From all of these things Jurgis was saved because
of Ona. He never would take but the one drink
at noontime; and so he got the reputation of being
a surly fellow, and was not quite welcome at the saloons,
and had to drift about from one to another. Then
at night he would go straight home, helping Ona and
Stanislovas, or often putting the former on a car.
And when he got home perhaps he would have to trudge
several blocks, and come staggering back through the
snowdrifts with a bag of coal upon his shoulder.
Home was not a very attractive place—at
least not this winter. They had only been able
to buy one stove, and this was a small one, and proved
not big enough to warm even the kitchen in the bitterest
weather. This made it hard for Teta Elzbieta all
day, and for the children when they could not get
to school. At night they would sit huddled round
this stove, while they ate their supper off their laps;
and then Jurgis and Jonas would smoke a pipe, after
which they would all crawl into their beds to get
warm, after putting out the fire to save the coal.
Then they would have some frightful experiences with
the cold. They would sleep with all their clothes
on, including their overcoats, and put over them all
the bedding and spare clothing they owned; the children
would sleep all crowded into one bed, and yet even
so they could not keep warm. The outside ones
would be shivering and sobbing, crawling over the
others and trying to get down into the center, and
causing a fight. This old house with the leaky
weatherboards was a very different thing from their
cabins at home, with great thick walls plastered inside
and outside with mud; and the cold which came upon
them was a living thing, a demon-presence in the room.
They would waken in the midnight hours, when everything
was black; perhaps they would hear it yelling outside,
or perhaps there would be deathlike stillness—and
that would be worse yet. They could feel the cold
as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for
them with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they
would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all
in vain. It would come, and it would come; a
grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns
of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the
tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction.
It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would
cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would
be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would
be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning—when
they would go out to another day of toil, a little
weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would
be their turn to be shaken from the tree.
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.
