The Jungle
Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man
the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they
cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would
go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would
stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in
him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved too
slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and
restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important
occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company’s “Central
Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival
in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this
he was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at
the pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in
that crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a
month—yes, many months—and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say,
“but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings,
fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want to get more
for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms”—and he would
clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might see the
rolling muscles—“that with these arms people will ever let me starve?”
“It is plain,” they would answer to this, “that you have come from the
country, and from very far in the country.” And this was the fact, for
Jurgis had never seen a city, and scarcely even a fair-sized town,
until he had set out to make his fortune in the world and earn his
right to Ona. His father, and his father’s father before him, and as
many ancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of
Lithuania known as _Brelovicz_, the Imperial Forest. This is a great
tract of a hundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been
a hunting preserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants
settled in it, holding title from ancient times; and one of these was
Antanas Rudkus, who had been reared himself, and had reared his
children in turn, upon half a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst
of a wilderness. There had been one son besides Jurgis, and one sister.
The former had been drafted into the army; that had been over ten years
ago, but since that day nothing had ever been heard of him. The sister
was married, and her husband had bought the place when old Antanas had
decided to go with his son.
It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a horse
fair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get
married—he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into;
but here, without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than
the exchange of half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the
face with embarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to
him for his wife—and offering his father’s two horses he had been sent
to the fair to sell. But Ona’s father proved as a rock—the girl was yet
a child, and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in
that way. So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and
summer toiled and tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest
was over, he saw that it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight’s
journey that lay between him and Ona.
He found an unexpected state of affairs—for the girl’s father had died,
and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis’ heart leaped as he
realized that now the prize was within his reach. There was Elzbieta
Lukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona’s stepmother, and
there were her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother
Jonas, a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were
people of great consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the
woods; Ona knew how to read, and knew many other things that he did not
know, and now the farm had been sold, and the whole family was
adrift—all they owned in the world being about seven hundred rubles
which is half as many dollars. They would have had three times that,
but it had gone to court, and the judge had decided against them, and
it had cost the balance to get him to change his decision.
Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she loved
Teta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,
where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part, and
the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless—they would
live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country
where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day; and Jurgis
figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were
where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor,
a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he
did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials—he might do as
he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man. So America was
a place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If one could only
manage to get the price of a passage, he could count his troubles at an
end.
It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and
meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and
tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work
upon a railroad in Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth
and bad food and cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out
in fine trim, and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not
drink or fight, because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for
the rest, he was a quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did
not lose his temper often, and when he did lose it made the offender
anxious that he should not lose it again. When they paid him off he
dodged the company gamblers and dramshops, and so they tried to kill
him; but he escaped, and tramped it home, working at odd jobs, and
sleeping always with one eye open.
So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the last
moment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona’s.
Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmer
of Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twenty that
it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risen up
and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.
There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children—and
Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;
there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got
them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of
their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This
happened to them again in New York—for, of course, they knew nothing
about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a
man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel
and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away.
The law says that the rate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it
does not say that it shall be in Lithuanian.
It was in the stockyards that Jonas’ friend had gotten rich, and so to
Chicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago and that
was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.
Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better off
than before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, with
its big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize
that they had arrived, and why, when they said “Chicago,” people no
longer pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or
laughed, or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in
their helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any
sort of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a
policeman they would cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of
the first day they wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion,
utterly lost; and it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of
a house, they were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the
station. In the morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken
and put upon a car, and taught a new word—“stockyards.” Their delight
at discovering that they were to get out of this adventure without
losing another share of their possessions it would not be possible to
describe.
They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which
seemed to run on forever, mile after mile—thirty-four of them, if they
had known it—and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched
little two-story frame buildings. Down every side street they could
see, it was the same—never a hill and never a hollow, but always the
same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings. Here and
there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud
shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a
railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing,
and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great
factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense
volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys, darkening the air above and
making filthy the earth beneath. But after each of these interruptions,
the desolate procession would begin again—the procession of dreary
little buildings.
A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note
the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time,
and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute,
as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields
were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And
along with the thickening smoke they began to notice another
circumstance, a strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was
unpleasant, this odor; some might have called it sickening, but their
taste in odors was not developed, and they were only sure that it was
curious. Now, sitting in the trolley car, they realized that they were
on their way to the home of it—that they had traveled all the way from
Lithuania to it. It was now no longer something far off and faint, that
you caught in whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell
it—you could take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure.
They were divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor,
raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There
were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were
others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants
were still tasting it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a
halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted—“Stockyards!”
They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side street
there were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half a
dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the very
sky—and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily,
and black as night. It might have come from the center of the world,
this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smolder. It came as if
self-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It was
inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great
streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing,
curling; then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the
sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.