Chapter 2

by Upton Sinclair

　　Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told himstories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards ofChicago, and of what had happened to them afterward--stories to makeyour flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been therefour months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too muchhealth in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten."That is well enough for men like you," he would say, "silpnas, punyfellows--but my back is broad."Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man thebosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they cannotget hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would go thereon the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would stand roundfidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was in him. If hewere working in a line of men, the line always moved too slowly for him,and you could pick him out by his impatience and restlessness. That waswhy he had been picked out on one important occasion; for Jurgis had stoodoutside of Brown and Company's "Central Time Station" not more than halfan hour, the second day of his arrival in Chicago, before he had beenbeckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he was very proud, and it made himmore disposed than ever to laugh at the pessimists. In vain would they alltell him that there were men in that crowd from which he had been chosenwho had stood there a month--yes, many months--and not been chosen yet."Yes," he would say, "but what sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking, and want toget more for it. Do you want me to believe that with these arms"--and hewould clench his fists and hold them up in the air, so that you might seethe rolling muscles--that with these arms people will ever let me starve?""It is plain," they would answer to this, "that you have come from thecountry, and from very far in the country." And this was the fact,for Jurgis had never seen a city, and scarcely even a fair-sized town,until he had set out to make his fortune in the world and earn his rightto Ona. His father, and his father's father before him, and as manyancestors back as legend could go, had lived in that part of Lithuaniaknown as Brelovicz, the Imperial Forest. This is a great tract of ahundred thousand acres, which from time immemorial has been a huntingpreserve of the nobility. There are a very few peasants settled in it,holding title from ancient times; and one of these was Antanas Rudkus,who had been reared himself, and had reared his children in turn, uponhalf a dozen acres of cleared land in the midst of a wilderness. There hadbeen one son besides Jurgis, and one sister. The former had been draftedinto the army; that had been over ten years ago, but since that day nothinghad ever been heard of him. The sister was married, and her husband hadbought the place when old Antanas had decided to go with his son.It was nearly a year and a half ago that Jurgis had met Ona, at a horsefair a hundred miles from home. Jurgis had never expected to get married--he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to walk into; but here,without ever having spoken a word to her, with no more than the exchangeof half a dozen smiles, he found himself, purple in the face withembarrassment and terror, asking her parents to sell her to him for hiswife--and offering his father's two horses he had been sent to the fairto sell. But Ona's father proved as a rock--the girl was yet a child,and he was a rich man, and his daughter was not to be had in that way.So Jurgis went home with a heavy heart, and that spring and summer toiledand tried hard to forget. In the fall, after the harvest was over, he sawthat it would not do, and tramped the full fortnight's journey that laybetween him and Ona.He found an unexpected state of affairs--for the girl's father had died,and his estate was tied up with creditors; Jurgis' heart leaped as herealized that now the prize was within his reach. There was ElzbietaLukoszaite, Teta, or Aunt, as they called her, Ona's stepmother, and therewere her six children, of all ages. There was also her brother Jonas,a dried-up little man who had worked upon the farm. They were people ofgreat consequence, as it seemed to Jurgis, fresh out of the woods; Onaknew how to read, and knew many other things that he did not know, and nowthe farm had been sold, and the whole family was adrift--all they owned inthe world being about seven hundred rubles which is half as many dollars.They would have had three times that, but it had gone to court, and thejudge had decided against them, and it had cost the balance to get him tochange his decision.Ona might have married and left them, but she would not, for she lovedTeta Elzbieta. It was Jonas who suggested that they all go to America,where a friend of his had gotten rich. He would work, for his part,and the women would work, and some of the children, doubtless--theywould live somehow. Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That wasa country where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day;and Jurgis figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices asthey were where he lived, and decided forthwith that he would go toAmerica and marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country,rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go intothe army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials--he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man.So America was a place of which lovers and young people dreamed. If onecould only manage to get the price of a passage, he could count histroubles at an end.It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and meantimeJurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and tramped nearlyfour hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work upon a railroadin Smolensk. This was a fearful experience, with filth and bad foodand cruelty and overwork; but Jurgis stood it and came out in fine trim,and with eighty rubles sewed up in his coat. He did not drink or fight,because he was thinking all the time of Ona; and for the rest, he wasa quiet, steady man, who did what he was told to, did not lose his temperoften, and when he did lose it made the offender anxious that he shouldnot lose it again. When they paid him off he dodged the company gamblersand dramshops, and so they tried to kill him; but he escaped, and trampedit home, working at odd jobs, and sleeping always with one eye open.So in the summer time they had all set out for America. At the lastmoment there joined them Marija Berczynskas, who was a cousin of Ona's.Marija was an orphan, and had worked since childhood for a rich farmerof Vilna, who beat her regularly. It was only at the age of twentythat it had occurred to Marija to try her strength, when she had risenup and nearly murdered the man, and then come away.There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children--and Ona, who was a little of both. They had a hard time on the passage;there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and gotthem into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of theirprecious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear. This happenedto them again in New York--for, of course, they knew nothing about thecountry, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a man in a blueuniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and keep them there,and make them pay enormous charges to get away. The law says that therate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not say that itshall be in Lithuanian.It was in the stockyards that Jonas' friend had gotten rich, and so toChicago the party was bound. They knew that one word, Chicago and thatwas all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better offthan before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, withits big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize thatthey had arrived, and why, when they said "Chicago," people no longerpointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or laughed,or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in theirhelplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any sortof person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a policeman theywould cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of the first daythey wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion, utterly lost;and it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of a house,they were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the station.In the morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken and put upona car, and taught a new word--"stockyards." Their delight at discoveringthat they were to get out of this adventure without losing another shareof their possessions it would not be possible to describe.They sat and stared out of the window. They were on a street which seemedto run on forever, mile after mile--thirty-four of them, if they had knownit--and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched little two-storyframe buildings. Down every side street they could see, it was the same--never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of uglyand dirty little wooden buildings. Here and there would be a bridgecrossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds anddocks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangleof switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by;here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building with innumerablewindows in it, and immense volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys,darkening the air above and making filthy the earth beneath. But aftereach of these interruptions, the desolate procession would begin again--theprocession of dreary little buildings.A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note theperplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, andupon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as thetrain sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grownparched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along with thethickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a strange,pungent odor. They were not sure that it was unpleasant, this odor;some might have called it sickening, but their taste in odors was notdeveloped, and they were only sure that it was curious. Now, sitting inthe trolley car, they realized that they were on their way to the homeof it--that they had traveled all the way from Lithuania to it. It wasnow no longer something far off and faint, that you caught in whiffs;you could literally taste it, as well as smell it--you could take holdof it, almost, and examine it at your leisure. They were divided in theiropinions about it. It was an elemental odor, raw and crude; it was rich,almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some who drank it in as ifit were an intoxicant; there were others who put their handkerchiefs totheir faces. The new emigrants were still tasting it, lost in wonder,when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door was flung open, and avoice shouted--"Stockyards!"They were left standing upon the corner, staring; down a side streetthere were two rows of brick houses, and between them a vista: half adozen chimneys, tall as the tallest of buildings, touching the verysky--and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily,and black as night. It might have come from the center of the world,this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smolder. It came as ifself-impelled, driving all before it, a perpetual explosion. It wasinexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the greatstreams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing, curling;then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down the sky,stretching a black pall as far as the eye could reach.Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, likethe color, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of tenthousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first--it sunk intoyour consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like themurmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; itsuggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It wasonly by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals,that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distantgrunting of ten thousand swine.They would have liked to follow it up, but, alas, they had no time foradventures just then. The policeman on the corner was beginning towatch them; and so, as usual, they started up the street. Scarcely hadthey gone a block, however, before Jonas was heard to give a cry, and beganpointing excitedly across the street. Before they could gather the meaningof his breathless ejaculations he had bounded away, and they saw him entera shop, over which was a sign: "J. Szedvilas, Delicatessen." When he cameout again it was in company with a very stout gentleman in shirt sleevesand an apron, clasping Jonas by both hands and laughing hilariously.Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly that Szedvilas had been the nameof the mythical friend who had made his fortune in America. To find thathe had been making it in the delicatessen business was an extraordinarypiece of good fortune at this juncture; though it was well on in themorning, they had not breakfasted, and the children were beginning towhimper.Thus was the happy ending to a woeful voyage. The two families literallyfell upon each other's necks--for it had been years since Jokubas Szedvilashad met a man from his part of Lithuania. Before half the day they werelifelong friends. Jokubas understood all the pitfalls of this new world,and could explain all of its mysteries; he could tell them the thingsthey ought to have done in the different emergencies--and what was stillmore to the point, he could tell them what to do now. He would take themto poni Aniele, who kept a boardinghouse the other side of the yards;old Mrs. Jukniene, he explained, had not what one would call choiceaccommodations, but they might do for the moment. To this Teta Elzbietahastened to respond that nothing could be too cheap to suit them justthen; for they were quite terrified over the sums they had had to expend.A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages hadbeen sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also aland of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as inany other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all thewonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had madethe discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at Americanprices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages--and so werereally being cheated by the world! The last two days they had all butstarved themselves--it made them quite sick to pay the prices that therailroad people asked them for food.Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not butrecoil, even so. ln all their journey they had seen nothing so badas this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness oftwo-story frame tenements that lie "back of the yards." There were foursuch flats in each building, and each of the four was a "boardinghouse"for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or Bohemians.Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were cooperative.There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each room--sometimesthere were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty or sixty to a flat.Each one of the occupants furnished his own accommodations--that is,a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses would be spread upon thefloor in rows--and there would be nothing else in the place except a stove.It was by no means unusual for two men to own the same mattress in common,one working by day and using it by night, and the other working at nightand using it in the daytime. Very frequently a lodging house keeper wouldrent the same beds to double shifts of men.Mrs. Jukniene was a wizened-up little woman, with a wrinkled face.Her home was unthinkably filthy; you could not enter by the frontdoor at all, owing to the mattresses, and when you tried to go up thebackstairs you found that she had walled up most of the porch with oldboards to make a place to keep her chickens. It was a standing jest ofthe boarders that Aniele cleaned house by letting the chickens loose inthe rooms. Undoubtedly this did keep down the vermin, but it seemedprobable, in view of all the circumstances, that the old lady regarded itrather as feeding the chickens than as cleaning the rooms. The truth wasthat she had definitely given up the idea of cleaning anything, underpressure of an attack of rheumatism, which had kept her doubled up inone corner of her room for over a week; during which time eleven of herboarders, heavily in her debt, had concluded to try their chances ofemployment in Kansas City. This was July, and the fields were green.One never saw the fields, nor any green thing whatever, in Packingtown;but one could go out on the road and "hobo it," as the men phrased it,and see the country, and have a long rest, and an easy time riding onthe freight cars. Such was the home to which the new arrivals were welcomed. There wasnothing better to be had--they might not do so well by looking further,for Mrs. Jukniene had at least kept one room for herself and her threelittle children, and now offered to share this with the women and thegirls of the party. They could get bedding at a secondhand store, sheexplained; and they would not need any, while the weather was so hot--doubtless they would all sleep on the sidewalk such nights as this, as didnearly all of her guests. "Tomorrow," Jurgis said, when they were leftalone, "tomorrow I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get one also;and then we can get a place of our own."Later that afternoon he and Ona went out to take a walk and look about them,to see more of this district which was to be their home. In back of theyards the dreary two-story frame houses were scattered farther apart,and there were great spaces bare--that seemingly had been overlooked by thegreat sore of a city as it spread itself over the surface of the prairie.These bare places were grown up with dingy, yellow weeds, hidinginnumerable tomato cans; innumerable children played upon them, chasingone another here and there, screaming and fighting. The most uncannything about this neighborhood was the number of the children; you thoughtthere must be a school just out, and it was only after long acquaintancethat you were able to realize that there was no school, but that thesewere the children of the neighborhood--that there were so many childrento the block in Packingtown that nowhere on its streets could a horse andbuggy move faster than a walk!It could not move faster anyhow, on account of the state of the streets.Those through which Jurgis and Ona were walking resembled streets lessthan they did a miniature topographical map. The roadway was commonlyseveral feet lower than the level of the houses, which were sometimesjoined by high board walks; there were no pavements--there were mountainsand valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows full ofstinking green water. In these pools the children played, and rolledabout in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them diggingin it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered about this,as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literallyblackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which assailed one'snostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the universe.It impelled the visitor to questions and then the residents would explain,quietly, that all this was "made" land, and that it had been "made" byusing it as a dumping ground for the city garbage. After a few years theunpleasant effect of this would pass away, it was said; but meantime,in hot weather--and especially when it rained--the flies were apt tobe annoying. Was it not unhealthful? the stranger would ask, and theresidents would answer, "Perhaps; but there is no telling."A little way farther on, and Jurgis and Ona, staring open-eyed andwondering, came to the place where this "made" ground was in processof making. Here was a great hole, perhaps two city blocks square,and with long files of garbage wagons creeping into it. The place hadan odor for which there are no polite words; and it was sprinkled overwith children, who raked in it from dawn till dark. Sometimes visitorsfrom the packing houses would wander out to see this "dump," and theywould stand by and debate as to whether the children were eating the foodthey got, or merely collecting it for the chickens at home. Apparentlynone of them ever went down to find out.Beyond this dump there stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys.First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled itup again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitousarrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America.A little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied andnot yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there,with the near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun;and then, when winter came, somebody cut the ice on it, and sold it tothe people of the city. This, too, seemed to the newcomers an economicalarrangement; for they did not read the newspapers, and their heads werenot full of troublesome thoughts about "germs."They stood there while the sun went down upon this scene, and the skyin the west turned blood-red, and the tops of the houses shone like fire.Jurgis and Ona were not thinking of the sunset, however--their backswere turned to it, and all their thoughts were of Packingtown, whichthey could see so plainly in the distance. The line of the buildingsstood clear-cut and black against the sky; here and there out of themass rose the great chimneys, with the river of smoke streaming away tothe end of the world. It was a study in colors now, this smoke; in thesunset light it was black and brown and gray and purple. All the sordidsuggestions of the place were gone--in the twilight it was a vision ofpower. To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up,it seemed a dream of wonder, with its talc of human energy, of things beingdone, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of opportunityand freedom, of life and love and joy. When they came away, arm in arm,Jurgis was saying, "Tomorrow I shall go there and get a job!"