Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/63

 printed propaganda of all sorts. The sound of their heavy boots made a deep and incessant thunder on the wooden floor… Signs were posted up everywhere: “Comrades! For the sake of your health, preserve cleanliness!” Long tables stood at the head of the stairs on every floor, and on the landings, heaped with pamphlets and the literature of the different political parties, for sale…

The spacious, low-ceilinged refectory downstairs was still a dining-room. For two rubles I bought a ticket entitling me

COMRADES, FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR HEALTH, PRESERVE CLEANLINESS.

to dinner, and stood in line with a thousand others, waiting to get to the long serving-tables, where twenty men and women were ladling from immense cauldrons cabbage soup, hunks of meat and piles of kasha, slabs of black bread. Five kopeks paid for tea in a tin cup. From a basket one grabbed a greasy wooden spoon… The benches along the wooden tables were packed with hungry proletarians, wolfing their food, plotting, shouting rough jokes across the room…

Upstairs was another eating-place, reserved for the Tsay-ee-kah—though every one went there. Here could be had bread thickly buttered and endless glasses of tea…

In the south wing on the second floor was the great hall