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

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There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs. The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.

We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon, and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights of a cheap theatre.

“We can get warm in here,” says Clark, abruptly, and he turns into a doorway which opens on the street.

I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.