第17章
"You will give yourself away," said Page."Everybody will know you're from the country.""I am," she retorted."But there's a difference between just mere 'country' and Massachusetts, and I'm not ashamed of it."Chicago, the great grey city, interested her at every instant and under every condition.As yet she was not sure that she liked it; she could not forgive its dirty streets, the unspeakable squalor of some of its poorer neighbourhoods that sometimes developed, like cancerous growths, in the very heart of fine residence districts.
The black murk that closed every vista of the business streets oppressed her, and the soot that stained linen and gloves each time she stirred abroad was a never-ending distress.
But the life was tremendous.All around, on every side, in every direction the vast machinery of Commonwealth clashed and thundered from dawn to dark and from dark till dawn.Even now, as the car carried her farther into the business quarter, she could hear it, see it, and feel in her every fibre the trepidation of its motion.The blackened waters of the river, seen an instant between stanchions as the car trundled across the State Street bridge, disappeared under fleets of tugs, of lake steamers, of lumber barges from Sheboygan and Mackinac, of grain boats from Duluth, of coal scows that filled the air with impalpable dust, of cumbersome schooners laden with produce, of grimy rowboats dodging the prows and paddles of the larger craft, while on all sides, blocking the horizon, red in color and designated by Brobdignag letters, towered the hump-shouldered grain elevators.
Just before crossing the bridge on the north side of the river she had caught a glimpse of a great railway terminus.Down below there, rectilinear, scientifically paralleled and squared, the Yard disclosed itself.A system of grey rails beyond words complicated opened out and spread immeasurably.
Switches, semaphores, and signal towers stood here and there.A dozen trains, freight and passenger, puffed and steamed, waiting the word to depart.Detached engines hurried in and out of sheds and roundhouses, seeking their trains, or bunted the ponderous freight cars into switches; trundling up and down, clanking, shrieking, their bells filling the air with the clangour of tocsins.Men in visored caps shouted hoarsely, waving their arms or red flags; drays, their big dappled horses, feeding in their nose bags, stood backed up to the open doors of freight cars and received their loads.A train departed roaring.
Before midnight it would be leagues away boring through the Great Northwest, carrying Trade--the life blood of nations--into communities of which Laura had never heard.Another train, reeking with fatigue, the air brakes screaming, arrived and halted, debouching a flood of passengers, business men, bringing Trade--a galvanising elixir--from the very ends and corners of the continent.
Or, again, it was South Water Street--a jam of delivery wagons and market carts backed to the curbs, leaving only a tortuous path between the endless files of horses, suggestive of an actual barrack of cavalry.
Provisions, market produce, "garden truck " and fruits, in an infinite welter of crates and baskets, boxes, and sacks, crowded the sidewalks.The gutter was choked with an overflow of refuse cabbage leaves, soft oranges, decaying beet tops.The air was thick with the heavy smell of vegetation.Food was trodden under foot, food crammed the stores and warehouses to bursting.Food mingled with the mud of the highway.
The very dray horses were gorged with an unending nourishment of snatched mouthfuls picked from backboard, from barrel top, and from the edge of the sidewalk.The entire locality reeked with the fatness of a hundred thousand furrows.A land of plenty, the inordinate abundance of the earth itself emptied itself upon the asphalt and cobbles of the quarter.It was the Mouth of the City, and drawn from all directions, over a territory of immense area, this glut of crude subsistence was sucked in, as if into a rapacious gullet, to feed the sinews and to nourish the fibres of an immeasurable colossus.
Suddenly the meaning and significance of it all dawned upon Laura.The Great Grey City, brooking no rival, imposed its dominion upon a reach of country larger than many a kingdom of the Old World.For, thousands of miles beyond its confines was its influence felt.
Out, far out, far away in the snow and shadow of Northern Wisconsin forests, axes and saws bit the bark of century-old trees, stimulated by this city's energy.
Just as far to the southward pick and drill leaped to the assault of veins of anthracite, moved by her central power.Her force turned the wheels of harvester and seeder a thousand miles distant in Iowa and Kansas.Her force spun the screws and propellers of innumerable squadrons of lake steamers crowding the Sault Sainte Marie.For her and because of her all the Central States, all the Great Northwest roared with traffic and industry; sawmills screamed; factories, their smoke blackening the sky, clashed and flamed;wheels turned, pistons leaped in their cylinders; cog gripped cog; beltings clasped the drums of mammoth wheels; and converters of forges belched into the clouded air their tempest breath of molten steel.