Chapter 5

by Upton Sinclair

　　They had bought their home. It was hard for them to realize that thewonderful house was theirs to move into whenever they chose. They spentall their time thinking about it, and what they were going to put into it.As their week with Aniele was up in three days, they lost no time ingetting ready. They had to make some shift to furnish it, and everyinstant of their leisure was given to discussing this.A person who had such a task before him would not need to look very farin Packingtown--he had only to walk up the avenue and read the signs,or get into a streetcar, to obtain full information as to pretty mucheverything a human creature could need. It was quite touching, thezeal of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for.Did the person wish to smoke? There was a little discourse about cigars,showing him exactly why the Thomas Jefferson Five-cent Perfecto was theonly cigar worthy of the name. Had he, on the other hand, smoked too much?Here was a remedy for the smoking habit, twenty-five doses for a quarter,and a cure absolutely guaranteed in ten doses. In innumerable ways suchas this, the traveler found that somebody had been busied to make smoothhis paths through the world, and to let him know what had been done for him.In Packingtown the advertisements had a style all of their own, adapted tothe peculiar population. One would be tenderly solicitous. "Is your wifepale?" it would inquire. "Is she discouraged, does she drag herself aboutthe house and find fault with everything? Why do you not tell her to tryDr. Lanahan's Life Preservers?" Another would be jocular in tone,slapping you on the back, so to speak. "Don't be a chump!" it wouldexclaim. "Go and get the Goliath Bunion Cure." "Get a move on you!"would chime in another. "It's easy, if you wear the Eureka Two-fifty Shoe."Among these importunate signs was one that had caught the attention ofthe family by its pictures. It showed two very pretty little birdsbuilding themselves a home; and Marija had asked an acquaintance to readit to her, and told them that it related to the furnishing of a house."Feather your nest," it ran--and went on to say that it could furnishall the necessary feathers for a four-room nest for the ludicrouslysmall sum of seventy-five dollars. The particularly important thingabout this offer was that only a small part of the money need be hadat once--the rest one might pay a few dollars every month. Our friendshad to have some furniture, there was no getting away from that; but theirlittle fund of money had sunk so low that they could hardly get to sleepat night, and so they fled to this as their deliverance. There was moreagony and another paper for Elzbieta to sign, and then one night whenJurgis came home, he was told the breathless tidings that the furniturehad arrived and was safely stowed in the house: a parlor set of fourpieces, a bedroom set of three pieces, a dining room table and fourchairs, a toilet set with beautiful pink roses painted all over it,an assortment of crockery, also with pink roses--and so on. One ofthe plates in the set had been found broken when they unpacked it,and Ona was going to the store the first thing in the morning to makethem change it; also they had promised three saucepans, and there hadonly two come, and did Jurgis think that they were trying to cheat them?The next day they went to the house; and when the men came from workthey ate a few hurried mouthfuls at Aniele's, and then set to work atthe task of carrying their belongings to their new home. The distancewas in reality over two miles, but Jurgis made two trips that night,each time with a huge pile of mattresses and bedding on his head,with bundles of clothing and bags and things tied up inside. Anywhereelse in Chicago he would have stood a good chance of being arrested;but the policemen in Packingtown were apparently used to these informalmovings, and contented themselves with a cursory examination now and then.It was quite wonderful to see how fine the house looked, with all thethings in it, even by the dim light of a lamp: it was really home,and almost as exciting as the placard had described it. Ona was fairlydancing, and she and Cousin Marija took Jurgis by the arm and escortedhim from room to room, sitting in each chair by turns, and then insistingthat he should do the same. One chair squeaked with his great weight,and they screamed with fright, and woke the baby and brought everybodyrunning. Altogether it was a great day; and tired as they were, Jurgisand Ona sat up late, contented simply to hold each other and gaze inrapture about the room. They were going to be married as soon as theycould get everything settled, and a little spare money put by; and thiswas to be their home--that little room yonder would be theirs!It was in truth a never-ending delight, the fixing up of this house.They had no money to spend for the pleasure of spending, but there werea few absolutely necessary things, and the buying of these was a perpetualadventure for Ona. It must always be done at night, so that Jurgiscould go along; and even if it were only a pepper cruet, or half a dozenglasses for ten cents, that was enough for an expedition. On Saturdaynight they came home with a great basketful of things, and spread themout on the table, while every one stood round, and the children climbedup on the chairs, or howled to be lifted up to see. There were sugarand salt and tea and crackers, and a can of lard and a milk pail, and ascrubbing brush, and a pair of shoes for the second oldest boy, and a canof oil, and a tack hammer, and a pound of nails. These last were to bedriven into the walls of the kitchen and the bedrooms, to hang things on;and there was a family discussion as to the place where each one was tobe driven. Then Jurgis would try to hammer, and hit his fingers becausethe hammer was too small, and get mad because Ona had refused to let himpay fifteen cents more and get a bigger hammer; and Ona would be invitedto try it herself, and hurt her thumb, and cry out, which necessitated thethumb's being kissed by Jurgis. Finally, after every one had had a try,the nails would be driven, and something hung up. Jurgis had come homewith a big packing box on his head, and he sent Jonas to get another thathe had bought. He meant to take one side out of these tomorrow, and putshelves in them, and make them into bureaus and places to keep things forthe bedrooms. The nest which had been advertised had not included feathersfor quite so many birds as there were in this family.They had, of course, put their dining table in the kitchen, and thedining room was used as the bedroom of Teta Elzbieta and five of herchildren. She and the two youngest slept in the only bed, and theother three had a mattress on the floor. Ona and her cousin dragged amattress into the parlor and slept at night, and the three men and theoldest boy slept in the other room, having nothing but the very levelfloor to rest on for the present. Even so, however, they slept soundly--it was necessary for Teta Elzbieta to pound more than once on the at aquarter past five every morning. She would have ready a great pot fullof steaming black coffee, and oatmeal and bread and smoked sausages;and then she would fix them their dinner pails with more thick slicesof bread with lard between them--they could not afford butter--and someonions and a piece of cheese, and so they would tramp away to work.This was the first time in his life that he had ever really worked,it seemed to Jurgis; it was the first time that he had ever had anythingto do which took all he had in him. Jurgis had stood with the rest upin the gallery and watched the men on the killing beds, marveling at theirspeed and power as if they had been wonderful machines; it somehow neveroccurred to one to think of the flesh-and-blood side of it--that is, notuntil he actually got down into the pit and took off his coat. Then he sawthings in a different light, he got at the inside of them. The pace theyset here, it was one that called for every faculty of a man--from theinstant the first steer fell till the sounding of the noon whistle, andagain from half-past twelve till heaven only knew what hour in the lateafternoon or evening, there was never one instant's rest for a man, for hishand or his eye or his brain. Jurgis saw how they managed it; there wereportions of the work which determined the pace of the rest, and for thesethey had picked men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changedfrequently. You might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they workedunder the eye of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This wascalled "speeding up the gang," and if any man could not keep up with thepace, there were hundreds outside begging to try.Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It saved him thenecessity of flinging his arms about and fidgeting as he did in most work.He would laugh to himself as he ran down the line, darting a glance nowand then at the man ahead of him. It was not the pleasantest work onecould think of, but it was necessary work; and what more had a man theright to ask than a chance to do something useful, and to get good payfor doing it?So Jurgis thought, and so he spoke, in his bold, free way; very muchto his surprise, he found that it had a tendency to get him into trouble.For most of the men here took a fearfully different view of the thing.He was quite dismayed when he first began to find it out--that most ofthe men hated their work. It seemed strange, it was even terrible, whenyou came to find out the universality of the sentiment; but it wascertainly the fact--they hated their work. They hated the bosses andthey hated the owners; they hated the whole place, the whole neighborhood--even the whole city, with an all-inclusive hatred, bitter and fierce.Women and little children would fall to cursing about it; it was rotten,rotten as hell--everything was rotten. When Jurgis would ask them whatthey meant, they would begin to get suspicious, and content themselveswith saying, "Never mind, you stay here and see for yourself."One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explainedto him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fightingfor their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights,a question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of anyrights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he wastold when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question wouldonly make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool.There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers' union who came to see Jurgisto enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he would haveto part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the delegate,who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian, lost histemper and began to threaten him. In the end Jurgis got into a fine rage,and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than one Irishmanto scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered that the mainthing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of "speeding-up";they were trying their best to force a lessening of the pace, for therewere some, they said, who could not keep up with it, whom it was killing.But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as this--he could do the workhimself, and so could the rest of them, he declared, if they were goodfor anything. If they couldn't do it, let them go somewhere else.Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would not have known how topronounce "laissez faire"; but he had been round the world enough to knowthat a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worstof it, there is nobody to listen to him holler.Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore byMalthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fundin time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned theunfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because ofhis poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging fora chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a worker ever since hewas a child; he had run away from home when he was twelve, because hisfather beat him for trying to learn to read. And he was a faithful man,too; he was a man you might leave alone for a month, if only you had madehim understand what you wanted him to do in the meantime. And now herehe was, worn out in soul and body, and with no more place in the worldthan a sick dog. He had his home, as it happened, and some one who wouldcare for him it he never got a job; but his son could not help thinking,suppose this had not been the case. Antanas Rudkus had been into everybuilding in Packingtown by this time, and into nearly every room; he hadstood mornings among the crowd of applicants till the very policemen hadcome to know his face and to tell him to go home and give it up. He hadbeen likewise to all the stores and saloons for a mile about, beggingfor some little thing to do; and everywhere they had ordered him out,sometimes with curses, and not once even stopping to ask him a question.So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis' faithin things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was huntinga job--and it was yet wider when he finally got it. For one evening theold man came home in a great state of excitement, with the tale that hehad been approached by a man in one of the corridors of the pickle roomsof Durham's, and asked what he would pay to get a job. He had not knownwhat to make of this at first; but the man had gone on with matter-of-factfrankness to say that he could get him a job, provided that he werewilling to pay one-third of his wages for it. Was he a boss? Antanashad asked; to which the man had replied that that was nobody's business,but that he could do what he said.Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them andasked what this meant. The friend, who was named Tamoszius Kuszleika,was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds, and helistened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all surprised.They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft. It wassimply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income. After Jurgishad been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply honeycombedwith rottenness of that sort--the bosses grafted off the men, and theygrafted off each other; and some day the superintendent would find outabout the boss, and then he would graft off the boss. Warming to thesubject, Tamoszius went on to explain the situation. Here was Durham's,for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as much money outof it as he could, and did not care in the least how he did it; andunderneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army, were managersand superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next belowhim and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible. And allthe men of the same rank were pitted against each other; the accountsof each were kept separately, and every man lived in terror of losinghis job, if another made a better record than he. So from top to bottomthe place was simply a seething caldron of jealousies and hatreds; therewas no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in itwhere a man counted for anything against a dollar. And worse than therebeing no decency, there was not even any honesty. The reason for that?Who could say? It must have been old Durham in the beginning; it was aheritage which the self-made merchant had left to his son, along withhis millions.Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there longenough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so therewas no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and didlike all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going tomake himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would soonfind out his error--for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good work.You could lay that down for a rule--if you met a man who was rising inPackingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to Jurgis'father by the boss, he would rise; the man who told tales and spied uponhis fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own business and did hiswork--why, they would "speed him up" till they had worn him out, and thenthey would throw him into the gutter.Jurgis went home with his head buzzing. Yet he could not bring himselfto believe such things--no, it could not be so. Tamoszius was simplyanother of the grumblers. He was a man who spent all his time fiddling;and he would go to parties at night and not get home till sunrise,and so of course he did not feel like work. Then, too, he was a punylittle chap; and so he had been left behind in the race, and that waswhy he was sore. And yet so many strange things kept coming to Jurgis'notice every day!He tried to persuade his father to have nothing to do with the offer.But old Antanas had begged until he was worn out, and all his couragewas gone; he wanted a job, any sort of a job. So the next day he wentand found the man who had spoken to him, and promised to bring hima third of all he earned; and that same day he was put to work in Durham'scellars. It was a "pickle room," where there was never a dry spot tostand upon, and so he had to take nearly the whole of his first week'searnings to buy him a pair of heavy-soled boots. He was a "squeedgie" man;his job was to go about all day with a long-handled mop, swabbing up thefloor. Except that it was damp and dark, it was not an unpleasant job,in summer.Now Antanas Rudkus was the meekest man that God ever put on earth; and soJurgis found it a striking confirmation of what the men all said, thathis father had been at work only two days before he came home as bitteras any of them, and cursing Durham's with all the power of his soul.For they had set him to cleaning out the traps; and the family sat roundand listened in wonder while he told them what that meant. It seemedthat he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef forcanning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men withgreat forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken tothe cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach, theyemptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up thebalance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet theyset Antanas with his mop slopping the "pickle" into a hole thatconnected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever;and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all thescraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every fewdays it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel theircontents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!This was the experience of Antanas; and then there came also Jonas andMarija with tales to tell. Marija was working for one of the independentpackers, and was quite beside herself and outrageous with triumph overthe sums of money she was making as a painter of cans. But one day shewalked home with a pale-faced little woman who worked opposite to her,Jadvyga Marcinkus by name, and Jadvyga told her how she, Marija, hadchanced to get her job. She had taken the place of an Irishwoman whohad been working in that factory ever since any one could remember.For over fifteen years, so she declared. Mary Dennis was her name,and a long time ago she had been seduced, and had a little boy; he wasa cripple, and an epileptic, but still he was all that she had in theworld to love, and they had lived in a little room alone somewhere backof Halsted Street, where the Irish were. Mary had had consumption,and all day long you might hear her coughing as she worked; of lateshe had been going all to pieces, and when Marija came, the "forelady"had suddenly decided to turn her off. The forelady had to come up toa certain standard herself, and could not stop for sick people, Jadvygaexplained. The fact that Mary had been there so long had not made anydifference to her--it was doubtful if she even knew that, for both theforelady and the superintendent were new people, having only been theretwo or three years themselves. Jadvyga did not know what had become ofthe poor creature; she would have gone to see her, but had been sickherself. She had pains in her back all the time, Jadvyga explained,and feared that she had womb trouble. It was not fit work for a woman,handling fourteen-pound cans all day. It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by themisfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with hamsfrom the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing rooms.The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about threescore hamson each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a ton. On the unevenfloor it was a task for a man to start one of these trucks, unless he wasa giant; and when it was once started he naturally tried his best to keepit going. There was always the boss prowling about, and if there was asecond's delay he would fall to cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such,who could not understand what was said to them, the bosses were wont tokick about the place like so many dogs. Therefore these trucks went forthe most part on the run; and the predecessor of Jonas had been jammedagainst the wall by one and crushed in a horrible and nameless manner.All of these were sinister incidents; but they were trifles compared towhat Jurgis saw with his own eyes before long. One curious thing he hadnoticed, the very first day, in his profession of shoveler of guts; whichwas the sharp trick of the floor bosses whenever there chanced to comea "slunk" calf. Any man who knows anything about butchering knows thatthe flesh of a cow that is about to calve, or has just calved, is not fitfor food. A good many of these came every day to the packing houses--and,of course, if they had chosen, it would have been an easy matter for thepackers to keep them till they were fit for food. But for the saving oftime and fodder, it was the law that cows of that sort came along withthe others, and whoever noticed it would tell the boss, and the boss wouldstart up a conversation with the government inspector, and the two wouldstroll away. So in a trice the carcass of the cow would be cleaned out,and entrails would have vanished; it was Jurgis' task to slide theminto the trap, calves and all, and on the floor below they took outthese "slunk" calves, and butchered them for meat, and used even the skinsof them.One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when thelast of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this injuredman had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the governmentinspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two of men onthe floor. That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and thesecattle had come in freight trains from far states, and some of them hadgot hurt. There were some with broken legs, and some with gored sides;there were some that had died, from what cause no one could say; and theywere all to be disposed of, here in darkness and silence. "Downers," themen called them; and the packing house had a special elevator upon whichthey were raised to the killing beds, where the gang proceeded to handlethem, with an air of businesslike nonchalance which said plainer thanany words that it was a matter of everyday routine. It took a couple ofhours to get them out of the way, and in the end Jurgis saw them go intothe chilling rooms with the rest of the meat, being carefully scatteredhere and there so that they could not be identified. When he came homethat night he was in a very somber mood, having begun to see at lasthow those might be right who had laughed at him for his faith in America.