Chapter 14

by Upton Sinclair

　　With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working ina sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of thegreat majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom,as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not beused for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it upinto sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had workedin the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meatindustry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that oldPackingtown jest--that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle wouldoften be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to takeaway the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters;also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, givingto any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any colorand any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hamsthey had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time andincreased the capacity of the plant--a machine consisting of a hollowneedle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meatand working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle ina few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hamsfound spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man couldhardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these thepackers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed theodor--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 hadgone 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 nowthey would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay,and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention therewas no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade--there was only NumberOne Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes--they hadwhat they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends ofpork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were theshoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out;and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whoseskins 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 thedepartment of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odorthat ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was neverthe least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there wouldcome all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected,and that was moldy and white--it would be dosed with borax andglycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for homeconsumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor,in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spituncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat storedin great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would dripover it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too darkin these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand overthese piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned breadout for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat wouldgo into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke;the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did theshoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with whicha poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to washtheir hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practiceof 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 bedumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under thesystem of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were somejobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among thesewas 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 stalewater--and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumpedinto 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 smokingtook time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon theirchemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it withgelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of thesame bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some ofit "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such wasthe work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work;it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was partof the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed forthe machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There wasonly one mercy about the cruel grind--that it gave her the gift ofinsensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor--she fellsilent. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the threewould walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too,was falling into a habit of silence--Ona, who had once gone aboutsinging like a bird. She was sick and miserable, and often she wouldbarely have strength enough to drag herself home. And there theywould eat what they had to eat, and afterward, because there wasonly their misery to talk of, they would crawl into bed and fall intoa stupor and never stir until it was time to get up again, and dressby candlelight, and go back to the machines. They were so numbedthat they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the childrencontinued 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 werecruel times. The gates of memory would roll open--old joys wouldstretch 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 itsforever 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 allthe 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 dowith wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom;of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decentand clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was allgone--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 theleast respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and howcruelly certain it was that they could never stand six years of sucha 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 itgave them the vast city in which they lived might have been an oceanwaste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would cometo Ona, in the nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie,afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyesof the old primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and wokeJurgis, who was tired and cross. After that she learned to weepsilently--their moods so seldom came together now! It was as iftheir hopes were buried in separate graves.Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was anotherspecter following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allowany one else to speak of it--he had never acknowledged its existenceto 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 afterweek--until now, there was not an organ of his body that did itswork without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in hishead day and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before himas he went down the street. And from all the unending horror ofthis there was a respite, a deliverance--he could drink! He couldforget the pain, he could slip off the burden; he would see clearlyagain, 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 laughingand 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 himselfthat that was economy; with the second he could eat another meal--butthere would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to payfor a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the agelonginstincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he tookthe plunge, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and wenthome half "piped," as the men phrase it. He was happier than hehad been in a year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness wouldnot last, he was savage, too with those who would wreck it, and withthe world, and with his life; and then again, beneath this, he wassick with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despairof his family, and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears cameinto 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 Jurgisdid not realize that very clearly; he was not given much time forreflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped inmisery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street wasto 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 blockas well; and each one stretched out a hand to him each one had apersonality of its own, allurements unlike any other. Going andcoming--before sunrise and after dark--there was warmth and a glowof light, and the steam of hot food,and perhaps music, or a friendlyface, and a word of good cheer. Jurgis developed a fondness forhaving Ona on his arm whenever he went out on the street, and he wouldhold her tightly, and walk fast. It was pitiful to have Ona knowof 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 despeate hours, he would find himself wishing thatshe might learn what it was, so that he need not be ashamed inher 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 Jurgisconsisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. He would haveugly moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family, because theystood in his way. He was a fool to have married; he had tiedhimself down, had made himself a slave. It was all because he wasa married man that he was compelled to stay in the yards; if it hadnot been for that he might have gone off like Jonas, and to hellwith 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 thememory of the last time they had been drunk, and the hope of the timewhen they would be drunk again. As for Jurgis, he was expected to bringhome every penny; he could not even go with the men at noontime--he wassupposed 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 wasnot smiling just now, being a mass of fiery red pimples. He hadhad all the diseases that babies are heir to, in quick succession,scarlet fever, mumps, and whooping cough in the first year, and nowhe was down with the measles. There was no one to attend him butKotrina; 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 andthen Kotrina would find time to sob over his woes, but for the greaterpart 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 lieand scream for hours, almost in convulsions; and then, when he wasworn out, he would lie whimpering and wailing in his torment. He wasburning up with fever, and his eyes were running sores; in the daytimehe was a thing uncanny and impish to behold, a plaster of pimplesand 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 allthese complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was. He wasthe child of his parents' youth and joy; he grew up like the conjurer'srosebush, and all the world was his oyster. In general, he toddledaround the kitchen all day with a lean and hungry look--the portionof the family's allowance that fell to him was not enough, and he wasunrestrainable in his demand for more. Antanas was but little overa 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 leftnothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with childagain now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate; even Jurgis,dumb and despairing as he was, could not but understand that yetother agonies were on the way, and shudder at the thought of them.For Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she wasdeveloping 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 greedystreetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain; but now it wasbeginning to grow serious, and to wake her up at night. Even worsethan 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 thenJurgis would go half-mad with fright. Elzbieta would explain to himthat it could not be helped, that a woman was subject to such thingswhen she was pregnant; but he was hardly to be persuaded, and wouldbeg and plead to know what had happened. She had never been likethis 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 womanwas 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 killthem at once and be done with it. They ought not to marry, to havechildren; no workingman ought to marry--if he, Jurgis, had known whata woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first. So hewould carry on, becoming half hysterical himself, which was anunbearable thing to see in a big man; Ona would pull herself togetherand 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 lieand sob out her grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at her,as helpless as a wounded animal, the target of unseen enemies.