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

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“You’ve been real nice to me,” she said, “and I want to ask you not to make a wrong use of this money. You’ll not buy liquor with it, will you?”

“Indeed I will not,” I assured her. “I have little temptation to do that, for I can quench my thirst for nothing; it is food that I find it hard to get. And, madam,” I continued, “I am deeply grateful to you for your good advice.”

She smiled upon me, her pretty mouth and dimpled cheeks and dark blue eyes all playing their part in the friendly salutation.

“You will go back to your friends, won’t you?” she said, persuasively.

“I will indeed,” I replied. “Already I look forward to that with keenest pleasure.”

Then richer by a quarter and all aglow with the sense of human sympathy I returned to the streets, and to the exhausting, dreary round of place-hunting.

That this in itself should be such hard work is largely due, I fancy, to the double strain, both on your strength and on your sensibilities. Certainly it is strangely enervating. Even when you are not weakened by the want of food, you find yourself at the far end of a fruitless search worn out beyond the exhaustion of a hard day’s work. And then the actual ground covered by your most persistent effort is always so sadly disappointing. You may begin the day’s hunt rested and fed and full of energy and resolve; you may have planned the search with care, taking pains to find out the various forms of unskilled labor which are employed within the chosen area; with utmost regard to systematic, time-saving expenditure of energy, you may go carefully over the ground, leaving no stone unturned; and yet, at the day’s end, you have not covered half the area of your careful plan, and your whole body aches with weariness, and your heart is heavy and sore within you. Nor does the task grow easier with long practice. You acquire a certain facility in search; you come, by practical acquaintance, to some knowledge of the ins and outs of the labor market; but you must begin each day’s quest with a greater draft upon your courage and resolution. For the actual barriers grow greater, as the outward marks of your mode of life become clearer upon you, and you feel yourself borne upon a tide that you cannot stem, out from the haven of a man’s work, where you would be, to the barren wastes, where drift to certain wreck the lives of the destitute idle who have lost all hold upon a “sure intent.”