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

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“Are they all like that place we’ve been in?” I ask.

“These dives, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“They are all the same. There are hundreds like them in this town,” he answers.

Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the street Clark turns into a dark entry.

“Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder.

“What is this?” I call after him from the threshold.

“Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies.

I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps. Under the light of a single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to a door at the right. Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth. The unmoving air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all but the suggesting power of words. An electric arc gleams from the centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled speech. In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men.