The Jungle
“Hold up your hands,” he snarled. Jurgis took a step back, clinching
his one well fist.
“What for?” he cried; and then understanding that the fellow proposed
to search him, he answered, “I’ll see you in hell first.”
“Do you want to go to jail?” demanded the butler, menacingly. “I’ll
have the police—”
“Have ’em!” roared Jurgis, with fierce passion. “But you won’t put your
hands on me till you do! I haven’t touched anything in your damned
house, and I’ll not have you touch me!”
So the butler, who was terrified lest his young master should waken,
stepped suddenly to the door, and opened it. “Get out of here!” he
said; and then as Jurgis passed through the opening, he gave him a
ferocious kick that sent him down the great stone steps at a run, and
landed him sprawling in the snow at the bottom.
CHAPTER XXV
Jurgis got up, wild with rage, but the door was shut and the great
castle was dark and impregnable. Then the icy teeth of the blast bit
into him, and he turned and went away at a run.
When he stopped again it was because he was coming to frequented
streets and did not wish to attract attention. In spite of that last
humiliation, his heart was thumping fast with triumph. He had come out
ahead on that deal! He put his hand into his trousers’ pocket every now
and then, to make sure that the precious hundred-dollar bill was still
there.
Yet he was in a plight—a curious and even dreadful plight, when he came
to realize it. He had not a single cent but that one bill! And he had
to find some shelter that night he had to change it!
Jurgis spent half an hour walking and debating the problem. There was
no one he could go to for help—he had to manage it all alone. To get it
changed in a lodging-house would be to take his life in his hands—he
would almost certainly be robbed, and perhaps murdered, before morning.
He might go to some hotel or railroad depot and ask to have it changed;
but what would they think, seeing a “bum” like him with a hundred
dollars? He would probably be arrested if he tried it; and what story
could he tell? On the morrow Freddie Jones would discover his loss, and
there would be a hunt for him, and he would lose his money. The only
other plan he could think of was to try in a saloon. He might pay them
to change it, if it could not be done otherwise.
He began peering into places as he walked; he passed several as being
too crowded—then finally, chancing upon one where the bartender was all
alone, he gripped his hands in sudden resolution and went in.
“Can you change me a hundred-dollar bill?” he demanded.
The bartender was a big, husky fellow, with the jaw of a prize fighter,
and a three weeks’ stubble of hair upon it. He stared at Jurgis.
“What’s that youse say?” he demanded.
“I said, could you change me a hundred-dollar bill?”
“Where’d youse get it?” he inquired incredulously.
“Never mind,” said Jurgis; “I’ve got it, and I want it changed. I’ll
pay you if you’ll do it.”
The other stared at him hard. “Lemme see it,” he said.
“Will you change it?” Jurgis demanded, gripping it tightly in his
pocket.
“How the hell can I know if it’s good or not?” retorted the bartender.
“Whatcher take me for, hey?”
Then Jurgis slowly and warily approached him; he took out the bill, and
fumbled it for a moment, while the man stared at him with hostile eyes
across the counter. Then finally he handed it over.
The other took it, and began to examine it; he smoothed it between his
fingers, and held it up to the light; he turned it over, and upside
down, and edgeways. It was new and rather stiff, and that made him
dubious. Jurgis was watching him like a cat all the time.
“Humph,” he said, finally, and gazed at the stranger, sizing him up—a
ragged, ill-smelling tramp, with no overcoat and one arm in a sling—and
a hundred-dollar bill! “Want to buy anything?” he demanded.
“Yes,” said Jurgis, “I’ll take a glass of beer.”
“All right,” said the other, “I’ll change it.” And he put the bill in
his pocket, and poured Jurgis out a glass of beer, and set it on the
counter. Then he turned to the cash register, and punched up five
cents, and began to pull money out of the drawer. Finally, he faced
Jurgis, counting it out—two dimes, a quarter, and fifty cents. “There,”
he said.
For a second Jurgis waited, expecting to see him turn again. “My
ninety-nine dollars,” he said.
“What ninety-nine dollars?” demanded the bartender.
“My change!” he cried—“the rest of my hundred!”
“Go on,” said the bartender, “you’re nutty!”
And Jurgis stared at him with wild eyes. For an instant horror reigned
in him—black, paralyzing, awful horror, clutching him at the heart; and
then came rage, in surging, blinding floods—he screamed aloud, and
seized the glass and hurled it at the other’s head. The man ducked, and
it missed him by half an inch; he rose again and faced Jurgis, who was
vaulting over the bar with his one well arm, and dealt him a smashing
blow in the face, hurling him backward upon the floor. Then, as Jurgis
scrambled to his feet again and started round the counter after him, he
shouted at the top of his voice, “Help! help!”
Jurgis seized a bottle off the counter as he ran; and as the bartender
made a leap he hurled the missile at him with all his force. It just
grazed his head, and shivered into a thousand pieces against the post
of the door. Then Jurgis started back, rushing at the man again in the
middle of the room. This time, in his blind frenzy, he came without a
bottle, and that was all the bartender wanted—he met him halfway and
floored him with a sledgehammer drive between the eyes. An instant
later the screen doors flew open, and two men rushed in—just as Jurgis
was getting to his feet again, foaming at the mouth with rage, and
trying to tear his broken arm out of its bandages.
“Look out!” shouted the bartender. “He’s got a knife!” Then, seeing
that the two were disposed to join the fray, he made another rush at
Jurgis, and knocked aside his feeble defense and sent him tumbling
again; and the three flung themselves upon him, rolling and kicking
about the place.
A second later a policeman dashed in, and the bartender yelled once
more—“Look out for his knife!” Jurgis had fought himself half to his
knees, when the policeman made a leap at him, and cracked him across
the face with his club. Though the blow staggered him, the wild-beast
frenzy still blazed in him, and he got to his feet, lunging into the
air. Then again the club descended, full upon his head, and he dropped
like a log to the floor.
The policeman crouched over him, clutching his stick, waiting for him
to try to rise again; and meantime the barkeeper got up, and put his
hand to his head. “Christ!” he said, “I thought I was done for that
time. Did he cut me?”
“Don’t see anything, Jake,” said the policeman. “What’s the matter with
him?”
“Just crazy drunk,” said the other. “A lame duck, too—but he ’most got
me under the bar. Youse had better call the wagon, Billy.”
“No,” said the officer. “He’s got no more fight in him, I guess—and
he’s only got a block to go.” He twisted his hand in Jurgis’s collar
and jerked at him. “Git up here, you!” he commanded.
But Jurgis did not move, and the bartender went behind the bar, and
after stowing the hundred-dollar bill away in a safe hiding place, came
and poured a glass of water over Jurgis. Then, as the latter began to
moan feebly, the policeman got him to his feet and dragged him out of
the place. The station house was just around the corner, and so in a
few minutes Jurgis was in a cell.
He spent half the night lying unconscious, and the balance moaning in
torment, with a blinding headache and a racking thirst. Now and then he
cried aloud for a drink of water, but there was no one to hear him.
There were others in that same station house with split heads and a
fever; there were hundreds of them in the great city, and tens of
thousands of them in the great land, and there was no one to hear any
of them.
In the morning Jurgis was given a cup of water and a piece of bread,
and then hustled into a patrol wagon and driven to the nearest police
court. He sat in the pen with a score of others until his turn came.
The bartender—who proved to be a well-known bruiser—was called to the
stand. He took the oath and told his story. The prisoner had come into
his saloon after midnight, fighting drunk, and had ordered a glass of
beer and tendered a dollar bill in payment. He had been given
ninety-five cents’ change, and had demanded ninety-nine dollars more,
and before the plaintiff could even answer had hurled the glass at him
and then attacked him with a bottle of bitters, and nearly wrecked the
place.
Then the prisoner was sworn—a forlorn object, haggard and unshorn, with
an arm done up in a filthy bandage, a cheek and head cut, and bloody,
and one eye purplish black and entirely closed. “What have you to say
for yourself?” queried the magistrate.
“Your Honor,” said Jurgis, “I went into his place and asked the man if
he could change me a hundred-dollar bill. And he said he would if I
bought a drink. I gave him the bill and then he wouldn’t give me the
change.”
The magistrate was staring at him in perplexity. “You gave him a
hundred-dollar bill!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, your Honor,” said Jurgis.
“Where did you get it?”
“A man gave it to me, your Honor.”
“A man? What man, and what for?”
“A young man I met upon the street, your Honor. I had been begging.”
There was a titter in the courtroom; the officer who was holding Jurgis
put up his hand to hide a smile, and the magistrate smiled without
trying to hide it. “It’s true, your Honor!” cried Jurgis, passionately.
“You had been drinking as well as begging last night, had you not?”
inquired the magistrate. “No, your Honor—” protested Jurgis. “I—”
“You had not had anything to drink?”
“Why, yes, your Honor, I had—”
“What did you have?”
“I had a bottle of something—I don’t know what it was—something that
burned—”
There was again a laugh round the courtroom, stopping suddenly as the
magistrate looked up and frowned. “Have you ever been arrested before?”
he asked abruptly.
The question took Jurgis aback. “I—I—” he stammered.
“Tell me the truth, now!” commanded the other, sternly.
“Yes, your Honor,” said Jurgis.
“How often?”
“Only once, your Honor.”
“What for?”
“For knocking down my boss, your Honor. I was working in the
stockyards, and he—”
“I see,” said his Honor; “I guess that will do. You ought to stop
drinking if you can’t control yourself. Ten days and costs. Next case.”
Jurgis gave vent to a cry of dismay, cut off suddenly by the policeman,
who seized him by the collar. He was jerked out of the way, into a room
with the convicted prisoners, where he sat and wept like a child in his
impotent rage. It seemed monstrous to him that policemen and judges
should esteem his word as nothing in comparison with the
bartender’s—poor Jurgis could not know that the owner of the saloon
paid five dollars each week to the policeman alone for Sunday
privileges and general favors—nor that the pugilist bartender was one
of the most trusted henchmen of the Democratic leader of the district,
and had helped only a few months before to hustle out a record-breaking
vote as a testimonial to the magistrate, who had been made the target
of odious kid-gloved reformers.
Jurgis was driven out to the Bridewell for the second time. In his
tumbling around he had hurt his arm again, and so could not work, but
had to be attended by the physician. Also his head and his eye had to
be tied up—and so he was a pretty-looking object when, the second day
after his arrival, he went out into the exercise court and
encountered—Jack Duane!