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

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We soon felt the friction of the crowd as it steered its devious course along the littered pavement, brushing against groups of purchasers who stood examining sample wares, and against idlers leaning to the doorposts with hands in their trousers’ pockets, and through the cross currents of drivers and shopmen who busily took on or discharged the loads.

The very confusion and hurry of the scene, while they suggested the chance of work, were really an added embarrassment to our search. More than under other circumstances we shrank from asking employment from men hard driven by the “instant need of things.” And this instinctive feeling was fully justified in the course of the actual quest. Of common hands there was an abundance, and ours, held out for sale, were of the nature of a provocation to men cumbered by complex care. Occasionally we could not get access to an employer; and when we did, we sometimes received a civil “no,” but commonly an emphatic one in a vent of evil temper.

At one moment an old gentleman was looking up at us over the tops of his spectacles as we stood at the foot of his desk. There was much shrewdness in his eye, and his face was deeply lined, but his speech revealed the frankness of a courteous nature.