The Jungle
Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like
the color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of
ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first—it sunk
into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like
the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest;
it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It
was only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by
animals, that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the
distant grunting of ten thousand swine.
They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time for
adventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning to
watch them; and so, as usual, they started up the street. Scarcely had
they gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and
began pointing excitedly across the street. Before they could gather
the meaning of his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and
they saw him enter a shop, over which was a sign: “J. Szedvilas,
Delicatessen.” When he came out again it was in company with a very
stout gentleman in shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both
hands and laughing hilariously. Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly
that Szedvilas had been the name of the mythical friend who had made
his fortune in America. To find that he had been making it in the
delicatessen business was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at
this juncture; though it was well on in the morning, they had not
breakfasted, and the children were beginning to whimper.
Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families
literally fell upon each other’s necks—for it had been years since
Jokubas Szedvilas had met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half
the day they were lifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls
of this new world, and could explain all of its mysteries; he could
tell them the things they ought to have done in the different
emergencies—and what was still more to the point, he could tell them
what to do now. He would take them to poni Aniele, who kept a
boardinghouse the other side of the yards; old Mrs. Jukniene, he
explained, had not what one would call choice accommodations, but they
might do for the moment. To this Teta Elzbieta hastened to respond that
nothing could be too cheap to suit them just then; for they were quite
terrified over the sums they had had to expend. A very few days of
practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to
make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high
prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other
corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful
dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had made the
discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at American
prices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages—and so were
really being cheated by the world! The last two days they had all but
starved themselves—it made them quite sick to pay the prices that the
railroad people asked them for food.
Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie “back of the yards.” There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a “boardinghouse”
for the occupancy of foreigners—Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room—sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty or
sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations—that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows—and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men to
own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.
Mrs. Jukniene was a wizened-up little woman, with a wrinkled face. Her
home was unthinkably filthy; you could not enter by the front door at
all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up the
backstairs you found that she had walled up most of the porch with old
boards to make a place to keep her chickens. It was a standing jest of
the boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose in
the rooms. Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemed
probable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded
it rather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms. The truth
was that she had definitely given up the idea of cleaning anything,
under pressure of an attack of rheumatism, which had kept her doubled
up in one corner of her room for over a week; during which time eleven
of her boarders, heavily in her debt, had concluded to try their
chances of employment in Kansas City. This was July, and the fields
were green. One never saw the fields, nor any green thing whatever, in
Packingtown; but one could go out on the road and “hobo it,” as the men
phrased it, and see the country, and have a long rest, and an easy time
riding on the freight cars.
Such was the home to which the new arrivals were welcomed. There was
nothing better to be had—they might not do so well by looking further,
for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her three
little children, and now offered to share this with the women and the
girls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store, she
explained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so
hot—doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this,
as did nearly all of her guests. “Tomorrow,” Jurgis said, when they
were left alone, “tomorrow I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get
one also; and then we can get a place of our own.”
Later that afternoon he and Ona went out to take a walk and look about
them, to see more of this district which was to be their home. In back
of the yards the dreary two-story frame houses were scattered farther
apart, and there were great spaces bare—that seemingly had been
overlooked by the great sore of a city as it spread itself over the
surface of the prairie. These bare places were grown up with dingy,
yellow weeds, hiding innumerable tomato cans; innumerable children
played upon them, chasing one another here and there, screaming and
fighting. The most uncanny thing about this neighborhood was the number
of the children; you thought there must be a school just out, and it
was only after long acquaintance that you were able to realize that
there was no school, but that these were the children of the
neighborhood—that there were so many children to the block in
Packingtown that nowhere on its streets could a horse and buggy move
faster than a walk!
It could not move faster anyhow, on account of the state of the
streets. Those through which Jurgis and Ona were walking resembled
streets less than they did a miniature topographical map. The roadway
was commonly several feet lower than the level of the houses, which
were sometimes joined by high board walks; there were no
pavements—there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and
ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water. In these pools
the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets; here
and there one noticed them digging in it, after trophies which they had
stumbled on. One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies
which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the
strange, fetid odor which assailed one’s nostrils, a ghastly odor, of
all the dead things of the universe. It impelled the visitor to
questions and then the residents would explain, quietly, that all this
was “made” land, and that it had been “made” by using it as a dumping
ground for the city garbage. After a few years the unpleasant effect of
this would pass away, it was said; but meantime, in hot weather—and
especially when it rained—the flies were apt to be annoying. Was it not
unhealthful? the stranger would ask, and the residents would answer,
“Perhaps; but there is no telling.”
A little way farther on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed and
wondering, came to the place where this “made” ground was in process of
making. Here was a great hole, perhaps two city blocks square, and with
long files of garbage wagons creeping into it. The place had an odor
for which there are no polite words; and it was sprinkled over with
children, who raked in it from dawn till dark. Sometimes visitors from
the packing houses would wander out to see this “dump,” and they would
stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the food
they got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home. Apparently
none of them ever went down to find out.
Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys.
First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up
again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous
arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A
little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and
not yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with
the near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun;
and then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it to
the people of the city. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an
economical arrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their
heads were not full of troublesome thoughts about “germs.”
They stood there while the sun went down upon this scene, and the sky
in the west turned blood-red, and the tops of the houses shone like
fire. Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however—their
backs were turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown,
which they could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the
buildings stood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out
of the mass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming
away to the end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke;
in the sunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the
sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a
vision of power. To the two who stood watching while the darkness
swallowed it up, it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human
energy, of things being done, of employment for thousands upon
thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy.
When they came away, arm in arm, Jurgis was saying, “Tomorrow I shall
go there and get a job!”
CHAPTER III
In his capacity as delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas had many
acquaintances. Among these was one of the special policemen employed by
Durham, whose duty it frequently was to pick out men for employment.
Jokubas had never tried it, but he expressed a certainty that he could
get some of his friends a job through this man. It was agreed, after
consultation, that he should make the effort with old Antanas and with
Jonas. Jurgis was confident of his ability to get work for himself,
unassisted by any one. As we have said before, he was not mistaken in
this. He had gone to Brown’s and stood there not more than half an hour
before one of the bosses noticed his form towering above the rest, and
signaled to him. The colloquy which followed was brief and to the
point:
“Speak English?”