He paused for a moment, watching her. “You were out of work?” he asked, finally.
“I got sick,” she replied, “and after that I had no money. And then Stanislovas died—”
“Stanislovas dead!”
“Yes,” said Marija, “I forgot. You didn’t know about it.”
“How did he die?”
“Rats killed him,” she answered.
Jurgis gave a gasp.
“Rats
killed him!”
“Yes,” said the other; she was bending over, lacing her shoes as she spoke. “He was working in an oil factory—at least he was hired by the men to get their beer. He used to carry cans on a long pole; and he’d drink a little out of each can, and one day he drank too much, and fell asleep in a corner, and got locked up in the place all night. When they found him the rats had killed him and eaten him nearly all up.”
Jurgis sat, frozen with horror. Marija went on lacing up her shoes. There was a long silence.
Suddenly a big policeman came to the door. “Hurry up, there,” he said.
“As quick as I can,” said Marija, and she stood up and began putting on her corsets with feverish haste.
“Are the rest of the people alive?” asked Jurgis, finally.
“Yes,” she said.
“Where are they?”
“They live not far from here. They’re all right now.”
“They are working?” he inquired.
“Elzbieta is,” said Marija, “when she can. I take care of them most of the time—I’m making plenty of money now.”
Jurgis was silent for a moment. “Do they know you live here—how you live?” he asked.
“Elzbieta knows,” answered Marija. “I couldn’t lie to her. And maybe the children have found out by this time. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—we can’t help it.”
“And Tamoszius?” he asked. “Does he know?”
Marija shrugged her shoulders. “How do I know?” she said. “I haven’t seen him for over a year. He got blood-poisoning and lost one finger, and couldn’t play the violin any more; and then he went away.”
Marija was standing in front of the glass fastening her dress. Jurgis sat staring at her. He could hardly believe that she was the same woman he had known in the old days; she was so quiet—so hard! It struck fear to his heart to watch her.
Then suddenly she gave a glance at him. “You look as if you had been having a rough time of it yourself,” she said.
“I have,” he answered. “I haven’t a cent in my pockets, and nothing to do.”
“Where have you been?”
“All over. I’ve been hoboing it. Then I went back to the yards—just before the strike.” He paused for a moment, hesitating. “I asked for you,” he added. “I found you had gone away, no one knew where. Perhaps you think I did you a dirty trick, running away as I did, Manja—”
“No,” she answered, “I don’t blame you. We never have—any of us. You did your best—the job was too much for us.” She paused a moment, then added: “We were too ignorant—that was the trouble. We didn’t stand any chance. If I’d known what I know now we’d have won out.”
“You’d have come here?” said Jurgis.
“Yes,” she answered; “but that’s not what I meant. I meant you—how differently you would have behaved—about Ona.”
Jurgis was silent; he had never thought of that aspect of it.
“When people are starving,” the other continued, “and they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it, I say. I guess you realize it now when it’s too late. Ona could have taken care of us all, in the beginning.” Marija spoke without emotion, as one who had come to regard things from the business point of view.
“I—yes, I guess so,” Jurgis answered hesitatingly. He did not add that he had paid three hundred dollars, and a foreman’s job, for the satisfaction of knocking down “Phil” Connor a second time.
The policeman came to the door again just then. “Come on, now,” he said. “Lively!”
“All right,” said Marija, reaching for her hat, which was big enough to be a drum-major‘s, and full of ostrich feathers. She went out into the hall and Jurgis followed, the policeman remaining to look under the bed and behind the door.
“What’s going to come of this?” Jurgis asked, as they started down the steps.
“The raid, you mean? Oh, nothing—it happens to us every now and then. The madame’s having some sort of time with the police; I don’t know what it is, but maybe they’ll come to terms before morning. Anyhow, they won’t do anything to you. They always let the men off.”
“Maybe so,” he responded, “but not me—I’m afraid I’m in for it. ”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m wanted by the police,” he said, lowering his voice, though of course their conversation was in Lithuanian. “They’ll send me up for a year or two, I’m afraid.”
“Hell!” said Marija. “That’s too bad. I’ll see if I can’t get you off.”
Downstairs, where the greater part of the prisoners were now massed, she sought out the stout personage with the diamond earrings, and had a few whispered words with her. The latter then approached the police sergeant who was in charge of the raid. “Billy,” she said, pointing to Jurgis, “there’s a fellow who came in to see his sister. He’d just got in the door when you knocked. You aren’t taking hoboes, are you?”
The sergeant laughed as he looked at Jurgis. “Sorry,” he said, “but the orders are every one but the servants.”
So Jurgis slunk in among the rest of the men, who kept dodging behind each other like sheep that have smelt a wolf. There were old men and young men, college boys and graybeards old enough to be their grandfathers; some of them wore evening-dress-there was no one among them save Jurgis who showed any signs of poverty.
When the round-up was completed, the doors were opened and the party marched out. Three patrol-wagons were drawn up at the curb, and the whole neighborhood had turned out to see the sport; there was much chaffing, and a universal craning of necks. The women stared about them with defiant eyes, or laughed and joked, while the men kept their heads bowed, and their hats pulled over their faces. They were crowded into the patrol-wagons as if into street-cars, and then off they went amid a din of cheers. At the station-house Jurgis gave a Polish name and was put into a cell with half a dozen others; and while these sat and talked in whispers, he lay down in a corner and gave himself up to his thoughts.
Jurgis had looked into the deepest reaches of the social pit, and grown used to the sights in them. Yet when he had thought of all humanity as vile and hideous, he had somehow always excepted his own family, that he had loved; and now this sudden horrible discovery—Marija a whore, and Elzbieta and the children living off her shame! Jurgis might argue with himself all he chose, that he had done worse, and was a fool for caring—but still he could not get over the shock of that sudden unveiling, he could not help being sunk in grief because of it. The depths of him were troubled and shaken, memories were stirred in him that had been sleeping so long he had counted them dead. Memories of the old life—his old hopes and his old yearnings, his old dreams of decency and independence! He saw Ona again, he heard her gentle voice pleading with him. He saw little Antanas, whom he had meant to make a man. He saw his trembling old father, who had blessed them all with his wonderful love. He lived again through that day of horror when he had discovered Ona’s shame—God, how he had suffered, what a madman he had been! How dreadful it had all seemed to him; and now, today, he had sat and listened, and half agreed when Marija told him he had been a fool! Yes—told him that he ought to have sold his wife’s honor and lived by it!—And then there was Stanislovas and his awful fate—that brief story which Marija had narrated so calmly, with such dull indifference! The poor little fellow, with his frost-bitten fingers and his terror of the snow—his wailing voice rang in Jurgis’s ears, as he lay there in the darkness, until the sweat started on his forehead. Now and then he would quiver with a sudden spasm of horror, at the picture of little Stanislovas shut up in the deserted building and fighting for his life with the rats!
All these emotions had become strangers to the soul of Jurgis; it was so long since they had troubled him that he had ceased to think they might ever trouble him again. Helpless, trapped, as he was, what good did they do him—why should he ever have allowed them to torment him? It had been the task of his recent life to fight them down, to crush them out of him; never in his life would he have suffered from them again, save that they had caught him unawares, and overwhelmed him before he could protect himself. He heard the old voices of his soul, he saw its old ghosts beckoning to him, stretching out their arms to him! But they were far-off and shadowy, and the gulf between them was black and bottomless; they would fade away into the mists of the past once more. Their voices would die, and never again would he hear them—and so the last faint spark of manhood in his soul would flicker out.
TWENTY-EIGHT
AFTER BREAKFAST Jurgis was driven to the court, which was crowded with the prisoners and those who had come out of curiosity or in the hope of recognizing one of the men and getting a case for blackmail. The men were called up first, and reprimanded in a bunch, and then dismissed; but Jurgis, to his terror, was called separately, as being a suspicious-looking case. It was in this very same court that he had been tried, that time when his sentence had been “suspended”; it was the same judge, and the same clerk. The latter now stared at Jurgis, as if he half thought that he knew him; but the judge had no suspicions—just then his thoughts were upon a telephone message he was expecting from a friend of the police captain of the district, telling what disposition he should make of the case of “Polly” Simpson, as the “madame” of the house was known. Meantime, he listened to the story of how Jurgis had been looking for his sister, and advised him dryly to keep his sister in a better place; then he let him go, and proceeded to fine each of the girls five dollars, which fines were paid in a bunch from a wad of bills which Madame Polly extracted from her stocking.
Jurgis waited outside and walked home with Marija. The police had left the house, and already there were a few visitors; by evening the place would be running again, exactly as if nothing had happened. Meantime, Marija took Jurgis upstairs to her room, and they sat and talked. By daylight, Jurgis was able to observe that the color on her cheeks was not the old natural one of abounding health; her complexion was in reality a parchment yellow, and there were black rings under her eyes.
“Have you been sick?” he asked.
“Sick?” she said. “Hell!” (Marija had learned to scatter her conversation with as many oaths as a longshoreman or a mule driver.) “How can I ever be anything but sick, at this life?”
She fell silent for a moment, staring ahead of her gloomily. “It’s morphine,” she said, at last. “I seem to take more of it every day.”
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“It’s the way of it; I don’t know why. If it isn’t that, it’s drink. If the girls didn’t booze they couldn’t stand it any time at all. And the madame always gives them dope when they first come, and they learn to like it; or else they take it for headaches and such things, and get the habit that way. I’ve got it, I know; I’ve tried to quit, but I never will while I’m here.”
“How long are you going to stay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Always, I guess. What else could I do?”
“Don’t you save any money?”
“Save!” said Marija. “Good Lord, no! I get enough, I suppose, but it all goes. I get a half share, two dollars and a half for each customer, and sometimes I make twenty-five or thirty dollars a night, and you’d think I ought to save something out of that! But then I am charged for my room and my meals—and such prices as you never heard of; and then for extras, and drinks—for everything I get, and some I don’t. My laundry bill is nearly twenty dollars each week alone—think of that! Yet what can I do? I either have to stand it or quit, and it would be the same anywhere else. It’s all I can do to save the fifteen dollars I give Elzbieta each week, so the children can go to school.”
Marija sat brooding in silence for a while; then, seeing that Jurgis was interested, she went on: “That’s the way they keep the girls—they let them run up debts, so they can’t get away. A young girl comes from abroad, and she doesn’t know a word of English, and she gets into a place like this, and when she wants to go the madame shows her that she is a couple of hundred dollars in debt, and takes all her clothes away, and threatens to have her arrested if she doesn’t stay and do as she’s told. So she stays, and the longer she stays, the more in debt she gets. Often, too, they are girls that didn’t know what they were coming to, that had hired out for housework. Did you notice that little French girl with the yellow hair, that stood next to me in the court?”
Jurgis answered in the affirmative.
“Well, she came to America about a year ago. She was a store-clerk, and she hired herself to a man to be sent here to work in a factory. There were six of them, all together, and they were brought to a house just down the street from here, and this girl was put into a room alone, and they gave her some dope in her food, and when she came to she found that she had been ruined. She cried, and screamed, and tore her hair, but she had nothing but a wrapper, and couldn’t get away, and they kept her half insensible with drugs all the time, until she gave up. She never got outside of that place for ten months, and then they sent her away, because she didn’t suit. I guess they’ll put her out of here, too—she’s getting to have crazy fits, from drinking absinthe. Only one of the girls that came out with her got away, and she jumped out of a second-story window one night. There was a great fuss about that—maybe you heard of it.”
“I did,” said Jurgis, “I heard of it afterward.” (It had happened in the place where he and Duane had taken refuge from their “country customer.” The girl had become insane, fortunately for the police.)
“There’s lots of money in it,” said Marija—“they get as much as forty dollars a head for girls, and they bring them from all over. There are seventeen in this place, and nine different countries among them. In some places you might find even more. We have half a dozen French girls—I suppose it’s because the madame speaks the language. French girls are bad, too, the worst of all, except for the Japanese. There’s a place next door that’s full of Japanese women, but I wouldn’t live in the same house with one of them.”