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Chapter 21
That was the way they did it! There was not half an hour's
warning--the works were closed! It had happened that way before,
said the men, and it would happen that way forever. They had
made all the harvesting machines that the world needed, and now
they had to wait till some wore out! It was nobody's fault--
that was the way of it; and thousands of men and women were turned out
in the dead of winter, to live upon their savings if they had
any, and otherwise to die. So many tens of thousands already in
the city, homeless and begging for work, and now several thousand
more added to them!
Jurgis walked home-with his pittance of pay in his pocket,
heartbroken, overwhelmed. One more bandage had been torn from
his eyes, one more pitfall was revealed to him! Of what help was
kindness and decency on the part of employers--when they could
not keep a job for him, when there were more harvesting machines
made than the world was able to buy! What a hellish mockery it
was, anyway, that a man should slave to make harvesting machines
for the country, only to be turned out to starve for doing his
duty too well!
It took him two days to get over this heartsickening
disappointment. He did not drink anything, because Elzbieta got
his money for safekeeping, and knew him too well to be in the
least frightened by his angry demands. He stayed up in the
garret however, and sulked--what was the use of a man's hunting a
job when it was taken from him before he had time to learn the
work? But then their money was going again, and little Antanas
was hungry, and crying with the bitter cold of the garret.
Also Madame Haupt, the midwife, was after him for some money.
So he went out once more.
For another ten days he roamed the streets and alleys of the huge
city, sick and hungry, begging for any work. He tried in stores
and offices, in restaurants and hotels, along the docks and in
the railroad yards, in warehouses and mills and factories where
they made products that went to every corner of the world. There
were often one or two chances--but there were always a hundred
men for every chance, and his turn would not come. At night he
crept into sheds and cellars and doorways--until there came a
spell of belated winter weather, with a raging gale, and the
thermometer five degrees below zero at sundown and falling all
night. Then Jurgis fought like a wild beast to get into the big
Harrison Street police station, and slept down in a corridor,
crowded with two other men upon a single step.
He had to fight often in these days to fight for a place near the
factory gates, and now and again with gangs on the street. He
found, for instance, that the business of carrying satchels for
railroad passengers was a pre-empted one--whenever he essayed it,
eight or ten men and boys would fall upon him and force him to
run for his life. They always had the policeman "squared," and
so there was no use in expecting protection.
That Jurgis did not starve to death was due solely to the
pittance the children brought him. And even this was never
certain. For one thing the cold was almost more than the
children could bear; and then they, too, were in perpetual peril
from rivals who plundered and beat them. The law was against
them, too--little Vilimas, who was really eleven, but did not
look to be eight, was stopped on the streets by a severe old lady
in spectacles, who told him that he was too young to be working
and that if he did not stop selling papers she would send a
truant officer after him. Also one night a strange man caught
little Kotrina by the arm and tried to persuade her into a dark
cellarway, an experience which filled her with such terror that
she was hardly to be kept at work.
At last, on a Sunday, as there was no use looking for work,
Jurgis went home by stealing rides on the cars. He found that
they had been waiting for him for three days--there was a chance
of a job for him.
It was quite a story. Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with
hunger these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself.
Juozapas had only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a
little child, but he had got himself a broomstick, which he put
under his arm for a crutch. He had fallen in with some other
children and found the way to Mike Scully's dump, which lay three
or four blocks away. To this place there came every day many
hundreds of wagonloads of garbage and trash from the lake front,
where the rich people lived; and in the heaps the children raked
for food--there were hunks of bread and potato peelings and apple
cores and meat bones, all of it half frozen and quite unspoiled.
Little Juozapas gorged himself, and came home with a newspaper
full, which he was feeding to Antanas when his mother came in.
Elzbieta was horrified, for she did not believe that the food out
of the dumps was fit to eat. The next day, however, when no harm
came of it and Juozapas began to cry with hunger, she gave in and
said that he might go again. And that afternoon he came home
with a story of how while he had been digging away with a stick,
a lady upon the street had called him. A real fine lady,
the little boy explained, a beautiful lady; and she wanted to know
all about him, and whether he got the garbage for chickens,
and why he walked with a broomstick, and why Ona had died, and how
Jurgis had come to go to jail, and what was the matter with
Marija, and everything. In the end she had asked where he lived,
and said that she was coming to see him, and bring him a new
crutch to walk with. She had on a hat with a bird upon it,
Juozapas added, and a long fur snake around her neck.
She really came, the very next morning, and climbed the ladder to
the garret, and stood and stared about her, turning pale at the
sight of the blood stains on the floor where Ona had died. She
was a "settlement worker," she explained to Elzbieta--she lived
around on Ashland Avenue. Elzbieta knew the place, over a feed
store; somebody had wanted her to go there, but she had not cared
to, for she thought that it must have something to do with
religion, and the priest did not like her to have anything to do
with strange religions. They were rich people who came to live
there to find out about the poor people; but what good they
expected it would do them to know, one could not imagine. So
spoke Elzbieta, naively, and the young lady laughed and was
rather at a loss for an answer--she stood and gazed about her,
and thought of a cynical remark that had been made to her, that
she was standing upon the brink of the pit of hell and throwing
in snowballs to lower the temperature.
Elzbieta was glad to have somebody to listen, and she told all
their woes--what had happened to Ona, and the jail, and the loss
of their home, and Marija's accident, and how Ona had died, and
how Jurgis could get no work. As she listened the pretty young
lady's eyes filled with tears, and in the midst of it she burst
into weeping and hid her face on Elzbieta's shoulder, quite
regardless of the fact that the woman had on a dirty old wrapper
and that the garret was full of fleas. Poor Elzbieta was ashamed
of herself for having told so woeful a tale, and the other had to
beg and plead with her to get her to go on. The end of it was
that the young lady sent them a basket of things to eat, and left
a letter that Jurgis was to take to a gentleman who was
superintendent in one of the mills of the great steelworks in
South Chicago. "He will get Jurgis something to do," the young
lady had said, and added, smiling through her tears--"If he
doesn't, he will never marry me."
The steel-works were fifteen miles away, and as usual it was so
contrived that one had to pay two fares to get there. Far and
wide the sky was flaring with the red glare that leaped from rows
of towering chimneys--for it was pitch dark when Jurgis arrived.
The vast works, a city in themselves, were surrounded by a
stockade; and already a full hundred men were waiting at the gate
where new hands were taken on. Soon after daybreak whistles
began to blow, and then suddenly thousands of men appeared,
streaming from saloons and boardinghouses across the way, leaping
from trolley cars that passed--it seemed as if they rose out of
the ground, in the dim gray light. A river of them poured in
through the gate--and then gradually ebbed away again, until
there were only a few late ones running, and the watchman pacing
up and down, and the hungry strangers stamping and shivering.
Jurgis presented his precious letter. The gatekeeper was surly,
and put him through a catechism, but he insisted that he knew
nothing, and as he had taken the precaution to seal his letter,
there was nothing for the gatekeeper to do but send it to the
person to whom it was addressed. A messenger came back to say
that Jurgis should wait, and so he came inside of the gate,
perhaps not sorry enough that there were others less fortunate
watching him with greedy eyes. The great mills were getting
under way--one could hear a vast stirring, a rolling and rumbling
and hammering. Little by little the scene grew plain: towering,
black buildings here and there, long rows of shops and sheds,
little railways branching everywhere, bare gray cinders underfoot
and oceans of billowing black smoke above. On one side of the
grounds ran a railroad with a dozen tracks, and on the other side
lay the lake, where steamers came to load.
Jurgis had time enough to stare and speculate, for it was two
hours before he was summoned. He went into the office building,
where a company timekeeper interviewed him. The superintendent
was busy, he said, but he (the timekeeper) would try to find
Jurgis a job. He had never worked in a steel mill before? But
he was ready for anything? Well, then, they would go and see.
So they began a tour, among sights that made Jurgis stare amazed.
He wondered if ever he could get used to working in a place like
this, where the air shook with deafening thunder, and whistles
shrieked warnings on all sides of him at once; where miniature
steam engines came rushing upon him, and sizzling, quivering,
white-hot masses of metal sped past him, and explosions of fire
and flaming sparks dazzled him and scorched his face. Then men
in these mills were all black with soot, and hollow-eyed and
gaunt; they worked with fierce intensity, rushing here and there,
and never lifting their eyes from their tasks. Jurgis clung to
his guide like a scared child to its nurse, and while the latter
hailed one foreman after another to ask if they could use another
unskilled man, he stared about him and marveled.
He was taken to the Bessemer furnace, where they made billets of
steel--a domelike building, the size of a big theater. Jurgis
stood where the balcony of the theater would have been,
and opposite, by the stage, he saw three giant caldrons, big enough
for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in, full of
something white and blinding, bubbling and splashing, roaring as
if volcanoes were blowing through it--one had to shout to be
heard in the place. Liquid fire would leap from these caldrons
and scatter like bombs below--and men were working there, seeming
careless, so that Jurgis caught his breath with fright. Then a
whistle would toot, and across the curtain of the theater would
come a little engine with a carload of something to be dumped
into one of the receptacles; and then another whistle would toot,
down by the stage, and another train would back up--and suddenly,
without an instant's warning, one of the giant kettles began to
tilt and topple, flinging out a jet of hissing, roaring flame.
Jurgis shrank back appalled, for he thought it was an accident;
there fell a pillar of white flame, dazzling as the sun, swishing
like a huge tree falling in the forest. A torrent of sparks
swept all the way across the building, overwhelming everything,
hiding it from sight; and then Jurgis looked through the fingers
of his hands, and saw pouring out of the caldron a cascade of
living, leaping fire, white with a whiteness not of earth,
scorching the eyeballs. Incandescent rainbows shone above it,
blue, red, and golden lights played about it; but the stream
itself was white, ineffable. Out of regions of wonder it
streamed, the very river of life; and the soul leaped up at the
sight of it, fled back upon it, swift and resistless, back into
far-off lands, where beauty and terror dwell. Then the great
caldron tilted back again, empty, and Jurgis saw to his relief
that no one was hurt, and turned and followed his guide out into
the sunlight.
They went through the blast furnaces, through rolling mills where
bars of steel were tossed about and chopped like bits of cheese.
All around and above giant machine arms were flying, giant wheels
were turning, great hammers crashing; traveling cranes creaked
and groaned overhead, reaching down iron hands and seizing iron
prey--it was like standing in the center of the earth, where the
machinery of time was revolving.
By and by they came to the place where steel rails were made; and
Jurgis heard a toot behind him, and jumped out of the way of a
car with a white-hot ingot upon it, the size of a man's body.
There was a sudden crash and the car came to a halt, and the
ingot toppled out upon a moving platform, where steel fingers and
arms seized hold of it, punching it and prodding it into place,
and hurrying it into the grip of huge rollers. Then it came out
upon the other side, and there were more crashings and
clatterings, and over it was flopped, like a pancake on a
gridiron, and seized again and rushed back at you through another
squeezer. So amid deafening uproar it clattered to and fro,
growing thinner and flatter and longer. The ingot seemed almost
a living thing; it did not want to run this mad course, but it
was in the grip of fate, it was tumbled on, screeching and
clanking and shivering in protest. By and by it was long and
thin, a great red snake escaped from purgatory; and then, as it
slid through the rollers, you would have sworn that it was
alive--it writhed and squirmed, and wriggles and shudders passed
out through its tail, all but flinging it off by their violence.
There was no rest for it until it was cold and black--and then it
needed only to be cut and straightened to be ready for a
railroad.
It was at the end of this rail's progress that Jurgis got his
chance. They had to be moved by men with crowbars, and the boss
here could use another man. So he took off his coat and set to
work on the spot.
It took him two hours to get to this place every day and cost him
a dollar and twenty cents a week. As this was out of the
question, he wrapped his bedding in a bundle and took it with
him, and one of his fellow workingmen introduced him to a Polish
lodginghouse, where he might have the privilege of sleeping upon
the floor for ten cents a night. He got his meals at free-lunch
counters, and every Saturday night he went home--bedding and
all--and took the greater part of his money to the family.
Elzbieta was sorry for this arrangement, for she feared that it
would get him into the habit of living without them, and once a
week was not very often for him to see his baby; but there was no
other way of arranging it. There was no chance for a woman at
the steelworks, and Marija was now ready for work again, and
lured on from day to day by the hope of finding it at the yards.
In a week Jurgis got over his sense of helplessness and
bewilderment in the rail mill. He learned to find his way about
and to take all the miracles and terrors for granted, to work
without hearing the rumbling and crashing. From blind fear he
went to the other extreme; he became reckless and indifferent,
like all the rest of the men, who took but little thought of
themselves in the ardor of their work. It was wonderful, when
one came to think of it, that these men should have taken an
interest in the work they did--they had no share in it--they were
paid by the hour, and paid no more for being interested. Also
they knew that if they were hurt they would be flung aside and
forgotten--and still they would hurry to their task by dangerous
short cuts, would use methods that were quicker and more
effective in spite of the fact that they were also risky. His
fourth day at his work Jurgis saw a man stumble while running in
front of a car, and have his foot mashed off, and before he had
been there three weeks he was witness of a yet more dreadful
accident. There was a row of brick furnaces, shining white
through every crack with the molten steel inside. Some of these
were bulging dangerously, yet men worked before them, wearing
blue glasses when they opened and shut the doors. One morning as
Jurgis was passing, a furnace blew out, spraying two men with a
shower of liquid fire. As they lay screaming and rolling upon
the ground in agony, Jurgis rushed to help them, and as a result
he lost a good part of the skin from the inside of one of his
hands. The company doctor bandaged it up, but he got no other
thanks from any one, and was laid up for eight working days
without any pay.
Most fortunately, at this juncture, Elzbieta got the long-awaited
chance to go at five o'clock in the morning and help scrub the
office floors of one of the packers. Jurgis came home and
covered himself with blankets to keep warm, and divided his time
between sleeping and playing with little Antanas. Juozapas was
away raking in the dump a good part of the time, and Elzbieta and
Marija were hunting for more work.
Antanas was now over a year and a half old, and was a perfect
talking machine. He learned so fast that every week when Jurgis
came home it seemed to him as if he had a new child. He would
sit down and listen and stare at him, and give vent to delighted
exclamations--"Palauk! Muma! Tu mano szirdele!" The little
fellow was now really the one delight that Jurgis had in the
world--his one hope, his one victory. Thank God, Antanas was a
boy! And he was as tough as a pine knot, and with the appetite
of a wolf. Nothing had hurt him, and nothing could hurt him; he
had come through all the suffering and deprivation
unscathed--only shriller-voiced and more determined in his grip
upon life. He was a terrible child to manage, was Antanas, but
his father did not mind that--he would watch him and smile to
himself with satisfaction. The more of a fighter he was the
better--he would need to fight before he got through.
Jurgis had got the habit of buying the Sunday paper whenever he
had the money; a most wonderful paper could be had for only five
cents, a whole armful, with all the news of the world set forth
in big headlines, that Jurgis could spell out slowly, with the
children to help him at the long words. There was battle and
murder and sudden death--it was marvelous how they ever heard
about so many entertaining and thrilling happenings; the stories
must be all true, for surely no man could have made such things
up, and besides, there were pictures of them all, as real as
life. One of these papers was as good as a circus, and nearly as
good as a spree--certainly a most wonderful treat for a workingman,
who was tired out and stupefied, and had never had any
education, and whose work was one dull, sordid grind, day
after day, and year after year, with never a sight of a green
field nor an hour's entertainment, nor anything but liquor to
stimulate his imagination. Among other things, these papers had
pages full of comical pictures, and these were the main joy in
life to little Antanas. He treasured them up, and would drag
them out and make his father tell him about them; there were all
sorts of animals among them, and Antanas could tell the names of
all of them, lying upon the floor for hours and pointing them out
with his chubby little fingers. Whenever the story was plain
enough for Jurgis to make out, Antanas would have it repeated to
him, and then he would remember it, prattling funny little
sentences and mixing it up with other stories in an irresistible
fashion. Also his quaint pronunciation of words was such a
delight--and the phrases he would pick up and remember, the most
outlandish and impossible things! The first time that the little
rascal burst out with "God damn," his father nearly rolled off
the chair with glee; but in the end he was sorry for this, for
Antanas was soon "God-damning" everything and everybody.
And then, when he was able to use his hands, Jurgis took his
bedding again and went back to his task of shifting rails. It
was now April, and the snow had given place to cold rains, and
the unpaved street in front of Aniele's house was turned into a
canal. Jurgis would have to wade through it to get home, and if
it was late he might easily get stuck to his waist in the mire.
But he did not mind this much--it was a promise that summer was
coming. Marija had now gotten a place as beef-trimmer in one of
the smaller packing plants; and he told himself that he had
learned his lesson now, and would meet with no more accidents--
so that at last there was prospect of an end to their long agony.
They could save money again, and when another winter came they
would have a comfortable place; and the children would be off the
streets and in school again, and they might set to work to nurse
back into life their habits of decency and kindness. So once
more Jurgis began to make plans and dream dreams.
And then one Saturday night he jumped off the car and started
home, with the sun shining low under the edge of a bank of clouds
that had been pouring floods of water into the mud-soaked street.
There was a rainbow in the sky, and another in his breast--for he
had thirty-six hours' rest before him, and a chance to see his
family. Then suddenly he came in sight of the house, and noticed
that there was a crowd before the door. He ran up the steps and
pushed his way in, and saw Aniele's kitchen crowded with excited
women. It reminded him so vividly of the time when he had come
home from jail and found Ona dying, that his heart almost stood
still. "What's the matter?" he cried.
A dead silence had fallen in the room, and he saw that every one
was staring at him. "What's the matter?" he exclaimed again.
And then, up in the garret, he heard sounds of wailing, in
Marija's voice. He started for the ladder--and Aniele seized him
by the arm. "No, no!" she exclaimed. "Don't go up there!"
"What is it?" he shouted.
And the old woman answered him weakly: "It's Antanas. He's dead.
He was drowned out in the street!"
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