"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!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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