The Jungle

ith one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a
sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great
majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found,
whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything
else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what
had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they
could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside,
and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that
they use everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would
often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take
away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of
all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort
of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor
and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious
apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the
plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by
plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man
could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of
this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so
bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump
into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which
destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them
thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be
found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as
“Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a
new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad
part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this
invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there
was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such
schemes—they had what they called “boneless hams,” which were all the
odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and “California hams,”
which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the
meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the oldest
hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy
them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled
“head cheese!”

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the
department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute
flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was
in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention
paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back
from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and
white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the
hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat
that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the
workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs.
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from
leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about
on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man
could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of
the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers
would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats,
bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy
story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man
who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he
saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with
which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to
wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a
practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the
sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of
corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that
would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under
the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some
jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was
the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in
the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water—and
cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the
hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some
of it they would make into “smoked” sausage—but as the smoking took
time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry
department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to
make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when
they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for
this they would charge two cents more a pound.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such
was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing
work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was
part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed
for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was
only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of
insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent.
She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk
home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into
a habit of silence—Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird.
She was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength
enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to
eat, and afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of,
they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until
it was time to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to
the machines. They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much
from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran
short.

Yet the soul of Ona was not dead—the souls of none of them were dead,
but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were
cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch
out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and
they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its
forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it;
but anguish would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It
was a thing scarcely to be spoken—a thing never spoken by all the
world, that will not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was
not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with
wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a
chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean,
to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone—it
would never be! They had played the game and they had lost. Six years
more of toil they had to face before they could expect the least
respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how cruelly
certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as
they were living! They were lost, they were going down—and there was no
deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast
city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness,
a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the
nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the
beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old
primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was
tired and cross. After that she learned to weep silently—their moods so
seldom came together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in
separate graves.

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter
following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one
else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself.
Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had—and once or
twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.

He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after
week—until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work
without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day
and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went
down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a
respite, a deliverance—he could drink! He could forget the pain, he
could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be
master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would
stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with
his companions—he would be a man again, and master of his life.

It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three
drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade
himself that that was economy; with the second he could eat another
meal—but there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to
pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the
age-long instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he
took the plunge, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went
home half “piped,” as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had
been in a year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not
last, he was savage, too with those who would wreck it, and with the
world, and with his life; and then again, beneath this, he was sick
with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his
family, and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears came into his
eyes, and he began the long battle with the specter.

It was a battle that had no end, that never could have one. But Jurgis
did not realize that very clearly; he was not given much time for
reflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped in
misery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street was to be
put upon the rack. There was surely a saloon on the corner—perhaps on
all four corners, and some in the middle of the block as well; and each
one stretched out a hand to him each one had a personality of its own,
allurements unlike any other. Going and coming—before sunrise and after
dark—there was warmth and a glow of light, and the steam of hot food,
and perhaps music, or a friendly face, and a word of good cheer. Jurgis
developed a fondness for having Ona on his arm whenever he went out on
the street, and he would hold her tightly, and walk fast. It was
pitiful to have Ona know of this—it drove him wild to think of it; the
thing was not fair, for Ona had never tasted drink, and so could not
understand. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself
wishing that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be
ashamed in her presence. They might drink together, and escape from the
horror—escape for a while, come what would.

So there came a time when nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis
consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. He would have ugly
moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family, because they stood in
his way. He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, had
made himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he
was compelled to stay in the yards; if it had not been for that he
might have gone off like Jonas, and to hell with the packers. There
were few single men in the fertilizer mill—and those few were working
only for a chance to escape. Meantime, too, they had something to think
about while they worked,—they had the memory of the last time they had
been drunk, and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again. As
for Jurgis, he was expected to bring home every penny; he could not
even go with the men at noontime—he was supposed to sit down and eat
his dinner on a pile of fertilizer dust.

This was not always his mood, of course; he still loved his family. But
just now was a time of trial. Poor little Antanas, for instance—who had
never failed to win him with a smile—little Antanas was not smiling
just now, being a mass of fiery red pimples. He had had all the
diseases that babies are heir to, in quick succession, scarlet fever,
mumps, and whooping cough in the first year, and now he was down with
the measles. There was no one to attend him but Kotrina; there was no
doctor to help him, because they were too poor, and children did not
die of the measles—at least not often. Now and then Kotrina would find
time to sob over his woes, but for the greater part of the time he had
to be left alone, barricaded upon the bed. The floor was full of
drafts, and if he caught cold he would die. At night he was tied down,
lest he should kick the covers off him, while the family lay in their
stupor of exhaustion. He would lie and scream for hours, almost in
convulsions; and then, when he was worn out, he would lie whimpering
and wailing in his torment. He was burning up with fever, and his eyes
were running sores; in the daytime he was a thing uncanny and impish to
behold, a plaster of pimples and sweat, a great purple lump of misery.

Yet all this was not really as cruel as it sounds, for, sick as he was,
little Antanas was the least unfortunate member of that family. He was
quite able to bear his sufferings—it was as if he had all these
complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was. He was the child of
his parents’ youth and joy; he grew up like the conjurer’s rosebush,
and all the world was his oyster. In general, he toddled around the
kitchen all day with a lean and hungry look—the portion of the family’s
allowance that fell to him was not enough, and he was unrestrainable in
his demand for more. Antanas was but little over a year old, and
already no one but his father could manage him.

It seemed as if he had taken all of his mother’s strength—had left
nothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with child again
now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate; even Jurgis, dumb and
despairing as he was, could not but understand that yet other agonies
were on the way, and shudder at the thought of them.

For Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she was
developing a cough, like the one that had killed old Dede Antanas. She
had had a trace of it ever since that fatal morning when the greedy
streetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain; but now it was
beginning to grow serious, and to wake her up at night. Even worse than
that was the fearful nervousness from which she suffered; she would
have frightful headaches and fits of aimless weeping; and sometimes she
would come home at night shuddering and moaning, and would fling
herself down upon the bed and burst into tears. Several times she was
quite beside herself and hysterical; and then Jurgis would go half-mad
with fright. Elzbieta would explain to him that it could not be helped,
that a woman was subject to such things when she was pregnant; but he
was hardly to be persuaded, and would beg and plead to know what had
happened. She had never been like this before, he would argue—it was
monstrous and unthinkable. It was the life she had to live, the
accursed work she had to do, that was killing her by inches. She was
not fitted for it—no woman was fitted for it, no woman ought to be
allowed to do such work; if the world could not keep them alive any
other way it ought to kill them at once and be done with it. They ought
not to marry, to have children; no workingman ought to marry—if he,
Jurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes
torn out first. So he would carry on, becoming half hysterical himself,
which was an unbearable thing to see in a big man; Ona would pull
herself together and fling herself into his arms, begging him to stop,
to be still, that she would be better, it would be all right. So she
would lie and sob out her grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at
her, as helpless as a wounded animal, the target of unseen enemies.