V.
Mothers of the World
Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street so far below. Motor-cars, crawling—crawling, glossy-backed beetles. “Drop a pin and impale that green one.” One couldn’t, from up there, give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses may leave one’s regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.
“But look at that!” she said.
In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat. Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have been christened The Eel. Or The Projectile. No masts. And, except at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward from that stack her body stretched five 180 hundred feet to her bow without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.
“But,” she said, “look at this.”
She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof’s tarred gravel and looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.
Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling currents of trade and of lust, here, there, and everywhere, were carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and fume—uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on senseless molten metal; 181 a reproduction in human lives of the phantom flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the Devil’s Flower Garden.
“Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?” she said. “That was making wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill. A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business. I’m emancipated.”
She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment, however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man stood, mending a bow.