Read Online I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated by Mary MacLane - Free Book Online Page B

round-faced Cornish women likewise, each with her train of children; there are suave sleek sporting men just out of the bath-tub; insignificant lawyers, dentists, messenger-boys; “plungers” without number; greasy Italians from Meaderville; greasier French people from the Boulevarde Addition; ancient miners - each of whom was the first to stake a claim in Butte; starved-looking Chinamen here and there; a contingent of Finns and Swedes and Germans; musty, stuffy old Jewish pawn-brokers who have crawled out of their holes for a brief recreation; dirt-encrusted Indians and squaws in dirty-gay blankets, from their flea-haunted camp below the town; “box rustlers” - who are as common in Butte as bar-maids in Ireland; swell, flashy-looking Africans; respectable women with white aprons tied around their waists and sailor-hats on their heads, who have left the children at home and stepped out to see what was going on; innumerable stray youngsters from the dark haunts of Dublin Gulch; heavy restaurant-keepers with tooth-picks in their mouths; a vast army of dry-goods clerks - the “paper-collared” gentry; miners of every description; representatives from Dog Town, Chicken Flats, Busterville, Butchertown, and Seldom Seen - suburbs of Butte; pale thin individuals who sing and dance in beer-halls; smart society people in high traps and tally-hos; impossible women - so-called (though in Butte no one is more possible), in vast hats and extremely plaid stockings; persons who take things seriously and play the races for a living; “beer-jerkers”; “biscuit-shooters”; soft-voiced Mexicans and Arabians; - the dregs, the é lite, the humbly respectable, the off-scouring - all thrown together, and shaken up, and mixed well.
    One may notice many odd bits of irony as one walks among these. One may notice that the Irish men are singularly carefree and strong and comfortable - and so jolly! While the Irish women are frumpish and careworn and borne earthward with children. The Cornishman who has consumed the greatest amount of whiskey is the most agreeable, and less and less inclined to leer and ogle. The Cornish woman whose profanity is the shrillest and most genial and voluble, is she whose life seems the most weighted and downtrodden. The young women whose bodies are encased in the tightest and stiffest corsets are in the most wildly hilarious spirits of all. The filthy little Irish youngsters from Dublin Gulch are much brighter and more clever in every way than the ordinary American children who are less filthy. A delicate aroma of cocktails and whiskey-and-soda hangs over even the four-in-hands and automobiles of the upper crust. Gamblers, news-boys, and Chinamen are the most chivalrously courteous among them. And the modest-looking “plunger” who has drunk the greatest number of high-balls is the most gravely, quietly polite of all. The rolling, rollicking, musical profanity of the “ould sod” - Bantry Bay, Donegal, Tyrone, Tipperary - falls much less limpidly from the cigaretted lips of the ten-year-old lad than from those of his mother, who taught it to him. One may notice that the husband and wife who smile the sweetest at each other in the sight of the multitudes are they whose countenances bear various scars and scratches commemorating late evening orgies at home; that the peculiar solid, block-shaped appearance of some of the miners’ wives is due quite as much to the quantity of beer they drink as to their annual maternity; that the one grand ruling passion of some men’s lives is curiosity; - that the entire herd is warped, distorted, barren, having lived its life in smoke-cured Butte.
    A single street in Butte contains people in nearly every walk of life - living side by side resignedly, if not in peace.
    In a row of five or six houses there will be living miners and their families, the children of which prevent life from stagnating in the street while their mothers talk to each other - with the inevitable