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

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By no means are all of them asleep. In the thick air above their reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices. What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse? It is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with coarse obscenity.

And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human is the prevailing type!—Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep, a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest characters the paralysis of the will. And then there are the stealthy, restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit.