“Well, I don’t believe you are any worse off for that here. I struck the place yesterday and I ain’t never seen so many idle men and hoboes in my life before. When the iron-works in Cleveland closed down, that laid me off. I couldn’t get no job there, and so I beat my way here. I had fifty cents in my clothes and that got me something to eat yesterday and a bed last night, but I spent my last cent for grub this noon. I’ve been to most every foundry in Chicago, I guess, but I ain’t found any sign of a job yet. Where are you going to put in the night?”
“I don’t know, for I haven’t any money either.”
“I am going to the Harrison Street station and I’ll show you the way, partner, if you like. My name is Clark, Thomas L. Clark,” he adds, with a particularity which is another proof of his belonging to a higher order of workingmen than I.
I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of “partner.”
We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.
At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the character of the street. It is wide, with broad pavements on each side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the “department store” the prevailing type. The shop-windows are ablaze with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking on a holiday character. Whole fronts of some of the buildings are fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,” and “fire sales.”
There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs. The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.
We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon, and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights of a cheap theatre.
“We can get warm in here,” says Clark, abruptly, and he turns into a doorway which opens on the street.
I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.