Mother I-II [antikvár]

I Every day the factory whistle shrieked tremulously in the grimy, greasy air above the workers' settlement. And in obedience to its summons sullen people, roused before sleep had refreshed their muscles, came scuttling out of their little grey houses like frightened cockroaches. They walked through the cold darkness, down the unpaved street to the high stone cells of the factory, which awaited them with cold complacency, its dozens of square oily eyes lighting up the road. The mud smacked beneath their feet. They shouted in hoarse sleepy voices and rent the air with ugly oaths, while other sounds came floating to meet them: the heavy hum of machinery and the hiss of steam. Tali black smokestacks, stern and gloomy, loomed like thick clubs above the settlement. In the evening, when the setting sun found weary reflection in the windows of the houses, the factory expelled the people from its stone bowels as though they were so much slag, and they climbed the street again—grimy, black-faced, the ir hungry teeth glittering, their bodies giving off the sticky odour of machine oil. Now their voices were lively, 9