Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda3 to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus4, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging5 this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly6 these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds7 and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle8 joints9, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs10, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy11 and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled12 into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps13 of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid14 economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust15 and old nails and stale water—and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage—but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.
Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta 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 faculty16 that was not needed for the machine was doomed17 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. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a habit of silence—Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. She was sick and miserable18, and often she would barely have strength enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to eat, and afterward19, because there was only their misery20 to talk of, they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor21 and never stir until it was time to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to the machines. They were so numbed22 that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret23 when the food ran short.
Yet the soul of Ona was not dead—the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping; and now and then they would waken, and these were cruel times. The gates of memory would roll open—old joys would stretch out their arms to them, old hopes and dreams would call to them, and they would stir beneath the burden that lay upon them, and feel its forever immeasurable weight. They could not even cry out beneath it; but anguish24 would seize them, more dreadful than the agony of death. It was a thing scarcely to be spoken—a thing never spoken by all the world, that will not know its own defeat.
They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It was not less tragic25 because it was so sordid26, because it had to do with wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean, to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone—it would never be! They had played the game and they had lost. Six years more of toil27 they had to face before they could expect the least respite28, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how cruelly certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as they were living! They were lost, they were going down—and there was no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness29, a desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the nighttime, when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beating of her own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross. After that she learned to weep silently—their moods so seldom came together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves.
Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one else to speak of it—he had never acknowledged its existence to himself. Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had—and once or twice, alas30, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.
He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after week—until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a respite, a deliverance—he could drink! He could forget the pain, he could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with his companions—he would be a man again, and master of his life.
It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could persuade himself that that was economy; with the second he could eat another meal—but there would come a time when he could eat no more, and then to pay for a drink was an unthinkable extravagance, a defiance31 of the age-long instincts of his hunger-haunted class. One day, however, he took the plunge32, and drank up all that he had in his pockets, and went home half "piped," as the men phrase it. He was happier than he had been in a year; and yet, because he knew that the happiness would not last, he was savage33, too with those who would wreck34 it, and with the world, and with his life; and then again, beneath this, he was sick with the shame of himself. Afterward, when he saw the despair of his family, and reckoned up the money he had spent, the tears came into his eyes, and he began the long battle with the specter.
It was a battle that had no end, that never could have one. But Jurgis did not realize that very clearly; he was not given much time for reflection. He simply knew that he was always fighting. Steeped in misery and despair as he was, merely to walk down the street was to be put upon the rack. There was surely a saloon on the corner—perhaps on all four corners, and some in the middle of the block as well; and each one stretched out a hand to him each one had a personality of its own, allurements35 unlike any other. Going and coming—before sunrise and after dark—there was warmth and a glow of light, and the steam of hot food, and perhaps music, or a friendly face, and a word of good cheer. Jurgis developed a fondness for having Ona on his arm whenever he went out on the street, and he would hold her tightly, and walk fast. It was pitiful to have Ona know of this—it drove him wild to think of it; the thing was not fair, for Ona had never tasted drink, and so could not understand. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself wishing that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be ashamed in her presence. They might drink together, and escape from the horror—escape for a while, come what would.
So there came a time when nearly all the conscious life of Jurgis consisted of a struggle with the craving36 for liquor. He would have ugly moods, when he hated Ona and the whole family, because they stood in his way. He was a fool to have married; he had tied himself down, had made himself a slave. It was all because he was a married man that he was compelled to stay in the yards; if it had not been for that he might have gone off like Jonas, and to hell with the packers. There were few single men in the fertilizer mill—and those few were working only for a chance to escape. Meantime, too, they had something 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. As for Jurgis, he was expected to bring home every penny; he could not even go with the men at noontime—he was supposed to sit down and eat his dinner on a pile of fertilizer dust.
This was not always his mood, of course; he still loved his family. But just now was a time of trial. Poor little Antanas, for instance—who had never failed to win him with a smile—little Antanas was not smiling just now, being a mass of fiery37 red pimples38. He had had all the diseases that babies are heir to, in quick succession, scarlet39 fever, mumps40, and whooping41 cough in the first year, and now he was down with the measles42. There was no one to attend him but Kotrina; there was no doctor to help him, because they were too poor, and children did not die of the measles—at least not often. Now and then Kotrina would find time to sob43 over his woes44, but for the greater part of the time he had to be left alone, barricaded45 upon the bed. The floor was full of drafts, and if he caught cold he would die. At night he was tied down, lest he should kick the covers off him, while the family lay in their stupor of exhaustion46. He would lie and scream for hours, almost in convulsions; and then, when he was worn out, he would lie whimpering and wailing47 in his torment48. He was burning up with fever, and his eyes were running sores; in the daytime he was a thing uncanny and impish to behold49, a plaster of pimples and sweat, a great purple lump of misery.
Yet all this was not really as cruel as it sounds, for, sick as he was, little Antanas was the least unfortunate member of that family. He was quite able to bear his sufferings—it was as if he had all these complaints to show what a prodigy50 of health he was. He was the child of his parents' youth and joy; he grew up like the conjurer's rosebush, and all the world was his oyster51. In general, he toddled52 around the kitchen all day with a lean and hungry look—the portion of the family's allowance that fell to him was not enough, and he was unrestrainable in his demand for more. Antanas was but little over a year old, and already no one but his father could manage him.
It seemed as if he had taken all of his mother's strength—had left nothing for those that might come after him. Ona was with child again now, and it was a dreadful thing to contemplate53; even Jurgis, dumb and despairing as he was, could not but understand that yet other agonies were on the way, and shudder54 at the thought of them.
For Ona was visibly going to pieces. In the first place she was developing a cough, like the one that had killed old Dede Antanas. She had had a trace of it ever since that fatal morning when the greedy streetcar corporation had turned her out into the rain; but now it was beginning to grow serious, and to wake her up at night. Even worse than that was the fearful nervousness from which she suffered; she would have frightful55 headaches and fits of aimless weeping; and sometimes she would come home at night shuddering56 and moaning, and would fling herself down upon the bed and burst into tears. Several times she was quite beside herself and hysterical57; 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 when she was pregnant; but he was hardly to be persuaded, and would beg and plead to know what had happened. She had never been like this before, he would argue—it was monstrous58 and unthinkable. It was the life she had to live, the accursed work she had to do, that was killing59 her by inches. She was not fitted for it—no woman was fitted for it, no woman ought to be allowed to do such work; if the world could not keep them alive any other way it ought to kill them at once and be done with it. They ought not to marry, to have children; no workingman ought to marry—if he, Jurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first. So he would carry on, becoming half hysterical himself, which was an unbearable60 thing to see in a big man; Ona would pull herself together and fling herself into his arms, begging him to stop, to be still, that she would be better, it would be all right. So she would lie and sob out her grief upon his shoulder, while he gazed at her, as helpless as a wounded animal, the target of unseen enemies.
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收听单词发音
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1
pickle
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| n.腌汁，泡菜；v.腌，泡 | |
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2
squeal
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| v.发出长而尖的声音；n.长而尖的声音 | |
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soda
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| n.苏打水；汽水 | |
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apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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5
plunging
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| adj.跳进的，突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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7
odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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8
knuckle
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| n.指节；vi.开始努力工作；屈服，认输 | |
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9
joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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10
hogs
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| n.（尤指喂肥供食用的）猪( hog的名词复数 )；（供食用的）阉公猪；彻底地做某事；自私的或贪婪的人 | |
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11
moldy
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| adj.发霉的 | |
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shoveled
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| vt.铲，铲出（shovel的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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13
scraps
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| 油渣 | |
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14
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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15
rust
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| n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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17
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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stupor
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| v.昏迷；不省人事 | |
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numbed
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| v.使麻木，使麻痹( numb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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fret
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| v.(使)烦恼；(使)焦急；(使)腐蚀，(使)磨损 | |
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24
anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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27
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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28
respite
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| n.休息，中止，暂缓 | |
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29
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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30
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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31
defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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32
plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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allurements
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| n.诱惑( allurement的名词复数 )；吸引；诱惑物；有诱惑力的事物 | |
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36
craving
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| n.渴望,热望 | |
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fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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38
pimples
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| n.丘疹，粉刺，小脓疱( pimple的名词复数 ) | |
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39
scarlet
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| n.深红色，绯红色，红衣；adj.绯红色的 | |
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40
mumps
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| n.腮腺炎 | |
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41
whooping
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| 发嗬嗬声的，发咳声的 | |
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42
measles
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| n.麻疹，风疹，包虫病，痧子 | |
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43
sob
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| n.空间轨道的轰炸机；呜咽，哭泣 | |
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44
woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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45
barricaded
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| 设路障于，以障碍物阻塞( barricade的过去式和过去分词 )； 设路障[防御工事]保卫或固守 | |
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46
exhaustion
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| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
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47
wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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48
torment
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| n.折磨；令人痛苦的东西(人)；vt.折磨；纠缠 | |
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49
behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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50
prodigy
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| n.惊人的事物，奇迹，神童，天才，预兆 | |
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51
oyster
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| n.牡蛎；沉默寡言的人 | |
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52
toddled
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| v.（幼儿等）东倒西歪地走( toddle的过去式和过去分词 )；蹒跚行走；溜达；散步 | |
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53
contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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54
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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55
frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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56
shuddering
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| v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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57
hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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59
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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60
unbearable
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| adj.不能容忍的；忍受不住的 | |
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