The Jungle | #13

During 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 draughts 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; she 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 tuberculous pork that is taken out at the bottom of the tank. 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 little 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 own 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 a month's wages in advance where she worked, 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—on Sunday afternoons, when she could get away from the place where she worked she would come over, and the mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about would set her weeping. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. He really had the best heart—if only she had heard about it, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure him of his lameness! . . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago billionaire, whose occupation shall be unspecified here, but whose name was Ogden Armour, had paid a sum equal to the life-time's earnings of several men such as Jurgis, to bring a great European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of a dislocation of the hip, the same disease 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 maudlin. 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 any body with the time to take the child; besides, there were the ten times as many poor children applying as the surgeon could treat, and so nearly all had to go back home and stay crippled, belonging as they did to that greater portion of the population of the civilized world for which medical and surgical science does not exist. It is sufficiently obvious that it is hopeless to doctor people whose conditions of life breed diseases ten times as fast as science can cure them; and that the Almighty cannot have intended the science of healing to apply to human beings who have unventilated and filthy homes to live in, and dangerous and exhausting work to do, and insufficient food and clothing—who in other words are not human beings at all, but simply parts of a machine for producing wealth.

All this time 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. There are all stages of being out of work, and be faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a place in Packingtown 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 went there every day, like a prisoner to an execution; 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! He knew perfectly well, however, that the chance of his getting employment there was greater than of getting it in all the rest of the yards together.

The fertilizer works of Anderson's lay to the south of 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 would say 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 them 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 in 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 on 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 over-powering blast of ammonia fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half dazed.

On top of this were the suffocating rooms where they dried the "tankage," as it was called, the mass of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the carcasses have had the lard and tallow tried out of them. This dried tankage they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had adulterated it with railroad cinders and an innocuous brown rock which they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of car loads 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. The next planting-time, let the farmer ponder the matter and imagine what this odor would be if the fertilizer were pure, instead of being a flavoring, and if instead of a ton or so spread out on several acres under the open sky, there were hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in hay-stack piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a choking dust that became a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirred.

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—he was not offered a job. But early in the June there came a record-breaking hot spell, and after that there was "no longer any excuse for a man's being idle" (to use the common phrase) in Packingtown. 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 man beckoned to him! In ten minutes more Jurgis had pulled off his coat and over-shirt, 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; it came out 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 clouds of dust 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 a wind blew, Anderson and Company lost a great deal of fertilizer; doubtless, however, they had figured it out, and found that they would lose more in extra wages than they would have saved in fertilizer, had they closed it up tight. As it was, it was hard to retain—not common laborers, for these were always to be had in droves—but bosses and trusty men to take charge; in the month of November, 1900, there was one week when one hundred and twenty-six men were employed and only six were able to continue.

End of original June 17th, 1905 publication. This following conclusion to Chapter 13 was published June 24th, 1905.

It was possible for Jurgis to conquer his revulsion from the odor of the fertilizer, but he could not prevent his body from rebelling. Working in his shirt-sleeves and with the thermometer at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of his 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 insides must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer-mill, the boss had said, if he would only 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 rattle-snake poison in one class. But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking—he could only stagger onto a car. He had a sense of humor, and later on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to get on a street car and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill to see 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 in large quantities and for unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminished in power. Jurgis smelt 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, for though his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not work. Every man who worked in the fertilizer plant was dying slowly of deadly diseases; but so long as the process was slow enough, it did not trouble them much—the men outside were dying more rapidly still.

So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity, all over the country, and the country ate generously of the 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. They could have become quite well off, by their standards, had they worked just so all the time. But there were one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long—it was too bad that their home should go all to wreck, while Teta Elzbieta remained a kitchen-woman; and also it was too bad that the two boys should have to sell papers at their age. It was quite useless to caution them and plead with them; quite without knowing it they were taking on the tone of their new environment, and anyone could see that they were growing rougher and less obedient. 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 "Levee," and the names of the "madames" who kept them, and the days when they gave their gorgeous banquets, which all the police-captains and the big politicians all attended. If a visiting "country-customer" were to ask them, they could show him which was "Hinky-dink'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. Among the other things, 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 car-fare riding out to the stock-yards 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 as soon as he was at work again, it was decided that Teta Elzbieta should give up her place and come home, and that Vilimui and Nikalojus and little Kotrina should all return to school in the fall.

And so in September the family was again just making out upon the earnings of Jurgis and Ona, and the board of Marija—when suddenly, and without so much as half an hours warning, Ona lost her place at Smith's!

There was no complicated story to this. It was all quite simple and obvious. Ona had now been working in the ham-wrapping room for two years, and every day during that time she had been half expecting what now happened, when the forelady came and told her that her services were no longer needed. Ona stood still, quite white about the lips; she caught at her breath two or three times, and then managed to gasp out an inquiry as to what she had done. She had done nothing in particular, the forelady answered, coldly; she was no longer needed. She would be paid for the time she had worked. And so Ona got her things together and went out, and sat down on the steps and wept to break her heart.

The next day Ona was told by Jadwiga Mariciukus that the forelady had put in her place one of the girls from the house down on the "Levee." That had happened so often that Ona was not surprised at all; though she felt the cruel injustice of it, there was nothing that she could do. There was no one higher up that she could complain to; the superintendent was this woman's paramour and accomplice, and in all the time that she had been there, the will of these two people had been Ona's law. For her to have inquired for or sought any higher authority would have been an unpardonable piece of impertinence. In Packingtown the discipline is the same as in an army—every official has full sway in his own department, and is responsible only to the official next in rank, and responsible, of course, for results. The ham-wrapping department of Smith's was competing with all the other ham-wrapping departments in the yards; and every week the reports of all would be submitted, and the managers would compare them. Anyone who is guileless enough may believe that what these hardheaded business men discussed was which had kept the highest moral standard among its workers, and had been kindest to the old and trusted hands—and not which of them had wrapped the most hams!

So the family faced one siege more. It was commonly much easier for a woman to get a place in the yards than for a man—with the introduction of new machinery and the perfecting of the processes, it was an every day matter for men to be turned off and women and children put in their places. But then Ona was not an ordinary woman; she could not hope to succeed like Marija, for instance, who would do the work of the average man and a little more. So there was great anxiety—and corresponding surprise and delight, when one of the girls that had worked with Ona came and told her of a chance that she might get in the sausage department. It was all the more strange, because the girl who told Ona was one who had been most chummy with the forelady, and a frequent visitor to the house downtown, and therefore, the last person in the world that Ona would have looked to for a favor. At first she thought it must be a cruel jest; and this became almost a certainty when she went to the sausage-rooms and saw the boss, a course-looking, red-faced Irishman whom she had frequently seen with her "forelady." But the man, after looking her over and asking her a few question, told her that he would give her a chance, and added that if she did her work she could earn more than she had in the place she had left.

So Ona became the servant of a sausage-machine. The change would have been a cruel one, even had she made several times as much money; for while she was wrapping hams she had been able to sit down, and now she had to be upon her feet from seven in the morning till noon, and again from one till six. 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 now working in the one of the dark holes, by electric light; the dampness, too, was deadly—there was always a thin layer 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, turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who work 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 sausage-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 machines. 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 well mixed with water, it was forced to the stuffing-machines on the other side of the room. These machines 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 gut and put the end over the nozzle and then work the whole thing on, as one works on the fingers of a tight glove. This string of a casing 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 centre, It was quite like the feat of prestidigitation—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, week after week, year after year, twisting sausage links and facing with death. It was piece-work, 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 thought, nor a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her as at some wild beast in a menagerie.