 CHAPTER XII. For three weeks after his injury, Eurgus never got up from bed. It was a very obstinate sprain. The swelling would not go down, and the pain still continued. At the end of that time, however, he would contain himself no longer, and began trying to walk a little every day, laboring to persuade himself that he was better. No arguments could stop him, and three or four days later he declared that he was going back to work. He limped to the cars and got to Browns, where he found that the boss had kept his place, that is, was willing to turn out into the snow the poor devil he had hired in the meantime. Every now and then the pain would force Eurgus to stop work, but he stuck it out till nearly an hour before closing. Then he was forced to acknowledge that he could not go on without fainting. It almost broke his heart to do it, and he stood leaning against a pillar and weeping like a child. Two of the men had to help him to the car, and when he got out he had to sit down and wait in the snow till someone came along. So they put him to bed again, and sent for the doctor, as they ought to have done in the beginning. It transpired that he had twisted a tendon out of place, and could never have gotten well without attention. Then he gripped the sides of the bed, and shut his teeth together, and turned white with agony, while the doctor pulled and wrenched away at his swollen ankle. When finally the doctor left, he told him that he would have to lie quiet for two months, and that if he went to work before that time he might blame himself for life. Three days later there came another heavy snowstorm, and Jonas and Maria and Ona and little Stanislawis all set out together, an hour before daybreak, to try to get to the yards. About noon the last two came back, the boy screaming with pain. His fingers were all frosted, it seemed. They had had to give up trying to get to the yards, and had nearly perished in adrift. All that they knew how to do was to hold the frozen fingers near the fire, and so little Stanislawis spent most of the day dancing about in horrible agony, till Jurgis flew into a passion of nervous rage and swore like a madman, declaring that he would kill him if he did not stop. All that day and night the family was half crazed with fear that Ona and the little boy had lost their places, and in the morning they set out earlier than ever, after the little fellow had been beaten with a stick by Jurgis. There could be no trifling in a case like this. It was a matter of life and death. Little Stanislawis could not be expected to realize that he might a great deal better freeze in the snowdrift than lose his job at the lard machine. Ona was quite certain that she would find her place gone, and was all unnerved when she finally got to Browns and found that the forelady herself had failed to come, and was therefore compelled to be lenient. One of the consequences of this episode was that the first joints of three of the little boy's fingers were permanently disabled, and another that, thereafter, he always had to be beaten before he set out to work, whenever there was fresh snow on the ground. Jurgis was called upon to do the beating, and as it hurt his foot he did it with the vengeance, but it did not tend to add to the sweetness of his temper. They say that the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it was the same with the man. He had not a thing to do all day but lie and curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted to curse everything. This was never for very long, however, for when Ona began to cry, Jurgis could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes. He was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies. It was better, he said, that he should not eat. It was a saving. About the end of March he had got hold of Ona's bankbook, and learned that there was only three dollars left to them in the world. But perhaps the worst of the consequences of this long siege was that they lost another member of their family. Brother Jonas disappeared. On Saturday night he did not come home, and thereafter all their efforts to get trace of him were futile. It was said by the boss at Durham's that he had gotten his week's money and left there. That might not be true, of course, for sometimes they would say that when a man had been killed. It was the easiest way out of it for all concerned. When for instance a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the fact out and making his family unhappy. More probable, however, was the theory that Jonas had deserted them, and gone on the road seeking happiness. He had been discontented for a long time and not without some cause. He paid good board and was yet obliged to live in a family where nobody had enough to eat, and Maria would keep giving them all her money, and, of course, he could not but feel that he was called upon to do the same. Then there were crying breaths and all sorts of misery. A man would have had to be a good deal of a hero to stand at all without grumbling, and Jonas was not, in the least, a hero. He was simply a weather-beaten old fellow who liked to have a good supper and sit in the corner by the fire and smoke his pipe in peace before he went to bed. Here there was not room by the fire, and through the winter the kitchen had seldom been warming up for comfort. So with the springtime what was more likely than that the wild idea of escaping had come to him. Two years he had been yoked like a horse to a half-ton truck in Durham's dark cellars, with never a rest, save on Sundays and four holidays in the year, and with never a word of thanks, only kicks and blows and curses, such as no decent dog would have stood. And now the winter was over and the spring winds were blowing, and with a day's walk a man might put the smoke of packing town behind him forever, and be where the grass was green and the flowers all the colors of the rainbow. But now the income of the family was cut down more than one-third, and the food demand was cut only one-eleventh, so that they were worse off than ever, and they were borrowing money for Maria and eating up her bank account and spoiling, once again, her hopes of marriage and happiness, and they were even going into debt to Tamosias Cushlaika, and letting him impoverish himself. Poor Tamosias was a man without any relatives, and with a wonderful talent besides, and he ought to have made money and prospered, but he had fallen in love, and so given hostages the fortune, and was doomed to be dragged down too. So it was finally decided that two more of the children would have to leave school. Just to Stanislavis, who was now fifteen, there was a little girl, little Kotrina, who was two years younger, and then two boys, Vilimas, who was eleven, and Nikolajos, who was ten. Both of these last were bright boys, and there was no reason why their family should starve when tens of thousands of children no older were earning their own livings. So one morning they were given a quarter of a piece, and a roll with a sausage in it, and, with their minds top-heavy with good advice, were sent out to make their way to the city and learn to sell newspapers. They came back late at night in tears, having walked for the five or six miles to report that a man had offered to take them to a place where they sold newspapers, and had taken their money and gone into a store to get them, and never more been seen. So they both received a whipping, and the next morning set out again. This time they found the newspaper place and procured their stock, and after wondering about till nearly noontime, saying, paper, to everyone they saw, they had all their stock taken away, and received a thrashing besides from a big newsman upon whose territory they had trespassed. Fortunately, however, they had already sold some papers, and came back with nearly as much as they started with. After a week of mishaps such as these, the two little fellows began to learn the ways of the trade, the names of the different papers, and how many of each to get, and what sort of people to offer them to, and where to go, and where to stay away from. After this, leaving home at four o'clock in the morning, and running about the streets, first with morning papers, and then with evening, they might come home late at night with twenty or thirty cents apiece, possibly as much as forty cents. From this they had to deduct their car fare, since the distance was so great, but after a while they made friends and learned still more, and then they would save their car fare. They would get on a car when the conductor was not looking, and hide in the crowd, and three times out of four he would not ask for their fares, either not seeing them, or thinking they had already paid it, or if he did ask, they would hunt through their pockets and then begin to cry, and either have their fares paid by some kind old lady, or else try the trick again on a new car. All this was fair play, they felt. Whose fault was it that at the hours when working men were going to their work and back, the cars were so crowded that the conductors could not collect all the fares? And besides, the companies were thieves, people said, had stolen all their franchises with the help of scoundrel-y politicians. Now that the winter was by, and there was no more danger of snow, and no more cold by, and another room warming up to put the children into when they cried, and enough money to get along from week to week with, Jorges was less terrible than he had been. A man can get used to anything in the course of time, and Jorges had gotten used to lying about the house. Ona saw this, and was very careful not to destroy his peace of mind by letting him know how very much pain she was suffering. It was now the time of the spring rains, and Ona had often to ride to her work, in spite of the expense. She was getting paler every day, and sometimes, in spite of her good resolutions, it pained her that Jorges did not notice it. She wondered if he cared for her as much as ever, if all this misery was not wearing out his love. She had to be away from him all the time, and bear her own troubles while he was bearing his, and then, when she came home, she was so worn out, and whenever they talked they had only their worries to talk of. Truly it was hard in such a life to keep any sentiment alive. The woe of this would flame up in Ona sometimes. At night she would suddenly clasp her big husband in her arms and break into passionate weeping, demanding to know if he really loved her. Poor Jorges, who had in truth grown more matter of fact under the endless pressure of penury, would not know what to make of these things, and could only try to recollect when he had last been cross, and so Ona would have to forgive him and sob herself to sleep. The latter part of April Jorges went to see the doctor, and was given a bandage to lace about his ankle and told that he might go back to work. It needed more than the permission of the doctor, however, for when he showed up on the killing floor of Brownes, he was told by the foreman that it had not been possible to keep his job for him. Jorges knew that this meant simply that the foreman had found someone else to do the work as well, and did not want to bother to make a change. He stood in the doorway, looking mournfully on, seeing his friends and companions at work, and feeling like an outcast. Then he went out and took his place with the mob of the unemployed. This time, however, Jorges did not have the same fine confidence, nor the same reason for it. He was no longer the finest-looking man in the Throng, and the bosses no longer made for him. He was thin and haggard, and his clothes were seedy, and he looked miserable. And there were hundreds who looked and felt just like him, and who had been wandering about Packingtown for months begging for work. This was a critical time in Jorges's life, and if he had been a weaker man, he would have gone the way the rest did. Those out-of-work wretches would stand about the packing-houses every morning till the police drove them away, and then they would scatter among the saloons. Very few of them had the nerve to face the rebuffs that they would encounter by trying to get into the buildings to interview the bosses. If they did not get a chance in the morning, there would be nothing to do but hang about the saloons the rest of the day and night. Jorges was saved from all this, partly to be sure because it was pleasant weather, and there was no need to be indoors, but mainly because he carried with him always the pitiful little face of his wife. He must get work, he told himself, fighting the battle with despair every hour of the day. He must get work. He must have a place again, and some money saved up before the next winter came. But there was no work for him. He sought out all the members of his union. Jorges had stuck to the union through all this, and begged them to speak a word for him. He went to everyone he knew, asking for a chance there or anywhere. He wandered all day through the buildings, and in a week or two, when he had been all over the yards and into every room to which he had access, and learned that there was not a job anywhere, he persuaded himself that there might have been a change in the places he had first visited, and began the round all over, till finally the watchmen and the spotters of the companies came to know him by sight, and to order him out with threats. Then there was nothing more for him to do but go with the crowd in the morning, and keep in the front row and look eager, and when he failed go back home and play with little Cotrina and the baby. The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jorges saw so plainly the meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job the first day, but now he was second hand, a damaged article, so to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him, they had worn him out with their speeding up, and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away. And Jorges would make the acquaintance of others of these unemployed men, and find that they had all had the same experience. There were some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up in other mills. There were others who were out from their own fault, some, for instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The vast majority, however, were simply the worn out parts of the great merciless packing machine. They had toiled there and kept up with the pace, some of them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could not keep up with it any more. Some had been frankly told that they were too old, that a spryer man was needed. Others had given occasion by some act of carelessness or incompetence. With most, however, the occasion had been the same as with Jorges. They had been overworked and underfed so long, and finally some disease had lain them on their backs, or they had cut themselves and had blood poisoning, or met with some other accident. When a man came back after that, he would get his place back only by the courtesy of the boss. To this there was no exception, save when the accident was one for which the firm was liable. In that case, they would send a slippery lawyer to see him, first to try to get him to sign away his claims, but if he was too smart for that, to promise him that he and his should always be provided with work. This promise they would keep, strictly and to the letter, for two years. Two years was the statute of limitations, and after that the victim could not sue. What happened to a man after any of these things all depended upon the circumstances. If he were of the highly skilled workers, he would probably have enough saved up to tide him over. The best-paid men, the splitters, made fifty cents an hour, which would be five or six dollars a day in the rush seasons and one or two in the dullest. A man could live and save on that, but then there were only half a dozen splitters in each place, and one of them, that Yorgos knew, had a family of twenty-two children, all hoping to grow up to be splitters like their father. For an unskilled man who made ten dollars a week in the rush seasons and five in the dull, it all depended upon his age and the number he had depended upon him. An unmarried man could save if he did not drink, and if he was absolutely selfish, that is, if he paid no heed to the demands of his old parents, or of his little brothers and sisters, or of any other relatives he might have, as well as of the members of his union and his chums, and the people who might be starving to next door. CHAPTER XIII During this time that Yorgos was looking for work occurred the death of little Christophorus, one of the children of Teta Esbeta. Both Christophorus and his brother Yosapas were cripples, the latter having lost one leg by having it run over, and Christophorus having congenital dislocation of the hip which made it impossible for him to ever walk. He was the last of Teta Esbeta'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 drafts, 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, would let him do anything undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting drove Yorgos 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 tubercular pork that was condemned as unfit for export. 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 Kothrina, who was all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a doctor came, but not until Christoforis had howled his last howl. No one was really sorry about this except poor Elspita, who was inconsolable. Yorgos 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, ringing her hands and screaming with grief and despair. Her child to be buried in a pauper's grave, and her stepdaughter to stand by, and here it said without protesting? It was enough to make Onus' 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 Maria said that she would help with ten dollars, and Yorgos, being still obdurate, Elspita went in tears and begged the money from the neighbors. And so Little Christoforis 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. The mere sight of the floor where Little Christoforis had crawled about would make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure him of his lameness. Some time ago Elspita was told a Chicago billionaire had paid a fortune to bring a great European surgeon over to cure his little daughter of the same disease from which Christoforis 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 eloquent. Elspita at last 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 car fare to spare to go every day to wait upon the surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child. All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Yorgos, as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a place 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 contended themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There were some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask Yorgos if he had worked there yet, and if he meant to, and Yorgos 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, shuttering. 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. The fertilizer works of durums lay away from 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 declared 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 bits of bone 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 albumin, 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 of 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 in like a man swimming underwater. 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 overpowering blast of ammonia fumes and would turn and run for his life and come out half-dazed. On top of this were the rooms where they dried the tankage, the mass of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions of the carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had mixed it up well with the mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they brought in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads 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 wore California wore 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. In Packingtown the fertilizer is pure instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton or so spread out on several acres under the open sky there are hundreds and thousands of tons of it in one building, heat here and there in haystack piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with a choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs. It was to this building that Jurgus came daily, as if dragged by an unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one, and his secret prayers were granted, but early in June there came a record-breaking hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the fertilizer mill. The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgus 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 boss beckoned to him. In ten minutes more Jurgus 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, rushing forth in a great brown river with the spray of the finest dust flung forth in clouds. Jurgus 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 dust storm 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 the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal of fertilizer. Working in his shirt sleeves and with the thermometer at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgus' 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 innards must be torn into shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer mill, the boss had said, if he would make up his mind to it, but Jurgus 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 the building and get his bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a saloon. They seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one class. But Jurgus was too ill to think of drinking. He could only make his way to the street and stagger onto a car. He had a sense of humor, and later on, when he became an old man, he used to think it fun to board a street car and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill to notice 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. Jurgus 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, Jurgus 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 for an unlimited time, without being itself in the least diminished in power. He smelled so that he made all the food at the table taste, and set the whole family devombating. 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 Jurgus 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 into 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, and though his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not work. So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity all over the country, and the country ate generously of packing-house products, and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the packer's efforts to keep a superfluidity of labor. They were again able to pay their debts, and to begin to save a little sum, but there were one or two sacrifices they considered too heavy to be made for long. It was too bad that the boys should have to sell papers at their age. It was utterly useless to caution them and plead with them, quite without knowing it, they were taking on the tone of their new environment. They were learning to swear in valuable 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 madams who kept them, and the days when they gave their state banquets, which 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 Dinks 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. And worse yet, 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 on a possible car fare, riding out to the stockyards 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 Yurgis declared that from this to ceasing to come at all would not be a very long step, and so it was decided that Vilamas and Nekolayos should return to school in the fall, and that instead Esbeta should go out and get some work, her place at home being taken by her younger daughter. Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely made old. She had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple, and also of the baby. She had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the evening. She was only thirteen and small for her age, but she did all this without a murmur, and her mother went out and after trudging a couple days about the yards, settled down as a servant of a sausage machine. Esbeta was used to working, but she found this change a hard one, for the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet from seven o'clock in the morning till half past twelve, and again from one till half past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she could not stand it. She suffered almost as much as Yorgos had from the fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling. Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes by electric light, and the dampness too was deadly. There were always puddles of water on the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room. The people who worked there 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, and turns green when he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked 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 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 inventions. 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 adulterated with potato flour and well mixed with water it was forced to the stuffing machines on the other side of the room. The latter 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 casing and put the end over the nozzle, and then work the whole thing on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove. This string 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 string of sausages, all dangling from a single center. It was quite like the feet of a pressed digitator, 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 parlor 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, year after year, twisting sausage links and racing with death. It was peace-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 glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie. CHAPTER XIV With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest, that they use everything of the pig, except the squeal. Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free lunch counters. Also, of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor, and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant. A machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump, by plunging this needle into the meat and working with this foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these, the Packers had a second and much stronger pickle, which destroyed the odor, a process known to the workers as giving them 30%. Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bed. Formerly, these had been sold as number three grade, but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the band part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white, hot iron. After this invention there was no longer number one, number two, and three grade. There was only number one grade. The Packers were always originating such schemes, they had what they called boneless hams, which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings, and California hams, which were the shoulders with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out, and fancy skinned hams, which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy in course 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 the department of Elzbeta, cut up by the two thousand revolutions a minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage. There would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white. It would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms, and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dry dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poison bread out for them. They would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story, and no joke. The meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one. There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of 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 be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was 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 stale water, and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into smoke sausage, but as the smoking took time and was therefore expensive they would call upon their chemistry department and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it special, and for this they would charge two cents more a pound. Such were the new surroundings in which Elsbeta was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work. It left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor. She fell silent. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a habit of silence, Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. She was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to eat, and afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of, they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time to get up again and dress by candlelight and go back to the machines. They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger. Now only the children continued 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 were cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open, old joys would stretch 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 its forever 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 all the world, that will not know its own defeat. They were beaten. They had lost a game. They were swept aside. It was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom, of a chance to look about them and learn something, to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone. 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 the least respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house, and how cruelly certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a 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 it gave them, the vast city in which they lived, might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Onah in the night time, when something awakened her. She would lie, afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud and woke Yurgis, who was tired and cross. After that she learned to weep silently. Their moods so seldom came together now. It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves. Yurgis being a man had troubles of his own. There was another specter following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow anyone else to speak of it. He had never acknowledged its existence to himself. Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had, and once or twice, alas, a little more. Yurgis had discovered drink. He was working in the steaming pit of hell, day after day, week after week. Until now there was not an organ of his body that did its work without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day and night, and the building swayed and danced before him as he went down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a respite, a deliverance. He could drink. He could forget the pain. He could slip off the burden. He would see clearly again. 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 laughing and cracking jokes with his companions. He would be a man again and master of his life. It was not an easy thing for Yurgis to take more than two or three drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade himself that that was economy. With the second he could eat another meal. But there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance of the age-old instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he took the plunge and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went home half-piped, as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had been in a year, and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not last, he was savage, too with those who would reckon, and with the world and with his life. And then again, beneath this, he was sick with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his family and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears came into 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 Yurgis did not realize that very clearly. He was not given much time for reflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped in misery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street was to 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 block as well, and each one stretched out a hand to him, each one had a personality of its own, allurements, unlike any other. Going and coming, before sunrise and after dark, there was warmth and a glow of light, and the steam of hot food, and perhaps music, or a friendly face, and a word of good cheer. Yurgis developed a fondness for having Ona on his arm whenever he went out on the street, and he would hold her tightly and walk fast. It was pitiful to have Ona know of this. It drove him wild to think of it. The thing was not fair. Her Ona had never tasted drink, and so could not understand. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself wishing that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be ashamed in her 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 Yurgis consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor. He would have ugly moods when he hated Ona and the whole family, because they stood in his way. He was a fool to have married. He had tied himself down, had made himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he was compelled to stay in the yards. If it had not been for that, he might have gone off like Jonas and to hell with 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 the memory of the last time they had been drunk, and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again. As for Yurgis, he was expected to bring home every penny. He could not even go with the men at noontime. He was supposed 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 Antonos, for instance, who had never failed to win him with a smile. Little Antonos was not smiling just now, being a mass of fiery red pimples. He had had all the diseases that babies are heir to, in quick succession, scarlet fever, mumps, and hooping cough in the first year, and now he was down with the measles. There was no one to attend to him but Katrina. 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 and then Katrina would find time to sob over his woes, but for the greater part 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 lie and scream for hours, almost in convulsions, and then, when he was worn out, he would lie whimpering and wailing in his torment. He was burning up with fever, and his eyes were running sores. In the daytime he was a thing uncanny and impish to behold, a plaster of pimples and sweat, a great purple lump of misery. Yet all this was not really as cruel as it sounds. For sick as he was, Little Antonos was the least unfortunate member of that family. He was quite able to bear his sufferings. It was as if he had all these complaints to show what a prodigy of health he was. He was the child of his parents' youth and joy. He grew up like the conjurer's rose-bush, and all the world was his oyster. In general, he toddled around the kitchen all day with a lean and hungry look. The portion of the family's allowance that tell to him was not enough, and he was unrestrainable in his demand for more. Antonos was but little over a 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 left nothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with child again now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate. Even Yurgis, dumb and despairing as he was, could not but understand that yet other agonies were on the way, and shudder at the thought of them, for Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she was developing a cough, like the one that had killed old Dede Antonos. She had had a trace of it ever since that fatal morning when the greedy streetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain, but now it was beginning to grow serious and to wake her up at night. Even worse than 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 then Yurgis would go half mad with fright. Elzbeta would explain to him that it could not be helped that a woman was subject to such things when she was pregnant, but he was hardly to be persuaded and would beg and plead to know what had happened. She had never been like this 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 woman was 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 kill them at once and be done with it. They ought not to marry, to have children. No working man ought to marry. If he, Yurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first. So he would carry on, becoming half hysterical himself, which was an unbearable thing to see in a big man. Ono would pull herself together and 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 lie and sob out her grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at her, as helpless as a wounded animal, the target of unseen enemies. End of Chapter 14, Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 15 of The Jungle The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Chapter 15 The beginning of these perplexing things was in the summer, and each time Ono would promise him with terror in her voice that it would not happen again, but in vain. Each crisis would leave Yurgis more and more frightened, more disposed to distrust Elbita's consolations, and to believe that there was some terrible thing about all this that he was not allowed to know. Once or twice in these outbreaks he caught Ono's eye, and it seemed to him like the eye of a hunted animal. There were broken phrases of anguish and despair now and then, amid her frantic weeping. It was only because he was so numb and beaten himself that Yurgis did not worry more about this. But he never thought of it, except when he was dragged to it. He lived like a dumb beast of burden, knowing only the moment in which he was. The winter was coming on again, more menacing and cruel than ever. It was October, and the holiday rush had begun. It was necessary for the packing machines to grind till late at night to provide food that would be eaten at Christmas breakfast, and Maria and Elbeta and Ono as part of the machine began working fifteen or sixteen hours a day. There was no choice about this. Whatever work there was to be done, they had to do, if they wished to keep their places. Besides that, it added another pittance to their incomes. So they staggered on with the awful load. They would start work every morning at seven and eat their dinners at noon, and then work until ten or eleven at night without another mouthful of food. Yurgis wanted to wait for them, to help them home at night, but they would not think of this. The fertilizer mill was not running over time, and there was no place for him to wait, save in a saloon. Each would stagger out into the darkness and make her way to the corner where they meant, or if the others had already gone, would get into a car and begin a painful struggle to keep awake. When they got home they were always too tired either to eat or to undress. They would crawl into bed with their shoes on and lie like logs. If they should fail, they would certainly be lost. If they held out, they might have enough coal for the winter. A day or two before Thanksgiving Day there came a snowstorm. It began in the afternoon, and by evening two inches had fallen. Yurgis tried to wait for the women, but went into a saloon to get warm and took two drinks and came out and ran home to escape from the demon. There he lay down to wait for them, and instantly fell asleep. When he opened his eyes again he was in the midst of a nightmare and found Elzbeta shaking him and crying out. At first he could not realize what she was saying. Ona had not come home. What time was it, he asked. It was morning, time to be up. Ona had not been home that night, and it was bitter cold and a foot of snow on the ground. Yurgis sat up with a start. Maria was crying with fright, and the children were wailing in sympathy. Little Stanislawus in addition, because the terror of the snow was upon him. Yurgis had nothing to put on but his shoes and his coat, and in half a minute he was out of the door. Then, however, he realized that there was no need of haste, that he had no idea where to go. It was still dark as midnight, and the thick snowflakes were sifting down. Everything was so silent that he could hear the rustle of them as they fell. In the few seconds that he stood there hesitating, he was covered white. He set off at a run for the yards, stopping by the way to inquire in the saloons that were open. Ona might have been overcome on the way, or else she might have met with an accident in the machines. When he got to the place where she worked, he inquired of one of the watchmen. There had not been any accident so far as the man had heard. At the time-office, which he found already open, the clerk told him that Ona's check had been turned in the night before, showing that she had left her work. After that there was nothing for him to do but wait, pacing back and forth in the snow, meantime to keep from freezing. Already the yards were full of activity, cattle were being unloaded from the cars in the distance, and across the way the beef luggers were toiling in the darkness, carrying two hundred pound quarters of bullocks into the refrigerator cars. Before the first streaks of daylight there came the crowding throngs of working men, shivering and swinging their dinner-pales as they hurried by. Jörgis took up his stand by the time-office window, where alone there was light enough for him to see. The snow fell so quick that it was only by peering closely that he could make sure that Ona did not pass him. Seven o'clock came, the hour when the great packing machine began to move. Jörgis ought to have been at his place in the fertilizer mill, but instead he was waiting in an agony of fear for Ona. It was fifteen minutes after the hour when he saw a form emerge from the snow mist and sprang toward it with a cry. It was she running swiftly. As she saw him she staggered forward and half fell into his outstretched arms. What has been the matter, he cried anxiously, where have you been? It was several seconds before she could get breath to answer him. I couldn't get home, she exclaimed. The snow, the cars had stopped. But where were you then, he demanded. I had to go home with a friend, she panned it, with Jadviga. Jörgis drew a deep breath. Then he noticed that she was sobbing and trembling, as if in one of those nervous crises that he dreaded so. But what's the matter, he cried. What has happened? Oh, Jörgis, I was so frightened, she said, clinging to him wildly. I have been so worried. They were near the time station window, and people were staring at them. Jörgis led her away. How do you mean, he asked, in perplexity. I was afraid. I was just afraid, sobbed Ona. I knew you wouldn't know where I was, and I didn't know what you might do. I tried to get home, but I was so tired. Oh, Jörgis, Jörgis. He was so glad to get her back that he could not think clearly about anything else. It did not seem strange to him that she should be so very much upset. All her fright and incoherent protestations did not matter since he had her back. He let her cry away her tears, and then, because it was nearly eight o'clock, and they would lose another hour if they delayed, he left her at the packing-house door with her ghastly white face and her haunted eyes of terror. There was another brief interval. Christmas was almost come, and because the snow still held and the searching cold, morning after morning Jörgis had carried his wife to her post, staggering with her through the darkness, until at last one night came the end. It lacked the three days of the holidays. About midnight Maria and Elzbeta came home, exclaiming an alarm when they found that Ona had not come. The two had agreed to meet her, and, after waiting, had gone to the room where she worked, only to find that the ham-wrapping girls had quit work an hour before and left. There was no snow that night, nor was it especially cold, and still Ona had not come. Something more serious must be wrong this time. They aroused Jörgis, and he sat up and listened crossly to the story. She must have gone home again with Yadviga, he said. Yadviga lived only two blocks from the yards, and perhaps she had been tired. Nothing could have happened to her, and even if there had, there was nothing could be done about it until morning. Jörgis turned over in his bed, and was snoring again before the two had closed the door. In the morning, however, he was up and out nearly an hour before the usual time. Yadviga Marcinkus lived on the other side of the yards, beyond Halstead Street, with her mother and sisters in a single basement room, for Mikolos had recently lost one hand from blood poisoning, and their marriage had been put off forever. The door of the room was in the rear, reached by a narrow court, and Jörgis saw a light in the window and heard something frying as he passed. He knocked, half expecting that Ona would answer. Instead, there was one of Yadviga's little sisters, who gazed at him through a crack in the door. Where's Ona? he demanded, and the child looked at him in perplexity. Ona, she said. Yes, said Jörgis. Isn't she here? No, said the child, and Jörgis gave a start. A moment later came Yadviga peering over the child's head. When she saw who it was, she slid around out of sight, for she was not quite dressed. Jörgis must excuse her, she began. Her mother was very ill. Ona isn't here, Jörgis demanded, too alarmed to wait for her to finish. Why, no, said Yadviga. What made you think she would be here? Had she said she was coming? No, he answered. But she hasn't come home, and I thought she would be here the same as before. As before, echoed Yadviga in perplexity. The time she spent the night here, said Jörgis. There must be some mistake, she answered quickly. Ona has never spent the night here. He was only half able to realize the words. Why, why, he exclaimed. Two weeks ago, Yadviga, she told me so the night it snowed, and she could not get home. There must be some mistake, declared the girl again. She didn't come here. He steadied himself by the door sill, and Yadviga, in her anxiety, for she was fond of Ona, opened the door wide, holding her jacket across her throat. Are you sure you didn't misunderstand her? She cried. She must have meant somewhere else. She. She said here, insisted Yörgis. She told me all about you. And how you were, and what you said. Are you sure you haven't forgotten you weren't away? No, no, she exclaimed. And then came a peatish voice. Yadviga, you are giving the baby a cold. Shut the door. Yörgis stood for half a minute more, stammering his perplexity through an eighth of an inch of crack. And then, as there was really nothing more to be said, he excused himself and went away. He walked on half days without knowing where he went. Ona had deceived him. She had lied to him. And what could that mean? Where had she been? Where was she now? He could hardly grasp the thing, much less try to solve it. But a hundred wild surmises came to him. A sense of impending calamity overwhelmed him. Because there was nothing else to do, he went back to the time office to watch again. He waited until nearly an hour after seven, and then went to the room where Ona worked to make inquiries of Ona's poor lady. The poor lady he found had not yet come. All the lines of cars that came from downtown were stalled. There had been an accident in the powerhouse, and no cars had been running since last night. Meantime, however, the ham-wrappers were working away with someone else in charge of them. The girl who answered Yörgis was busy, and as she talked she looked to see if she were being watched. Then a man came up, wheeling a truck. He knew Yörgis for Ona's husband, and was curious about the mystery. Maybe the cars had something to do with it, he suggested. Maybe she had gone downtown. No, said Yörgis. She never went downtown. Perhaps not, said the man. Yörgis thought he saw him exchange a swift glance with the girl as he spoke, and he demanded quickly what do you know about it. But the man had seen that the boss was watching him. He started on again, pushing his truck. I don't know anything about it, he said, over his shoulder. How should I know where your wife goes? Then Yörgis went out again, and paced up and down before the building. All the morning he stayed there, with no thought of his work. About noon he went to the police station to make inquiries, and then came back again for another anxious vigil. Finally toward the middle of the afternoon, he set out for home once more. He was walking out Ashland Avenue. The street cars had begun running again, and several passed him, packed to the steps with people. The sight of them set Yörgis to thinking again of the man's sarcastic remark. And half involuntarily he found himself watching the cars, with the result that he gave a sudden startled exclamation and stopped short in his tracks. Then he broke into a run. For a whole block he tore after the car, only a little ways behind. That rusty black hat with the drooping red flower, it might not be onus, but there was very little likelihood of it. He would know for certain very soon, or she would get out two blocks ahead. He slowed down and let the car go on. She got out, and as soon as she was out of sight, on the side street, Yörgis broke into a run. Suspicion was ripe in him now, and he was not ashamed to shadow her. He saw her turn the corner near their home, and then he ran again, and saw her as she went up the porch steps of the house. After that he turned back, and for five minutes, paced up and down, his hands clenched tightly and his lips set, his mind in a turmoil. Then he went home and entered. As he opened the door, he saw Elspita, who had also been looking for Ona, and had come home again. She was now on tiptoe and had a finger on her lips. Yörgis waited until she was close to him. Don't make any noise, she whispered hurriedly. What's the matter, he asked. Ona is asleep, she panned it. She's been very ill. I'm afraid her mind's been wandering, Yörgis. She was lost on the street all night, and I've only just succeeded in getting her quiet. When did she come in, he asked. Soon after you left this morning, said Elspita. Has she been out since? No, of course not. She's so weak, Yörgis. She— and he set his teeth hard together. You are lying to me, he said. Elspita started and turned pale. Why, she gasped. What do you mean? But Yörgis did not answer. He pushed her aside and strode to the bedroom door and opened it. Ona was sitting on the bed. She turned a startled look upon him as he entered. He closed the door in Elspita's face and went towards his wife. Where have you been, he demanded. She had her hands clasped tightly in her lap, and he saw that her face was as white as paper and drawn with pain. She gasped once or twice as she tried to answer him, and then began speaking low and swiftly. Yörgis, I— I think I have been out of my mind. I started to come home last night, and I could not find the way. I walked. I walked all night, I think, and—and I only got home this morning. You needed a rest, he said in a hard tone. Why did you go out again? He was looking her fairly in the face, and he could read the sudden fear and wild uncertainty that leaped into her eyes. I— I had to go to— To the store, she gasped, almost in a whisper. I had to go. You are lying to me, said Yörgis. Then he clenched his fists and took a step toward her. Why do you lie to me? he cried fiercely. What are you doing that you have to lie to me? Yörgis, she exclaimed, staring up in fright. Oh, Yörgis, how can you? You have lied to me, I say, he cried. You told me you had been to Yadviga's house that other night, and you hadn't. You had been where you were last night, somewhere's downtown, for I saw you get off the car. Where were you? It was as if he had struck a knife into her. She seemed to go all to pieces. For half a second she stood, reeling and swaying, staring at him with horror in her eyes. Then, with a cry of anguish, she tottered forward, stretching out her arms to him. But he stepped aside deliberately and let her fall. She caught herself at the side of the bed, and then sank down, burying her face in her hands and bursting into frantic weeping. Then came one of those hysterical crises that had so often dismayed him. Ona sobbed and wept. Her fear and anguish building themselves up into long climaxes. Furious gusts of emotion would come sweeping over her, shaking her as the tempest shakes the trees upon the hills. All her frame would quiver and throb with them. It was as if some dreadful thing rose up within her and took possession of her, torturing her, tearing her. This thing had been want to set Giorgis quite beside himself. But now he stood with his lips set tightly and his hands clenched. She might weep till she killed herself. But she should not move him this time. Not an inch. Not an inch. Because the sound she made set his blood to running cold and his lips to quivering in spite of himself, he was glad of the diversion when Teta Elzbeta, pale with fright, opened the door and rushed in. Yet he turned upon her with an oath. Go out! he cried. Go out! And then as she stood hesitating about to speak, he seized her by the arm and half flung her from the room, slamming the door and barring it with a table. Then he turned again and faced Ona crying, Now answer me! Yet she did not hear him. She was still in the grip of the fiend. Giorgis could see her outstretched hands shaking and twitching, roaming here and there over the bed at will, like living things. He could see convulsive shuttering start in her body and run through her limbs. She was sobbing and choking. It was as if there were too many sounds for one throat. They came chasing each other like waves upon the sea. Then her voice would begin to rise into screams, louder and louder, until it broke in wild, horrible peals of laughter. Giorgis bore it until he could bear it no longer, and then he sprang at her, seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her, shouting into her ear, Stop it, I say! Stop it! She looked up at him, out of her agony. Then she fell forward at his feet. She caught them in her hands, in spite of his efforts to step aside, and with her face upon the floor lay writhing. It made a choking in Giorgis throat to hear her, and he cried again, more savagely than before. Stop it, I say! This time she heeded him and caught her breath and lay silent, save for the gasping sobs that wrenched all her frame. For a long minute she lay there, perfectly motionless, until a cold fear seized her husband, thinking that she was dying. Suddenly, however, he heard her voice faintly. Giorgis. Giorgis. What is it, he said? He had to bend down to her. She was so weak. She was pleading with him in broken praises, painfully uttered, have faith in me, believe me, believe what he cried, believe that I know best, that I love you, and do not ask me what you did. Oh, Giorgis, please, please, it is for the best. It is, he started to speak again, but she rushed on predically, heading him up. If you will only do it, if you will only, only believe me, it wasn't my fault. I couldn't help it. It will be all right. It is nothing. It is no harm. Oh, Giorgis, please, please. She had hold of him and was trying to raise herself to look at him. He could feel the palsy shaking of her hands, and the heaving of the bosom she pressed against him. She managed to catch one of his hands and gripped it convulsively, drawing it to her face, and bathing it in her tears. Oh, believe me, believe me, she wailed again, and he shouted in fury, I will not. But still she clung to him, wailing aloud in her despair. Oh, Giorgis, think what you are doing. It will ruin us. It will ruin us. Oh, no, you must not do it. No, don't. Don't do it. You must not do it. It will drive me mad. It will kill me. No, no, Giorgis, I am crazy. It is nothing. You do not really need to know. We can be happy. We can love each other, just the same. Oh, please, please, believe me. Her words fairly drove him wild. He tore his hands loose and flung her off. Answer me, he cried. Goddammit, I say, answer me. She sank down upon the floor, beginning to cry again. It was like listening to the moan of a damned soul, and Giorgis could not stand it. He smote his fist upon the table by his side, and shouted again at her. Answer me. She began to scream aloud, her voice like the voice of some wild beast. I, I, I can't, I can't do it. Why can't you do it? He shouted. I don't know how. He sprang and caught her by the arm, lifting her up and glaring into her face. Tell me where you were last night, he panted. Quick, out with it. Then she began to whisper. One word at a time. I was in a house, downtown. What house? What do you mean? She tried to hide her eyes away, but he held her. Miss Henderson's house, she gasped. He did not understand it first. Miss Henderson's house, he echoed, and then suddenly, as in an explosion, the horrible truth burst over him, and he reeled and staggered back with a scream. He caught himself against the wall, and put his hand to his forehead, staring about him, and whispering, Jesus, Jesus. An instant later, he leaped at her as she lay groveling at his feet. He seized her by the throat. Tell me, he gasped hoarsely. Quick, who took you to that place? She tried to get away, making him furious. He thought it was fear of the pain of his clutch. He did not understand that it was the agony of her shame. Still she answered him. Connor. Connor, he gasped. Who is Connor? The boss, she answered. The man. He tightened his grip in his frenzy, and only when he saw her eyes closing did he realize that he was choking her. Then he relaxed his fingers and crouched, waiting until she opened her lids again. His breath beat hot into her face. Tell me, he whispered at last. Tell me about it. She lay perfectly motionless, and he had to hold his breath to catch her words. I did not want to do it, she said. I tried. I tried not to do it. I only did it to save us. It was our only chance. Again, for a space, there was no sound but his panting. Ona's eyes closed, and when she spoke again she did not open them. He told me he would have turned me off. He told me he would. We, would all of us, lose our places. We could never get anything to do. Here, again. He, he meant it. He would have ruined us. Yorgos's arms were shaking so that he could scarcely hold himself up, and lurched forward now and then as he listened. When, when did this begin, he gasped. At the very first, she said. She spoke as if in a trance. It was all, it was their plot, Ms. Henderson's plot. She hated me, and he, he wanted me. He used to speak to me, out on the platform. Then he began to, to make love to me. He offered me money. He begged. He said, he loved me. Then he threatened me. He knew all about us. He knew we would starve. He knew your boss. He knew Maria's. He would hound us to death, he said. Then he said, if I would, if I, we would all of us be sure of work. Always. Then one day he caught hold of me. He would not let me go. He, he, where was this? In the hallway, at night, after everyone had gone, I could not help it. I thought of you, of the baby, of mother and the children. I was afraid of him, afraid to cry out. A moment ago her face had been ashing gray. Now it was scarlet. She was beginning to breathe hard again. Jörgis made not a sound. That was two months ago. Then he wanted me to come to that house. He wanted me to stay there. He said, all of us, that we would not have to work. He made me come there in the evenings. I told you, you thought I was at the factory. Then one night it snowed, and I couldn't get back. And last night the cars were stopped. It was such a little thing to ruin us all. I tried to walk, but I couldn't. I didn't want you to know. It would have been all right. We could have gone on, just the same. You'd need never have known about it. He was getting tired of me. He would have let me alone soon. I am going to have a baby. I am getting ugly. He told me that. Twice he told me, last night. He kicked me, last night, too. And now you will kill him. You, you will kill him. And we shall die. All this she had said without a quiver. She lay still as death, not an eyelid moving. And Yurgis, too, said not a word. He lifted himself by the bed and stood up. He did not stop for another glance at her, but went to the door and opened it. He did not see Elsbeta crouching terrified in the corner. He went out hatless, leaving the street door open behind him. The instant his feet were on the sidewalk, he broke into a run. He ran like one possessed, blindly, furiously, looking neither to the right nor left. He was on Ashland Avenue before exhaustion compelled him to slow down, and then, noticing a car, he made a dart for it and drew himself aboard. His eyes were wild and his hair flying, and he was breathing hoarsely like a wounded bull. But the people on the car did not notice this particularly. Perhaps it seemed natural to them that a man who smelled as Yurgis smelled should exhibit an aspect to correspond. They began to give way before him as usual. The conductor took his nickel gingerly, with the tips of his fingers, and then left him with a platform to himself. Yurgis did not even notice it. His thoughts were far away. Within his soul it was like a roaring furnace. He stood waiting, waiting, crouching as if for a spring. He had some of his breath back when the car came to the entrance of the yards, and so he leaped off and started again, racing at full speed. People turned and stared at him, but he saw no one. There was the factory, and he bound it through the doorway and down the corridor. He knew the room where Ona worked, and he knew Connor, the boss of the loading-gang outside. He looked for the man as he sprang into the room. The truckmen were hard at work loading the freshly packed boxes and barrels upon the cars. Yurgis shot one swift glance up and down the platform. The man was not on it. But then suddenly he heard a voice in the corridor and started or with a bound. In an instant more, he confronted the boss. He was a big red-faced Irishman, coarse-featured, and smelling of liquor. He saw Yurgis as he crossed the threshold and turned white. He hesitated one second, as if meaning to run. And in the next his assailant was upon him. He put up his hands to protect his face, but Yurgis, lunging with all the power of his arm and body, struck him fairly between the eyes and knocked him backward. The next moment he was on top of him, burying his fingers in his throat. To Yurgis this man's whole presence wreaked of the crime he had committed. The touch of his body was madness to him. It set every nerve of him a tremble. It aroused all the demon in his soul. It had worked its will upon Ona, this great beast. And now he had it. He had it. It was his turn now. Things swam blood before him, and he screamed aloud in his fury, lifting his victim and smashing his head upon the floor. The place, of course, was in an uproar, women fainting and shrieking and men rushing in. Yurgis was so bent upon his task that he knew nothing of this, and scarcely realized that people were trying to interfere with him. It was only when half a dozen men had seized him by the legs and shoulders and were pulling at him that he understood that he was losing his prey. In a flash he had bent down and sunk his teeth into the man's cheek, and when they tore him away he was dripping with blood, and little ribbons of skin were hanging in his mouth. They got him down upon the floor, clinging to him by his arms and legs, and still they could hardly hold him. He fought like a tiger, writhing and twisting, half flinging them off, and starting towards his unconscious enemy. Yet others rushed in until there was a little mountain of twisted limbs and bodies, heaving and tossing, and working its way about the room. In the end, by their sheer weight, they choked the breath out of him, and then they carried him to the company police station, where he lay still until they had summoned a patrol wagon to take him away.