a fire, and could
chat with a companion until he was as warm as toast. At the saloon,
too, he felt at home. Part of the saloon-keeper’s business was to offer
a home and refreshments to beggars in exchange for the proceeds of
their foragings; and was there any one else in the whole city who would
do this—would the victim have done it himself?
Poor Jurgis might have been expected to make a successful beggar. He
was just out of the hospital, and desperately sick-looking, and with a
helpless arm; also he had no overcoat, and shivered pitifully. But,
alas, it was again the case of the honest merchant, who finds that the
genuine and unadulterated article is driven to the wall by the artistic
counterfeit. Jurgis, as a beggar, was simply a blundering amateur in
competition with organized and scientific professionalism. He was just
out of the hospital—but the story was worn threadbare, and how could he
prove it? He had his arm in a sling—and it was a device a regular
beggar’s little boy would have scorned. He was pale and shivering—but
they were made up with cosmetics, and had studied the art of chattering
their teeth. As to his being without an overcoat, among them you would
meet men you could swear had on nothing but a ragged linen duster and a
pair of cotton trousers—so cleverly had they concealed the several
suits of all-wool underwear beneath. Many of these professional
mendicants had comfortable homes, and families, and thousands of
dollars in the bank; some of them had retired upon their earnings, and
gone into the business of fitting out and doctoring others, or working
children at the trade. There were some who had both their arms bound
tightly to their sides, and padded stumps in their sleeves, and a sick
child hired to carry a cup for them. There were some who had no legs,
and pushed themselves upon a wheeled platform—some who had been favored
with blindness, and were led by pretty little dogs. Some less fortunate
had mutilated themselves or burned themselves, or had brought horrible
sores upon themselves with chemicals; you might suddenly encounter upon
the street a man holding out to you a finger rotting and discolored
with gangrene—or one with livid scarlet wounds half escaped from their
filthy bandages. These desperate ones were the dregs of the city’s
cesspools, wretches who hid at night in the rain-soaked cellars of old
ramshackle tenements, in “stale-beer dives” and opium joints, with
abandoned women in the last stages of the harlot’s progress—women who
had been kept by Chinamen and turned away at last to die. Every day the
police net would drag hundreds of them off the streets, and in the
detention hospital you might see them, herded together in a miniature
inferno, with hideous, beastly faces, bloated and leprous with disease,
laughing, shouting, screaming in all stages of drunkenness, barking
like dogs, gibbering like apes, raving and tearing themselves in
delirium.
CHAPTER XXIV
In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price
of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of
freezing to death. Day after day he roamed about in the arctic cold,
his soul filled full of bitterness and despair. He saw the world of
civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world
in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those
who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not. He was one
of the latter; and all outdoors, all life, was to him one colossal
prison, which he paced like a pent-up tiger, trying one bar after
another, and finding them all beyond his power. He had lost in the
fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated; and all
society was busied to see that he did not escape the sentence.
Everywhere that he turned were prison bars, and hostile eyes following
him; the well-fed, sleek policemen, from whose glances he shrank, and
who seemed to grip their clubs more tightly when they saw him; the
saloon-keepers, who never ceased to watch him while he was in their
places, who were jealous of every moment he lingered after he had paid
his money; the hurrying throngs upon the streets, who were deaf to his
entreaties, oblivious of his very existence—and savage and contemptuous
when he forced himself upon them. They had their own affairs, and there
was no place for him among them. There was no place for him
anywhere—every direction he turned his gaze, this fact was forced upon
him: Everything was built to express it to him: the residences, with
their heavy walls and bolted doors, and basement windows barred with
iron; the great warehouses filled with the products of the whole world,
and guarded by iron shutters and heavy gates; the banks with their
unthinkable billions of wealth, all buried in safes and vaults of
steel.
And then one day there befell Jurgis the one adventure of his life. It
was late at night, and he had failed to get the price of a lodging.
Snow was falling, and he had been out so long that he was covered with
it, and was chilled to the bone. He was working among the theater
crowds, flitting here and there, taking large chances with the police,
in his desperation half hoping to be arrested. When he saw a blue-coat
start toward him, however, his heart failed him, and he dashed down a
side street and fled a couple of blocks. When he stopped again he saw a
man coming toward him, and placed himself in his path.
“Please, sir,” he began, in the usual formula, “will you give me the
price of a lodging? I’ve had a broken arm, and I can’t work, and I’ve
not a cent in my pocket. I’m an honest working-man, sir, and I never
begged before! It’s not my fault, sir—”
Jurgis usually went on until he was interrupted, but this man did not
interrupt, and so at last he came to a breathless stop. The other had
halted, and Jurgis suddenly noticed that he stood a little unsteadily.
“Whuzzat you say?” he queried suddenly, in a thick voice.