CHAPTER XVII ACROSS AMERICA NORTH TO SOUTH
Ewart was much surprised by the politeness of Chicago. If he made a mistake in New York, such as to bring his lighted cigarette into a car of the overhead railway, he met with such rebukes as Put that cigarette out! Put-it-OUT! But as the porter put our bags into the cab at Chicago he cried out to us: "Good luck, boys!" and gave us a cheery salute. Perhaps we overtipped him. And when we got to Santa Fe a salesman in a shop selling Ewart a shirt called him "brother"—"This pattern, brother, is what you want." I explained to my friend that the lower orders in New York were Lithuanians and the like, who had only just learned enough English to be impolite in it. He must not judge the manners of America by them.
We spent a Chicago morning in Marshall Field's and "The Fair," trying to buy a pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles and brown leather facings, something Ewart had seen on the boat and fancied. The foreman of the floor walkers of the huge department store examined his chart, saw at a glance which salesmen were occupied and which were waiting, and assigned us to one who was straightway called. That young man proceeded to try and sell to us, not what Ewart wanted, but what he had got; brought out box after box of shoes, and even persuaded him to try on a pair of shoes of an entirely different style. "But what I mean is a sort of a tennis shoe with leather toe-caps. You know what I mean," said Ewart. "You want Oxfords," decided the salesman, and passed him on to another department. Thence we were transferred to a subdivision of the Athletic department, and then got back to "Shoes." Here another salesman proceeded to show us all that we had seen before, assuring us, however, that he had just what we wanted.
After that we spent an hour in that crowded chaotic emporium called "The Fair" where the procedure was different. A very busy, preoccupied salesman, tending six or seven anxious bargain-hunting Chicagoans, assured us he had just the thing, got Ewart with his boots off, gave him a pair of white tennis shoes, "just to get his size," and left him stranded for a full quarter of an hour—whilst as it seemed all Chicago swirled past, gossiping, buying, clamoring, jostling, and in the midst of this great shop crowds of children went up and down a moving staircase for fun.
I believe that both in Marshall Field's and "The Fair" shoes of the kind wanted were in stock, but the salesman's habit was to show just what he was put in charge of—he had become incapable of the mental process of imagining what a customer might describe as his need. In England a shopkeeper has to pay much more attention to individual wants. If he has not got a certain thing he will get it. Americans buy much more from what is spread before them than by choice and need.
However, without the shoes, we left "The Fair" for the less crowded streets, and had lunch in a restaurant on Dearborn. My friend had ordered roast beef. "The thing to have here is 'hot dog,'" said I.
"No, really? I say, I think I'll change that order. Have you, er, have you hot dog?"
"Sure," replied the waitress with alacrity, and she brought him back two large sausages, crisp and burst at one end.
"Some dawgs, I'll say," smiled the girl as she put them before him. He did not put them away coldly from him. He ate his dogs, and was amused. He was getting what they call "an angle on America."
"Not bad 'eats,'" said he with a twinkle. "I'll remember that. In Chicago I ate dog."
One can hardly see Chicago in two or three days. It is a more important place for studying America than is New York. For it is more characteristic. The lights of the capitals of Europe all shine in New York. It is a city of a hundred good-bys. But in Chicago one light burns and that is the light of America. It is a city of a hundred good mornings.
But Chicago so much depends on your knowing what it was. The visitor who sees it for the first time is still likely to pass an adverse judgment upon it—especially if he wanders in its streets at random. There is dirt and a humanity that looks like dirt, there is appalling carelessness and lack of joy in life, rust and refuse uncounted—but that is not all. Chicago is a city rising to strong self-consciousness, a city getting under control and improving steadily. It is no longer the city which Stead saw when he wrote, If Christ came to Chicago, nor is it the city described in Upton Sinclair's Jungle. It is many streets better. It has gone several blocks West. In Chicago people now talk of the "City Beautiful."
Chicago has been the anvil of fortune, and that merely, the smithy, the works, the place to which men went to make money, to lift themselves from a life of rough primitive toil to a life of clean clothes and ease. There they employed whom they could to help them, and incidentally helped their helpers often. It is true they exploited the foreign immigrant and that they did not help him much—because he was largely helpless. And they attracted great numbers of Negroes and exploited them and did not help them much. They left the immigrant and the colored man to live round about their factories amid waste ends of material. And when that labor itself wore out, it lay around also as waste-ends—waste-ends of humanity. Hence the vast aggregation of dirt and poverty in the city.
But the point of view has changed. The people of business are so rich that America has become intolerant of poverty. Like the Prince of Monaco, she is determined to abolish the poor. She will not admit new poor into her country, and those she has she is raising out of the slough. Every thing and every one is being cleaned up. Chicago is to become all middle class, and during the ten years since I saw it first it has made enormous strides in that direction.
Michigan Avenue and the Magnolia Walk, the long parklike water-front, were very gratifying to our eyes after the clamor and bang of State Street and Dearborn, where there are still many at the anvil of fortune. "In a hundred years," I hazarded, "the whole city may have become a park."
Kansas City, at which we stopped next, is of course far less problematical in aspect than Chicago. It is smaller. It grew up in a more prosperous era. It took advantage of all the new fixtures and technical appliances of a later stage. It is, therefore, cleaner and not so much littered with discarded material. The stock yards and tanning factories, however, charge the air heavily upon occasion with an odor which should surely be intolerable. No one could live for pleasure in a city of infected air. It must, therefore, be a city of business, money-making, and that only, for most people. Yet it is a fine city on the high bank of the Kansas River, overlooking rich farmland. It is the fringe of the West, and cowboys with their broad hats and sunburnt faces are not infrequent on its crowded streets. There is an air of expectancy, as if the gates of industrialism and bondage stood open and the American nation was free to pour out on to the prairies and the wild places of the Rockies.
It much astonished Ewart that whilst passing through the States of Kansas and Iowa we could not buy cigarettes. There no one smoked, and it appeared no one wanted to. Cigarette smoking was regarded as a vice and a shame.
"Betting has also been abolished, and so has immorality," observed a Kansan with a smile.
"Free speech also," said I. And I had him there, for America was then still excited by the arrest of William Allen White at Emporia, Kansas, for saying he was partly in favor of a railroad strike.
Intolerance cuts into vice, but sometimes takes a slice of virtue too, even in Kansas. I believe, however, that the Kansan is nearest to being an average normal American. He is the representative American.
South of Kansas the people are mostly Southerners; West of it they are certainly Western; North of it and East of it they are certainly Middle West. But Kansas itself is a New England seed in Middle Western soil.
"You are the people who have taken away our wine," say Easterners, reproachfully.
The Kansans smile.
"We are the people!" they say, and are not at all ashamed.
Ewart and I traveled across Kansas and its many farms, and the vague thought of Quivira crossed my mind. This was the country in which Coronado and his followers in 1541 gave up their quest of gold, being brought to Wichita by an Indian who wished to lead them to their doom. In this country, the Indian said, lay the Kingdom of Quivira, where the King and his princes wore golden armor. And he brought them to a camp of nomads near the great bend of the Arkansas River, and there was naught there but the invisible possibility of what is now Kansas. The enraged Spaniards, therefore, strangled the Indian and turned their faces southward once more toward Cibola and the deserts in New Spain.
But golden Quivira is golden to-day, golden with corn, and Kansas is the richest State in the Union; a State literally without poor, a State of empty prisons, without doss-houses, without out-door relief. Kansas of to-day wears golden armor against Fate and has proved the Indian to be right.
"Ho for Kansas, land that restores us!" as Lindsay cried. And then, farewell. The train on its iron tracks rolls onward, following its predecessor, followed inevitably by its successor, sootily, dustily, heavily, to the steeps of Colorado; out of the green country up to the gray and bare, up to the hills and broken cliffs, to the pasture lands and the cowboys. The pipe smokers of Colorado fill the black-leather section of the ordinary cars, the smoking section; in come horse-faced men who have lived with horses so much that their features have caught a reflection of horses' features, men with sun-dried complexions and bodies; not so witty as the people of the East, more humorous though, and full of a new kind of talk. All the linen collars have gone, and with them the comparative stiffness of business life. Not that there are not collars on the train. God forbid! There are Pullman cars lagging on to us somewhere, and respectability sitting perched on plush, as everywhere else. But in the smoking section of the ordinary car is the real life of the country.
Ewart would have liked to dismount at Trinidad, Colorado, and at Dodge City, but our tickets were nearly out of date. So we let ourselves be hoisted on to the New Mexican plateau with its wide stretches of sand dotted with dwarf pines, with its dried-up river channels, its mud heads of mountains and strange bluffs, its Mexicans and Indians. Next day we were at Santa Fe.