The Jungle

by Upton Sinclair

Some of it they would make into “smoked” sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would preserve it with borax, and color it with gelatine to make it brown.

Such were the new surroundings in which Ona was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent—Ona, who had once gone about all day singing like a bird. She had nothing to sing about now, nothing to think about. She had barely strength to drag herself home at night; she would meet Jurgis at the corner, and often they would not say a word all the way. At home they would eat what they had to eat, and then, because there was only their misery to talk of, they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time to get up again, and dress by candle light, and go back to the machine. They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.

Meantime, too, they had some-thing to think about while they worked—

they had the memory of the last time they had been drunk, and the hope of the time when they would be drunk again.

She would have frightful headaches and fits of aimless weeping; sometimes she would come home at night shuddering and moaning, and would fling herself down upon the bed and burst into tears. Several times she was quite beside herself and hysterical; and then Jurgis would go half mad with fright. Elzbieta would explain to him that it could not be helped, that a woman was subject to such things

Once or twice in these outbreaks he caught Ona’s eye, and it seemed to him like the eye of a hunted animal; there were broken phrases of anguish and despair now and then amid her frantic weeping.

There was no choice about this—whatever work there was to be done she had to do, if she wished to keep her place, besides that, it added another pittance to her income, so she staggered on with the awful load.

She would start to work every morning at seven, and eat her dinner at noon, and then work until ten or eleven at night without another mouthful of food.

Jurgis had nothing to put on but his shoes and his coat, and in half a minute he was out of the door. Then, however, he realized that there was no need of haste, that he had no idea where to go. It was still dark as midnight. And the thick snowflakes were sifting down—everything was so silent that he could hear the rustle of them as they fell. In the few seconds that he stood there hesitating, he was covered white.

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watching him; keeping as far away as possible, however, on account of the fertilizer.

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he knew what the police were. It was as much as a man’s very life was worth to anger them, here in their inmost lair; like as not a dozen would pile on to him at once, and pound his face into a pulp. It would be nothing unusual if he got his skull cracked in the melee—in which case they would report that he had been drunk and had fallen down, and there would be no one to know the difference, or to care.

that he had nearly killed the boss would not help Ona—not the horrors that she had borne, nor the memory that would haunt her all her days. It would not help to feed her and her child; she would certainly lose her place, while he—what was to happen to him, God only knew.

At midnight they opened the station-house to the homeless wanderers who were crowded about the door, shivering in the winter blast; they thronged into the corridor outside of the cells. Some of them stretched themselves out on the bare stone floor and fell to snoring; others sat up, laughing and talking, cursing and quarreling.

They had brought him his supper, which was “duffers and dope”—being hunks of dry bread on a tin plate, and coffee, called “dope” because it was drugged to keep the prisoners quiet.

seen any dead bodies in the streets, but he had seen people evicted and disappear, no one knew where;

relief-bureau, though there was a charity organization society in the stock-yards district, in all his life there he had never heard of them. They did not advertise their activities, having ten times as many calls as they could attend to without that.

he had been at it a long time—had been the business agent in the city council of old man Anderson,

Then they led him to a room and told him to strip for a bath; after which he had to walk down a long gallery, past the grated cell-doors of the inmates of the jail. This was a great event to the latter—the daily review of the new arrivals—all stark naked—and many and diverting were the comments.

There were two bunks, one above the other, each with a straw mattress and a pair of gray blankets—the latter stiff as boards with filth, and alive with fleas, bed-bugs and lice. When Jurgis lifted up the mattress he discovered beneath it a layer of skurrying roaches almost as badly frightened as himself.

Would any man in his senses have trapped a wild thing in its lair and left its young to die?

He was striking all the time— there was war between him and society. He was a genial free-booter, living off the enemy, without fear or shame; he was not always victorious, but then defeat did not mean annihilation, and need not break his

For his cell-mate Jurgis had an Italian fruit-seller who had refused to pay his graft to the policeman and been arrested for carrying a large pocket-knife;

who proved to be quarrelsome, cursing Jurgis because he moved in his bunk and caused the roaches to drop upon the lower one. It would have been quite intolerable, staying in a cell with this

Sometimes they can’t come home at all—I’m going to try to find them tonight and sleep where they do, it’s so late, and it’s such a long ways home.

set out to “do up” his boss,

He had to walk every foot of it, for they had turned him out of jail without a penny in his pockets.

Every few blocks there would be a railroad crossing, on a level with the sidewalk, a death-trap for the unwary; long freight trains would be passing, the cars clanking and crashing together, and Jurgis would pace about waiting, burning up with a fever of impatience. Occasionally the cars would stop for some minutes, and wagons and street-cars would crowd together waiting, the drivers swearing at each other, or hiding beneath umbrellas out of the rain; at such times Jurgis would dodge under the gates and run across the tracks and between the cars, taking his life into his hands.

Jurgis’s brain was so in a whirl that he could not grasp the situation. It was as if his family had been wiped out of existence; as if they were proving to be dream people, who never had existed at all. He was quite lost—but then suddenly he thought of Grandmother

It was monstrous, it was unthinkable—they could not do it—it could not be true! Only think what he had suffered for that house—what miseries they had all suffered for it—the price they had paid for it!

gone—they were back where they had started from, flung out into the cold to starve and freeze!

they were tied hand and foot; the law was against them—the whole machinery of society was at their oppressors’ command! If Jurgis so much as raised a hand against them, back he would go into that wild-beast pen from which he had just escaped!

half-dazed.

said, “and try and get somebody yourself. And maybe the rest can help —give him some money, you; he will pay you back some day, and it will do him good to have something to think about, even if he doesn’t succeed. When he comes back maybe it will be over.” And so the other women turned out the contents of their pocketbooks; most of them had only pennies and nickels, but they gave him all. Mrs. Oiszewski, who lived next door, and had a husband who was a skilled cattle-butcher, but a drinking man, gave nearly half a dollar, enough to raise the whole sum to a dollar and a quarter. Then Jurgis thrust it into his pocket, still holding it tightly in his fist, and started away at a run.

“MADAME HAUPT,

“But where shall I go?” Jurgis asked, helplessly. “I don’t know where,” she answered. “Go on the street, if there is no other place—only go! And stay all night!”

He was used to the sight of human wrecks, this saloon-keeper; he “fired” dozens of them every night, just as haggard and cold and forlorn as this one. But they were all men who had given up and been counted out, while Jurgis was still in the fight, and had reminders of decency about him. As he got up meekly, the other reflected that he had always been a steady man, and might soon be a good customer again. “You’ve been up against it, I see,” he said. “Come this way.”

BUT A BIG MAN cannot stay drunk very long on three dollars.

also it was nearly as cold as out-doors.

Perhaps he ought to have meditated upon the hunger of the children, and upon his own baseness; but he thought only of Ona, he gave himself up again to the luxury of grief. He shed no tears, being ashamed to make a sound; he sat motionless and shuddering with his anguish.

poor devil, he was black-listed!

time in St. Louis and New York, in Omaha and Boston, in Kansas City and St. Joseph. He was condemned and sentenced, without trial and without appeal; he could never work for the packers again—he could not even clean cattle-pens or drive a truck in any place where they controlled.

There was nothing in Packingtown but packing-houses; and so it was the same thing as evicting him from his home.

As there was no one from whom he could borrow there, and he dared not beg for fear of being arrested, it was arranged that every day he should meet one of the children and be given fifteen cents of their earnings, upon which he could keep going. Then all day he was to pace the streets with hundreds and thousands of other homeless wretches, inquiring at stores, warehouses and factories for a chance; and at night he was to crawl into some door-way, or underneath a truck, and hide there until midnight, when he might get into one of the station-houses, and spread a newspaper upon the floor, and lie down in the midst of a throng of “bums” and beggars, reeking with alcohol and tobacco, and filthy with vermin and disease.

So for two weeks more Jurgis fought with the demon of despair.

on several nights when he might otherwise have frozen to death;

Day after day Jurgis discovered these things—things never expected nor dreamed of by him—until this new place came to seem a kind of a heaven to him.

setting the machine to match the highest possible speed of human hands. Thirty thousand of these pieces he handled every day—nine or ten millions every year—how many in a lifetime it rested with the gods to say.

with no overcoat and not pay for it, and Jurgis had to walk or ride five or six miles back and forth to his work. It so happened that half of this was in one direction and half in another, necessitating a change of cars;

to this pirate power, which had gotten its franchises long ago by buying up the city council, in the face of popular clamor amounting almost to a rebellion.

and dark and bitter cold as it was in the morning, Jurgis generally chose to walk; at the hours other workmen were traveling, the street-car monopoly saw fit to put on so few cars that there would be men hanging to every foot of the backs of them and often crouching upon the snow-covered roof. Of course, the doors could never be closed, and so the cars were as cold as out-doors;