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

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The bread and coffee and clean air had revived us both. I dreaded a swift relapse, and so I urged a wash, in the hope of its bracing effect. But where could we achieve this simple need? Certainly not in the wash-room of the station, for we had trespassed dangerously far in drinking at the fountain, and the eye of more than one employee was already upon us. There was no hotel into whose public lavatory we could pass unchallenged, and not so much upon Clark’s account as upon mine. There remained the open lake; so we walked up Van Buren Street and across the Lake Park and the railway tracks to the edge of the outer harbor. Here we knelt among the broken fragments of ice and bathed our faces and hands. It was vigorous exercise to rub them dry before they chapped in the winter wind. It warmed us, and the feeling of relative cleanness was enheartening. And then I sat down and dipped up water in one hand and applied it, until I had a cold saturated cushion against the bruise on my leg. This wrought wonderful relief until the wet cloth froze, and then it chafed the bruise badly for a time.