The Jungle

ll summer long the family toiled, and in the fall they had money
enough for Jurgis and Ona to be married according to home traditions of
decency. In the latter part of November they hired a hall, and invited
all their new acquaintances, who came and left them over a hundred
dollars in debt.

It was a bitter and cruel experience, and it plunged them into an agony
of despair. Such a time, of all times, for them to have it, when their
hearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for their
married life; they loved each other so, and they could not have the
briefest respite! It was a time when everything cried out to them that
they ought to be happy; when wonder burned in their hearts, and leaped
into flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depths of
them, with the awe of love realized—and was it so very weak of them
that they cried out for a little peace? They had opened their hearts,
like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen
upon them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the
world had been so crushed and trampled!

Over them, relentless and savage, there cracked the lash of want; the
morning after the wedding it sought them as they slept, and drove them
out before daybreak to work. Ona was scarcely able to stand with
exhaustion; but if she were to lose her place they would be ruined, and
she would surely lose it if she were not on time that day. They all had
to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence in
sausages and sarsaparilla. All that day he stood at his lard machine,
rocking unsteadily, his eyes closing in spite of him; and he all but
lost his place even so, for the foreman booted him twice to waken him.

It was fully a week before they were all normal again, and meantime,
with whining children and cross adults, the house was not a pleasant
place to live in. Jurgis lost his temper very little, however, all
things considered. It was because of Ona; the least glance at her was
always enough to make him control himself. She was so sensitive—she was
not fitted for such a life as this; and a hundred times a day, when he
thought of her, he would clench his hands and fling himself again at
the task before him. She was too good for him, he told himself, and he
was afraid, because she was his. So long he had hungered to possess
her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had not earned the
right; that she trusted him so was all her own simple goodness, and no
virtue of his. But he was resolved that she should never find this out,
and so was always on the watch to see that he did not betray any of his
ugly self; he would take care even in little matters, such as his
manners, and his habit of swearing when things went wrong. The tears
came so easily into Ona’s eyes, and she would look at him so
appealingly—it kept Jurgis quite busy making resolutions, in addition
to all the other things he had on his mind. It was true that more
things were going on at this time in the mind of Jurgis than ever had
in all his life before.

He had to protect her, to do battle for her against the horror he saw
about them. He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed she
would be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide her
from the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now. It was
a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did not
give feasts to other people, you waited for them to give feasts to you.
You went about with your soul full of suspicion and hatred; you
understood that you were environed by hostile powers that were trying
to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps
with. The store-keepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of
lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lampposts and
telegraph poles, were pasted over with lies. The great corporation
which employed you lied to you, and lied to the whole country—from top
to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.

So Jurgis said that he understood it; and yet it was really pitiful,
for the struggle was so unfair—some had so much the advantage! Here he
was, for instance, vowing upon his knees that he would save Ona from
harm, and only a week later she was suffering atrociously, and from the
blow of an enemy that he could not possibly have thwarted. There came a
day when the rain fell in torrents; and it being December, to be wet
with it and have to sit all day long in one of the cold cellars of
Brown’s was no laughing matter. Ona was a working girl, and did not own
waterproofs and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her on the
streetcar. Now it chanced that this car line was owned by gentlemen who
were trying to make money. And the city having passed an ordinance
requiring them to give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and
first they had made a rule that transfers could be had only when the
fare was paid; and later, growing still uglier, they had made
another—that the passenger must ask for the transfer, the conductor was
not allowed to offer it. Now Ona had been told that she was to get a
transfer; but it was not her way to speak up, and so she merely waited,
following the conductor about with her eyes, wondering when he would
think of her. When at last the time came for her to get out, she asked
for the transfer, and was refused. Not knowing what to make of this,
she began to argue with the conductor, in a language of which he did
not understand a word. After warning her several times, he pulled the
bell and the car went on—at which Ona burst into tears. At the next
corner she got out, of course; and as she had no more money, she had to
walk the rest of the way to the yards in the pouring rain. And so all
day long she sat shivering, and came home at night with her teeth
chattering and pains in her head and back. For two weeks afterward she
suffered cruelly—and yet every day she had to drag herself to her work.
The forewoman was especially severe with Ona, because she believed that
she was obstinate on account of having been refused a holiday the day
after her wedding. Ona had an idea that her “forelady” did not like to
have her girls marry—perhaps because she was old and ugly and unmarried
herself.

There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them.
Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could
they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage
of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that
the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and
doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at
home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was
obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know
that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea
and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned
peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with
aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have
done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any
other sort was to be had? The bitter winter was coming, and they had to
save money to get more clothing and bedding; but it would not matter in
the least how much they saved, they could not get anything to keep them
warm. All the clothing that was to be had in the stores was made of
cotton and shoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and
weaving the fiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get
frills and fanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not
obtain for love nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas’, recently come
from abroad, had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he
narrated with glee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting
countryman by his boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm
clock, and the boss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that
the price of one was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five.
Upon being asked what the difference was, the man had wound up the
first halfway and the second all the way, and showed the customer how
the latter made twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked
that he was a sound sleeper, and had better take the more expensive
clock!

There is a poet who sings that

“Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died.”

But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that
comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet
so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the
slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish
that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not
admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told
in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to
excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family
found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and
inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned
money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation
and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect
powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent
gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of
course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had
the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards
set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of
this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up
and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days.

Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where he
worked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breath all
day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man’s
cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when it hardly ever
stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place. Then, too, a
still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked in a place where
his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not long before they had
eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to break out on his feet,
and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his blood was bad, or
there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the men about it,
and learned that it was a regular thing—it was the saltpeter. Every one
felt it, sooner or later, and then it was all up with him, at least for
that sort of work. The sores would never heal—in the end his toes would
drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would not quit; he saw
the suffering of his family, and he remembered what it had cost him to
get a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and
coughing, until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap,
like the One-Horse Shay. They carried him to a dry place and laid him
on the floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poor
old man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until the
end, he never could get up again. He would lie there and cough and
cough, day and night, wasting away to a mere skeleton. There came a
time when there was so little flesh on him that the bones began to poke
through—which was a horrible thing to see or even to think of. And one
night he had a choking fit, and a little river of blood came out of his
mouth. The family, wild with terror, sent for a doctor, and paid half a
dollar to be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the
doctor did not say this so that the old man could hear, for he was
still clinging to the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be
better, and could go back to his job. The company had sent word to him
that they would keep it for him—or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the
men to come one Sunday afternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas
continued to believe it, while three more hemorrhages came; and then at
last one morning they found him stiff and cold. Things were not going
well with them then, and though it nearly broke Teta Elzbieta’s heart,
they were forced to dispense with nearly all the decencies of a
funeral; they had only a hearse, and one hack for the women and
children; and Jurgis, who was learning things fast, spent all Sunday
making a bargain for these, and he made it in the presence of
witnesses, so that when the man tried to charge him for all sorts of
incidentals, he did not have to pay. For twenty-five years old Antanas
Rudkus and his son had dwelt in the forest together, and it was hard to
part in this way; perhaps it was just as well that Jurgis had to give
all his attention to the task of having a funeral without being
bankrupted, and so had no time to indulge in memories and grief.

Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summer
long, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of them
lose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snow
and hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so it
was in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the struggle
that was an agony, and those whose time was come died off in hordes.
All the year round they had been serving as cogs in the great packing
machine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the
replacing of damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking
among them, seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual
harvest of those whom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came
cruel, cold, and biting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing
relentlessly for failing muscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or
later came the day when the unfit one did not report for work; and
then, with no time lost in waiting, and no inquiries or regrets, there
was a chance for a new hand.

The new hands were here by the thousands. All day long the gates of the
packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came,
literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each
other for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no difference to
them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before the
sun rose, an hour before the work began. Sometimes their faces froze,
sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all
together—but still they came, for they had no other place to go. One
day Durham advertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and
all that day the homeless and starving of the city came trudging
through the snow from all over its two hundred square miles. That night
forty score of them crowded into the station house of the stockyards
district—they filled the rooms, sleeping in each other’s laps, toboggan
fashion, and they piled on top of each other in the corridors, till the
police shut the doors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow,
before daybreak, there were three thousand at Durham’s, and the police
reserves had to be sent for to quell the riot. Then Durham’s bosses
picked out twenty of the biggest; the “two hundred” proved to have been
a printer’s error.

Four or five miles to the eastward lay the lake, and over this the
bitter winds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten
or twenty degrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets
would be piled with snowdrifts up to the first-floor windows. The
streets through which our friends had to go to their work were all
unpaved and full of deep holes and gullies; in summer, when it rained
hard, a man might have to wade to his waist to get to his house; and
now in winter it was no joke getting through these places, before light
in the morning and after dark at night. They would wrap up in all they
owned, but they could not wrap up against exhaustion; and many a man
gave out in these battles with the snowdrifts, and lay down and fell
asleep.

And if it was bad for the men, one may imagine how the women and
children fared. Some would ride in the cars, if the cars were running;
but when you are making only five cents an hour, as was little
Stanislovas, you do not like to spend that much to ride two miles. The
children would come to the yards with great shawls about their ears,
and so tied up that you could hardly find them—and still there would be
accidents. One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at
the lard machine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and
screaming with pain. They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously
rubbing his ears; and as they were frozen stiff, it took only two or
three rubs to break them short off. As a result of this, little
Stanislovas conceived a terror of the cold that was almost a mania.
Every morning, when it came time to start for the yards, he would begin
to cry and protest. Nobody knew quite how to manage him, for threats
did no good—it seemed to be something that he could not control, and
they feared sometimes that he would go into convulsions. In the end it
had to be arranged that he always went with Jurgis, and came home with
him again; and often, when the snow was deep, the man would carry him
the whole way on his shoulders. Sometimes Jurgis would be working until
late at night, and then it was pitiful, for there was no place for the
little fellow to wait, save in the doorways or in a corner of the
killing beds, and he would all but fall asleep there, and freeze to
death.

There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might exactly as well
have worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was very
little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places—and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had
to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above
the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were
apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned
against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand
upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your
skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old
sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked
again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great
lumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the
bosses were not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and
ankles into the steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across
the room to the hot-water jets. The cruelest thing of all was that
nearly all of them—all of those who used knives—were unable to wear
gloves, and their arms would be white with frost and their hands would
grow numb, and then of course there would be accidents. Also the air
would be full of steam, from the hot water and the hot blood, so that
you could not see five feet before you; and then, with men rushing
about at the speed they kept up on the killing beds, and all with
butcher knives, like razors, in their hands—well, it was to be counted
as a wonder that there were not more men slaughtered than cattle.

And yet all this inconvenience they might have put up with, if only it
had not been for one thing—if only there had been some place where they
might eat. Jurgis had either to eat his dinner amid the stench in which
he had worked, or else to rush, as did all his companions, to any one
of the hundreds of liquor stores which stretched out their arms to him.
To the west of the yards ran Ashland Avenue, and here was an unbroken
line of saloons—“Whiskey Row,” they called it; to the north was
Forty-seventh Street, where there were half a dozen to the block, and
at the angle of the two was “Whiskey Point,” a space of fifteen or
twenty acres, and containing one glue factory and about two hundred
saloons.

One might walk among these and take his choice: “Hot pea-soup and
boiled cabbage today.” “Sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Walk in.”
“Bean soup and stewed lamb. Welcome.” All of these things were printed
in many languages, as were also the names of the resorts, which were
infinite in their variety and appeal. There was the “Home Circle” and
the “Cosey Corner”; there were “Firesides” and “Hearthstones” and
“Pleasure Palaces” and “Wonderlands” and “Dream Castles” and “Love’s
Delights.” Whatever else they were called, they were sure to be called
“Union Headquarters,” and to hold out a welcome to workingmen; and
there was always a warm stove, and a chair near it, and some friends to
laugh and talk with. There was only one condition attached,—you must
drink. If you went in not intending to drink, you would be put out in
no time, and if you were slow about going, like as not you would get
your head split open with a beer bottle in the bargain. But all of the
men understood the convention and drank; they believed that by it they
were getting something for nothing—for they did not need to take more
than one drink, and upon the strength of it they might fill themselves
up with a good hot dinner. This did not always work out in practice,
however, for there was pretty sure to be a friend who would treat you,
and then you would have to treat him. Then some one else would come
in—and, anyhow, a few drinks were good for a man who worked hard. As he
went back he did not shiver so, he had more courage for his task; the
deadly brutalizing monotony of it did not afflict him so,—he had ideas
while he worked, and took a more cheerful view of his circumstances. On
the way home, however, the shivering was apt to come on him again; and
so he would have to stop once or twice to warm up against the cruel
cold. As there were hot things to eat in this saloon too, he might get
home late to his supper, or he might not get home at all. And then his
wife might set out to look for him, and she too would feel the cold;
and perhaps she would have some of the children with her—and so a whole
family would drift into drinking, as the current of a river drifts
downstream. As if to complete the chain, the packers all paid their men
in checks, refusing all requests to pay in coin; and where in
Packingtown could a man go to have his check cashed but to a saloon,
where he could pay for the favor by spending a part of the money?

From all of these things Jurgis was saved because of Ona. He never
would take but the one drink at noontime; and so he got the reputation
of being a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons, and
had to drift about from one to another. Then at night he would go
straight home, helping Ona and Stanislovas, or often putting the former
on a car. And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudge several
blocks, and come staggering back through the snowdrifts with a bag of
coal upon his shoulder. Home was not a very attractive place—at least
not this winter. They had only been able to buy one stove, and this was
a small one, and proved not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the
bitterest weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all day, and for
the children when they could not get to school. At night they would sit
huddled round this stove, while they ate their supper off their laps;
and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after which they would
all crawl into their beds to get warm, after putting out the fire to
save the coal. Then they would have some frightful experiences with the
cold. They would sleep with all their clothes on, including their
overcoats, and put over them all the bedding and spare clothing they
owned; the children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yet even
so they could not keep warm. The outside ones would be shivering and
sobbing, crawling over the others and trying to get down into the
center, and causing a fight. This old house with the leaky
weatherboards was a very different thing from their cabins at home,
with great thick walls plastered inside and outside with mud; and the
cold which came upon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the
room. They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything was
black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside, or perhaps there
would be deathlike stillness—and that would be worse yet. They could
feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them
with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower,
and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come;
a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power
primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to
chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they
would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear
them if they cried out; there would be no help, no mercy. And so on
until morning—when they would go out to another day of toil, a little
weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be
shaken from the tree.