Chapter 7

by Upton Sinclair

　　All summer long the family toiled, and in the fall they had money enoughfor 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 theirnew 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 agonyof despair. Such a time, of all times, for them to have it, when theirhearts were made tender! Such a pitiful beginning it was for theirmarried life; they loved each other so, and they could not have thebriefest respite! It was a time when everything cried out to them thatthey ought to be happy; when wonder burned in their hearts, and leapedinto flame at the slightest breath. They were shaken to the depthsof them, with the awe of love realized--and was it so very weak of themthat they cried out for a little peace? They had opened their hearts,like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallenupon them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in theworld 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 drovethem out before daybreak to work. Ona was scarcely able to stand withexhaustion; 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 allhad to go, even little Stanislovas, who was ill from overindulgence insausages and sarsaparilla. All that day he stood at his lard machine,rocking unsteadily, his eyes closing in spite of him; and he all butlost 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 pleasantplace to live in. Jurgis lost his temper very little, however, allthings considered. It was because of Ona; the least glance at her wasalways enough to make him control himself. She was so sensitive--shewas 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 himselfagain 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 topossess her, but now that the time had come he knew that he had notearned the right; that she trusted him so was all her own simplegoodness, and no virtue of his. But he was resolved that she shouldnever find this out, and so was always on the watch to see that he did notbetray 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 soappealingly--it kept Jurgis quite busy making resolutions, in additionto all the other things he had on his mind. It was true that more thingswere going on at this time in the mind of Jurgis than ever had in all hislife before.He had to protect her, to do battle for her against the horror he sawabout them. He was all that she had to look to, and if he failed shewould be lost; he would wrap his arms about her, and try to hide herfrom the world. He had learned the ways of things about him now. It wasa war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost. You did notgive 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 understoodthat you were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get yourmoney, 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, werepasted over with lies. The great corporation which employed you liedto you, and lied to the whole country--from top to bottom it was nothingbut 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 saveOna 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 cellarsof Brown's was no laughing matter. Ona was a working girl, and did notown waterproofs and such things, and so Jurgis took her and put her onthe streetcar. Now it chanced that this car line was owned by gentlemenwho were trying to make money. And the city having passed an ordinancerequiring them to give transfers, they had fallen into a rage; and firstthey had made a rule that transfers could be had only when the fare waspaid; and later, growing still uglier, they had made another--that thepassenger must ask for the transfer, the conductor was not allowed tooffer it. Now Ona had been told that she was to get a transfer; but itwas not her way to speak up, and so she merely waited, following theconductor 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 arguewith 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 wenton--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 ofthe way to the yards in the pouring rain. And so all day long she satshivering, and came home at night with her teeth chattering and painsin 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 wasespecially severe with Ona, because she believed that she was obstinateon 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 girlsmarry--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 couldthey know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainageof fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know thatthe pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered,and doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were notwell at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now shewas obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts--and how was she toknow that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that theirtea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that theircanned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams withaniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it havedone them, since there was no place within miles of them where any othersort was to be had? The bitter winter was coming, and they had to savemoney to get more clothing and bedding; but it would not matter in theleast 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 andshoddy, which is made by tearing old clothes to pieces and weaving thefiber again. If they paid higher prices, they might get frills andfanciness, or be cheated; but genuine quality they could not obtain forlove nor money. A young friend of Szedvilas', recently come from abroad,had become a clerk in a store on Ashland Avenue, and he narrated withglee a trick that had been played upon an unsuspecting countryman byhis boss. The customer had desired to purchase an alarm clock, and theboss had shown him two exactly similar, telling him that the price ofone was a dollar and of the other a dollar seventy-five. Upon beingasked what the difference was, the man had wound up the first halfwayand the second all the way, and showed the customer how the lattermade twice as much noise; upon which the customer remarked that he wasa 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 thatcomes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yetso sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating--unredeemed by the slightesttouch of dignity or even of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poetshave not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into thevocabulary of poets--the details of it cannot be told in polite societyat all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy amonglovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alivewith vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and humiliationthey were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent, in efforts to getrid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty they paid twenty-fivecents for a big package of insect powder--a patent preparation whichchanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth which hadcost 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 aftereating 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 restof their days.Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and the place where heworked was a dark, unheated cellar, where you could see your breathall day, and where your fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So theold man's cough grew every day worse, until there came a time when ithardly ever stopped, and he had become a nuisance about the place.Then, too, a still more dreadful thing happened to him; he worked ina place where his feet were soaked in chemicals, and it was not longbefore they had eaten through his new boots. Then sores began to breakout on his feet, and grow worse and worse. Whether it was that his bloodwas bad, or there had been a cut, he could not say; but he asked the menabout 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 endhis toes would drop off, if he did not quit. Yet old Antanas would notquit; he saw the suffering of his family, and he remembered what it hadcost him to get a job. So he tied up his feet, and went on limping aboutand 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 himon the floor, and that night two of the men helped him home. The poorold man was put to bed, and though he tried it every morning until theend, 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 whenthere 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 nighthe 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 dollarto be told that there was nothing to be done. Mercifully the doctor didnot say this so that the old man could hear, for he was still clingingto the faith that tomorrow or next day he would be better, and could goback to his job. The company had sent word to him that they would keepit for him--or rather Jurgis had bribed one of the men to come one Sundayafternoon and say they had. Dede Antanas continued to believe it, whilethree more hemorrhages came; and then at last one morning they found himstiff and cold. Things were not going well with them then, and thoughit nearly broke Teta Elzbieta's heart, they were forced to dispense withnearly all the decencies of a funeral; they had only a hearse, and onehack 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 thepresence of witnesses, so that when the man tried to charge him for allsorts of incidentals, he did not have to pay. For twenty-five years oldAntanas Rudkus and his son had dwelt in the forest together, and it washard to part in this way; perhaps it was just as well that Jurgis had togive all his attention to the task of having a funeral without beingbankrupted, and so had no time to indulge in memories and grief.Now the dreadful winter was come upon them. In the forests, all summerlong, the branches of the trees do battle for light, and some of themlose and die; and then come the raging blasts, and the storms of snowand hail, and strew the ground with these weaker branches. Just so itwas in Packingtown; the whole district braced itself for the strugglethat 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 packingmachine; and now was the time for the renovating of it, and the replacingof damaged parts. There came pneumonia and grippe, stalking among them,seeking for weakened constitutions; there was the annual harvest of thosewhom tuberculosis had been dragging down. There came cruel, cold, andbiting winds, and blizzards of snow, all testing relentlessly for failingmuscles and impoverished blood. Sooner or later came the day when theunfit 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 thepacking houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came,literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with eachother for a chance for life. Blizzards and cold made no differenceto them, they were always on hand; they were on hand two hours before thesun 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 Durhamadvertised in the paper for two hundred men to cut ice; and all that daythe homeless and starving of the city came trudging through the snow fromall over its two hundred square miles. That night forty score of themcrowded into the station house of the stockyards district--they filledthe rooms, sleeping in each other's laps, toboggan fashion, and theypiled on top of each other in the corridors, till the police shut thedoors and left some to freeze outside. On the morrow, before daybreak,there were three thousand at Durham's, and the police reserves had to besent for to quell the riot. Then Durham's bosses picked out twenty ofthe 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 bitterwinds came raging. Sometimes the thermometer would fall to ten or twentydegrees below zero at night, and in the morning the streets would bepiled with snowdrifts up to the first-floor windows. The streets throughwhich our friends had to go to their work were all unpaved and full ofdeep holes and gullies; in summer, when it rained hard, a man might haveto wade to his waist to get to his house; and now in winter it was nojoke getting through these places, before light in the morning and afterdark at night. They would wrap up in all they owned, but they could notwrap up against exhaustion; and many a man gave out in these battles withthe snowdrifts, and lay down and fell asleep.And if it was bad for the men, one may imagine how the women and childrenfared. Some would ride in the cars, if the cars were running; but whenyou are making only five cents an hour, as was little Stanislovas, youdo not like to spend that much to ride two miles. The children wouldcome to the yards with great shawls about their ears, and so tied upthat you could hardly find them--and still there would be accidents.One bitter morning in February the little boy who worked at the lardmachine with Stanislovas came about an hour late, and screaming with pain.They unwrapped him, and a man began vigorously rubbing his ears; and asthey were frozen stiff, it took only two or three rubs to break themshort off. As a result of this, little Stanislovas conceived a terror ofthe cold that was almost a mania. Every morning, when it came time tostart for the yards, he would begin to cry and protest. Nobody knew quitehow to manage him, for threats did no good--it seemed to be something thathe could not control, and they feared sometimes that he would go intoconvulsions. In the end it had to be arranged that he always went withJurgis, 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 Jurgiswould be working until late at night, and then it was pitiful, for therewas no place for the little fellow to wait, save in the doorways or ina 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 wellhave worked out of doors all winter. For that matter, there was verylittle heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms andsuch places--and it was the men who worked in these who ran the mostrisk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room theyhad to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing onabove the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing bedsyou were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if youleaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put yourhand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leavingyour skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and oldsacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soakedagain, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on greatlumps the size of the feet of an elephant. Now and then, when the bosseswere not looking, you would see them plunging their feet and ankles intothe steaming hot carcass of the steer, or darting across the room to thehot-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 armswould be white with frost and their hands would grow numb, and then ofcourse 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 feetbefore you; and then, with men rushing about at the speed they kept upon the killing beds, and all with butcher knives, like razors, in theirhands-- well, it was to be counted as a wonder that there were not moremen slaughtered than cattle.And yet all this inconvenience they might have put up with, if only ithad not been for one thing--if only there had been some place where theymight eat. Jurgis had either to eat his dinner amid the stench in whichhe had worked, or else to rush, as did all his companions, to any one ofthe hundreds of liquor stores which stretched out their arms to him.To the west of the yards ran Ashland Avenue, and here was an unbrokenline 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 theangle 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 boiledcabbage today." "Sauerkraut and hot frankfurters. Walk in." "Bean soupand stewed lamb. Welcome." All of these things were printed in manylanguages, as were also the names of the resorts, which were infinitein their variety and appeal. There was the "Home Circle" and the"Cosey Corner"; there were "Firesides" and "Hearthstones" and "PleasurePalaces" and "Wonderlands" and "Dream Castles" and "Love's Delights."Whatever else they were called, they were sure to be called "UnionHeadquarters," and to hold out a welcome to workingmen; and there wasalways a warm stove, and a chair near it, and some friends to laughand 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 headsplit open with a beer bottle in the bargain. But all of the menunderstood the convention and drank; they believed that by it they weregetting something for nothing--for they did not need to take more thanone drink, and upon the strength of it they might fill themselves up witha 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 thenyou 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 wentback he did not shiver so, he had more courage for his task; the deadlybrutalizing monotony of it did not afflict him so,--he had ideas whilehe worked, and took a more cheerful view of his circumstances. On theway home, however, the shivering was apt to come on him again; and sohe 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 homelate to his supper, or he might not get home at all. And then hiswife 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 awhole family would drift into drinking, as the current of a river driftsdownstream. As if to complete the chain, the packers all paid their menin checks, refusing all requests to pay in coin; and where in Packingtowncould a man go to have his check cashed but to a saloon, where he couldpay for the favor by spending a part of the money?From all of these things Jurgis was saved because of Ona. He neverwould take but the one drink at noontime; and so he got the reputationof 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 wouldgo straight home, helping Ona and Stanislovas, or often putting theformer on a car. And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudgeseveral blocks, and come staggering back through the snowdrifts with abag 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 thekitchen in the bitterest weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbietaall day, and for the children when they could not get to school. At nightthey would sit huddled round this stove, while they ate their supper offtheir laps; and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after whichthey would all crawl into their beds to get warm, after putting out thefire to save the coal. Then they would have some frightful experienceswith the cold. They would sleep with all their clothes on, includingtheir overcoats, and put over them all the bedding and spare clothingthey owned; the children would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yeteven so they could not keep warm. The outside ones would be shiveringand sobbing, crawling over the others and trying to get down into thecenter, and causing a fight. This old house with the leaky weatherboardswas a very different thing from their cabins at home, with great thickwalls plastered inside and outside with mud; and the cold which cameupon them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room. They wouldwaken in the midnight hours, when everything was black; perhaps they wouldhear it yelling outside, or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness--and that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold as it crept inthrough the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealingfingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, allin vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specterborn in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowingthe tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It wascruel 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 theywould go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little nearerto the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree.