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He waved his hand wearily. "Yes," she said. "I've done. Only a word more!" And off she started again. Christophe shook himself angrily. "Will you keep your dirtiness to yourself!" "I was only joking." "Find cleaner subjects, then!" "Tell me why, then. Tell me why you don't like it." "Why? You can't argue as to why a dump-heap smells. It does smell, and that is all! I hold my nose and go away."
We met the Colonel at the head of an indescribable pit of ruin, full of sunshine, whose steps ran down a very steep hillside under the lee of an almost vertically plunging parapet. To the left of that parapet the whole hillside was one gruel of smashed trees, split stones, and powdered soil. It might have been a rag-picker's dump-heap on a colossal scale. Alan looked at it critically.
When tea and the social hour came around culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted. "The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city dump-heap at my front door.
The river-front is one long dump-heap. It is a grave-yard for rusty boilers, deck-plates, chains, fire-bars. The interior of the principal storehouse for ships' supplies, directly in front of the office of the captain of the port, looks like a junk-shop for old iron and newspapers.
Besides "Sully the Pug," a mere human animal, hairy and muscular as a bear, and two "Texicans," as those born in the States of some Mexican blood and generally a touch of foreign accent are called, there were two engineers who lived with their "chinitas," or illiterate mestizo Mexican wives and broods of peon children down in the valley below the dump-heap.
Deathly silence followed him to the door, but, as it closed behind him, he heard the outbreak of the sages like a tidal wave striking a dump-heap of tin cans. Two hours later he descended from an evil ark of a cab at the corral attached to Beaver Beach, and followed the path through the marsh to the crumbling pier. A red-bearded man was seated on a plank by the water edge, fishing.
A cyclone or a fire might have done just as good a job. The place was simply a great dump-heap; an exaggeration of those which disgrace the outskirts of American towns. It was the same thing over and over; mounds of burned brick and broken stone, heaps of rusty, twisted iron, splintered beams and rafters, stagnant pools, cellar holes full of muddy water.
While the New York June grew hotter and hotter and stickier and stickier, while the crowds, crammed together in the subway in a jam as unlovely as a pile of tomato-cans on a public dump-heap, grew pale in the damp heat, Carl labored in his office, and almost every evening called on Ruth, who was waiting for the first of July, when she was to go to Cousin Patton Kerr's, in the Berkshires.
Eight men and a woman who had ventured an act of heroism and been made the victims of a crime could not easily be persuaded to see their efforts and sacrifices thrown on the dump-heap, nor were they timid in expressing their opinions of those who were betraying them. "You been tryin' to get us out!" cried Tim Rafferty.
Zamboni's bedraggled brood, poking with sticks into a dump-heap looking for something to eat, perhaps, or for something to play with. There was the dry, waste grass of the road-side, grimy with coal-dust, as was everything else in the village. What a scene! And this girl's eyes had never a sight of anything more inspiring than this. Day in and day out, all her life long, she looked at this scene!
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