THE GATES OF THE CITY
It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the
reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had
not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had
somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the
chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter
came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom,
but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly
passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train,
too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the
weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange
town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their
lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would
fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was
worse.
Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to
proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night.
Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of
gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning
Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his
parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful
dreams.
When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had
nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and
some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky.
The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched
the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in
utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off
their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet
prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed,
their hair in slovenly disarray.
The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally
gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her
breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in
shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of
his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward
Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their
blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent
snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it
seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then
suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his
sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.
Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they
had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long
car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had
boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone
short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him
to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having
been in Macochee so short a time before.
Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car;
she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back
of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up
and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort
of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was
evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely
and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the
city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.
The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it
passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty
gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower
swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of
working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The
train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the
car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it
through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear
the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn.
The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air
of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting
down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated
with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light,
lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered
and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained
and pulled on again.
The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate
themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened
her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their
boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again.
The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all
concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.
The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it
seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the
morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of
brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue,
and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no
pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were
plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.
As the train rushed over unknown streets, Marley caught visions of the
crowds blockaded by the crossing gates, street-cars already filled with
people, empty trucks going after the great loads under which they would
groan all the day; and people, people, people, ready for the new day of
toil that had come to the earth.
At last the train drew up under the black shed of the Union Station, and
Marley stood with the passengers that huddled at the door of the car. He
went out and down; he joined the crowd that passed through the big iron
gates into the station; and then he turned and glanced back for one last
look at the train that had brought him; only a few hours before it had
been in Macochee; a few hours more and it would be there again. In
leaving the train he felt that he was breaking the last tie that bound
him to Macochee, and he would have liked to linger and gaze on it. But a
man in a blue uniform, with the official surliness, ordered him not to
hold back the crowd. He climbed the steps, went out into Canal Street,
ran the gantlet of the cabmen, and was caught up in the crowd and swept
across the bridge into Madison Street.
He was in Chicago, and here among these thousands of people, each
hurrying along through the sordid crowd to his own task, here in this
hideous, cruel city, he must make a place for himself, and gain the
foothold from which he could fight his battle for existence in the
world.