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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 29 |
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_ CHAPTER XXIX When Adelle reached the street she found Archie lolling in the car, across the way, in the shade of a tall building. At her appearance he yawned and stretched his cramped legs. "It took you an awful time," he grumbled to his wife. "What was the trouble?" "Nothing," Adelle replied. As she got into the car she gave the driver an order,--"Go out to Alton." "Where's that?" Archie inquired. "A little way out--across the river," Adelle informed him. "What do you want to go there for--it's nearly lunch-time," Archie demurred. "I'm going out to see Clark's Field," Adelle replied succinctly. Archie knew vaguely that the Field had something to do with his wife's fortune, but understood that it had been mostly "cashed in" as he would phrase it. "What's your hurry?" Archie objected. "We can go out there some other time just as well." But for once Archie was compelled to bend to a superior purpose and endure being bumped over the rough pavements of the city out to the old South Road, which was still cut up badly by heavy teaming as it had been in the days of the farmers' market carts, and which also swarmed with huge trolley boxes and motor trucks and pedestrians. For Alton was now merely a lively industrial quarter of the "greater" city. In addition to the old stove-works of enduring fame there were also foundries and factories and mills. The old, leisurely "Square" had become a knot of squalid arteries radiating into this human hive. Life teemed all over, swarmed upon the pavements, hung from the high tenement windows, infested the strange delicatessen and drink shops, many of which bore foreign names. Most marvelous fact of all was that the thin, pale American type, of which Adelle herself was an example, had largely disappeared from the Alton streets, and in its place there were members from pretty nearly all the races of the earth,--Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Persians,--especially Italians. Many a sturdy young woman, with bare brown arms and glossy black hair, strode along, hatless and unashamed, on her way to shop or mill through the streets where Addie Clark had sidled with prim consciousness of her "place" in society. Archie remarked the growing cosmopolitanism of his native land with strong expressions of disapproval. "It looks like a slum," he grumbled. "And nothing but dagoes in it. What a place!--and what scum!" he commented frankly upon his wife's birthplace. "Was it like this when you lived here?" he asked pityingly. "Not so much," she said quietly, not knowing why she disliked his tone and his comment upon the present population of Alton. "They ought to do something to prevent all this foreign trash from swarming over here," Archie observed. He did not reflect, nor did Adelle, that this "foreign scum" had come to replace his race because he and his kind refused any longer to do the hard labor of the world. If he had been of a more serious turn of mind, he would have joined the anti-Immigration League and raised the patriotic slogan of "America for Americans!" Adelle made no reply to his remarks. She sat silent in her corner of the car, glancing intently at the old scenes that were so new and unexpected. From time to time she directed the chauffeur when he was in doubt, the old turnings of the streets coming back to her with astonishing sureness. At last, at Shepard Street, she told him to turn off the South Road, and at once they were in the maze of brick and mortar that had been Clark's Field,--the old Clark pasture. The bulky car had to move slowly through the narrow streets, much to the driver's impatience, and he had frequently to toot his horn or screech his raucous Claxton to warn the pedestrians to make way for the visitors. The children crawled off the streets with the instinctive unconcern of familiarity with traffic; the bareheaded women and dark-faced men scowlingly gave the chariot of the rich space to proceed. So they threaded the lanes and the cross-streets that ribbed the old Field, crossing it twice and completely circling it once, until Archie was in a state of vocal rebellion at the stench, the squalor, the ugliness of the place. But Adelle looked and looked with unwonted curiosity. In her European wanderings she had penetrated by necessity or accident similar industrial neighborhoods, where human beings swarmed and life was ugly, only to escape as soon as possible. But this time she did not wish to hurry. Clark's Field seemed different to her from anything else she had ever seen. It was all new, and yet in the way of slums it was immemorially ancient at the same time, as if the members of old races that had come to fill it had brought with them all the grime, all the dreariness of generations of bitter living. And it was this, rather than the marvelous transformation of the sandy field which Adelle dimly remembered, that seized hold of her. How could people live so thickly together, swarm like flies in so many identical doorways, get along with so little air or sunshine or freedom of movement! "Packed like rotting sardines," was Archie's sneering comment. Artificially packed, too, scientifically packed in an up-to-date manner, and all in the space of a few years! Modern magic they said of things like this, and took a strange blind pride in it. Even Archie observed with curiosity,--"They must have been a busy little bunch that got this up so quickly!" Indeed, the Washington Trust Company, under the thin disguise of the Clark's Field Associates, had shown great shrewdness and ingenuity in "developing" the fifty-acre tract so that the greatest possible sum could be extracted from its lean soil. They had resisted all temptations to open it as "a residential section" of the growing city. They knew that Alton was condemned to the coarser uses of society and must be an industrial slum. So they had sold a small portion in one corner to a steel foundry--one of the subsidiaries of a great corporation. And then they developed the remainder for the use of the operatives gathered together from all parts of the earth. The choicest lots they reserved for "future growth." Along the broad South Road they built substantial brick buildings for stores and offices. In the nest of by-streets that ribbed the tract they erected lofty tenement warrens, as closely packed as the law allows,--not the lowest order of tenement, to be sure, because in the long run such buildings do not make a good investment; but a slightly higher class of brick, bathroomed, three-and four-room tenements, from the rear of which flowed out long streamers of clothes drying in the wind. For the most part Clark's Field had thus received its "development." That which had agitated a number of generations of Alton citizens had been accomplished. For a considerable term of years Clark's Field would not change in character unless a disturbance of unexpected magnitude should wipe clean the ground for men to plan anew. As I have said, Clark's Field was now an industrial slum, but its character was not as bad as much else in the cities of men. There are far worse places in London or New York or Chicago--even in such smaller cities as Pittsburg and Liverpool--for filth, crowding, and gloom. Age added to cheapness increases misery and squalor, and Clark's Field was still an infant. Indeed, the promoters of Clark's Field were proud of their achievement and advertised it as the last and most enlightened example of wholesale, industrial housing. But as Archie felt about it, the place was worse really than the more celebrated slums of older cities in its pretentious cheapness, its dreary monotony and colorlessness, its very respectability and smug tediousness. A life dropped into its maze and growing up in it must be lost for good and all--must become just another human ant crawling over Clark's Field, with the habits and coloring of all the other human ants striving there for life and happiness. Archie, perhaps, felt this cramped and deadening atmosphere more keenly than Adelle, and he prided himself on his greater sensitiveness. He thanked God that he had come from the broad sunny vineyards of the Golden State, where life still touches the arcadian age,--not from this, as his wife had! His two years of foreign rambling had educated him into a prideful sense of American vulgarity and hideousness of detail. Adelle seemed wholly absorbed in the bricks and mortar laid upon old Clark's Field. She did not speak. It would be impossible to say what she was thinking of.... At last, as they emerged from another long stretch of narrow street bordered on either side by high tenements that were varied according to a machine pattern by different colored bricks, Archie protested. He growled,--"Well, haven't you seen enough of this sort of thing to last you awhile?" Adelle gave the order to retrace their journey to the hotel. She looked back into the dreary maze with her wide gray eyes, and now they were not quite empty eyes as they had been in the probate courtroom. She looked and looked as if she were seeing the past as well as the present, as if she were trying to fathom what Judge Orcutt had meant. When the Field faded into the distance behind the rapid car, she sank back into her corner with an unconscious sigh. Archie had taken a cigarette from the little gold case that had been one of Adelle's first presents to him, and as he lighted it skillfully in face of the wind was doubtless thinking that never again would he be misled into going to Clark's Field. On the way back Adelle ordered the driver to stop in the Square, and despite Archie's protest that it was already long past lunch-time she left him in the car and turned down the side street that led to the old rooming-house. It was gone! In its place was a five-story flat building that occupied not only all their yard, but the livery-stable lot as well. Adelle realized the change with a positive shock. Latterly, since the little lecture by the probate judge, the images of her early life had come back to her mind as they had not for years. The transformation of Clark's Field did not matter so much even: it had not been in the immediate horizon of her youth,--more an idea than a physical possession. But Church Street and the rooming-house and the livery-stable--they had been her very self. She felt strangely as she had seven years before when she was returning to her aunt's house after the funeral of the widow. The last of all her landmarks had been swept away.... She returned to the car with a thoughtful face, and all the way into the city she paid no attention to Archie's chatter, her mind far away, busy with her forlorn little past. Once or twice she wondered what the judge had meant by urging her to take her husband to see Clark's Field. But she was glad that she had gone. She should have visited Alton sometime or other she supposed to see what the old place was like;--she must remember to go to the cemetery before they left B---- and look for her aunt's grave. But this was not all that the judge meant, Adelle suspected. She was not to discover for some years the full, fine meaning of the judge's intention, perhaps might never recognize all the implications of his message to her on her twenty-first birthday. _ |
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