From
The Jungle.
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 Marija.
The victim was Tamoszius Kuszleika, who played the violin. Everybody
laughed at them, for Tamoszius was petite and frail, and Marija could
have picked him up and carried him off under one arm. But perhaps that
was why she fascinated him; the sheer volume of Marija's energy was
overwhelming. That first night at the wedding Tamoszius 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 Tamoszius 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 Jurgis would
clap him upon the back, in his hearty way, crying, "Come now, brother,
give us a tune." And then Tamoszius' face would light up and he would
get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin, and play. And forthwith
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 Marija's face,
until she would begin to turn red and lower her eyes. There was no
resisting the music of Tamoszius, however; even the children would sit
awed and wondering, and the tears would run down Teta Elzbieta'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 Marija from this friendship--
benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamoszius 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-natured
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 Marija to accompany
him to such a party, and Marija 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
Marija would bring back a huge pocketful 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; Tamoszius 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 Marija 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 hardworked 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 Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin case in the street
and spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms. She told
them all about it the next day, and fairly cried with happiness, for she
said that Tamoszius 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. Tamoszius made good wages;
and little by little the family were paying back their debt to Marija,
so she ought soon to have enough to start life upon--only, with her
preposterous softheartedness, she would insist upon spending a good part
of her money every week for things which she saw they needed. Marija was
really the capitalist of the party, for 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.
Marija 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 Marija 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! Marija 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 that there was to it--her job was gone!
It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to
Marija'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, for 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, can-painting, 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.
Marija 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 Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As nearly all
the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls hunting work,
it will be readily understood that Marija 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 lake front, 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 Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis 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 Jurgis 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 Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would 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 supper. 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
kicking 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 altered. And so
on Christmas Eve Jurgis 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. Jurgis 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.
ne 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 "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. Jurgis 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 lives--and when one was in danger of falling behind
the standard, what was easier than to catch up by making the gang work
awhile "for the church"? This was a savage witticism the men had, which
Jurgis 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 Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in
a far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis,
this of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand
and conquer the packers! Jurgis 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 "a free 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 Jurgis
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, Marija'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 Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; 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.
Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis 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 Irishman, with big staring eyes and a wild
aspect, a "hoister" 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. Jurgis did not mind that,
only he was frightened. The method of operation of the higher intelligences
was Tom Finnegan's theme, and he desired to find out if Jurgis 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 ye have iver had onything to do wid
shperrits," said he, and looked inquiringly at Jurgis, who kept shaking
his head. "Niver mind, niver mind," continued the other, "but their
influences may be operatin' upon ye; it's shure as I'm tellin' ye, it's
them that has the reference to the immejit surroundin's that has the most
of power. It was vouchsafed to me in me youthful days to be acquainted
with shperrits" and so Tommy Finnegan went on, expounding a system of
philosophy, while the perspiration came out on Jurgis' forehead, so great
was his agitation and embarrassment. In the end one of the men, seeing
his plight, came over and rescued him; but it was some time before he was
able to find any one 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 declaiming
at once, in as many dialects of English; but the speakers were all
desperately in earnest, and Jurgis was in earnest too, for he understood
that a fight was on, and that it was his fight. Since the time of his
disillusionment, Jurgis 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. Jurgis 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 nonunion 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 Jurgis, alas, 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.
The Jungle Chapter 9