Читать книгу The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West - Walter A. Wyckoff - Страница 4

OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP.

“If we ain’t never had ’em, I guess we’ll catch ’em to-night,” says Clark, softly in my ear, and the words take on a sickening significance as we enter an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution, and we see more clearly the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men, and have glimpses here and there of caking filth upon a naked limb.

The wisdom of a late hour of retiring is at once apparent when we have sight of the inner passage. Not a square foot of the dark, concrete floor is visible. The space is packed with men all lying on their right sides with their legs drawn up, and each man’s legs pressed close in behind those of the man in front.

Clark draws from an inside pocket a roll of old newspapers, and hands me one. We spread them on the pavement as a Mohammedan unrolls his mat for prayers, and then we take off our boots and coats. Our soaked, pulpy boots we fold in our jackets and use them as pillows, and we soften our bed by spreading over the newspapers our outer coats, which thus have a chance to dry in the warmth of the room and in that which comes from our bodies. We need no covering in the steaming heat in which we lie, and I can see at a glance that Clark and I are more fortunate than most of the other men, for few of them have outer coats, and in their threadbare, filthy garments they lie with nothing but paper between them and the floor, their heads pillowed on their arms.

By no means are all of them asleep. In the thick air above their reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices. What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse? It is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with coarse obscenity.

And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human is the prevailing type!—Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep, a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest characters the paralysis of the will. And then there are the stealthy, restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit.

But there are marked exceptions to the prevailing type, men like Clark, sound and strong in flesh, and having about them the signs of habitual decency, and their faces stamped with the open frankness which comes of earning a living by honest work. Some of these are young immigrants, newly come, most evidently, and I picture their rude awakenings from golden dreams of a land of plenty.

Clark is fast asleep beside me, but I cannot sleep for gnawing hunger and the dull pain of lying bruised and sore upon the hard, paved floor.

There is sudden, nervous movement near me. Looking up I see a man seated straight, tugging frantically at his shirt, and swearing viciously the while in muffled tones. In a moment he has torn the garment off, and his crooked, bony fingers are passing swiftly over the shrivelled skin of his old, lean body in search of his tormentors, and his oaths come lisping from his toothless mouth. The men about him are ordering him, with deepening curses, to lie down and keep still.

The former quiet soon returns, and in it I lie thinking of another world I know, a world of men and women whose plane of life is removed from this by all the distance of the infinite. Faith and love and high resolve are there, the inspirers of true living, and courage spurs to unflinching effort, and hope lights the way of unsuccess and gives vision through the vale of sorrow and of death. And the common intercourse is the perfect freedom which is bred of high allegiance to inborn courtesy and honor.

What living link is there that joins these worlds together, and gives vital meaning to the confirmation of brotherhood spoken in the divine words of the Apostle: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and everyone members one of another?”

Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the army of the unemployed.