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

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We walk now toward Harrison Street, and as we enter it, there shines high from out the darkness an illumined face of a clock with its hands pointing to a few minutes past the hour of twelve. A freight-train is drawing slowly into the station-yard, creaking and jolting with the varying tug of a locomotive that pants deeply to a steady pull, and then puffs hard in sudden spurts which send its wheels “racing” on the icy rails. The train stands still with a sound of communicated bumping which loses itself far down the yard, and then there come swarming from the cars a score or two of tramps who have beaten their way into the city. They know their ground, for silent and stooping in the wet they make straight, as with a common impulse, to the station-house on the corner.

“We’ll leave them go in first,” says Clark, “it’s all the better for us,” and then we walk up and down before the plain brick building, with the lights streaming from its basement and first-floor windows.

By a short flight of steps we finally enter a small passage which opens into a large, square room. A few police officers and reporters are standing about in casual conversation. One officer, with unerring judgment of our need, beckons us his way, and, without a word, he points us down the steps into the basement. A locked door of iron grating blocks the way at the foot of the steps, and we stand there for some minutes while a newly arrived prisoner is being registered and searched. Behind a high desk sits a typical, robust officer who asks questions and notes the answers in his book, and beside him, near at hand, a matronly woman is sewing with an air of domesticity and entire oblivion to her unusual surroundings, while near the prisoner before the desk, stand two policemen who have “run him in.”