Читать онлайн
A Cry in the Wilderness
A Cry in the Wilderness
"What a wilderness was this Seigniory of Lamoral! and yet—I liked it." Frontispiece. See Page 92.
BOOK ONE
THE JUGGERNAUT
A Cry in the Wilderness
I
"You Juggernaut!"
That's exactly what I said, and said aloud too.
I was leaning from the window in my attic room in the old district of New York known as "Chelsea"; both hands were stemmed on the ledge.
"You Juggernaut of a city!" I said again, and found considerable satisfaction in repeating that word. I leaned out still farther into the sickening September heat and defiantly shook my fist, as it were into the face of the monster commercial metropolis of the New World.
I felt the blood rush into my cheeks—thin and white enough, so my glass told me. Then I straightened myself, drew back and into the room. The quick sharp clang of the ambulance gong, the clatter of running hoofs sounded below me in the street.
"And they keep going under—so," I said beneath my breath; and added, but between my teeth:
"But I won't—I won't!"
Turning from the window, I took my seat at the table on which was a pile of newspapers I kept for reference, and searched through them until I found an advertisement I remembered to have seen a week before. I had marked it with a blue pencil. I cut it out. Then I put on my hat and went down into the city that lay swooning in the intense, sultry heat of mid-September.
The sun, dimmed and blood red in vapor, was setting behind the Jersey shore. The heated air quivered above the housetops. Wherever there was a stretch of asphalt pavement, innumerable hoof-dents witnessed to the power of the sun's rays. The shrivelled foliage in the parks was gray with dust.
I knew well enough that on the upper avenues for blocks and blocks the houses were tightly boarded as if hermetically sealed to light and air; but I was going southward, and below and seaward every door and window yawned wide. To the rivers, to the Battery, to the Bridge, the piers, and the parks, the sluggish, vitiated life of the city's tenement districts was crawling listless. The tide was out; and I knew that beneath the piers—who should know better than I who for six years had taken half of my recreation on them?—the fetid air lay heavy on the scum gathered about the slime-covered piles.