Adelle from her corner of the carriage silently followed this in her cousin's expressive face. She saw that it all seemed small to him, petty, planned on a little scale.
"Give me the Coast!" he said when at last they reached the famous Square of Alton, which was now little more than the intersection of three noisy streets, and turned up the old South Road. That simple expression meant volumes as she knew. It expressed the love of freedom, vigor, simplicity, natural manhood, the longing for the large, fresh face of Nature, where the hopeful soul of man is ready to meet his destiny by himself, unpropped by his ancestors and relatives. There was an echo in her own soul to this primitive lyric cry,—"Give me the Coast!"
(Need we explain that to the true son of California there is but one "Coast" in all the world?)
The old judge smiled sympathetically in response to the cry. Evidently he liked the young man, for he was at great pains to point out to him everything of interest and to explain certain historic monuments that they passed.
Alton had never been notable as a place of residence even in Adelle's childhood, but now it was almost completely converted to industrial uses. The stove factory had grown like a tropic plant, and had spawned about itself a number of parasitic industries, such as tack-mills, paper-box factories, and other occupations that use the labor of women and children. It was one long, smoky, grimy thoroughfare, where in a small, congested area the coarser labors of humanity were performed wholesale by a race of imported gnomes, such as might be found in any of the larger centers of the country. Alton was not one of the "show places," and it may be wondered why the judge had chosen to drive his guests thither instead of to the famous parks of the city.
But Adelle suspected something of his purpose, and more when they turned into that brick maze of small streets that had once been Clark's Field. At this the Californian's mobile face expressed frank contempt, not to say disgust. Even on this beautiful May morning, Clark's Field, with its close-packed rows of lofty tenements, its narrow, dirty alleys, and monotonous blocks of ugly brick facades, was dreary, depressing, a needless monstrosity of civilization. And all this had come about in a little over ten years, as the judge carefully explained to the mason. It had taken less than a generation to cover Clark's Field with its load of brick and mortar, to make it into a swarming hive of mean human lives—a triumph of our day, so often boastfully celebrated in newspaper and magazine, the triumph of efficient property exploitation by the Washington Trust Company under the thin disguise of the "Clark's Field Associates"!
The judge was indefatigable in his determination to penetrate to every dreary corner, every noisome alley of the place, although the young stranger seemed to think that he had had enough at the first glance. It is not necessary for us to make the rounds of the Field for the third time with the little party. Adelle, who had a greater interest than her cousin because of her dim understanding of the judge's purpose, gazed searchingly at everything, and was able to see it differently, to comprehend it all as she had not been able to the time before when she had forced Archie to make the expedition with her. She realized now, at least in part, what Clark's Field really meant, what the magic lamp she had so carelessly rubbed for years to gratify her desires was made of. And it made her thoughtful.
About noon, when the little streets were flooded from curb to curb by a motley army of pale-faced foreign workers from the high lofts and the noisy factories, the judge's carriage drew up beside a vacant corner, the one large undeveloped bit of land still left, nearly in the center of the whole tract. This was plastered with the signs of the realty company, seductively offering to lease it for a term of years or improve it with a building to suit tenant, etc.
"About all the open space and blue sky there is left!" the judge remarked, pointing out the figures of a few dirty children who were exploring a puddle and a pit of rubbish in the vacant lot. (These, I suppose, were the descendants of that brave body of little hoodlums of which I and my brothers were members years ago, and the puddle and pit were all that was left of our mysterious playground!)
"There's a heap of cheap foreign rubbish all around here," the mason growled, spitting contemptuously into the roadbed, as if he resented that human beings could be found forlorn enough, low enough, to labor under such conditions. "Not one of 'em looks as if he had had enough to eat or knew what a good wash was or what the earth smells like!"