Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West онлайн

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“That meeting is not far,” he is saying, “and it’s warm there. Won’t you go?”

“THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING, “AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?”

“Thank you, I will,” is my ready reply, and then he politely points the way down a side street on the left where, he says, a large transparency over the door marks the entrance to the meeting-hall.

The place is crowded with men—workingmen many of them—and many are plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no loafing-place.”