I
LEAVING New Jersey I kept from all contact with money, and was
consequently turning over in memory many delicious adventures among the
Pennsylvania-German farmers. After crossing that lovely, lonely plateau
called Pocono Mountain, I descended abruptly to Wilkesbarre by a length
of steep automobile road called Giant Despair.
It was a Sunday noon in May. Wilkesbarre was a mixture of Sabbath calm
and the smoke of torment that ascendeth forever. One passed pious faces
too clean, sooty faces too restless. I hurried through, hoping for
more German farmers beyond. But King Coal had conspired against the
traveller, and would not let him go. The further west I walked, the
thicker the squalor and slag heaps, and the presence of St. Francis
seemed withdrawn from me, though I had been faithful in my fashion.
King Coal is a boaster. He says he furnishes food for all the engines
of the earth. He says he is the maker of steam. He says steam is the
twentieth century. He holds that an infinite number of black holes in
the ground is a blessing.
He may say what he likes, but he has not excused himself to me. He
blasts the landscape. Never do human beings drink so hard to forget
their sorrow as in the courtyards of this monarch. To dig in a mine
makes men reckless, to own one makes them tormentors.
I had a double reason for hurrying on. My rules as a mendicant afoot
were against cities and railroads. I flattered myself I was called and
sent to the agricultural laborer.
When the land grew less black and less inhabited, I mistakenly
rejoiced, assuming I should soon strike the valleys where grain is
sown and garnered. Yet the King was following me still, like a great
mole underground. There was no coal on the surface. The land was
rusty-red and ashen-gray,--as though blasted by the torch of a Cyclops
and only yesterday cooled by the rain. The best grain that could have
been scattered among such rocks with the hope of a crop was a seed of
dragons’ teeth.
How long the desolation continued! Toward the end of the day in the
midst of the nothingness, I came upon a saloon full of human creatures
roaring drunk. Otherwise there was not so much as a shed in sight.
Four vilely dirty little girls came down the steps carrying beer. One
of them, too intoxicated for her errand, entrusted her can to her
companions. They preceded me toward the smoke-veiled sun by a highway
growing black again with the foot-prints of the King.
Now there was a deafening explosion. I sat down on a rock examining
myself to see if I was still alive. The children pattered on. My start
seemed to amuse them immensely. I followed toward the new civil war, or
whatever it was.
Just over the crest and around the corner I encountered the King’s
never-varying insignia, the double-row of “company houses.”
Every dwelling was as eternally and uniformly damned as its neighbor,
making the eyes ache, standing foursquare in the presence of the
insulted daylight. Every porch and railing was jig-sawed in the same
ruthless way. Every front yard was grassless. Everything was made of
wood, yet seemed made of iron, so black it was, so long had it stood
in the wasting weather, so steadily had it resisted the dynamite now
shaking the earth.
There they stood, thirty houses to the left, thirty to the right, with
what you might call a street between, whose ruts were seemingly cut by
the treasure-chariots of the brimstone princes of the nether world.
Two-thirds of the way through, several young miners were exploding
giant powder. As I approached I saw another was loading his pistol with
ball-cartridges and shooting over the hills at the sun. He did not put
it out.
The group of children with the beer served these knights of dynamite,
holding up the cans for them to drink. The little cup-bearers were then
given pennies. They scurried home.
By their eyes and queer speech I guessed that these children were
Poles, or of some other race from Eastern Europe. I guessed the same
about the men celebrating. Every porch on both sides of that street
held some heavy headed creatures from presumably the same foreign
parts. They were, no doubt, good citizens after their peculiar fashion,
but with countenances that I could not read. Though the next explosion
seemed to jolt the earth out of its orbit, they merely blinked.
I said to myself, “This is not the fourth of July. Therefore it must
be the anniversary of the day when ‘Freedom shrieked’ and ‘Kosciuszko
fell.’”
I reached the end of the street; nothing beyond but a hollow of hills
and a dubious river, enclosing a new Tophet, that I learned afterwards
was Shickshinny. It was late. I wanted to get beyond to the green
fields.
I zigzagged across that end of the street to folk on the front
porches that I thought were Americans. Each time I vainly attempted
conversation with some dumb John Sobieski in Sunday clothes. I wondered
what were the Polish words for bread, shelter, and dead broke.