第19章 IV(4)

Inspiration is fleeting,beauty is vain,and the power of the mind for wonder limited.Though the shining hosts themselves had risen choiring from the bottom of the gorge,they would not have prevented her papa and one baser than he from rolling stones down those stupendous rainbow-washed slides.Seventeen hundred feet of steep-est pitch and rather more than seventeen hundred colors for log or bowlder to whirl through!

So we heaved things and saw them gather way and bound from white rock to red or yellow,dragging behind them torrents of color,till the noise of their descent ceased and they bounded a hundred yards clear at the last into the Yellowstone.

"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.

VChicago "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,Iurgently 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--Ihad 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.AHottentot 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.Ihad 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.Here they turned out so many hundred thousand dollars'worth of such and such an article;there so many million other things;this house was worth so many million dollars;that one so many million,more or less.