But for once Archie was compelled to bend to a superior purpose and endure being bumped over the rough pavements of the city out to the old South Road, which was still cut up badly by heavy teaming as it had been in the days of the farmers' market carts, and which also swarmed with huge trolley boxes and motor trucks and pedestrians. For Alton was now merely a lively industrial quarter of the "greater" city. In addition to the old stove-works of enduring fame there were also foundries and factories and mills. The old, leisurely "Square" had become a knot of squalid arteries radiating into this human hive. Life teemed all over, swarmed upon the pavements, hung from the high tenement windows, infested the strange delicatessen and drink shops, many of which bore foreign names. Most marvelous fact of all was that the thin, pale American type, of which Adelle herself was an example, had largely disappeared from the Alton streets, and in its place there were members from pretty nearly all the races of the earth,—Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Persians,—especially Italians. Many a sturdy young woman, with bare brown arms and glossy black hair, strode along, hatless and unashamed, on her way to shop or mill through the streets where Addie Clark had sidled with prim consciousness of her "place" in society. Archie remarked the growing cosmopolitanism of his native land with strong expressions of disapproval.
"It looks like a slum," he grumbled. "And nothing but dagoes in it. What a place!—and what scum!" he commented frankly upon his wife's birthplace. "Was it like this when you lived here?" he asked pityingly.
"Not so much," she said quietly, not knowing why she disliked his tone and his comment upon the present population of Alton.
"They ought to do something to prevent all this foreign trash from swarming over here," Archie observed.
He did not reflect, nor did Adelle, that this "foreign scum" had come to replace his race because he and his kind refused any longer to do the hard labor of the world. If he had been of a more serious turn of mind, he would have joined the anti-Immigration League and raised the patriotic slogan of "America for Americans!"
Adelle made no reply to his remarks. She sat silent in her corner of the car, glancing intently at the old scenes that were so new and unexpected. From time to time she directed the chauffeur when he was in doubt, the old turnings of the streets coming back to her with astonishing sureness. At last, at Shepard Street, she told him to turn off the South Road, and at once they were in the maze of brick and mortar that had been Clark's Field,—the old Clark pasture. The bulky car had to move slowly through the narrow streets, much to the driver's impatience, and he had frequently to toot his horn or screech his raucous Claxton to warn the pedestrians to make way for the visitors. The children crawled off the streets with the instinctive unconcern of familiarity with traffic; the bareheaded women and dark-faced men scowlingly gave the chariot of the rich space to proceed. So they threaded the lanes and the cross-streets that ribbed the old Field, crossing it twice and completely circling it once, until Archie was in a state of vocal rebellion at the stench, the squalor, the ugliness of the place.
But Adelle looked and looked with unwonted curiosity. In her European wanderings she had penetrated by necessity or accident similar industrial neighborhoods, where human beings swarmed and life was ugly, only to escape as soon as possible. But this time she did not wish to hurry. Clark's Field seemed different to her from anything else she had ever seen.
It was all new, and yet in the way of slums it was immemorially ancient at the same time, as if the members of old races that had come to fill it had brought with them all the grime, all the dreariness of generations of bitter living. And it was this, rather than the marvelous transformation of the sandy field which Adelle dimly remembered, that seized hold of her. How could people live so thickly together, swarm like flies in so many identical doorways, get along with so little air or sunshine or freedom of movement!
"Packed like rotting sardines," was Archie's sneering comment.
Artificially packed, too, scientifically packed in an up-to-date manner, and all in the space of a few years! Modern magic they said of things like this, and took a strange blind pride in it. Even Archie observed with curiosity,—"They must have been a busy little bunch that got this up so quickly!"