Читать книгу Sister Carrie / Сестра Кэрри. Книга для чтения на английском языке онлайн | страница 22

“Stand up, why don’t you?” said the girl at her right without any form of introduction. “They won’t care.”

Carrie looked at her gratefully. “I guess I will,” she said.

She stood up from her stool and worked that way for a while, but it was a more difficult position. Her neck and shoulder ached in bending over.

The spirit of the place impressed itself on her in a rough way. She did not venture to look around, but above the clack of the machine she could hear an occasional remark. She could also note a thing or two out of the side of her eye.

“Did you see Harry last night?” said the girl at her left, addressing her neighbor.

“No.”

“You ought to have seen the tie he had on. Gee, but he was a mark.[17]”

“S-s-t,” said the other girl, bending over her work.

The first, silenced, instantly assumed a solemn face. The foreman passed slowly along, eyeing each worker distinctly. The moment he was gone, the conversation was resumed again.

“Say,” began the girl at her left, “what do you think he said?”

“I don’t know.”

“He said he saw us with Eddie Harris at Martin’s last night.”

“No!” They both giggled.

A youth with tan-colored hair, that needed clipping very badly, came shuffling along between the machines, bearing a basket of leather findings under his left arm, and pressed against his stomach. When near Carrie, he stretched out his right hand and gripped one girl under the arm.

“Aw, let me go,” she exclaimed angrily. “Duffer.”[18]

He only grinned broadly in return.

“Rubber!”[19] he called back as she looked after him.

There was nothing of the gallant in him.

Carrie at last could scarcely sit still. Her legs began to tire and she wanted to get up and stretch. Would noon never come? It seemed as if she had worked an entire day. She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her eyes were tired, straining at the one point where the eye-punch came down. The girl at the right noticed her squirmings and felt sorry for her. She was concentrating herself too thoroughly-what she did really required less mental and physical strain. There was nothing to be done, however. When she was wondering whether the strain would ever cease, a dull-sounding bell clanged somewhere down an elevator shaft, and the end came. In a instant there was a buzz of action and conversation. All the girls instantly left their stools and hurried away in an adjoining room, men passed through, coming from some department which opened on the right. The whirling wheels began to sing in a steadily modifying key, until at last they died away in a low buzz. There was an audible stillness, in which the common voice sounded strange.