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

40 страница из 79

At Van Buren Street we turned, to the Rock Island Railway station, and in the waiting-room we quenched our thirst as best we could at the drinking-fountain. Many of the men had taken the direction of South Clark Street. I asked Clark why.

“There’s barrel-houses down there,” he explained.

The word had come upon me repeatedly in the last day, with only a dim suggestion of its meaning, and so I owned to my ignorance.

“A barrel-house?” said Clark. “That’s a dive where they keep cheap whiskey on tap; you can get a pint for a nickel. It’s about the size of the whiskey you want for the thirst you get in a station-house, I’m thinking,” he added. And then more to himself than to me: “I’m damned if I don’t wish I had some now to wash that air out of my mouth.”

His face was very wry, and there was returning to it the expression of hopelessness which it had worn while we crouched for shelter in the doorway on the night before. It cut you to the quick. His light-blue eyes, which had drawn me from the first by the honest directness of their gaze, now began to lose their human, speaking quality and to take on the dumb, beseeching look of a hunted beast.