XII
THE train swung Tom southward from Chicago about the duned neck of the Lake. The sun broke at last in clear sky upon him. The everlasting smoke sank behind like dust of a departed battle.... Tom had the vision of the town of his childhood.
The train was swimming up the path of the sun. The world cut flat from the train’s stride like a sea from the prow of a racing vessel. The horizon swayingly scooped: trees low and faint in the shrill sky, nude in young leaves, lascivious in blossoms, almost bowled over by the roll of the world—and the blue belch of sturdier chimneys beyond, scattered half-acres of hell spewing soot and shadow over a scarred and flowered prairie. In his eyes now an old sick town....
The long street swooned under foliage. Trees crowded between the two rows of houses as if they had burst them apart. Under their arrogant verdure the little wooden boxes of men crouched and were smothered. A man came out from the dull pressure: he walked into the sway of the trees: he went forth to his toil: he was immersed in the redundance of fields.
Tom went back to the town of his childhood armed with his intelligence. He thought he saw with understanding. Through the window of the train, he found his face fleeing across the prairie. “I understand,” he whispered to himself.
“I understand the tyrannies that oppressed my people: the tyrannies that formed them. The vastness of the soil and of its fruit: the dying spiritual world my fathers packed with them from Europe, and into which they tried to cram—what new bursts of passion, what new world’s splendors! I see what treasure and promise were these fields and hills—and the little hands, the littler minds and tools with which to work them. Of course, there came blindness upon the dazzlement, penury upon their drunken spending, fear of the Spirit upon their rape of the Earth. What masters my fathers must have been not to have been mastered by America!”
Tom understood why the men of ripe New York were shrunken midges beneath the stuff of their buildings: and the still unuttered fate of Chicago: and why Chicago, with its long soiled lazy hands, had held his heart.
“I am of the West. I had forgotten—but I am of the West! To think that ten years of New York could have made me forget. Chicago claimed me!”
New York was a place of exile. There they whose lives were done or were denied builded State upon the principle of their death. New York was a gaunt, ghost City: a dwelling place of shadows that towered above men.
What was New York against this splendor of plains, against Chicago? wide crude child city with the loud voice and the playful heart, with the swift gait and the lumberly laborer’s mind? What was New York against the love of his discovered home?