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

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All the days of this vagrant living were not equally hard. Some were harder than others. Saturday was a case in point. After an early frugal breakfast, for which Clark paid his last penny, we separated with an agreement to meet again at six o’clock in the evening in the reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association. We were bent on different quests. Clark was determined to find work at his trade if he could, and I had no choice apart from unskilled labor. For odd jobs we were each to have out an eye, and our acquaintance thus far with such a course made us fairly confident of at least the means of bare subsistence.

But nothing is less predictable than the outcome of this fortuitous living. The days vary with the variability which belongs to existence. Things “come your way” at times, and then again they have another destination which your widest and closest search fails to reveal.

It was hard, but it was not impossible through that Saturday morning to keep one’s purpose fairly firm. From the ebb of the city’s traffic in the darkness before the dawn I felt it flowing to its full tide. However destitute a man may be he cannot fail to share the quickening to waking life of a great city. The mystery of deepest night enfolds the place, and from out its veiling darkness the vague conformations of streets and buildings gradually emerge to the sharp outlines of the day’s reality. An occasional delivery wagon from the market, or a milkman’s cart goes rattling down a street, awaking echoes as of a deserted town, or a heavy truck laden with great rolls of white paper for the printing-press passes slowly, drawn by gigantic horses whose flat, hairy hoofs patiently pound the cobbles in their plodding pace, while whiffs of white vapor puff from their nostrils with their deep, regular breathing. The driver’s oath can be heard a square away.