Читать книгу The Color of a Great City онлайн

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As for the vast piers on the shores of the Hudson, the East River, the Jersey side and Brooklyn and Staten Island, where the liners house themselves, I cannot fancy anything more colorful. They come from all ports of the world, these big ships. They bring tremendous cargoes, not only of people but of goods, and they carry large forces of men, to say nothing of those who assist them to load and unload. If you watch any of the waterfronts to and from which they make their entry and departure you will find that you can easily tell when they are loading and unloading. The broad, expansive street-fronts before these piers are crowded with idling men waiting for the opportunity to work, the call of duty or of necessity. And it is an interesting crowd of men always, this, imposingly large on occasion. Individually these men are crude but appealing, the kind of man that is usually and truly dubbed a workingman. They have in the main, rough, quaint, ambling figures, and rougher, ruder hands and faces. Some of them are black from having shoveled in the holds of vessels or passed coal (coal-passers is their official title), and some are dusky and strawy from having juggled boxes and bales, but they are men who with a small capacity for mental analysis are taking things exactly as they find them. They are not even possessed of a trade, unless you would call the art of piling boxes and bales under the direction of a foreman a trade. Apparently they have no sense of the sociologic or economic arrangement of life, no comprehension of the position which they occupy in the affairs of the world. They know they are laborers and as such subject to every whim and fancy of their masters. They stand or sit like sheep in droves awaiting the call of opportunity. You see them in sun or rain, on hot days and cold ones, waiting here. Sometimes they jest, sometimes they talk, sometimes they sit and wait. But the water with which they are so intimately connected, from which they draw their subsistence, flows on. I have seen a vain, self-conscious foreman come out from one of these great pier buildings and with a Cæsar-like wave of his hand beckon to this man and that. At his sign a dozen, a score of men would rise and look inquiringly in his direction, dumb and patient like cattle. And then he would pick this one and that, wavering subtly over his choice, pushing aside this one, who was not quite strong enough, perhaps, or agile enough, laying a hand favoringly on that, and then turning eventually and leaving the remaining members of the group dumb but a little disappointed. Invariably they seemed to me to be a bit bereaved and neglected, sorry that they could not help themselves, but still willing to wait. I have sometimes thought that cattle are better provided for, or at least as well.