THE HERLAND TRILOGY: Moving the Mountain, Herland & With Her in Ourland (Complete Edition). Charlotte Perkins GilmanЧитать онлайн книгу.
pleasant feeling that the power used will heat the house or run the motor.
“Is that why I don’t smell gasoline in the streets?”
“Yes. We use all those sloppy, smelly things in special places — and apply all the power by electric storage mostly. You saw the little batteries in our boat.”
Then he showed me the railroad. There were six tracks, clean and shiny — thick turf between them.
“The inside four are for the special trains — rapid transit and long distance freight. The outside two are open to anyone.”
We stopped long enough to see some trains go by; the express at an incredible speed, yet only buzzing softly; and the fast freight; cars seemingly of aluminum, like a string of silver beads.
“We use aluminum for almost everything. You know it was only a question of power — the stuff is endless,” Owen explained.
And all the time, on the outside tracks, which had a side track at every station, he told me, ran single coaches or short trains, both passenger and freight, at a comfortable speed.
“All kinds of regular short-distance traffic runs this way. It’s a great convenience. But the regular highroads are the best. Have you noticed?”
I had seen from the air-motor how broad and fine they looked, but told him I had made no special study of them.
“Come on — while we’re about it,” he said; and called a little car. We ran up the hills to Old Broadway, and along its shaded reaches for quite a distance. It was broad, indeed. The center track, smooth, firm, and dustless, was for swift traffic of any sort, and well used. As the freight wagons were beautiful to look at and clean, they were not excluded, and the perfect road was strong enough for any load. There were rows of trees on either side, showing a good growth, though young yet; then a narrower roadway for slower vehicles, on either side a second row of trees, the footpaths, and the outside trees. i
“These are only about twenty-five years old. Don’t you think they are doing well?”
“They are a credit to the National Bureau of Highways and Arboriculture that I see you are going to tell me about.”
“You are getting wise,” Owen answered, with a smile. “Yes — that’s what does it. And it furnishes employment, I can tell you. In the early morning these roads are alive with caretakers. Of course the bulk of the work is done by running machines; but there is a lot of pruning and trimming and fighting with insects. Among our richest victories in that line is the extermination of the gipsy moth — brown tail — elm beetle and the rest.”
“How on earth did you do that?”
“Found the natural devourer — as we did with the scale pest. Also by raising birds instead of killing them; and by swift and thorough work in the proper season. We gave our minds to it, you see, at last.”
The outside path was a delightful one, wide, smooth, soft to the foot, agreeable in color.
“What do you make your sidewalk of?” I asked.
Owen tapped it with his foot. “It’s a kind of semi-flexible concrete — wears well, too. And we color it to suit ourselves, you see. There was no real reason why a path should be ugly to look at.”
Every now and then there were seats; also of concrete, beautifully shaped and too heavy to be easily moved. A narrow crack ran along the lowest curve.
“That keeps ’em dry,” said Owen.
Drinking fountains bubbled invitingly up from graceful standing basins, where birds drank and dipped in the overflow.
“Why, these are fruit trees,” I said suddenly, looking along the outside row.
“Yes, nearly all of them, and the next row are mostly nut trees. You see, the fruit trees are shorter and don’t take the sun off. The middle ones are elms wherever elms grow well. I tell you, John, it is the experience of a lifetime to take a long motor trip over the roads of Ajnerica! You can pick your climate, or run with the season. Nellie and I started once from New Orleans in February — the violets out. We came north with them; I picked her a fresh bunch every dayl”
He showed me the grape vines trained from tree to tree in Tuscan fashion; the lines of berry bushes, and the endless ribbon of perennial flowers that made the final border of the pathway. On its inner side were beds of violets, lilies of the valley, and thick ferns; and around each fountain were groups of lilies and water-loving plants.
I shook my head.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I simply don’t believe it! How could any nation afford to keep up such roads!”
Owen drew me to a seat — we had dismounted to examine a fountain and see the flowers. He produced pencil and paper.
“I’m no expert,” he said. “I can’t give you exact figures. But I want you to remember that the trees pay. Pay! These roads, hundreds of thousands of miles of them, constitute quite a forest, and quite an orchard. Nuts, as Hallie told you, are in growing use as food. We have along these roads, as beautiful clean shade trees, the finest improved kinds of chestnut, walnut, butternut, pecan — whatever grows best in the locality.”
And then he made a number of startling assertions and computations, and showed me the profit per mile of two rows of well-kept nut trees.
“I suppose Hallie has told you about tree farming?” he added.
“She said something about it — but I didn’t rightly know what she meant.”
“Oh, it’s a big thing; it has revolutionized agriculture. As you’re sailing over the country now you don’t see so many bald spots. A healthy, permanent world has to keep its fur on.”
I was impressed by that casual remark, “As you’re sailing over the country.”
“Look here, Owen, I think I have the r glimmer of an idea. Didn’t the common
‘ use of airships help to develop this social consciousness you’re always talking about — this general view of things?”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re dead right, John — it did, and I don’t believe any of us would have thought to mention it.” He looked at me admiringly. “Behold the power of a naturally strong mind — in spite of circumstances! Yes, really that’s a fact. You see few people are able to visualize what they have not seen. Most of us had no more idea of the surface of the earth than an ant has of a meadow. In each mind was only a thready fragment of an idea of the world — no real geographic view. And when we got flying all over it commonly, it became real and familiar to us — like a big garden.
“I guess that helped on the tree idea. You see, in our earlier kind of agriculture the first thing we did was to cut down the forest, dig up and burn over, plow, harrow, and brush fine — to plant our little grasses. All that dry, soft, naked soil was helplessly exposed to the rain — and the rain washed it steadily away. In one heavy storm soil that it had taken centuries of forest growth to make would be carried off to clog the livers and harbors. This struck us all at once as wasteful. We began to realize that food could grow on trees as well as grasses; that the cubic space occupied by a chestnut tree could produce more bushels of nutriment than the linear space below it. Of course we have our wheat fields yet, but around every exposed flat acreage is a broad belt of turf and trees; every river and brook is broadly bordered with turf and trees, or shrubs. We have stopped soil waste to a very great extent. Also we make soil — but that is a different matter.”
“Hurrying Mother Nature again, eh?” “Yes, the advance in scientific agriculture is steady. Don’t you remember that German professor who raised all kinds of things in water? Just fed them a pinch of chemicals now and then? They said he had a row of trees before his door with their roots in barrels of water — the third generation that had never touched ground. We kept on studying, and began to learn how to put together the proper kind of soil for different kinds of plants. Rock-crushers furnished the basis, then add the