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

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We were soon seated opposite each other at one of the side tables of the restaurant. The lights were reproduced in myriad reflections in the mirrors, and we seemed to be sitting near the centre of a vast dining-hall with multitudes at its countless tables and its farther portions fading in the perspective of dim distance. The Irish stew and bread were indescribably good, and in the company of other diners we felt that we were among our fellow-men and of them, and we were free for the time from the torment of that haunting isolation which keeps one unspeakably lonely even in the thronging crowd.

Light-hearted and full of hope again we walked to the lodging-house, and after a wash we were soon fast asleep, each on a rough cot in a wooden closet, the electric lights streaming in upon us through the wire netting which was spread over the tops of long lines of such sleeping booths, that stood separated by thin board partitions like the bath-houses at the sea.

Friday and Saturday came and passed with the same vain search for work, and with varying fortune in odd jobs. We took separate routes through the day, but always agreed at parting upon an hour and place of meeting. The Young Men’s Christian Association rooms became our rendezvous. When we met there on Friday evening I had a quarter and Clark was high-spirited and opulent with forty-five cents to his credit. He was full of his good fortune. In the middle of the forenoon he had chanced upon the job of shifting coal in the cellar of a private house. The work having been finished he was allowed to wash himself in the kitchen with an abundance of hot water and soap and the luxury of a towel. And then he sat down at the kitchen-table to a dinner of hot turkey and cranberry-sauce, and any number of vegetables, and all the bread and coffee he wanted, and finally a towering saucer of plum-pudding. Fifty cents was added to the dinner in payment for his work, and, as he had had a dime left in his pocket after breakfast, he did not hesitate at an expenditure of fifteen cents in car-fare to facilitate his search for work.