The Jungle
should any one else speak, after that miraculous man—why should they
not all sit in silence? The chairman was explaining that a collection
would now be taken up to defray the expenses of the meeting, and for
the benefit of the campaign fund of the party. Jurgis heard; but he had
not a penny to give, and so his thoughts went elsewhere again.
He kept his eyes fixed on the orator, who sat in an armchair, his head
leaning on his hand and his attitude indicating exhaustion. But
suddenly he stood up again, and Jurgis heard the chairman of the
meeting saying that the speaker would now answer any questions which
the audience might care to put to him. The man came forward, and some
one—a woman—arose and asked about some opinion the speaker had
expressed concerning Tolstoy. Jurgis had never heard of Tolstoy, and
did not care anything about him. Why should any one want to ask such
questions, after an address like that? The thing was not to talk, but
to do; the thing was to get bold of others and rouse them, to organize
them and prepare for the fight! But still the discussion went on, in
ordinary conversational tones, and it brought Jurgis back to the
everyday world. A few minutes ago he had felt like seizing the hand of
the beautiful lady by his side, and kissing it; he had felt like
flinging his arms about the neck of the man on the other side of him.
And now he began to realize again that he was a “hobo,” that he was
ragged and dirty, and smelled bad, and had no place to sleep that
night!
And so, at last, when the meeting broke up, and the audience started to
leave, poor Jurgis was in an agony of uncertainty. He had not thought
of leaving—he had thought that the vision must last forever, that he
had found comrades and brothers. But now he would go out, and the thing
would fade away, and he would never be able to find it again! He sat in
his seat, frightened and wondering; but others in the same row wanted
to get out, and so he had to stand up and move along. As he was swept
down the aisle he looked from one person to another, wistfully; they
were all excitedly discussing the address—but there was nobody who
offered to discuss it with him. He was near enough to the door to feel
the night air, when desperation seized him. He knew nothing at all
about that speech he had heard, not even the name of the orator; and he
was to go away—no, no, it was preposterous, he must speak to some one;
he must find that man himself and tell him. He would not despise him,
tramp as he was!
So he stepped into an empty row of seats and watched, and when the
crowd had thinned out, he started toward the platform. The speaker was
gone; but there was a stage door that stood open, with people passing
in and out, and no one on guard. Jurgis summoned up his courage and
went in, and down a hallway, and to the door of a room where many
people were crowded. No one paid any attention to him, and he pushed
in, and in a corner he saw the man he sought. The orator sat in a
chair, with his shoulders sunk together and his eyes half closed; his
face was ghastly pale, almost greenish in hue, and one arm lay limp at
his side. A big man with spectacles on stood near him, and kept pushing
back the crowd, saying, “Stand away a little, please; can’t you see the
comrade is worn out?”
So Jurgis stood watching, while five or ten minutes passed. Now and
then the man would look up, and address a word or two to those who were
near him; and, at last, on one of these occasions, his glance rested on
Jurgis. There seemed to be a slight hint of inquiry about it, and a
sudden impulse seized the other. He stepped forward.
“I wanted to thank you, sir!” he began, in breathless haste. “I could
not go away without telling you how much—how glad I am I heard you. I—I
didn’t know anything about it all—”
The big man with the spectacles, who had moved away, came back at this
moment. “The comrade is too tired to talk to any one—” he began; but
the other held up his hand.
“Wait,” he said. “He has something to say to me.” And then he looked
into Jurgis’s face. “You want to know more about Socialism?” he asked.
Jurgis started. “I—I—” he stammered. “Is it Socialism? I didn’t know. I
want to know about what you spoke of—I want to help. I have been
through all that.”
“Where do you live?” asked the other.
“I have no home,” said Jurgis, “I am out of work.”
“You are a foreigner, are you not?”
“Lithuanian, sir.”
The man thought for a moment, and then turned to his friend. “Who is
there, Walters?” he asked. “There is Ostrinski—but he is a Pole—”
“Ostrinski speaks Lithuanian,” said the other. “All right, then; would
you mind seeing if he has gone yet?”
The other started away, and the speaker looked at Jurgis again. He had
deep, black eyes, and a face full of gentleness and pain. “You must
excuse me, comrade,” he said. “I am just tired out—I have spoken every
day for the last month. I will introduce you to some one who will be
able to help you as well as I could—”
The messenger had had to go no further than the door, he came back,
followed by a man whom he introduced to Jurgis as “Comrade Ostrinski.”
Comrade Ostrinski was a little man, scarcely up to Jurgis’s shoulder,
wizened and wrinkled, very ugly, and slightly lame. He had on a
long-tailed black coat, worn green at the seams and the buttonholes;
his eyes must have been weak, for he wore green spectacles that gave
him a grotesque appearance. But his handclasp was hearty, and he spoke
in Lithuanian, which warmed Jurgis to him.
“You want to know about Socialism?” he said. “Surely. Let us go out and
take a stroll, where we can be quiet and talk some.”
And so Jurgis bade farewell to the master wizard, and went out.
Ostrinski asked where he lived, offering to walk in that direction; and
so he had to explain once more that he was without a home. At the
other’s request he told his story; how he had come to America, and what
had happened to him in the stockyards, and how his family had been
broken up, and how he had become a wanderer. So much the little man
heard, and then he pressed Jurgis’s arm tightly. “You have been through
the mill, comrade!” he said. “We will make a fighter out of you!”
Then Ostrinski in turn explained his circumstances. He would have asked
Jurgis to his home—but he had only two rooms, and had no bed to offer.
He would have given up his own bed, but his wife was ill. Later on,
when he understood that otherwise Jurgis would have to sleep in a
hallway, he offered him his kitchen floor, a chance which the other was
only too glad to accept. “Perhaps tomorrow we can do better,” said
Ostrinski. “We try not to let a comrade starve.”
Ostrinski’s home was in the Ghetto district, where he had two rooms in
the basement of a tenement. There was a baby crying as they entered,
and he closed the door leading into the bedroom. He had three young
children, he explained, and a baby had just come. He drew up two chairs
near the kitchen stove, adding that Jurgis must excuse the disorder of
the place, since at such a time one’s domestic arrangements were upset.
Half of the kitchen was given up to a workbench, which was piled with
clothing, and Ostrinski explained that he was a “pants finisher.” He
brought great bundles of clothing here to his home, where he and his
wife worked on them. He made a living at it, but it was getting harder
all the time, because his eyes were failing. What would come when they
gave out he could not tell; there had been no saving anything—a man
could barely keep alive by twelve or fourteen hours’ work a day. The
finishing of pants did not take much skill, and anybody could learn it,
and so the pay was forever getting less. That was the competitive wage
system; and if Jurgis wanted to understand what Socialism was, it was
there he had best begin. The workers were dependent upon a job to exist
from day to day, and so they bid against each other, and no man could
get more than the lowest man would consent to work for. And thus the
mass of the people were always in a life-and-death struggle with
poverty. That was “competition,” so far as it concerned the
wage-earner, the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top,
the exploiters, it appeared very differently, of course—there were few
of them, and they could combine and dominate, and their power would be
unbreakable. And so all over the world two classes were forming, with
an unbridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous
fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The
latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and
helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until
they were organized—until they had become “class-conscious.” It was a
slow and weary process, but it would go on—it was like the movement of
a glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every
Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the “good time
coming,”—when the working class should go to the polls and seize the
powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means
of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered,
he could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if
he did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a
Socialist, the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always
the progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the
movement was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial
center of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but
their organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were
organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as
the unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.
Ostrinski explained the organization of the party, the machinery by
which the proletariat was educating itself. There were “locals” in
every big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly in the
smaller places; a local had anywhere from six to a thousand members,
and there were fourteen hundred of them in all, with a total of about
twenty-five thousand members, who paid dues to support the
organization. “Local Cook County,” as the city organization was called,
had eighty branch locals, and it alone was spending several thousand
dollars in the campaign. It published a weekly in English, and one each
in Bohemian and German; also there was a monthly published in Chicago,
and a cooperative publishing house, that issued a million and a half of
Socialist books and pamphlets every year. All this was the growth of
the last few years—there had been almost nothing of it when Ostrinski
first came to Chicago.
Ostrinski was a Pole, about fifty years of age. He had lived in
Silesia, a member of a despised and persecuted race, and had taken part
in the proletarian movement in the early seventies, when Bismarck,
having conquered France, had turned his policy of blood and iron upon
the “International.” Ostrinski himself had twice been in jail, but he
had been young then, and had not cared. He had had more of his share of
the fight, though, for just when Socialism had broken all its barriers
and become the great political force of the empire, he had come to
America, and begun all over again. In America every one had laughed at
the mere idea of Socialism then—in America all men were free. As if
political liberty made wage slavery any the more tolerable! said
Ostrinski.
The little tailor sat tilted back in his stiff kitchen chair, with his
feet stretched out upon the empty stove, and speaking in low whispers,
so as not to waken those in the next room. To Jurgis he seemed a
scarcely less wonderful person than the speaker at the meeting; he was