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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 48 |
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_ CHAPTER XLVIII Since Adelle's visit Judge Orcutt had given some hours of profound reflection to Clark's Field, for the second time in his life. Not to the legal problem suggested by the young woman's desire to upset the disposition of her property. That he had answered in the only way he could, firmly and decisively. Unscrupulous lawyers might hold out delusive hopes to these newly found heirs if they should fall into their clutches; but the probate judge knew the law of the land and the temper of the courts on this familiar topic. No, his attention had been given to Adelle herself and to her request for his advice upon what she should do with the property that had been given her in the due process of the law. He realized that he was called upon to advise again crucially in regard to Clark's Field. For he recognized Adelle's earnestness of purpose and her pathetically groping desire for light upon life. He had already reversed that decision about her, given when Adelle upon her majority appeared in his court and he had had occasion to lecture her about the nature of the fortune he was handing over to her. Then his harsh tone had been due to a sense of futility in having been at great pains to preserve for this foolishly dressed and apparently empty-headed young woman a very great property. To him had come then acutely the disheartening realization of the underlying irony of life, when such power and privilege could be put into such futile hands. And he--the conscientious judge--had been the instrument of the law in perpetrating this bitter jest upon justice. But now he felt that Adelle might justify her good fortune. For it seemed that her riches after poisoning her had already begun to work their own cure. She wanted to rid herself of them. That was a good sign. Not that he sympathized in her crude plan of endowing these unknown Clark cousins with a lot of her money. He was glad that, at any rate, the law put a stop to further litigation over Clark's Field. If she wanted to distribute her estate to them she could, of course. But in all probability it would do them little good; and it might do a great deal of harm. He was interested in Adelle, in her development and her being, much more than in the Clark money. What would be best for her ultimately? If he had been a conventionally minded old gentleman, he would have urged her to bestow her money prudently upon safe charities--perhaps create a special philanthropic trust for the distribution of Clark's Field, after her death, of course, for the good of education, or hospitals, or art--the ordinary channels chosen by those rich persons who cared to alienate from themselves and their heirs a portion of their property. But the judge, fortunately, was not conventionally minded, although he had sat upon the bench for upwards of forty years. He knew that philanthropy was a very wasteful and mechanical method of attaining an end, and often did great harm to everybody, because such a little charity made such an immense amount of social salve. He did not believe that "philanthropy" would appeal in its common forms to Adelle, certainly not deathbed giving. She had been through some terrible experiences, that was evident, and was still more shaken by them than she knew. But she was young, with a long life presumably to lead, and other children and loves and interests to blossom in it. Would it not be wise for her to retain her property, now that she had learned something of the nature of money, and endeavor by herself to use Clark's Field wisely? It was here that the judge's musings brought up. He was inclined to have faith in Adelle as a person for the first time. We can see how far from the anarchist his philosophy of life led him. The accidents of life--yes, but mysterious, not merely ironic and meaningless, accidents! Adelle Clark, the unpromising little girl, the loud, silly young married woman, was the instrument chosen by Fate--only the judge said God-sharpened by pain and sorrow to become the intelligent destiny of Clark's Field. Could the law with all its hedging and guarding beat that? Could the stone mason or the judge himself or any human mind select a better executor for Clark's Field than the unlikely instrument which Fate had chosen? The judge thought not, and with his own little plan in mind serenely awaited the arrival of the Clark cousins on this joyous May morning, having previously ordered the horses and carriage that he commonly used for his outings. * * * * * Adelle sat beside the judge in the old-fashioned brougham, and the stone mason opposite to them, his great brown hands bedded on his knees, his face critically examining the city landscape. The judge talked chiefly to the young man, in his humorous and rather garrulous manner, describing for his benefit the glories of the old city. They plunged almost at once off the hill into a slum, where in the tall brick tenements women were hanging out of the windows enjoying the spring day. The sunshine and the blue sky made the narrow, dirty streets, and the evil-looking buildings even more out of place than usual. The young Californian wrinkled his mouth scornfully over it. But soon they drove out upon a new bridge that bound the two parts of the city together where the breeze came in across the water gayly. The mason was specially pleased with the tunnel through which the surface cars disappeared into the bowels of the city. That was some good, he said, and added that they did not have it in California. "But we don't need it yet--we aren't so crowded out there," he explained. He did not think much of the tall buildings they encountered on their route. They had better ones in "'Frisco," and had he not seen New York? His attitude towards this home of his forefathers was mildly tolerant. If the issue had been put to him squarely, he would never have exchanged his free California inheritance for his share of Clark's Field! He seemed to think better of his grandfather for having shaken the dust of Alton from his scornful feet. That was exactly what he himself would have done if it had been his misfortune to belong to the younger branch of the family. But in that case, perhaps, he would not have had the courage to brave the unknown! 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!" No, the Coast for him, and the sooner the better, too! The judge smiled tolerantly, observing,-- "I don't suppose they have much chance to bathe here. The city cannot afford to put up public baths and employers rarely think of those things." "Look at the rotten stuff they eat!" The mason pointed disdainfully to the tipcarts drawn up along the curb, where men and women were chaffering over dried fish and forlorn vegetables that would have soured the soul of old Adams, who once raised celery on this very spot. "Don't the folks in these parts eat better than that?" "Not generally," the judge replied. "We have no public market in this city, and it is very difficult for the poorer sort to get fresh food." "You'd oughter see the California markets!" the young man bragged. "Tell me about them," the judge said. And while the young mason expatiated on his land of plenty where the poor man could still enjoy his own bit of God's sunlight and fresh fruit and flowers from the earth, Adelle watched the thick stream of workers in Clark's Field, pushing and dawdling along the narrow street. There were girls with bare arms and soiled shirt-waists and black skirts, there were lean, pale boys, and women old before their time, hurrying from tenement to shop, their hearts divided between the two cares of home and livelihood. Adelle recalled one of her first talks with the stone mason, in which he had crudely told her that her yearly income represented the total wages of four or five hundred able-bodied men and women, such as these, who worked from ten to sixteen hours a day for three hundred days each year, when they could, and all told earned hardly what she drew by signing her name to slips of paper as income from her property during the same space of time. He said to her,--"You can think that you are worth about four hundred human lives! Who talks about slavery being abolished? Hell!" She had thought then that his way of putting it was quite wrong, unjust: she was sure that Major Pound could easily have disposed of his contention. Indeed, she had heard the major and men like him maintain that capitalists like herself were the only true benefactors of humanity, that without them the working-people could never be fed! But to-day she was not sure that her cousin had been wrong. She saw a concrete proof of his statement in this stream of poorly nourished, hard-worked men, women, boys, and girls, all toiling to maintain themselves and pay her the interest upon the crowded land of Clark's Field. In a very definite sense they were all working for her; they were her slaves! The younger women and girls looked into the judge's brougham curiously or impudently, attracted by the spectacle of leisure and quiet richness that Adelle presented, a sight not commonly afforded them in the streets of Clark's Field and always fascinating to women of any class wherever it may be. Adelle's dress was plain black, and she had shed much of her jewelry; but beneath her simple gown and fine linen and carefully cherished skin she began to feel a new sensation, not exactly pity for these less lucky sisters, rather wonder that it should all be so, that she should be sitting there in idleness and comfort and they should be tramping the pavement of Clark's Field to the factory.... When she saw the boys playing in the mud puddle in the one vacant lot, she thought of her own little boy, on whom she had lavished every care, every luxury. So with these working-girls, she thought how easily she might have been one of them going from the rooming-house in Church Street to shop or factory, as many women of better Puritan families than hers had done. It was pure accident, she could see, why she and her child had been saved from such a lot--due neither to her own ability nor that of any of her Clark forbears! It was a humbling perception. "Hell!" her cousin was saying explosively, "these people are no better 'n cattle. At least they ought to give 'em a trough to wash in and a place where they could buy decent food." "A few other things, too, perhaps," the judge added with his gentle smile. "But who will do it? The city is already badly debt-ridden. The owners of the land pay so much in taxes and interest, due to the high price of the land here, that they probably make a bare eight per cent net on their investment." He looked inquiringly at the young man. "It's all wrong," the mason retorted heatedly, forgetting that he had hoped to become one of these "owners of the land," and returning to his incipient rebellion at the state of society in which he lived. "Somebody ought to be made to do such things." The judge smiled finely, merely remarking in a casual tone,-- "It is a very perplexing question, all that, my young friend!" "But you don't think it's right so," the mason persisted belligerently, thinking to challenge a supporter of things as they are. "There's very little that is quite right in this world, my boy," the judge replied simply. "Well, we'd better set out now to make it nearer right," the young man grumbled. "Oh, yes, that is perfectly sound doctrine.... And shall we begin with Clark's Field?" he asked, turning to Adelle with one of his playful, kindly smiles. "It needs it," she said simply. "Yes, I think it needs it!" "Sure!" the mason asserted resoundingly. A little while afterwards the judge said to the driver,-- "I think that we will go home now, John." _ |
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