Chicago is an instance of a successful, contemptuous disregard of nature by man. Other great cities have been called gradually into existence about some fine opportunity suggested by nature, at the junction of fertile valleys, or on a loving bend of a broad river, or in the inner recesses of a sea-harbour, where nature has pointed out, as it were, a spot favourable for life and growth. In the case of Chicago, man has decided to make for himself a city for his artificial necessities in defiance of every indifference displayed by nature. Along the level floor of sand and gravel cast up by the mighty lake, the city has swelled and pushed, like a pool of quicksilver, which, poured out on a flat plate, is ever undulating and altering its borders, as it eats its way further into the desert expanse. Railroad lines, like strands of a huge spider’s web, run across the continent in all directions, wilfully, strenuously centring in this waste spot, the swampy corner of a great lake. Through these manifold strands, the city touches the world.
The soil, where it emerges from the swamp, will grow nothing but spindling, scrubby trees and weeds. Man must make all,—must prepare special foundations for his great buildings; must superimpose good streets of asphalt or brick upon the treacherous bottom; must make green things live, with the cares of a hot-house, to delight his eye, for left to herself nature merely hides the plain with a kind of brown scab. Upon this desolate waste first necessities have been provided for by miles and miles of nondescript buildings, enclosures for business and the requirements of naked existence; and then, these last years, time has come for ornamentation and individual care,—for the private house, the boulevard, the park. This last development, however, is sporadic; hence as a whole the first impression Chicago gives is that of a huge garment made of heterogeneous materials,—here a square of faded cotton, next door a patch let in of fine silk. For the order of life is first existence, then comfort, then luxury, and last—when the human mind begins to suffer ennui—a little beauty for a plaything.
The complex quality of this wonderful city is best seen as the stranger shoots across the prairie in a railroad train, penetrating layer after layer of the folds. First in the great distance, rises a pall of dull smoke, shifting lethargically up and down the scene, as the lake wind or the land wind pulls and tugs at its mephitic dead body. Then the railroad, describing irregular curves, crosses lines of streets built up on embankments with oily ditches below, and intersected by cross streets that disappear into the marsh. In the chinks of the broken, ambitious plank walks grow brown weeds and grass. At regular intervals lamp posts set high up on mounds indicate where the city will place some day a solid level for actual, busy life. Here and there rows of frame boxes, or cheaply ornamented cottages crop up, or a stone-front apartment building stands stranded, above the swamp, its foundation stones on a level with the lamp posts or the broken plank walk that gives access to its desolate self. Sometimes these tentative buildings lie closely together, and there are stores and saloons, and the streets are penetrated by electric wires. This is the Chicago of the future,—perhaps of the morrow, whenever the advancing lines of blocks shall have bounded that way.
Then come the solid outworks of the great city, which are marked roughly by the parks flanking the three landward sides. These parks are a noble patronage of nature, an indulgence to the carnal appetites of men, which are given to green things, as trees and flowering bushes and soft sod. They are great slices of man’s territory handed over to the landscape gardener to be made into nature by a tour de force. Here begin the broad boulevards where live the men of the city who lead the toil and fight in the furnace, and have emerged to build great comfortable new houses surrounded by broad edgings of cool-looking grass. If one has succeeded fairly, there beyond, under the pall of black smoke, one comes out here to rest and enjoy and possess.
Still there is left the city, becoming hotter and fiercer mile by mile. Life spins there; man there is handling existence as you knead bread in a pan. The city is made of man; that is the last word to say of it. Brazen, unequal, like all man’s works, it stands a stupendous piece of blasphemy against nature. Once within its circle, the heart must forget that the earth is beautiful. “Go to,” man boasts, “our fathers lived in the fear of nature; we will build a city where men and women in their passions shall be the beginning and end. Man is enough for man.”
And out lakeward hangs the cool wind, ready now and then to rush into the thousands of streets and avenues that intersect the city like the pipes of a boiler, to clean out the stale air and the filth, willing thus to assist man in his slipshod management of his home. At other times it is busy with the lake—that marvellous lake!—spread out beyond the sandy shores, shifting, changing, gathering light to itself, playing out the panorama of nature close at hand for the unheeding benefit of this creature, man.
To John Wilbur, Chicago was like a congenial Alpine air, which stimulated his appetites. From the very first the strife for advancement summoned all his virility, and the sense of rapid success exhilarated him. His wife, on the other hand, remembered for many a day the sudden depression which the fierce city had given her spirits that first March morning of their arrival. It seemed to her imaginative mind the first fact she had ever known. But she learned to accept the conditions passably, and to do without many sensibilities; she learned how to make business—the mechanics of life—serve for all interests of mind. Nearly two years passed thus in a swift leap while Mrs. Wilbur was becoming a “worker,” before Molly Parker came to visit her. Mrs. Ormiston Dexter having died suddenly, Molly was preparing wonderingly to earn her bread, and for such vague purposes Chicago offered a good field.
The first morning after her arrival the two visited the Wilburs’ new house that was going up some miles to the south. They drove out by the arrow-like Michigan Boulevard, then turned back and forth, skilfully dodging bad streets where pools of slime lay in the broken wooden pavements, crossing the whirring cable-tracks, until they reached a broad avenue. Here the houses were separated by patches of lawn or vacant lots, and the expansive boulevard was divided in two by little artificial mounds of earth, with trees and shrubs, in which wound gravelled walks.
“We decided to build ’way south,” Mrs. Wilbur explained, “because it isn’t so dreadfully noisy and dusty out here. We can have plenty of room, and, just think! there are two or three fair-sized trees on our lot.”
Miss Parker was eagerly looking here and there. The morning breeze from the lake shot little spots of bright colour over her face.