 8. Yet even by this deadly winter the germ of hope was not to be kept from sprouting in their hearts. It was just at this time that the great adventure befell Maria. The victim was Tamosius Cushlaica, who played the violin. Everybody laughed at them, for Tamosius was petite and frail, and Maria could have picked him up and carried him off under one arm. But perhaps that was why she fascinated him. The sheer volume of Maria's energy was overwhelming. That first night at the wedding Tamosius had hardly taken his eyes off her, and later on when he came to find that she had really the heart of a baby, her voice and her violence ceased to terrify him, and he got the habit of coming to pay her visits on Sunday afternoons. There was no place to entertain company except in the kitchen, in the midst of the family, and Tamosius would sit there with his hat between his knees, never saying more than half a dozen words at a time, and turning red in the face before he managed to say those, until finally Yurgis would clap him upon the back in his hearty way, crying, Come now, brother, give us a tune, and then Tamosius' face would light up, and he would get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin, and play. And forwith the soul of him would flame up and become eloquent. It was almost an impropriety, for all the while his gaze would be fixed upon Maria's face, until she would begin to turn red and lower her eyes. There was no resisting the music of Tamosius, however, even the children would sit odd and wondering, and the tears would run down Kedah El's beta's cheeks. A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life. Then there were other benefits accruing to Maria from this friendship, benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamosius big money to come and make music on state occasions, and also they would invite him to parties and festivals, knowing well that he was too good nature to come without his fiddle, and that having brought it, he could be made to play while others danced. Once he made bold to ask Maria to accompany him to such a party, and Maria accepted to his great delight, after which he never went anywhere without her, while if the celebration were given by friends of his, he would invite the rest of the family also. In any case, Maria would bring back a huge pocket full of cakes and sandwiches for the children, and stories of all the good things she herself had managed to consume. She was compelled at these parties to spend most of her time at the refreshment table, for she could not dance with anybody except other women and very old men. Tamosius was of an excitable temperament and afflicted with a frantic jealousy, and any unmarried man who ventured to put his arm about the ample waist of Maria would be certain to throw the orchestra out of tune. It was a great help to a person who had to toil all the week to be able to look forward to some such relaxation as this on Saturday nights. The family was too poor and too hard work to make many acquaintances. In Packingtown, as a rule, people know only their near neighbors and shopmates, and so the place is like a myriad of little country villages. But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to travel and widen her horizon, and so each week there would be new personalities to talk about, how so and so was dressed, and where she worked, and what she got, and whom she was in love with, and how this man had jilted his girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl, and what had passed between them, and how another man beat his wife and spent all her earnings upon drink and pawned her very clothes. Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip, but then one has to talk about what one knows. It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding, that Tomotius found courage and set down his violin case in the street and spoke his heart, and then Moria clasped him in her arms. She told them all about it the next day, and fairly cried with happiness, for she said that Tomotius was a lovely man. After that he no longer made love to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for hours in the kitchen, blissfully happy in each other's arms. It was the tacit convention of the family to know nothing of what was going on in that corner. They were planning to be married in the spring, and have the garret of the house fixed up and live there. Tomotius made good wages, and little by little the family were paying back their debt to Moria, so she ought soon to have enough to start life upon, only with her preposterous soft heartedness she would insist upon spending a good part of her money every week for things which she saw they needed. Moria was really the capitalist of the party. Her she had become an expert can painter by this time. She was getting fourteen cents for every hundred and ten cans, and she could paint more than two cans every minute. Moria felt, so to speak, that she had her hand on the throttle, and the neighborhood was vocal with her rejoicings. Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow. One could not count upon such good fortune forever. There were accidents that always happened. But Moria was not to be prevailed upon, and went on planning and dreaming of all the treasures she was going to have for her home. And so, when the crash did come, her grief was painful to see. For her canning factory shut down. Moria would about as soon have expected to see the sun shut down. The huge establishment had been to her a thing akin to the planets and the seasons. But now it was shut. And they had not given her any explanation. They had not even given her a day's warning. They had simply posted a notice one Saturday that all hands would be paid off that afternoon and would not resume work for at least a month. And that was all there was to it. Her job was gone. It was the holiday rush that was over, the girl said in answer to Moria's inquiries. After that there was always a slack. Sometimes the factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no telling. It had been known to stay closed until way into the summer. The prospects were bad at present. Her truckmen who worked in the storerooms said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the firm could not have found room for another week's output of cans. And they had turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still worse sign, since it meant that there were no orders to be filled. It was all a swindle, campaigning, said the girls. You were crazy with delight because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and saving half of it, but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you were out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought. Moria came home, and because she was a person who could not rest without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and then she set out to search Hackingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, at all the girls' hunting work, it will be readily understood that Moria did not find any. Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this failed, she even traveled over into the far distant regions near the lakefront, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged there for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not know English. The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which had turned Moria out, but they felt it in a different way, and a way which made Jorges understand at last all their bitterness. The big packers did not turn their hands off and close down like the canning factories, but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at seven o'clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o'clock, which was bad enough in all conscience, but now in the slack season they would perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon, and so they would have to loaf around in a place where the thermometer might be twenty degrees below zero. At first one would see them running about or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm, but before the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted, and when the cattle finally came, so near-frozen that to move was an agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the merciless speeding up would begin. There were weeks at a time when Jorges went home after such a day as this, with not more than two hours' work to his credit, which meant about thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average was six hours a day, which meant for Jorges about six dollars a week, and this six hours of work wouldn't be done after standing on the killing bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock in the afternoon. Like as not, there would come a rush of cattle at the very end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went home, often working by electric light till nine or ten or even twelve or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of suffer. The men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding off for better prices if they could scare the shippers into thinking that they meant to buy nothing that day. They could get their own terms. For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much above the market price, and you were not allowed to bring your own fodder. Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day, now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy their cattle that night to get them cheaper, and then would come into play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day they were bought. There was no use ticking about this. There had been one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance of its ever being ordered. And so, on Christmas Eve, Yorgos worked till nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas day he was on the killing bed at seven o'clock. All this was bad, and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Yorgos had once been among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating, and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late was docked an hour, and this was economical, for he was made to work the balance of the hour. He was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on the other hand, if he came ahead of time, he got no pay for that, though often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the day. They did not pay for any fraction of an hour for a broken time. A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a sort of lottery, a struggle, all but breaking into open war between the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through, and the latter trying to stretch it out. Jörgis blamed the bosses for this, though the truth to be told it was not always their fault, for the Packers kept them frightened for their lies, and when one was in danger of falling behind a standard, what was easier than to catch up by making the gang work a while for the church. This was a savage witticism the men had, which Jörgis had to have explained to him. Old man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at each other and say, now we're working for the church. One of the consequences of all these things was that Jörgis was no longer perplexed when he heard the men talk of fighting for their rights. He felt like fighting now himself, and when the Irish delegate of the Butcher's Helpers Union came to him a second time, he received him in a far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jörgis, this of the men, that by combining they might be able to make a stand and conquer the Packers. Jörgis wondered who had first thought of it, and when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase of pre-country. The delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jörgis signified that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all their troubles. But only ten days after she had joined, Maria's canning factory closed down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended a meeting, Maria got up and made a speech about it. It was a business meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to Maria. She said what was in her, and all the pounding of the chairman's gavel, and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not prevail. Quite apart from her own troubles, she was boiling over with a general sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of the Packers and what she thought of a world where such things were allowed to happen. And then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the shock of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and the meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the election of a recording secretary. Jörgis, too, had an indenture for the first time he attended a union meeting, but it was not of his own seeking. Jörgis had gone with the desire to get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done, but this attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little egregious man, with big staring eyes and a wild aspect, a hoistor by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back in the far distant past, Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience, and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he had done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked, he caught his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer and closer, which was trying because his teeth were so bad. Jörgis did not mind that, only he was frightened. The method of operation of the higher intelligences was Tommy Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if Jörgis had ever considered that the representation of things in their present similarity might be altogether unintelligible upon a more elevated plane. There were assuredly wonderful mysteries about the developing of these things, and then, becoming confidential, Mr. Finnegan proceeded to tell of some discoveries of his own. If he ever had anything to do with spirits, said he, and looked inquiringly at Jörgis, who kept shaking his head. Never mind, never mind, continued the other. But their influences may be operating upon ye. It sure as I'm telling ye, it's them that has the reference to the immediate surroundings that has the most of power. It was valsive to me in the youthful days to be acquainted with spirits. And so Tommy Finnegan went on, expounding a system of philosophy. While the perspiration came out on Jörgis' forehead, so great was his agitation and embarrassment. In the end, one of the men, seeing his flight, came over and rescued him. But it was some time before he was able to find anyone to explain things to him. And meanwhile, his fear, lest the strange little Irishman should get him cornered again, was enough to keep him dodging about the room the whole evening. He never missed a meeting, however. He had picked up a few words of English by this time, and friends would help him to understand. They were often very turbulent meetings, with half a dozen men beclaiming at once in as many dialects of English, but the speakers were all desperately in earnest, and Jörgis was in earnest too, for he understood that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his disillusionment, Jörgis had sworn to trust no man except in his own family. But here he discovered that he had brothers in affliction and allies. Their one chance for life was in union, and so the struggle became a kind of crusade. Jörgis had always been a member of the church, because it was the right thing to be, but the church had never touched him. He left all that for the women. Here, however, was a new religion, one that did touch him, that took hold of every fiber of him, and with all the zeal and fury of a convert he went out as a missionary. There were many non-union men among the Lithuanians, and with these he would labor and wrestle in prayer, trying to show them the right. Sometimes they would be obstinate and refuse to see it, and Jörgis at last was not always patient. He forgot how he himself had been blind a short time ago, after the fashion of all Crusaders since the original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of brotherhood by force of arms. End of Chapter 8 Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 9 of The Jungle This Liberbox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Chapter 9 One of the first consequences of the discovery of the union was that Jörgis became desirous of learning English. He wanted to know what was going on at the meetings and to be able to take part in them, and so he began to look about him and to try to pick up words. The children who were at school and learning fast would teach him a few, and a friend loaned him a little book that had some in it, and Ona would read them to him. Then Jörgis became sorry that he could not read himself, and later on in the winter, when someone told him that there was a night school that was free, he went and enrolled. After that, every evening that he got home from the yards in time, he would go to the school. He would go even if he were in time for only half an hour. They were teaching him both to read and to speak English, and they would have taught him other things if only he had had a little time. Also, the union made another great difference with him. It made him begin to pay attention to the country. It was the beginning of democracy with him. It was a little state, the union, a miniature republic. Its affairs were every man's affairs, and every man had a real say about them. In other words, in the union Jörgis learned to talk politics. In the place where he had come from, there had not been any politics. In Russia, one thought of the government as an affliction, like the lightning and the hail. Duck, little brother duck, the wise old peasants would whisper. Everything passes away. And when Jörgis had first come to America, he had supposed that it was the same. He had heard people say that it was a free country, but what did that mean? He found that here, precisely as in Russia, there were rich men who owned everything, and if one could not find any work, was not the hunger he began to feel the same sort of hunger? When Jörgis had been working about three weeks at Browns, there had come to him one noontime a man who was employed as a night watchman. And who asked him if he would not like to take out naturalization papers and become a citizen? Jörgis did not know what that meant, but the man explained the advantages. In the first place, it would not cost him anything, and it would get him half a day off with his pay just the same. And then when election time came, he would be able to vote, and there was something in that. Jörgis was naturally glad to accept, and so the night watchman said a few words to the boss, and he was excused for the rest of the day. When, later on, he wanted a holiday to get married, he could not get it, and as for a holiday with pay just the same, what power had wrought that miracle heaven only knew. However, he went with the man who picked up several other newly landed immigrants, Poles, Lithuanians, and Slobaks, and took them all outside where stood a great four-horse tally-hoe coach with 15 or 20 men already in it. It was a fine chance to see the sights of the city, and the party had a merry time with plenty of beer handed up from inside. So they drove downtown and stopped before an imposing granite building in which they interviewed an official who had the papers already, with only the names to be filled in. So each man, in turn, took an oath of which he did not understand a word, and then was presented with a handsome ornamented document with a big red seal and the shield of the United States upon it, and was told that he had become a citizen of the Republic and the equal of the President himself. A month or two later, Yorgos had another interview with this same man, who told him where to go to register. And then finally, when election day came, the packing houses posted a notice that men who desired to vote might remain away until nine that morning, and the same night watchman took Yorgos and the rest of his flock into the back room of a saloon and showed each of them where and how to mark a ballot, and then gave each two dollars and took them to the polling place, where there was a policeman on duty, especially to see that they got through all right. Yorgos felt quite proud of this good luck till he got home and met Jonas, who had taken the leader aside and whispered to him, offering to vote three times for four dollars, which offer had been accepted, and now in the union Yorgos met men who explained all this mystery to him, and he learned that America differed from Russia in that its government existed under the form of a democracy. The officials who ruled it and got all the graft had to be elected first, and so there were two rival sets of grafters known as political parties, and the one got the office who bought the most votes. Now and then the election was very close, and that was the time the poor man came in. In the stockyards, this was only in national and state elections, or in local elections, the Democratic Party always carried everything. The ruler of the district was therefore the Democratic boss, a little Irishman named Mike Scully. Scully held an important party office in the state, and bossed even the mayor of the city, it was said. It was his boast that he carried the stockyards in his pocket. He was an enormously rich man. He had a hand in all the big graft in the neighborhood. It was Scully, for instance, who owned that dump which Yurgis and Ona had seen the first day of their arrival. Not only did he own the dump, but he owned the brick factory as well, and first he took out the clay and made it into bricks, and then he had the city bring garbage to fill up the hole so that he could build houses to sell to the people. Then too, he sold the bricks to the city at his own price, and the city came and got them in its wagons. And also he owned the other hole nearby, where the stagnant water was. And it was he who cut the ice and sold it, and what was more, if the men told truth, he had not had to pay any taxes for the water, and he had built the ice house out of city lumber, and had not had to pay anything for that. The newspapers had got hold of that story, and there had been a scandal, but Scully had hired somebody to confess and take all the blame, and then skip the country. It was said too that he had built his brick kiln in the same way, and that the workmen were on the city payroll while they did it. However, one had to press closely to get these things out of the men, for it was not their business, and Mike Scully was a good man to stand in with. A note signed by him was equal to a job any time at the packing houses, and also he employed a good many men himself, and worked them only eight hours a day, and paid them the highest wages. This gave him many friends, all of whom he had gotten together into the Warwoop League, whose clubhouse you might see just outside the yards. It was the biggest clubhouse, and the biggest club in all Chicago, and they had prize fights every now and then, and cock fights, and even dog fights. The policemen in the district all belonged to the League, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold tickets for them. The man that had taken Yorgos to be naturalized was one of these Indians, as they were called, and on Election Day there would be hundreds of them out, and all with big wads of money in their pockets, and free drinks at every saloon in the district. That was another thing, the men said. All the saloon keepers had to be Indians, and to put up on demand, otherwise they could not do business on Sundays nor have any gambling at all, in the same way as Scully had all the jobs in the fire department at his disposal, and all the rest of the city grafted in the stockyards district. He was building a block of flats somewhere upon Ashland Avenue, and the man who was overseeing it for him was drawing pay as a city inspector of sewers. The city inspector of water pipes had been dead and buried for over a year, but somebody was still drawing his pay. The city inspector of sidewalks was a barkeeper at the Warwoop Cafe, and maybe he could make it uncomfortable for any tradesmen who did not stand in with Sully. Even the Packers were in awe of him, so the men said. It gave them pleasure to believe this, for Scully stood as the people's man, and boasted of it boldly when Election Day came. The Packers had won a bridge at Ashland Avenue, but they had not been able to get it till they had seen Scully, and it was the same with Bubbly Creek, which the city had threatened to make the Packers cover over till Scully had come to their aid. Bubbly Creek is an arm of the Chicago River, and forms the southern boundary of the yards. All the drainage of the square mile of packing houses empties into it, so that it is really a great open sewer a hundred or two feet wide. One long arm of it is blind, and the filth stays there forever and a day. The grease and chemicals that are poured into it undergo all sorts of strange transformations, which are the cause of its name. It is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathons disporting themselves in its depths. Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide. Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava. Chickens walk about on it feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across and vanish temporarily. The Packers used to lead the creek that way, till every now and then the surface would catch on fire and burn furiously, and the fire department would have to come and put it out. Once, however, an ingenious stranger came and started to gather this filth in scowls to make lard out of, and then the Packers took the cue and got an injunction to stop him, and afterward gathered it themselves. The banks of Bubbly Creek are plastered thick with hairs, and this also the Packers gather and clean. And there were things even stranger than this according to the gossip of the men. The Packers had secret mains through which they stole billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had been full of this scandal, once there had even been an investigation and an actual uncovering of the pipes, but nobody had been punished, and the thing went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat. They did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the Packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority beyond that. For the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state, the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine, rules and regulations for the inspection of livestock and their products, United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Industries, order number 125, section 1. Proprietors of slaughterhouses, canning, salting, packing, or rendering establishments engaged in the slaughtering of cattle, sheep, or swine, or the packing of any of their products, the carcasses or products of which are to become subjects of interstate or foreign commerce, shall make application to the Secretary of Agriculture for inspection of said animals and their products. Section 15. Such rejected or condemned animals shall at once be removed by the owners from the pens containing animals which have been inspected and found to be free from disease and fit for human food, and shall be disposed of in accordance with the laws, ordinances, and regulations of the state and municipality in which said rejected or condemned animals are located. Section 25. A microscopic examination for trichini, made of all swine products exported to countries requiring such examination. No microscopic examination will be made of hogs slaughtered for interstate trade, but this examination shall be confined to those intended for the export trade, and shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained tomanes, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city. And so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene, and was ordered to resign the same week. So indignant were the packers that they went farther and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection, so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone, and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars, and hauled away to a place called Globe in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard. Eurigus heard of these things little by little in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher for the plant where Maria had worked, which killed meat for canning only, and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they must have agencies all over the country to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on whiskey malt, the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called steerly, which means covered with poils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face. And when a man's sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was stuff such as this that made the embalmed beef that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards. Only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned. It was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars. Then one Sunday evening Yorgos sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and who worked in the canning rooms at Durums. And so Yorgos learned a few things about the great and only Durum canned goods, which had become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durums. They advertised a mushroom ketchup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised potted chicken, and it was like the boarding-house soup of the comic papers through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically. Who knows, said Yorgos' friend. The things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fatter pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal when they had any. They put these up in several grades and sold them at several prices, but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was potted game, and potted grouse, potted ham, and deviled ham, deviled, as the men called it. Deviled ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines, and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white, and trimmings of hams in corned beef, and potatoes, skins and all, and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Yorgos' informant. But it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long, where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding because it made them fatten more quickly, and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and oxidized it by a forced air process to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities. Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards, ostensibly for fertilizer. But after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really complied with, for the present at any rate. Any day, however, one might see sharp horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep, and yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh. There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtown. Those are the various afflictions of the workers. When Jorges had first inspected the packing plants with Shedvilis, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there. Now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases, and the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own person. Generally, he had only to hold out his hand. There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old Antonos had gotten his death, scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck into the pickle-room, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world. All the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the asset, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boneers and tremors, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb. Time and again, the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the men pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be crisscrossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, they had worn them off pulling hides, their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light. In these rooms, the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator cars, a fearful kind of work that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism, the time limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the picklemen, for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat, and their hands too were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the hoisters, as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam, and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing-room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on, which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to a visitor, for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats, and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting. Sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's pure leaf lard. CHAPTER X During the early part of the winter the family had had money enough to live and a little over to pay their debts with, but when the earnings of Urigus fell from nine or ten dollars a week to five or six there was no longer anything to spare. The winter went, and the spring came, and found them still living thus from hand to mouth, hanging on day by day with literally not a month's wages between them and starvation. Moria was in despair, for there was still no word about the reopening of the canning factory, and her savings were almost entirely gone. She had had to give up all idea of marrying then. The family could not get along without her, though for that matter she was likely soon to become a burden even upon them, for when her money was all gone they would have to pay back what they owed her in board. So Urigus and Ona and Teta Elsbeta would hold anxious conferences until late at night, trying to figure out how they could manage this too without starting. Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have nor expect a single instance respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money. They would no sooner escape as by a miracle from one difficulty than a new one would come into view. In addition to all their physical hardships there was thus a constant strain upon their minds. They were harried all day and nearly all night by worry and fear. This was in truth not living. It was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all the time, and when people did their best thought they not to be able to keep alive, there seemed never to be an end to the things they had to buy and to the unforeseen contingencies. Once their water pipes froze and burst, and when, in their ignorance, they thawed them out, they had a terrifying flood in their house. It happened while the men were away, and poor Elsbeta rushed out into the street screaming for help, for she did not even know whether the flood could be stopped, or whether they were ruined for life. It was nearly as bad as the latter. They found in the end, for the plumber charged them seventy-five cents an hour, and seventy-five cents for another man who had stood and watched him, and included all the time the two had been going and coming, and also a charge for all sorts of materials and extras. And then again, when they went to pay their January's installment on the house, the agent terrified them by asking them if they had had the insurance attended to yet. In answer to their inquiry, he showed the McClaws in the deed which provided that they were to keep the house insured for one thousand dollars, as soon as the present policy ran out, which would happen in a few days. Poor Elsbeta, upon whom again fell the blow, demanded how much it would cost them. Seven dollars, the man said, and that night came Giorgis grim and determined, requesting that the agent would be good enough to inform him, once and for all, as to all the expenses they were liable for. The deed was signed now, he said, with sarcasm proper to the new way of life he had learned. The deed was signed, and so the agent had no longer anything to gain by keeping quiet. And Giorgis looked the fellow squarely in the eye, and so the fellow wasted no time in conventional protests, but read him the deed. They would have to renew the insurance every year. They would have to pay the taxes about ten dollars a year. They would have to pay the water tax about six dollars a year. Giorgis silently resolved to shut off the hydrant. This, besides the interest and the monthly installments, would be all, unless by chance the city should happen to decide to put in a sewer or to lay a sidewalk. Yes, said the agent, they would have to have these whether they wanted them or not, if the city said so. The sewer would cost them about twenty-two dollars, and the sidewalk fifteen if it were wood, twenty-five if it were cement. So Giorgis went home again. It was a relief to know the worst at any rate, so that he could no more be surprised by fresh demands. He saw now how they had been plundered, but they were in for it. There was no turning back. They could only go on and make the fight and win, for defeat was a thing that could not even be thought of. When the spring time came, they were delivered from the dreadful cold, and that was a great deal. But in addition, they had counted on the money they would not have to pay for coal, and it was just at this time that Maria's board began to fail. Then, too, the warm weather brought trials of its own. Each season had its trials as they found. In the spring there were cold rains that turned the streets into canals and bogs. The mud would be so deep that wagons would sink up to the hubs, so that half a dozen horses could not move them. Then, of course, it was impossible for anyone to get to work with dry feet, and this was bad for men that were poorly clad and shod, and still worse for women and children. Later came mid-summer with the stifling heat, when the dingy killing-beds of durums became a very purgatory. One time, in a single day, three men fell dead from sunstroke. All day long the rivers of hot blood poured forth, until, with the sun beating down and the air motionless, the stench was enough to knock a man over. All the old smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat, for there was never any washing of the walls and raptors and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing-beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty feet away. There was simply no such thing as keeping decent. The most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanness. There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate as much raw blood as food at dinner time. When they were at work, they could not even wipe off their faces. They were as helpless as newly-born babes in that respect. And it may seem like a small matter, but when the sweat began to run down their necks and tickle them, or a fly to bother them, it was a torture like being burned alive. Whether it was the slaughterhouses or the dumps that were responsible, one could not say. But with the hot weather, there descended upon Packingtown a veritable Egyptian plague of flies. There could be no describing this. The houses would be black with them. There was no escaping. You might provide all your doors and windows with screens, but their buzzing outside would be like the swarming of bees, and whenever you opened the door, they would rush in as if a storm of wind were driving them. Perhaps the summertime suggests to you thoughts of the country, visions of green fields, and mountains and sparkling lakes. It had no such suggestion for the people in the yards. The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields, and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan, but for all the good it did them, it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine and tied to it for life. The managers and superintendents and clerks of packing town were all recruited from another class and never from the workers. They scorned the workers the very meanest of them. A poor devil of a bookkeeper who had been working in dorms for twenty years at a salary of six dollars a week, and might work there for twenty more and do no better, would yet consider himself a gentleman, as far removed as the polls from the most skilled worker on the killing beds. He would dress differently, and live in another part of the town, and come to work at a different hour of the day, and in every way make sure that he never rubbed elbows with a laboring man. Perhaps this was due to the repulsiveness of the work. At any rate, the people who worked with their hands were a class of heart, and were made to feel it. In the late spring the canning factory started up again, and so once more Maria was heard to sing, and the love music of Timotius took on a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however. For a month or two later a dreadful calamity fell upon Maria. Just one year and three days after she had begun work as a campaigner, she lost her job. It was a long story. Maria insisted that it was because of her activity in the union. The Packers, of course, had spies in all the unions, and in addition they made a practice of buying up a certain number of the union officials, as many as they thought they needed. So every week they received reports as to what was going on, and often they knew things before the members of the union knew them. Anyone who was considered to be dangerous by them would find that he was not a favorite with his boss, and Maria had been a great hand for going after the foreign people and preaching to them. However that might be, the known facts were that a few weeks before the factory closed Maria had been cheated out of her pay for three hundred cans. The girls worked at a long table, and behind them walked a woman with pencil and notebook, keeping count of the number they finished. This woman was, of course, only human, and sometimes made mistakes. When this happened there was no redress. If on Saturday you got less money than you had earned you had to make the best of it. But Maria did not understand this and made a disturbance. Maria's disturbances did not mean anything, and while she had known only Lithuanian and Polish they had done no harm for people only laughed at her and made her cry. But now Maria was able to call names in English and so she got the woman who made the mistake to disliking her. Probably, as Maria claimed, she made mistakes on purpose after that. At any rate, she made them, and the third time it happened Maria went on the war path and took the matter first to the forelady, and when she got no satisfaction there, to the superintendent. This was unheard of presumption. But the superintendent said he would see about it, which Maria took to mean that she was going to get her money. After waiting three days, she went to see the superintendent again. This time the man frowned and said that he had not had time to attend to it, and when Maria against the advice and warning of everyone tried it once more he ordered her back to her work in a passion. Just how things happened after that Maria was not sure, but that afternoon the forelady told her that her services would not be any longer required. Poor Maria could not have been more dumbfounded had the woman knocked her over the head. At first she could not believe what she heard, and then she grew furious and swore that she would come anyway, that her place belonged to her. In the end she sat down in the middle of the floor and wept and wailed. It was a cruel lesson, but then Maria was headstrong. She should have listened to those who had had experience. The next time she would know her place as the forelady expressed it, and so Maria went out, and the family faced the problem of an existence again. It was especially hard this time, for Ona was to be confined before long, and Jorgus was trying hard to save up money for this. He had heard dreadful stories of the midwives who grow as thick as fleas in Packingtown, and he had made up his mind that Ona must have a man-doctor. Jorgus could be very obstinate when he wanted to, and he was, in this case, much to the dismay of the women, who felt that a man-doctor was an impropriety, and that the matter really belonged to them. The cheapest doctor they could find would charge them fifteen dollars, and perhaps more when the bill came in, and here was Jorgus declaring that he would pay it, even if he had to stop eating in the meantime. Maria had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of finding it. Maria could do the work of an able-bodied man when she was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would come home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time, poor creature. She learned it ten times over. All the family learned it along with her, that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you hang on to it, come what will. Four weeks Maria hunted, and half of a fifth week. Of course, she stopped paying her dues to the union. She lost all interest in the union, and cursed herself for a fool that she had ever been dragged into one. She had about made up her mind that she was a lost soul when somebody told her of an opening, and she went and got a place as a beef trimmer. She got this because the boss saw that she had the muscles of a man, and so he discharged the man and put Maria to do his work, paying her a little more than half what he had been paying before. When she first came to Packingtown, Maria would have scorned such work as this. She was in another canning factory, and her work was to trim the meat of those diseased cattle that Yurgis had been told about not long before. She was shut up in one of the rooms where the people seldom saw the daylight. Beneath her were the chilling rooms where the meat was frozen, and above her were the cooking rooms, and so she stood on an ice-cold floor while her head was often so hot that she could scarcely breathe. Trimming beef off the bones by the hundred weight, while standing up from early morning till late at night, with heavy boots on and the floor always damp and full of puddles, liable to be thrown out of work indefinitely because of a slackening in the trade, liable again to be kept overtime in rush seasons, and the work till she trembled in every nerve and lost her grip on her slimy knife and gave herself a poisoned wound. That was the new life that unfolded itself before Maria. But because Maria was a human horse, she merely laughed and went at it. It would enable her to pay her board again and keep the family going. And as for Tamosius, well, they had waited a long time and they could wait a little longer. They could not possibly get along upon his wages alone, and the family could not live without hers. He would come and visit her and sit in the kitchen and hold her hand, and he must manage to be content with that. But day by day the music of Tamosius' violin became more passionate and heartbreaking, and Maria would sit with her hands clasped in her cheeks wet and all her body a-tremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the unborn generations which cried out in her for life. Maria's lesson came just in time to save Ona from a similar fate. Ona, too, was dissatisfied with her place and had far more reason than Maria. She did not tell half of her story at home because she saw it was a torment to Yurgis, and she was afraid of what he might do. For a long time Ona had seen that Miss Henderson, the forelady in her department, did not like her. At first she thought it was the old-time mistake she had made in asking for a holiday to get married. Then she concluded it must be because she did not give the forelady a present occasionally. She was the kind that took presents from the girls Ona learned and made all sorts of discriminations in favor of those who gave them. In the end, however, Ona discovered that it was even worse than that. Miss Henderson was a newcomer, and it was some time before rumor made her out, but finally it transpired that she was a kept woman, the former mistress of the superintendent of a department in the same building. He had put her there to keep her quiet, it seemed, and that, not altogether with success, for once or twice they had been heard quarreling. She had the temper of a hyena, and soon the place she ran was a witch's cauldron. There were some of the girls who were of her own sort who were willing to toadie to her and flatter her, and these would carry tales about the rest, and so the furies were unchained in the place. Worse than this, the woman lived in a body-house downtown, with a coarse red-faced Irishman named Connor, who was the boss of the loading gang outside, and would make free with the girls as they went to and from their work. In the slack seasons, some of them would go with Miss Henderson to this house downtown. In fact, it would not be too much to say that she managed her department at Brown's in conjunction with it. Sometimes women from the house would be given places alongside of decent girls, and after other decent girls had been turned off to make room for them. When you worked in this woman's department, the house downtown was never out of your thoughts all day. There were always whiffs of it to be caught, like the odor of the packing-town rendering plants at night, when the wind shifted suddenly. There would be stories about it going the rounds. The girls opposite you would be telling them and winking at you. In such a place, Ona would not have stayed a day, but for starvation, and as it was, she was never sure that she could stay the next day. She understood now that the real reason that Miss Henderson hated her was that she was a decent married girl, and she knew that the tail-bearers and the toties hated her for the same reason, and were doing their best to make her life miserable. But there was no place a girl could go in packing-town, if she was particular about things of this sort. There was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl. Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave-drivers. Under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent as it was under the system of chattel-slavery. Things that were quite unspeakable went on there in the packing-houses all the time, and were taken for granted by everybody. Only they did not show, as in the old-slavery times, because there was no difference in color between master and slave. One morning Ona stayed home, and Yurgis had the man doctor according to his whim, and she was safely delivered of a fine baby. It was an enormous big boy, and Ona was such a tiny creature herself that it seemed quite incredible. Yurgis would stand and gaze at the stranger by the hour, unable to believe that it had really happened. The coming of this boy was a decisive event with Yurgis. It made him irrevocably a family man. It killed the last lingering impulse that he might have had to go out in the evenings and sit and talk with the men in the saloons. There was nothing he cared for now so much as to sit and look at the baby. This was very curious, for Yurgis had never been interested in babies before, but then this was a very unusual sort of a baby. He had the brightest little black eyes and little black ringlets all over his head. He was the living image of his father, everybody said, and Yurgis found this a fascinating circumstance. It was sufficiently perplexing that this tiny might of life should have come into the world at all in the manner that it had. That it should have come with a comical imitation of its father's nose was simply on candy. Perhaps Yurgis thought this was intended to signify that it was his baby, that it was his and Ona's, to care for all its life. Yurgis had never possessed anything nearly so interesting. A baby was, when you came to think about it, assuredly a marvelous possession. It would grow up to be a man, a human soul, with a personality all its own, a will of its own. Such thoughts would keep haunting Yurgis, filling him with all sorts of strange and almost painful excitements. He was wonderfully proud of little Antonos. He was curious about all the details of him, the washing and the dressing and the eating and the sleeping of him, and asked all sorts of absurd questions. It took him quite a while to get over his alarm at the incredible shortness of the little creature's legs. Yurgis had, alas, very little time to see his baby. He never felt the chains about him more than just then. When he came home at night, the baby would be asleep, and it would be the nearest chance if he awoke before Yurgis had to go to sleep himself. Then in the morning there was no time to look at him, so really the only chance the father had was on Sundays. This was more cruel yet for Ona, who ought to have stayed home and nursed him, the doctor said, for her own health as well as the baby's, but Ona had to go to work and leave him for Teta Elsbeta to feed upon the pale blue poison that was called milk at the corner grocery. Ona's confinement lost her only a week's wages. She would go to the factory the second Monday, and the best that Yurgis could persuade her was to ride in the car and let him run along behind and help her to Browns when she alighted. After that it would be all right, said Ona. It was no strain sitting still, sowing hands all day, and if she waited longer she might find that her dreadful forelady had put someone else in her place. That would be a greater calamity than ever now, Ona continued, on account of the baby. They would all have to work harder now on his account. It was such a responsibility. They must not have the baby grow up to suffer as they had, and this indeed had been the first thing that Yurgis had thought of himself. He had clenched his hands and braced himself anew for the struggle, for the sake of that tiny might of human possibility. And so Ona went back to Browns and saved her place and a week's wages, and so she gave herself someone of the thousand ailments that women group under the title of womb trouble, and was never again a well person as long as she lived. It is difficult to convey in words all that this meant to Ona. It seemed such a slight offense, and the punishment was so out of all proportion that neither she nor anyone else ever connected to two. Womb trouble to Ona did not mean a specialist diagnosis and a course of treatment, and perhaps an operation or two. It meant simply headaches and pains in the back, and depression and heart sickness, and the relgia when she had to go to work in the rain. The great majority of the women who worked in Packingtown suffered in the same way, and from the same cause, so it was not deemed a thing to see the doctor about. Instead Ona would try patent medicines one after the other, as her friends told her about them. As these all contained alcohol or some other stimulant, she found that they all did her good while she took them, and so she was always chasing the phantom of good health, and losing it because she was too poor to continue. End of chapter 10 Recording by Tom Weiss Chapter 11 of The Jungle This Lieberbach's recording is in the public domain. Recording by Tom Weiss The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Chapter 11 During the summer the packing houses were in full activity again, and Jörgdis made more money. He did not make so much, however, as he had the previous summer, for the packers took on more hands. There were new men every week it seemed. It was a regular system, and this number they would keep over to the next slack season, so that everyone would have less than ever. Sooner or later, by this plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago trained to do their work, and how very cunning a trick was that. The men were to teach new hands, who would someday come and break their strike, and meantime they were kept so poor that they could not prepare for the trial. But let no one suppose that this superfluidity of employees meant easier work for anyone. On the contrary, the speeding up seemed to be growing more savage all the time. They were continually inventing new devices to crowd the work on. It was for all the world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay them more. They would drive the men on with new machinery. It was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day. In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same wages. And then, after the workers had accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in time. They had done this so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly desperate. Their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break any day. Only a month after Maria had become a beef trimmer, the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls' earnings almost squarely in half. And so great was the indignation at this that they marched outside without even a parley and organized in the street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it, the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great department store at a salary of two dollars and a half a week. Yurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to 15 cents an hour, and Yurgis knew that if this was done his turn would come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency. Yurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof, and the price of all dressed meat in the country, but that was something he did not understand or care about. The only one who was not afraid of a cut was Maria, who congratulated herself somewhat naively, that there had been one in her place only a short time before she came. Maria was getting to be a skilled beef trimmer, and was mounting to the heights again. During the summer and fall, Yurgis and Ona managed to pay her back the last penny they owed her, and so she began to have a bank account. Tamosias had a bank account also, and they ran a race and began to figure upon household expenses once more. The possession of vast wealth entails cares and responsibilities, however, as poor Maria found out. She had taken the advice of a friend and invested her savings in a bank on Ashland Avenue. Of course she knew nothing about it, except that it was big and imposing. What possible chance has a poor foreign working girl to understand the banking business as it is conducted in this land of frenzied finance? So Maria lived in a continual dread lest something should happen to her bank, and would go out of her way mornings to make sure that it was still there. Her principal thought was of fire, for she had deposited her money in bills, and was afraid that if they were burned up the bank would not give her any others. Yurgis made fun of her for this, for he was a man and was proud of his superior knowledge, telling her that the bank had fireproof bolts, and all its millions of dollars hidden safely away in them. However, one morning Maria took her usual detour, and, to her horror and dismay, saw a crowd of people in front of the bank, filling the avenue solid for half a block. All the blood went out of her face for terror. She broke into a run shouting to the people to ask what was the matter, but not stopping to hear what they answered, till she had come to where the throng was so dense that she could no longer advance. There was a run on the bank, they told her then, but she did not know what that was, and turned from one person to another, trying in an agony of fear to make out what they meant. Had something gone wrong with the bank? Nobody was sure, but they thought so. Couldn't she get her money? There was no telling, the people were afraid not, and they were all trying to get it. It was too early yet to tell anything, the bank would not open for nearly three hours. So, in a frenzy of despair, Maria began to claw her way toward the doors of this building, through a throng of men, women, and children, all as excited as herself. It was a scene of wild confusion, women shrieking and wringing their hands and fainting, and men fighting and trampling down everything in their way. In the midst of the melee, Maria recollected that she did not have her bankbook, and could not get her money anyway, so she fought her way out and started on a run for home. This was fortunate for her, for a few minutes later the police reserves arrived. In half an hour Maria was back, Tata Elsbeta with her, both of them breathless with running and sick with fear. The crowd was now formed in a line, extending for several blocks, with half a hundred policemen keeping guard, and so there was nothing for them to do but to take their places at the end of it. At nine o'clock the bank opened and began to pay the waiting throng, but then what good did that do Maria, who saw three thousand people before her, enough to take out the last penny of a dozen banks? To make matters worse, a drizzling rain came up and soaked them to the skin, yet all the morning they stood there, creeping slowly toward the goal. All the afternoon they stood there, heart sick, seeing that the hour of closing was coming, and that they were going to be left out. Maria made up her mind that, come what might, she would stay there and keep her place, but as nearly all did the same, all through the long cold night she got very little closer to the bank for that. Toward evening Yurgis came, he had heard the story from the children, and he brought some food and dry wraps, which made it a little easier. The next morning before daybreak came a bigger crowd than ever, and more policemen from downtown. Maria held on like grim death, and toward afternoon she got into the bank and got her money, all in big silver dollars, a handkerchief full. When she had once got her hands on them, her fear vanished, and she wanted to put them back again, but the man at the window was savage and said that the bank would receive no more deposits from those who had taken part in the run. So Maria was forced to take her dollars home with her, watching to right and left, expecting every instant that someone would try to rob her, and when she got home she was not much better off. Until she could find another bank there was nothing to do but sew them up in her clothes, and so Maria went about for a week or more, loaded down with bullion and afraid to cross the street in front of the house, because Yurgis told her she would sink out of sight in the mud. Waited this way she made her way to the yards, again in fear, this time to see if she had lost her place. But fortunately about ten percent of the working people of Packingtown had been depositors in that bank, and it was not convenient to discharge that many at once. The cause of the panic had been the attempt of a policeman to arrest a drunken man in a saloon next door, which had drawn a crowd at the hour the people were on their way to work, and so started the run. About this time Yurgis and Ona also began a bank account. Besides having paid Gonas and Maria they had almost paid for their furniture and could have that little sum to count on, so long as each of them could bring home nine or ten dollars a week they were able to get along finally. Also election day came round again, and Yurgis made half a week's wages out of that, all net profit. It was a very close election that year, and the echoes of the battle reached even to Packingtown. The two rival sets of grafters hired halls and set off fireworks and made speeches to try to get the people interested in the matter. Although Yurgis did not understand it all, he knew enough by this time to realize that it was not supposed to be right to sell your vote. However, as everyone did it, and his refusal to join would not have made the slightest difference in the results, the idea of refusing would have seemed absurd had it ever come into his head. Now chill winds and shortening days began to warn them that the winter was coming again. It seemed as if the respite had been too short. They had not had time enough to get ready for it, but still it came inexorably, and the haunted look began to come back into the eyes of little Stanislawis. The prospect struck fear to the heart of Yurgis also, for he knew that Ona was not fit to face the cold and the snow drifts this year. And suppose that someday when a blizzard struck them and the cars were not running, Ona should have to give up, and should come the next day to find that her place had been given to someone who lived nearer and could be depended on. It was the week before Christmas that the first storm came, and then the soul of Yurgis rose up within him like a sleeping lion. There were four days that the Ashland Avenue cars were sold, and in those days, for the first time in his life, Yurgis knew what it was to be really opposed. He had faced difficulties before, but they had been child's play. Now there was a death struggle, and all the furies were unchained within him. The first morning they set out two hours before dawn. Ona wrapped up all in blankets and tossed upon his shoulder like a sack of meal, and the little boy bundled nearly out of sight, hanging by his coat tails. There was a raging blast feeding in his face, and the thermometer stood below zero. The snow was never short of his knees, and in some drifts it was nearly up to his armpits. It would catch his feet and try to trip him. It would build itself into a wall before him to beat him back, and he would fling himself into it, plunging like a wounded buffalo, puffing and snorting in rage. So, foot by foot, he drove his way, and when at last he came to Durham's, he was staggering and almost blind, and leaned against a pillar, gasping, and thanking God that the cattle came late to the killing beds that day. In the evening the same thing had to be done again, and because Yurgis could not tell what hour of the night he would get off, he got a saloon keeper to let Ona sit and wait for him in a corner. Once it was eleven o'clock at night, and black as the pit, but still they got home. That blizzard knocked many a man out, for the crowd outside begging for work was never greater, and the packers would not wait long for anyone. When it was over, the soul of Yurgis was a song, for he had met the enemy and conquered, and felt himself the master of his fate. So it might be with some monarch of the forest that has vanquished his foes in fair fight and then falls into some cowardly trap in the night-time. A time of peril on the killing fields was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck. Then there would be a yell of warning, the men would drop everything and dash for the nearest pillar, slipping here and there on the floor, and tumbling over each other. This was bad enough in the summer, when a man could see. In wintertime, it was enough to make your hair stand up, for the room would be so full of steam that you could not make anything out five feet in front of you. To be sure, the steer was generally blind and frantic, and not especially bent on hurting anyone, but think of the chances of running upon a knife, while nearly every man had one in his hand. And then, to cap the climax, the floor boss would come rushing up with a rifle and begin blazing away. It was in one of these melees that Yurgis fell into his trap. That is the only word to describe it. It was so cruel and so utterly not to be perceived. At first he hardly noticed it. It was such a slight accident, simply that in leaping out of the way he turned his ankle. There was a twinge of pain, but Yurgis was used to pain and did not coddle himself. When he came to walk home, however, he realized that it was hurting him a great deal, and in the morning his ankle was swollen out nearly double its size, and he could not get his foot into his shoe. Still, even then, he did nothing more than swear a little, and wrapped his foot in old rags and hobbled out to take the car. It chanced to be a rush day at Durum's, and all the long morning he limped about with his aching foot. By noontime the pain was so great that it made him faint, and after a couple of hours in the afternoon he was fairly beaten and had to tell the boss. They sent for the company doctor, and he examined the foot and told Yurgis to go home to bed, adding that he had probably laid himself up for months by his folly. The injury was not one that Durum and company could be held responsible for, and so that was all there was to it, so far as the doctor was concerned. Yurgis got home somehow, scarcely able to see for the pain, and with an awful terror in his soul, Elzbeta helped him into bed and bandaged his injured foot with cold water and tried hard not to let him see her dismay. When the rest came home at night she met them outside and told them, and they too put on a cheerful face, saying it would only be for a week or two, and that they would pull him through. When they had gotten him to sleep, however, they sat by the kitchen fire and talked it over in frightened whispers. They were in for a siege. That was plainly to be seen. Yurgis had only about sixty dollars in the bank, and the slack season was upon them, but Jonas and Maria might soon be earning no more than enough to pay their board, and besides that there were only the wages of Ona and the pittance of the little boy. There was the rent to pay, and still some on the furniture. There was the insurance, just due, and every month there was sack after sack of coal. It was January, midwinter, an awful time to have to face privation. Deep snows would come again, and who would carry Ona to her work now? She might lose her place, she was almost certain to lose it, and then little Stanislavist began to whimper, who would take care of him. It was dreadful that an accident of this sort, that no man can help, should have meant such suffering. The bitterness of it was the daily food and drink of Yurgis. It was of no use for them to try to deceive him. He knew as much about the situation as they did, and he knew that the family might literally starve to death. The worry of it fairly ate him up. He began to look haggard the first two or three days of it. In truth, it was almost maddening for a strong man like him, a fighter, to have to lie there helpless on his back. It was for all the world the old story of Prometheus found. As the Yurgis lay on his bed, hour after hour, there came to him emotions that he had never known before. Before this he had met life with a welcome. It had its trials, but none that a man could not face. But now, in the night time, when he lay tossing about, there would come stalking into his chamber a grisly phantom, the sight of which made his flesh curl and his hair to bristle up. It was like seeing the world fall away from underneath his feet, like plunging down into a bottomless abyss into yawning caverns of despair. It might be true then, after all, what others had told him about life, that the best powers of a man might not be equal to it. It might be true that, strived as he would, toiled as he would, he might fail and go down and be destroyed. The thought of this was like an icy hand at his heart, the thought that here, in this ghastly home of all horror, he and all those who were dear to him might lie and perish of starvation and cold, and there would be no ear to hear their cry, no hand to help them. It was true, it was true, that here, in this huge city, with its stores of heaped up wealth, human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed by the wild beast powers of nature, just as truly as ever they were in the days of the cavemen. Ona was now making about thirty dollars a month, and Stanislawus about thirteen. To add to this, there was the board of Jonas and Maria, about forty-five dollars. Deducting this from the rent, interest, and installments on the furniture, they had left sixty dollars, and deducting the coal, they had fifty. They did without everything that human beings could do without. They went in old and ragged clothing that left them at the mercy of the cold, and when the children's shoes wore out, they tied them up with string. Half-invalid as she was, Ona would do herself harm by walking in the rain and cold when she ought to have ridden. They bought literally nothing but food, and still they could not keep alive on fifty dollars a month. They might have done it, if only they could have gotten pure food and at fair prices, or if only they had known what to get, if they had not been so pitifully ignorant. But they had come to a new country where everything was different, including the food. They had always been accustomed to eat a great deal of smoked sausage, and how could they know that what they bought in America was not the same, that its color was made by chemicals, and that its smoky flavor by more chemicals, and that it was full of potato flour besides. Potato flour is the waste of potato after the starch and alcohol have been extracted. It has no more food value than so much wood, and as its use as a food adulterant is a penal offense in Europe, thousands of tons of it are shipped to America every year. It was amazing what quantities of food such as this were needed every day by eleven hungry persons. A dollar sixty-five a day was simply not enough to feed them, and there was no use trying, and so each week they made an in-road upon the pitiful little bank account that Ona had begun. Because the account was in her name, it was possible for her to keep this a secret from her husband, and to keep the heart-sickness of it for her own. It would have been better if Yurgis had been really ill if he had not been able to think, for he had no resources such as most invalids have. All he could do was to lie there and toss about from side to side. Now and then he would break into cursing, regardless of everything, and now and then his impatience would get the better of him, and he would try to get up, and poor Teta Elsbeta would have to plead with him in a frenzy. Elsbeta was all along with him the greater part of the time. She would sit and smooth his forehead by the hour, and talk to him and try to make him forget. Sometimes it would be too cold for the children to go to school, and they would have to play in the kitchen where Yurgis was, because it was the only room that was half warm. These were dreadful times, for Yurgis would get as cross as any bear. He was scarcely to be blamed, for he had enough to worry him, and it was hard when he was trying to take a nap to be kept awake by noisy and peevish children. Elsbeta's only resource in those times was little Antonas. Indeed it would be hard to say how they could have gotten along at all if it had not been for little Antonas. It was the one consolation of Yurgis' long imprisonment that now he had time to look at his baby. Teta Elsbeta would put the clothes basket in which the baby slept alongside of his mattress, and Yurgis would lie upon one elbow and watch him by the hour, imagining things. Then little Antonas would open his eyes. He was beginning to take notice of things now, and he would smile, how he would smile. So Yurgis would begin to forget and be happy, because he was in a world where there was a thing so beautiful as the smile of little Antonas, and because such a world could not but be good at the heart of it. He looked more like his father every hour, Elsbeta would say, and said it many times a day, because she saw that it pleased Yurgis. The poor little terror-stricken woman was planning all day and all night to sue the prison giant who was entrusted to her care. Yurgis, who knew nothing about the age-long and everlasting hypocrisy of woman, would take the bait and grin with delight, and then he would hold his finger in front of little Antonas' eyes, and move it this way, and that, and laugh with glee to see the baby follow it. There is no pet quite so fascinating as a baby. He would look in the Yurgis' face with such uncanny seriousness, and Yurgis would start and cry. Ha-luck! Look, Mooma! He knows his papa! He does! He does! Tumana share-delay, the little rascal! End of Chapter 11, Recording by Tom Weiss