"I've been down there," said Tom, that evening. "It's easy to
get down if you're careful - just sit an' slide; but getting up is
worse. An' I found down below there two stones just marked with
a picture of the canyon. I wouldn't sell these rocks not for
fifteen dollars."
And papa and I crawled down to the Yellowstone - just above the
first little fall - to wet a line for good luck. The round moon
came up and turned the cliffs and pines into silver; and a
two-pound trout came up also, and we slew him among the rocks,
nearly tumbling into that wild river.
. . . . . .
Then out and away to Livingstone once more. The maiden from New
Hampshire disappeared, papa and mamma with her. Disappeared,
too, the old lady from Chicago, and the others.
V
Chicago
"I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,
And all thy glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material."
I HAVE struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago.
The other places do not count. San Francisco was a
pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a
phenomenon.
This place is the first American city I have encountered. It
holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and
stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I
urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by
savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is
dirt. Also it says that it is the "boss" town of America.
I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country.
They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded
and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble
crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about
everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno
with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted
at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for
him told me that this was "the finest hotel in the finest city on
God Almighty's earth." By the way, when an American wishes to
indicate the next country or state, he says, "God A'mighty's
earth." This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.
Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and
without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the
East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those
held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable
vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and
crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a
great horror.
Except in London - and I have forgotten what London was like - I
had never seen so many white people together, and never such a
collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and
no beauty - only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone
flagging under foot.
A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so
much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all
this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired,
that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one
atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.
He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures
hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they
were trying to make some money that they might not die through
lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as
black as ink, and filled with un-told abominations, and bid me
watch the stream of traffic across the bridges.
He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note
that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A
Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism.
The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them
there had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage.
"Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and
studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and
looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each
vender stood at his door howling: - "For the sake of my money,
employ or buy of me, and me only!"
Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You
know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their
arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women
dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I
had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what
he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The
other makes me ill.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress,
and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every
intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in
language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together
of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of
money is progress.
I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through
scores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few
hundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat
through their noses.
The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who
was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion
required or the big blank factories suggested.
