Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest, completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent interchange of men’s and women’s voices.
The naturalness and untrammelled social ease have blinded you for a time to what you really see, and then the black reality reveals itself in human degradation below which there is no depth--as though lost, sexless souls were already met upon a common plane of deepest knowledge of all evil. And yet in very truth they are living fellow men and women, in whom have centred the strength of natural love and hope, and centres still the constraining love of a Heavenly Father.
“I guess we’d better get out of this. That waiter has his eye on us. In a minute he’ll ask us for our orders.”
We pass again through the garish lights that flood the pavements before saloons from whose inner chambers come the tinkling, brassy notes of cheap music.
“Are they all like that place we’ve been in?” I ask.
“They are all the same. There are hundreds like them in this town,” he answers.
Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the street Clark turns into a dark entry.
“Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder.
“What is this?” I call after him from the threshold.
“Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies.
I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps. Under the light of a single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to a door at the right. Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth. The unmoving air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all but the suggesting power of words. An electric arc gleams from the centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled speech. In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men.