The Jungle

uring this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred the death of
little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta. Both
Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having
lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital
dislocation of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk.
He was the last of Teta Elzbieta’s children, and perhaps he had been
intended by nature to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate
he was wretchedly sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though
he was over three years old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child of
one. All day long he would crawl around the floor in a filthy little
dress, whining and fretting; because the floor was full of drafts he
was always catching cold, and snuffling because his nose ran. This made
him a nuisance, and a source of endless trouble in the family. For his
mother, with unnatural perversity, loved him best of all her children,
and made a perpetual fuss over him—would let him do anything
undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting drove Jurgis
wild.

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that
morning—which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork
that was condemned as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after
eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he
was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was
all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a
doctor came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one
was really sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable.
Jurgis announced that so far as he was concerned the child would have
to be buried by the city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at
this the poor woman almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands
and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a
pauper’s grave! And her stepdaughter to stand by and hear it said
without protesting! It was enough to make Ona’s father rise up out of
his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to this, they might as well
give up at once, and be buried all of them together! . . . In the end
Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis being
still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from the
neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white
plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to
mark the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that;
the mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about
would make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little
fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only
she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great
doctor to cure him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was
told, a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great
European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease
from which Kristoforas had suffered. And because this surgeon had to
have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that he would treat the
children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which the papers
became quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers, and no
one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then they would
not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait upon the
surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow
hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the
pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching
the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown,
and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a
place that waits for the lowest man—the fertilizer plant!

The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers. Not more than one
in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented
themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There
were some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask
Jurgis if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis would
debate the matter with himself. As poor as they were, and making all
the sacrifices that they were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work
that was offered to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would he
dare to go home and eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and
complaining as she was, knowing that he had been given a chance, and
had not had the nerve to take it?—And yet he might argue that way with
himself all day, and one glimpse into the fertilizer works would send
him away again shuddering. He was a man, and he would do his duty; he
went and made application—but surely he was not also required to hope
for success!

The fertilizer works of Durham’s lay away from the rest of the plant.
Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come out looking
like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been into hell.
To this part of the yards came all the “tankage” and the waste products
of all sorts; here they dried out the bones,—and in suffocating cellars
where the daylight never came you might see men and women and children
bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts
of shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to
die, every one of them, within a certain definite time. Here they made
the blood into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things
still more foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was
done you might lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the
dust and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off
twinkling stars—red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the
color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of
these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but
there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his
courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming
under water; he would put his handkerchief over his face, and begin to
cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate, he would find
his head beginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead to throb,
until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of ammonia
fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the “tankage,” the mass
of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the
carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried
material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had
mixed it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which
they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that
purpose, the substance was ready to be put into bags and sent out to
the world as any one of a hundred different brands of standard bone
phosphate. And then the farmer in Maine or California or Texas would
buy this, at say twenty-five dollars a ton, and plant it with his corn;
and for several days after the operation the fields would have a strong
odor, and the farmer and his wagon and the very horses that had hauled
it would all have it too. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure,
instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on
several acres under the open sky, there are hundreds and thousands of
tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in haystack piles,
covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a
choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if dragged by an
unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and his
secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a
record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the
fertilizer mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis by this time, and
had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came to the door about
two o’clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden spasm of pain
shoot through him—the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis
had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together and
gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him was one of the
vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground—rushing
forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung
forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen
others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That
others were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he
sometimes collided with them; otherwise they might as well not have
been there, for in the blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet
in front of his face. When he had filled one cart he had to grope
around him until another came, and if there was none on hand he
continued to grope till one arrived. In five minutes he was, of course,
a mass of fertilizer from head to feet; they gave him a sponge to tie
over his mouth, so that he could breathe, but the sponge did not
prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with it and his ears from
filling solid. He looked like a brown ghost at twilight—from hair to
shoes he became the color of the building and of everything in it, and
for that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building had to be left
open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of
fertilizer.

Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer at over a
hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis’ skin,
and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost dazed.
The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine’s throbbing; there
was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly
control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months’ siege
behind him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an
hour later he began to vomit—he vomited until it seemed as if his
inwards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the
fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it;
but Jurgis now began to see that it was a question of making up his
stomach.

At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand. He had to
catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get his
bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a
saloon—they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one
class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could only make
his way to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor,
and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to
board a streetcar and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill
to notice it—how the people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to
put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and transfix him with furious
glances. Jurgis only knew that a man in front of him immediately got up
and gave him a seat; and that half a minute later the two people on
each side of him got up; and that in a full minute the crowded car was
nearly empty—those passengers who could not get room on the platform
having gotten out to walk.

Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer mill a minute
after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin—his whole
system was full of it, and it would have taken a week not merely of
scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was,
he could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest
discovery of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an
unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminished in power.
He smelled so that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the
whole family to vomiting; for himself it was three days before he could
keep anything upon his stomach—he might wash his hands, and use a knife
and fork, but were not his mouth and throat filled with the poison?

And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches he would
stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once more, and begin to
shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And so at the end of the week he
was a fertilizer man for life—he was able to eat again, and though his
head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not
work.

So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over
the country, and the country ate generously of packing house products,
and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the
packers’ efforts to keep a superfluity of labor. They were again able
to pay their debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there were
one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long—it
was too bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age. It
was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without
knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment. They
were learning to swear in voluble English; they were learning to pick
up cigar stumps and smoke them, to pass hours of their time gambling
with pennies and dice and cigarette cards; they were learning the
location of all the houses of prostitution on the “Lêvée,” and the
names of the “madames” who kept them, and the days when they gave their
state banquets, which the police captains and the big politicians all
attended. If a visiting “country customer” were to ask them, they could
show him which was “Hinkydink’s” famous saloon, and could even point
out to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and “hold-up men”
who made the place their headquarters. And worse yet, the boys were
getting out of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use,
they would ask, of wasting time and energy and a possible carfare
riding out to the stockyards every night when the weather was pleasant
and they could crawl under a truck or into an empty doorway and sleep
exactly as well? So long as they brought home a half dollar for each
day, what mattered it when they brought it? But Jurgis declared that
from this to ceasing to come at all would not be a very long step, and
so it was decided that Vilimas and Nikalojus should return to school in
the fall, and that instead Elzbieta should go out and get some work,
her place at home being taken by her younger daughter.

Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made
old; she had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and
also of the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and
clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the
evening. She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all
this without a murmur; and her mother went out, and after trudging a
couple of days about the yards, settled down as a servant of a “sausage
machine.”

Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for
the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven
o’clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from one till
half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she could
not stand it—she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the
fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling.
Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric
light, and the dampness, too, was deadly—there were always puddles of
water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room.
The people who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature,
whereby the ptarmigan is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of
snow in the winter, and the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a
stump and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who
worked in this department were precisely the color of the “fresh
country sausage” they made.

The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for two or three
minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people; the machines
were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant. Presumably
sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it would be
interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these
inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men
shoveled loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great
bowls were whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute,
and when the meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour,
and well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on
the other side of the room. The latter were tended by women; there was
a sort of spout, like the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would
take a long string of “casing” and put the end over the nozzle and then
work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove.
This string would be twenty or thirty feet long, but the woman would
have it all on in a jiffy; and when she had several on, she would press
a lever, and a stream of sausage meat would be shot out, taking the
casing with it as it came. Thus one might stand and see appear,
miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling snake of sausage of
incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught these creatures,
and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared and twisted
them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing work
of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an
endless chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her
hands a bunch of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was
quite like the feat of a prestidigitator—for the woman worked so fast
that the eye could literally not follow her, and there was only a mist
of motion, and tangle after tangle of sausages appearing. In the midst
of the mist, however, the visitor would suddenly notice the tense set
face, with the two wrinkles graven in the forehead, and the ghastly
pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly recollect that it was
time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she stayed right
there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage
links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have
a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had
arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did,
with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance
at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as
at some wild beast in a menagerie.