The best short stories of 1915, and the yearbook of the American short story
General
The best short stories of 1915, and the yearbook of the American short story
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes; Short stories, American
Over the bridge and through the packed streets of the down-town
district Thorold, shaken from his revery of power and Peter, watched
the film that Chicago unrolled for the boulevard pilgrims. The boats
in the river, the long switch-tracks of the railroads, the tall
grain-elevators, the low warehouses from which drifted alluring
odors of spices linked for James Thorold the older city of his youth
with the newer one of his age as the street linked one division of the
city's geography with another. They were the means by which Chicago had
risen from the sand-flats of the fifties to the Michigan Avenue of the
present, that wide street of the high skyline that fronted the world
as it faced the Great Lakes, squarely, solidly, openly. They were the
means, too, by which James Thorold had augmented his fortune until it
had acquired the power to send him to Forsland. To him, however, they
represented not ladders to prosperity but a social condition of a
passing generation, the Chicago of the seventies, a city distinctively
American in population and in ideals, a youthful city of a single
standard of endeavor, a pleasant place that had been swallowed by the
Chicago of the present, that many-tentacled monster of heterogeneous
races, that affected him as it did so many of the older residents,
with an overwhelming sensation of revolt against its sprawling lack
of cohesion. Even the material advantages that had accrued to him from
the growth of the city could not reconcile James Thorold to the fact
that the elements of the city's growth came from the races of men whom
he held in contempt. What mattered it, he reasoned, that Chicago waxed
huge when her grossness came from the unassimilated, indigestible mass
of Latins and Greeks, Poles and Russians, Czechs, Bulgars, Jews, who
filled the streets, the factories, and the schools?
The prejudice, always strong within him, rose higher as he found his
machine blocked again, this time by the crowd that stood across Jackson
Boulevard at La Salle Street. Even after the peremptory order of a
mounted police officer had cleared the way for him James Thorold frowned
on the lines of men and women pressed back against the curbstones. The
thought that they were waiting the coming of the body of that boy who
had died in Mexico added to his annoyance the realization that he would
have to fight his way through another crowd at the station if he wished
to reach the train-shed where Peter's train would come. The struggle was
spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took
it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the
funeral cortège of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine
passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the
train-shed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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