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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Marching Men, by Sherwood Anderson
+#2 in our series by Sherwood Anderson
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+Title: Marching Men
+
+Author: Sherwood Anderson
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7045]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 27, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCHING MEN ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was provided by Juliet Sutherland <juliet.sutherland@verizon.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+MARCHING MEN
+
+BY
+
+SHERWOOD ANDERSON
+Author of "Windy Mcpherson's Son"
+
+MCMXVII
+
+
+
+TO
+AMERICAN WORKINGMEN
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Uncle Charlie Wheeler stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor's
+bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania
+and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood
+before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a
+wink at the Reverend Minot Weeks who stood by the door leading to the
+street, he tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.
+
+"It has," he said, waving attention to the boy, who was making a mess
+of the effort to arrange Uncle Charlie's loaf into a neat package, "a
+pretty name. They call it Norman--Norman McGregor." Uncle Charlie
+laughed heartily and again stamped upon the floor. Putting his finger
+to his forehead to suggest deep thought, he turned to the minister. "I
+am going to change all that," he said.
+
+"Norman indeed! I shall give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too
+soft, too soft and delicate for Coal Creek, eh? It shall be
+rechristened. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden naming
+things. We will call it Beaut--Our Beautiful One--Beaut McGregor."
+
+The Reverend Minot Weeks also laughed. He thrust four ringers of each
+hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie
+along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like
+two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and
+jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing
+as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door
+ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go
+along the street from store to store telling the tale of the
+christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details
+of the story.
+
+It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one
+of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks
+and in the gutters of Main Street--black snow, sordid with the
+gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the
+bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling
+along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they
+carried dinner pails.
+
+The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great
+hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie,
+Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and
+looked after him as with the loaf of bread under his arm he hurried
+along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still
+enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his
+nearness to life in the mining town. "Did not Christ himself laugh,
+eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, as he waddled
+through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the
+two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-
+shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was
+the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole
+between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand
+forth among his fellows.
+
+In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it
+is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast
+disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in
+route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
+towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
+come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
+Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
+through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
+with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent
+of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of
+them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or
+Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of
+the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of
+our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of
+our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing
+step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own
+individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly
+mass in at the door of a Chicago factory morning after morning and
+year after year with never an epigram from the lips of one of them.
+
+In Coal Creek when men got drunk they staggered in silence through the
+street. Did one of them, in a moment of stupid animal sportiveness,
+execute a clumsy dance upon the barroom floor, his fellow--labourers
+looked at him dumbly, or turning away left him to finish without
+witnesses his clumsy hilarity.
+
+Standing in the doorway and looking up and down the bleak village
+street, some dim realisation of the disorganised ineffectiveness of
+life as he knew it came into the mind of the McGregor boy. It seemed
+to him right and natural that he should hate men. With a sneer on his
+lips, he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist, who was
+forever talking of a day coming when men would march shoulder to
+shoulder and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, should cease being
+aimless and become definite and full of meaning.
+
+"They will never do that and who wants them to," mused the McGregor
+boy. A blast of wind bearing snow beat upon him and he turned into the
+shop and slammed the door behind him. Another thought stirred in his
+head and brought a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the
+silence of the empty shop shaking with emotion. "If I could form the
+men of this place into an army I would lead them to the mouth of the
+old Shumway cut and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist
+toward the door. "I would stand aside and see the whole town struggle
+and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
+drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the
+street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
+went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the
+loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being,
+the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had
+made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance,
+galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men
+looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and
+nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the snow from
+before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he
+called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beaut is the name
+for you! Oh you Beaut!"
+
+The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
+Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
+satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend Minot
+Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his hat
+and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
+new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
+thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about
+it. It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been
+plain John or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed
+through him. "She might have used more sense," he muttered.
+
+And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the
+name. That checked his flight toward universal hatred and he began
+pushing the cart forward again, a more genial current of thought
+running through his mind. The tall boy loved the memory of his father,
+"Cracked McGregor." "They called him 'Cracked' until that became his
+name," he thought. "Now they are at me." The thought renewed a feeling
+of fellowship between himself and his dead father--it softened him.
+When he reached the first of the bleak miners' houses a smile played
+about the corners of his huge mouth.
+
+In his day Cracked McGregor had not borne a good reputation in Coal
+Creek. He was a tall silent man with something morose and dangerous
+about him. He inspired fear born of hatred. In the mines he worked
+silently and with fiery energy, hating his fellow miners among whom he
+was thought to be "a bit off his head." They it was who named him
+"Cracked" McGregor and they avoided him while subscribing to the
+common opinion that he was the best miner in the district. Like his
+fellow workers he occasionally got drunk. When he went into the saloon
+where other men stood in groups buying drinks for each other he bought
+only for himself. Once a stranger, a fat man who sold liquor for a
+wholesale house, approached and slapped him on the back. "Come, cheer
+up and have a drink with me," he said. Cracked McGregor turned and
+knocked the stranger to the floor. When the fat man was down he kicked
+him and glared at the crowd in the room. Then he walked slowly out at
+the door staring around and hoping some one would interfere.
+
+In his house also Cracked McGregor was silent. When he spoke at all he
+spoke kindly and looked into the eyes of his wife with an eager
+expectant air. To his red-haired son he seemed to be forever pouring
+forth a kind of dumb affection. Taking the boy in his arms he sat for
+hours rocking back and forth and saying nothing. When the boy was ill
+or troubled by strange dreams at night the feel of his father's arms
+about him quieted him. In his arms the boy went to sleep happily. In
+the mind of the father there was a single recurring thought, "We have
+but the one bairn, we'll not put him into the hole in the ground," he
+said, looking eagerly to the mother for approval.
+
+Twice had Cracked McGregor walked with his son on a Sunday afternoon.
+Taking the lad by the hand the miner went up the face of the hill,
+past the last of the miners' houses, through the grove of pine trees
+at the summit and on over the hill into sight of a wide valley on the
+farther side. When he walked he twisted his head far to one side like
+one listening. A falling timber in the mines had given him a deformed
+shoulder and left a great scar on his face, partly covered by a red
+beard filled with coal dust. The blow that had deformed his shoulder
+had clouded his mind. He muttered as he walked along the road and
+talked to himself like an old man.
+
+The red-haired boy ran beside his father happily. He did not see the
+smiles on the faces of the miners, who came down the hill and stopped
+to look at the odd pair. The miners went on down the road to sit in
+front of the stores on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory
+of the hurrying McGregors. They had a remark they tossed about. "Nance
+McGregor should not have looked at her man when she conceived," they
+said.
+
+Up the face of the hill climbed the McGregors. In the mind of the boy
+a thousand questions wanted answering. Looking at the silent gloomy
+face of his father, he choked back the questions rising in his throat,
+saving them for the quiet hour with his mother when Cracked McGregor
+was gone to the mine. He wanted to know of the boyhood of his father,
+of the life in the mine, of the birds that flew overhead and why they
+wheeled and flew in great ovals in the sky. He looked at the fallen
+trees in the woods and wondered what made them fall and whether the
+others would presently fall in their turn.
+
+Over the hill went the silent pair and through the pinewood to an
+eminence half way down the farther side. When the boy saw the valley
+lying so green and broad and fruitful at their feet he thought it the
+most wonderful sight in the world. He was not surprised that his
+father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground he opened and
+closed his eyes, his soul stirred by the beauty of the scene that lay
+before them.
+
+On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
+Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
+the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
+minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
+river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
+water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
+the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
+incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
+droning song.
+
+On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
+father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
+the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
+and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
+Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
+brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
+the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
+the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
+in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
+which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
+of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of
+Eden, told him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother went
+over the hill and down toward the valley but that his father, wearing
+a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood
+upon the hillside swinging a long sword blazing with fire and drove
+them back.
+
+When the boy went again over the hill it was October and a cold wind
+blew down the hill into his face. In the woods golden brown leaves ran
+about like frightened little animals and golden-brown were the leaves
+on the trees about the farmhouses and golden-brown the corn standing
+shocked in the fields. The scene saddened the boy. A lump came into
+his throat and he wanted back the green shining beauty of the spring.
+He wished to hear the birds singing in the air and in the grass on the
+hillside.
+
+Cracked McGregor was in another mood. He seemed more satisfied than on
+the first visit and ran up and down on the little eminence rubbing his
+hands together and on the legs of his trousers. Through the long
+afternoon he sat on the log muttering and smiling.
+
+On the road home through the darkened woods the restless hurrying
+leaves frightened the boy so that, with his weariness from walking
+against the wind, his hunger from being all day without food, and with
+the cold nipping at his body, he began to cry. The father took the boy
+in his arms and holding him across his breast like a babe went down
+the hill to their home.
+
+It was on a Tuesday morning that Cracked McGregor died. His death
+fixed itself as something fine in the mind of the boy and the scene
+and the circumstance stayed with him through life, filling him with
+secret pride like a knowledge of good blood. "It means something that
+I am the son of such a man," he thought.
+
+It was past ten in the morning when the cry of "Fire in the mine" ran
+up the hill to the houses of the miners. A panic seized the women. In
+their minds they saw the men hurrying down old cuts, crouching in
+hidden corridors, pursued by death. Cracked McGregor, one of the night
+shift, slept in his house. The boy's mother, threw a shawl about her
+head, took his hand and ran down the hill to the mouth of the mine.
+Cold winds spitting snow blew in their faces. They ran along the
+tracks of the railroad, stumbling over the ties, and stood on the
+railroad embankment that overlooked the runway to the mine.
+
+About the runway and along the embankment stood the silent miners,
+their hands in their trousers pockets, staring stolidly at the closed
+door of the mine. Among them was no impulse toward concerted action.
+Like animals at the door of a slaughter-house they stood as though
+waiting their turn to be driven in at the door. An old crone with bent
+back and a huge stick in her hand went from one to another of the
+miners gesticulating and talking. "Get my boy--my Steve! Get him out
+of there!" she shouted, waving the stick about.
+
+The door of the mine opened and three men came out, staggering as they
+pushed before them a small car that ran upon rails. On the car lay
+three other men, silent and motionless. A woman thinly clad and with
+great cave-like hollows in her face climbed the embankment and sat
+upon the ground below the boy and his mother. "The fire is in the old
+McCrary cut," she said, her voice quivering, a dumb hopeless look in
+her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My man Ike is in
+there." She put down her head and sat weeping. The boy knew the woman.
+She was a neighbour who lived in an unpainted house on the hillside.
+In the yard in front of her house a swarm of children played among the
+stones. Her husband, a great hulking fellow, got drunk and when he
+came home kicked his wife. The boy had heard her screaming at night.
+
+Suddenly in the growing crowd of miners below the embankment Beaut
+McGregor saw his father moving restlessly about. On his head he had
+his cap with the miner's lamp lighted. He went from group to group
+among the people, his head hanging to one side. The boy looked at him
+intently. He was reminded of the October day on the eminence
+overlooking the fruitful valley and again he thought of his father as
+a man inspired, going through a kind of ceremony. The tall miner
+rubbed his hands up and down his legs, he peered into the faces of the
+silent men standing about, his lips moved and his red beard danced up
+and down.
+
+As the boy looked a change came over the face of Cracked McGregor. He
+ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. In his eyes was the
+look of a perplexed animal. The wife bent down and began to talk to
+the weeping woman on the ground, trying to comfort her. She did not
+see her husband and the boy and man stood in silence looking into each
+other's eyes.
+
+Then the puzzled look went out of the father's face. He turned and
+running along with his head rolling about reached the closed door of
+the mine. A man, who wore a white collar and had a cigar stuck in the
+corner of his mouth, put out his hand.
+
+"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful arm
+the runner pulled open the door of the mine and disappeared down the
+runway.
+
+A hubbub arose. The man in the white collar took the cigar from his
+mouth and began to swear violently. The boy stood on the embankment
+and saw his mother running toward the runway of the mine. A miner
+gripped her by the arm and led her back up the face of the embankment.
+In the crowd a woman's voice shouted, "It's Cracked McGregor gone to
+close the door to the McCrary cut."
+
+The man with the white collar glared about as he chewed the end of his
+cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, again closing the door to the
+mine.
+
+Cracked McGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to
+the old cut where the fire burned. With him died all but five of the
+imprisoned miners. All day parties of men tried to get down into the
+mine. Below in the hidden passages under their own homes the scurrying
+miners died like rats in a burning barn while their wives, with shawls
+over their heads, sat silently weeping on the railroad embankment. In
+the evening the boy and his mother went up the hill alone. From the
+houses scattered over the hill came the sound of women weeping.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For several years after the mine disaster the McGregors, mother and
+son, lived in the house on the hillside. The woman went each morning
+to the offices of the mine where she washed windows and scrubbed
+floors. The position was a sort of recognition on the part of the mine
+officials of the heroism of Cracked McGregor.
+
+Nance McGregor was a small blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She wore
+glasses and had the name in Coal Creek of being quick and sharp. She
+did not stand by the fence to talk with the wives of other miners but
+sat in her house and sewed or read aloud to her son. She subscribed
+for a magazine and had bound copies of it standing upon shelves in the
+room where she and the boy ate breakfast in the early morning. Before
+the death of her husband she had maintained a habit of silence in her
+house but after his death she expanded, and, with her red-haired son,
+discussed freely every phase of their narrow lives. As he grew older
+the boy began to believe that she like the miners had kept hidden
+under her silence a secret fear of his father. Certain things she said
+of her life encouraged the thought.
+
+Norman McGregor grew into a tall broad-shouldered boy with strong
+arms, flaming red hair and a habit of sudden and violent fits of
+temper. There was something about him that held the attention. As he
+grew older and was renamed by Uncle Charlie Wheeler he began going
+about looking for trouble. When the boys called him "Beaut" he knocked
+them down. When men shouted the name after him on the street he
+followed them with black looks. It became a point of honour with him
+to resent the name. He connected it with the town's unfairness to
+Cracked McGregor.
+
+In the house on the hillside the boy and his mother lived together
+happily. In the early morning they went down the hill and across the
+tracks to the offices of the mine. From the offices the boy went up
+the hill on the farther side of the valley and sat upon the
+schoolhouse steps or wandered in the streets waiting for the day in
+school to begin. In the evening mother and son sat upon the steps at
+the front of their home and watched the glare of the coke ovens on the
+sky and the lights of the swiftly-running passenger trains, roaring
+whistling and disappearing into the night.
+
+Nance McGregor talked to her son of the big world outside the valley
+and told him of the cities, the seas and the strange lands and peoples
+beyond the seas. "We have dug in the ground like rats," she said, "I
+and my people and your father and his people. With you it will be
+different. You will get out of here to other places and other work."
+She grew indignant thinking of the life in the town. "We are stuck
+down here amid dirt, living in it, breathing it," she complained.
+"Sixty men died in that hole in the ground and then the mine started
+again with new men. We stay here year after year digging coal to burn
+in engines that take other people across the seas and into the West."
+
+When the son was a tall strong boy of fourteen Nance McGregor bought
+the bakery and to buy it took the money saved by Cracked McGregor.
+With it he had planned to buy a farm in the valley beyond the hill.
+Dollar by dollar it had been put away by the miner who dreamed of life
+in his own fields.
+
+In the bakery the boy worked and learned to make bread. Kneading the
+dough his arms and hands grew as strong as a bear's. He hated the
+work, he hated Coal Creek and dreamed of life in the city and of the
+part he should play there. Among the young men he began to make here
+and there a friend. Like his father he attracted attention. Women
+looked at him, laughed at his big frame and strong homely features and
+looked again. When they spoke to him in the bakery or on the street he
+spoke back fearlessly and looked them in the eyes. Young girls in the
+school walked home down the hill with other boys and at night dreamed
+of Beaut McGregor. When some one spoke ill of him they answered
+defending and praising him. Like his father he was a marked man in the
+town of Coal Creek.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+One Sunday afternoon three boys sat on a log on the side of the hill
+that looked down into Coal Creek. From where they sat they could see
+the workers of the night shift idling in the sun on Main Street. From
+the coke ovens a thin line of smoke rose into the sky. A freight train
+heavily loaded crept round the hill at the end of the valley. It was
+spring and over even that hive of black industry hung a faint promise
+of beauty. The boys talked of the life of people in their town and as
+they talked thought each of himself.
+
+Although he had not been out of the valley and had grown strong and
+big there, Beaut McGregor knew something of the outside world. It
+isn't a time when men are shut off from their fellows. Newspapers and
+magazines have done their work too well. They reached even into the
+miner's cabin and the merchants along Main Street of Coal Creek stood
+before their stores in the afternoon and talked of the doings of the
+world. Beaut McGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that
+not everywhere did men toil all day black and grimy underground, that
+not all women were pale bloodless and bent. As he went about
+delivering bread he whistled a song. "Take me back to Broadway," he
+sang after the soubrette in a show that had once come to Coal Creek.
+
+Now as he sat on the hillside he talked earnestly while he
+gesticulated with his hands. "I hate this town," he said. "The men
+here think they are confoundedly funny. They don't care for anything
+but making foolish jokes and getting drunk. I want to go away." His
+voice rose and hatred flamed up in him. "You wait," he boasted. "I'll
+make men stop being fools. I'll make children of them. I'll----"
+Pausing he looked at his two companions.
+
+Beaut poked the ground with a stick. The boy sitting beside him
+laughed. He was a short well--dressed black--haired boy with rings on
+his fingers who worked in the town poolroom, racking the pool balls.
+"I'd like to go where there are women with blood in them," he said.
+
+Three women came up the hill toward them, a tall pale brown-haired
+woman of twenty-seven and two fairer young girls. The black-haired boy
+straightened his tie and began thinking of a conversation he would
+start when the women reached him. Beaut and the other boy, a fat
+fellow, the son of a grocer, looked down the hill to the town over the
+heads of the newcomers and continued in their minds the thoughts that
+had made the conversation.
+
+"Hello girls, come and sit here," shouted the black-haired boy,
+laughing and looking boldly into the eyes of the tall pale woman. They
+stopped and the tall woman began stepping over the fallen logs, coming
+to them. The two young girls followed, laughing. They sat down on the
+log beside the boys, the tall pale woman at the end beside red-haired
+McGregor. An embarrassed silence fell over the party. Both Beaut and
+the fat boy were disconcerted by this turn to their afternoon's outing
+and wondered how it would turn out.
+
+The pale woman began to talk in a low tone. "I want to get away from
+here," she said, "I wish I could hear birds sing and see green things
+grow."
+
+Beaut McGregor had an idea. "You come with me," he said. He got up and
+climbed over the logs and the pale woman followed. The fat boy shouted
+at them, relieving his own embarrassment by trying to embarrass them.
+"Where're you going--you two?" he shouted.
+
+Beaut said nothing. He stepped over the logs to the road and began
+climbing the hill. The tall woman walked beside him and held her
+skirts out of the deep dust of the road. Even on this her Sunday gown
+there was a faint black mark along the seams--the mark of Coal Creek.
+
+As McGregor walked his embarrassment left him. He thought it fine that
+he should be thus alone with a woman. When she had tired from the
+climb he sat with her on a log beside the road and talked of the
+black-haired boy. "He has your ring on his finger," he said, looking
+at her and laughing.
+
+She held her hand pressed tightly against her side and closed her
+eyes. "The climbing hurts me," she said.
+
+Tenderness took hold of Beaut. When they went on again he walked
+behind her, his hand upon her back pushing her up the hill. The desire
+to tease her about the black-haired boy had passed and he wished he
+had said nothing about the ring. He remembered the story the black-
+haired boy had told him of his conquest of the woman. "More than
+likely a mess of lies," he thought.
+
+Over the crest of the hill they stopped and rested, leaning against a
+worn rail fence by the woods. Below them in a wagon a party of men
+went down the hill. The men sat upon boards laid across the box of a
+wagon and sang a song. One of them stood in the seat beside the driver
+and waved a bottle. He seemed to be making a speech. The others
+shouted and clapped their hands. The sounds came faint and sharp up
+the hill.
+
+In the woods beside the fence rank grass grew. Hawks floated in the
+sky over the valley below. A squirrel running along the fence stopped
+and chattered at them. McGregor thought he had never had so delightful
+a companion. He got a feeling of complete, good fellowship and
+friendliness with this woman. Without knowing how the thing had been
+done he felt a certain pride in it. "Don't mind what I said about the
+ring," he urged, "I was only trying to tease you."
+
+The woman beside McGregor was the daughter of an undertaker who lived
+upstairs over his shop near the bakery. He had seen her in the evening
+standing in the stairway by the shop door. After the story told him by
+the black-haired boy he had been embarrassed about her. When he passed
+her standing in the stairway he went hurriedly along and looked into
+the gutter.
+
+They went down the hill and sat on the log upon the hillside. A clump
+of elders had grown about the log since his visits there with Cracked
+McGregor so that the place was closed and shaded like a room. The
+woman took off her hat and laid it beside her on the log. A faint
+colour mounted to her pale cheeks and a flash of anger gleamed in her
+eyes. "He probably lied to you about me," she said, "I didn't give him
+that ring to wear. I don't know why I gave it to him. He wanted it. He
+asked me for it time and again. He said he wanted to show it to his
+mother. And now he has shown it to you and I suppose told lies about
+me."
+
+Beaut was annoyed and wished he had not mentioned the ring. He felt
+that an unnecessary fuss was being made about it. He did not believe
+that the black-haired boy had lied but he did not think it mattered.
+
+He began talking of his father, boasting of him. His hatred of the
+town blazed up. "They thought they knew him down there," he said,
+"they laughed at him and called him 'Cracked.' They thought his
+running into the mine just a crazy notion like a horse that runs into
+a burning stable. He was the best man in town. He was braver than any
+of them. He went in there and died when he had almost enough money
+saved to buy a farm over here." He pointed down the valley.
+
+Beaut began to tell her of the visits to the hillside with his father
+and described the effect of the scene on himself when he was a child.
+"I thought it was paradise," he said.
+
+She put her hand on his arm and seemed to be soothing him like a
+careful groom quieting an excitable horse. "Don't mind them," she
+said, "you will go away after a time and make a place for yourself out
+in the world."
+
+He wondered how she knew. A profound respect for her came over him.
+"She is keen to guess that," he thought.
+
+He began to talk of himself, boasting and throwing out his chest. "I'd
+like to have the chance to show what I can do," he declared. A thought
+that had been in his mind on the winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler
+put the name of Beaut upon him came back and he walked up and down
+before the woman making grotesque motions with his hands as Cracked
+McGregor had walked up and down before him.
+
+"I'll tell you what," he began and his voice was harsh. He had
+forgotten the presence of the woman and half forgotten what had been
+in his mind. He sputtered and glared over his shoulder up the hillside
+as he struggled for words. "Oh to Hell with men!" he burst forth.
+"They are cattle, stupid cattle." A fire blazed up in his eyes and a
+confident ring came into his voice. "I'd like to get them together,
+all of them," he said, "I'd like to make them----" Words failed him
+and again he sat down on the log beside the woman. "Well I'd like to
+lead them to an old mine shaft and push them in," he concluded
+resentfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into the
+valley. "I wonder why we don't go there, mother and I," he said. "When
+I see it I'm filled with the notion. I think I want to be a farmer and
+work in the fields. Instead of that mother and I sit and plan of the
+city. I'm going to be a lawyer. That's all we talk about. Then I come
+up here and it seems as though this is the place for me."
+
+The tall woman laughed. "I can see you coming home at night from the
+fields," she said. "It might be to that white house there with the
+windmill, You would be a big man and would have dust in your red hair
+and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman with a baby
+in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand leaning on the
+fence waiting for you. When you came up she would put her arm around
+your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard would tickle her cheek.
+You should have a beard when you grow older. Your mouth is so big."
+
+A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had said
+that and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then and there.
+He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the hill far away at
+the other end of the valley. "We'd better be getting along back," he
+said.
+
+The woman remained seated on the log. "Sit down," she said, "I'll tell
+you something--something it's good for you to hear. You're so big and
+red you tempt a girl to bother you. First though you tell me why you
+go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the
+stairway in the evening."
+
+Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-
+haired boy had told him of her. "Then it was true--what he said about
+you?" he asked.
+
+"No! No!" she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on
+her hat. "Let's be going."
+
+Beaut sat stolidly on the log. "What's the use bothering each other,"
+he said. "Let's sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home
+before dark."
+
+They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
+boasted of his father.
+
+"I'm too old for that boy," she said; "I'm older than you by a good
+many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women.
+I do pretty well. I don't have any one to talk to except father and he
+sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I
+let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me
+in the stairway it is because I'm lonesome. There isn't a man in town
+I'd marry--not one."
+
+The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his father
+were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than this
+pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women
+at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had thought
+before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent to
+their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it
+crudely so that it hurt.
+
+Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
+hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again
+he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill.
+Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.
+
+Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side.
+Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky.
+"One living up here and never going down there might think it rather
+grand and big," he said. Again the hatred came. "They might think the
+men who live down there knew something instead of being just a lot of
+cattle."
+
+A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole
+into her eyes. "We get at one another," she said, "we can't let one
+another alone. I wish we hadn't quarrelled. We might be friends if we
+tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I've heard
+others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here
+would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was
+than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say
+that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay
+listening."
+
+The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
+frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. "I don't like
+the women," he said, "but I liked you, seeing you standing in the
+stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought
+maybe you amounted to something. I don't know why you should be
+bothered by what I think. I don't know why any woman should be
+bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on
+doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a lawyer."
+
+He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
+her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
+afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood
+crept over him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and
+cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east
+to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
+the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books
+they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men
+and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
+the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all
+they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern
+life.
+
+The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged
+to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the
+officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who
+was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by
+the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived
+in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the
+train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the
+offices of the mine. After five o'clock in the afternoon no white
+collars were to be seen upon the streets of Coal Creek.
+
+In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with toil they drank greedily
+in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. Among
+them a constant low muttering went on. They felt the injustice of
+their lot but could not voice it logically and when they thought of
+the men who owned the mine they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in
+their thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and Barney Butterlips,
+a thin little man with a cork leg, stood on a box and made speeches
+regarding the coming brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was
+unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the main street. The
+battery was made up of several men in brown uniforms. They set up a
+Gatling gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.
+
+An Italian who lived in a house on the hillside cultivated a garden.
+His place was the one beauty spot in the valley. With a wheelbarrow he
+brought earth from the woods at the top of the hill and on Sunday he
+could be seen going back and forth and whistling merrily. In the
+winter he sat in his house making a drawing on a bit of paper. In the
+spring he took the drawing, and by it planted his garden, utilising
+every inch of his ground. When a strike came on he was told by the
+mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He
+thought of the garden and the work he had done and went back to his
+routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the
+hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined
+the striking miners.
+
+In a little one-room shack on the hill lived an old woman. She lived
+alone and was vilely dirty. In her house she had old broken chairs and
+tables picked up about town and piled in such profusion that she could
+scarcely move about. On warm days she sat in the sun before the shack
+chewing on a stick that had been dipped in tobacco. Miners coming up
+the hill dumped bits of bread and meat-ends out of their dinner-pails
+into a box nailed to a tree by the road. These the old woman collected
+and ate. When the soldiers came to town she walked along the street
+jeering at them. "Pretty boys! Scabs! Dudes! Dry-goods clerks!" she
+called after them as she walked by the tails of their horses. A young
+man with glasses on his nose, who was mounted on a grey horse turned
+and called to his comrades, "Let her alone--it's old Mother Misery
+herself."
+
+When the tall red-haired boy looked at the workers and at the old
+woman who followed the soldiers he did not sympathise with them. He
+hated them. In a way he sympathised with the soldiers. His blood was
+stirred by the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought
+there was order and decency in the rank of uniformed men moving
+silently and quickly along and he half wished they would destroy the
+town. When the strikers made a wreck of the garden of the Italian he
+was deeply touched and walked up and down in the room before his
+mother, proclaiming himself. "I would have killed them had it been my
+garden," he said. "I would not have left one of them alive." In his
+heart he like Cracked McGregor nursed his hatred of the miners and of
+the town. "The place is one to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't
+like it here let him get up and leave." He remembered his father
+working and saving for the farm in the valley. "They thought him
+cracked but he knew more than they. They would not have dared touch a
+garden he had planted."
+
+In the heart of the miner's son strange half-formed thoughts began to
+find lodgings. Remembering in his dreams at night the moving columns
+of men in their uniforms he read new meaning into the scraps of
+history picked up in the school and the movements of men in old
+history began to have significance for him. On a summer afternoon as
+he loitered before the town's hotel, beneath which was the saloon and
+billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men
+talking of the significance of men.
+
+One of the men was an itinerant oculist who came to the mining town
+once a month to fit and sell spectacles. When the oculist had sold
+several pairs of spectacles he got drunk, sometimes staying drunk for
+a week. When he was drunk he spoke French and Italian and sometimes
+stood in the barroom before the miners, quoting the poems of Dante.
+His clothes were greasy from long wear and he had a huge nose streaked
+with red and purple veins. Because of his learning in the languages
+and his quoting of poems the miners thought the oculist infinitely
+wise. To them it seemed that one with such a mind must have almost
+unearthly knowledge concerning the eyes and the fitting of glasses and
+they wore with pride the cheap ill-fitting things he thrust upon them.
+
+Occasionally, as though making a concession to his patrons, the
+oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the
+sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently
+back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning "The
+harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed." After the
+song he put his head down upon the bar and wept while the miners
+looked on touched with sympathy.
+
+On the summer afternoon when Beaut McGregor listened, the oculist was
+engaged in a violent quarrel with another man, drunk like himself. The
+second man was a slender dandified fellow of middle age who sold shoes
+for a Philadelphia jobbing-house. He sat in a chair tilted against the
+hotel and tried to read aloud from a book. When he was fairly launched
+in a long paragraph the oculist interrupted. Staggering up and down
+the narrow board walk before the hotel the old drunkard raved and
+swore. He seemed beside himself with wrath.
+
+"I am sick of such slobbering philosophy," he declared. "Even the
+reading of it makes you drool at the mouth. You do not say the words
+sharply, and they can't be said sharply. I'm a strong man myself."
+
+Spreading his legs wide apart and blowing up his cheeks, the oculist
+beat upon his breast. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the man in
+the chair.
+
+"You but slobber and make a foul noise," he declared. "I know your
+kind. I spit upon you. The Congress at Washington is full of such
+fellows as is also the House of Commons in England. In France they
+were once in charge. They ran things in France until the coming of a
+man such as myself. They were lost in the shadow of the great
+Napoleon."
+
+The oculist as though dismissing the dandified man from his mind
+turned to address Beaut. He talked in French and the man in the chair
+fell into a troubled sleep. "I am like Napoleon," the drunkard
+declared, breaking again into English. Tears began to show in his
+eyes. "I take the money of these miners and I give them nothing. The
+spectacles I sell to their wives for five dollars cost me but fifteen
+cents. I ride over these brutes as Napoleon rode over Europe. There
+would be order and purpose in me were I not a fool. I am like Napoleon
+in that I have utter contempt for men."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Again and again the words of the drunkard came back into the mind of
+the McGregor boy influencing his thoughts. Grasping nothing of the
+philosophy back of the man's words his imagination was yet touched by
+the drunkard's tale of the great Frenchman, babbled into his ears, and
+it in some way seemed to give point to his hatred of the disorganised
+ineffectiveness of the life about him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Nance McGregor opened the bakery another strike came to disturb
+the prosperity of the business. Again the miners walked idly through
+the streets. Into the bakery they came to get bread and told Nance to
+write the debt down against them. Beaut McGregor was disturbed. He saw
+his father's money being spent for flour which when baked into loaves
+went out of the shop under the arms of the miners who shuffled as they
+walked. One night a man whose name appeared on their books followed by
+a long record of charged loaves came reeling past the bakery. McGregor
+went to his mother and protested. "They have money to get drunk," he
+said, "let them pay for their loaves."
+
+Nance McGregor went on trusting the miners. She thought of the women
+and children in the houses on the hill and when she heard of the plans
+of the mining company to evict the miners from their houses she
+shuddered. "I was the wife of a miner and I will stick to them," she
+thought.
+
+One day the mine manager came into the bakery. He leaned over the
+showcase and talked to Nance. The son went and stood by his mother's
+side to listen. "It has got to be stopped," the manager was saying. "I
+will not see you ruin yourself for these cattle. I want you to close
+this place till the strike is over. If you won't close it I will. The
+building belongs to us. They did not appreciate what your husband did
+and why should you ruin yourself for them?"
+
+The woman looked at him and answered in a low tone full of resolution.
+"They thought he was crazy and he was," she said; "but what made him
+so--the rotten timbers in the mine that broke and crushed him. You and
+not they are responsible for my man and what he was."
+
+Beaut McGregor interrupted. "Well I think he is right," he declared,
+leaning over the counter beside his mother and looking into her face.
+"The miners don't want better things for their families, they want
+more money to get drunk. We will close the doors here. We will put no
+more money into bread to go into their gullets. They hated father and
+he hated them and now I hate them also."
+
+Beaut walked around the end of the counter and went with the mine
+manager to the door. He locked it and put the key into his pocket.
+Then he walked to the rear of the bake shop where his mother sat on a
+box weeping. "It is time a man took charge here," he said.
+
+Nance McGregor and her son sat in the bakery and looked at each other.
+Miners came along the street, tried the door and went away grumbling.
+Word ran from lip to lip up the hillside. "The mine manager has closed
+Nance McGregor's shop," said the women leaning over back fences.
+Children sprawling on the floors of the houses put up their heads and
+howled. Their lives were a succession of new terrors. When a day
+passed that a new terror did not shake them they went to bed happy.
+When the miner and his woman stood by the door talking in low tones
+they cried, expecting to be put to bed hungry. When guarded talk did
+not go on by the door the miner came home drunk and beat the mother
+and the children lay in beds along the wall trembling with fright.
+
+Late that night a party of miners came to the door of the bakery and
+beat upon it with their fists. "Open up here!" they shouted. Beaut
+came out of the rooms above the bakery and stood in the empty shop.
+His mother sat in a chair in her room and trembled. He went to the
+door and unlocking it stepped out. The miners stood in groups on the
+wooden sidewalk and in the mud of the road. Among them stood the old
+crone who had walked beside the horses and shouted at the soldiers. A
+miner with a black beard came and stood before the boy. Waving his
+hand at the crowd he said, "We have come to open the bakery. Some of
+us have no ovens in our stoves. You give us the key and we will open
+the place. We will break in the door if you don't want to do that. The
+company can't blame you if we do it by force. You can keep account of
+what we take. Then when the strike is settled we will pay you."
+
+A flame shot into the eyes of the boy. He walked down the steps and
+stood among the miners. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he peered
+into their faces. When he spoke his voice resounded through the
+street, "You jeered at my father, Cracked McGregor, when he went into
+the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and
+did not spend it buying you drinks. Now you come here to get bread his
+money bought and you do not pay. Then you get drunk and go reeling
+past this very door. Now let me tell you something." He thrust his
+hands into the air and shouted. "The mine manager did not close this
+place. I closed it. You jeered at Cracked McGregor, a better man than
+any of you. You have had fun with me--laughing at me. Now I jeer at
+you." He ran up the steps and unlocking the door stood in the doorway.
+"Pay the money you owe this bakery and there will be bread for sale
+here," he called, and went in and locked the door.
+
+The miners walked off up the street. The boy stood within the bakery,
+his hands trembling. "I've told them something," he thought, "I've
+shown them they can't make a fool of me." He went up the stairway to
+the rooms above. By the window his mother sat, her head in her hands,
+looking down into the street. He sat in a chair and thought of the
+situation. "They will be back here and smash the place like they tore
+up that garden," he said.
+
+The next evening Beaut sat in the darkness on the steps before the
+bakery. In his hands he held a hammer. A dull hatred of the town and
+of the miners burned in his brain. "I will make it hot for some of
+them if they come here," he thought. He hoped they would come. As he
+looked at the hammer in his hand a phrase from the lips of the drunken
+old oculist babbling of Napoleon came into his mind. He began to think
+that he also must be like the figure of which the drunkard had talked.
+He remembered a story the oculist had told of a fight in the streets
+of a European city and muttered and waved the hammer about. Upstairs
+his mother sat by the window with her head in her hands. From the
+saloon down the street a light gleamed out on the wet sidewalk. The
+tall pale woman who had gone with him to the eminence overlooking the
+valley came down the stairway from above the undertaker's shop. She
+ran along the sidewalk. On her head she wore a shawl and as she ran
+she clutched it with her hand. The other hand she held against her
+side.
+
+When the women reached the boy who sat in silence before the bakery
+she put her hands on his shoulders and plead with him. "Come away,"
+she said. "Get your mother and come to our place. They're going to
+smash you up here. You'll get hurt."
+
+Beaut arose and pushed her away. Her coming had given him new courage.
+His heart jumped at the thought of her interest in him and he wished
+that the miners might come so that he could fight them before her. "I
+wish I could live among people as decent as she," he thought.
+
+A train stopped at the station down the street. There came the sound
+of tramping of men and quick sharp commands. A stream of men poured
+out of the saloon onto the sidewalk. Down the street came a file of
+soldiers with guns swung across their shoulders. Again Beaut was
+thrilled by the sight of trained orderly men moving along shoulder to
+shoulder. In the presence of these men the disorganized miners seemed
+pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl pulled the shawl about her
+head and ran up the street to disappear into the stairway. The boy
+unlocked the door and went upstairs and to bed.
+
+After the strike Nance McGregor who owned nothing but unpaid accounts
+was unable to open the bakery. A small man with a white moustache, who
+chewed tobacco, came from the mill and took the unused flour and
+shipped it away. The boy and his mother continued living above the
+bakery store room. Again she went in the morning to wash the windows
+and scrub the floors in the offices of the mine and her red-haired son
+stood upon the street or sat in the pool room and talked to the black-
+haired boy. "Next week I'll be going to the city and will begin making
+something of myself," he said. When the time came to go he waited and
+idled in the streets. Once when a miner jeered at him for his idleness
+he knocked him into the gutter. The miners who hated him for his
+speech on the steps, admired him for his strength and brute courage.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+In a cellar-like house driven like a stake into the hillside above
+Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with
+the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor
+did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half
+running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along
+with white intense face shook their heads. "He's cracked," they said.
+"He'll hurt some one yet."
+
+Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in
+the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him
+to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps
+in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together
+collections of birds' eggs which he sold to women in the trains that
+stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put
+beads in their eyesockets and sold them also. He proclaimed himself an
+anarchist and like Cracked McGregor muttered to himself as he hurried
+along.
+
+One day Beaut came upon Mike Hartnet reading a book as he sat on a log
+overlooking the town. A shock ran through McGregor when he looked over
+the shoulder of the man and saw what book he read. "It is strange," he
+thought, "that this fellow should stick to the same book that fat old
+Weeks makes his living by."
+
+Beaut sat on the log beside Hartnet and watched him. The reading man
+looked up and nodded nervously then slid along the log to the farther
+end. Beaut laughed. He looked down at the town and then at the
+frightened nervous book-reading man on the log. An inspiration came to
+him.
+
+"If you had the power, Mike, what would you do to Coal Creek?" he
+asked.
+
+The nervous man jumped and tears came into his eyes. He stood before
+the log and spread out his hands. "I would go among men like Christ,"
+he cried, pitching his voice forward like one addressing an audience.
+"Poor and humble, I would go teaching them of love." Spreading out his
+hands like one pronouncing a benediction he shouted, "Oh men of Coal
+Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil."
+
+Beaut jumped up from the log and strode before the trembling figure.
+He was strangely moved. Grasping the man he thrust him back upon the
+log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a great roaring laugh.
+"Men of Coal Creek," he shouted, mimicking the earnestness of Hartnet,
+"listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you
+jeered at my father and at me and because you cheated my mother, Nance
+McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganised like
+cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power of force. I
+would like to slay you one by one, not with weapons but with my naked
+fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole they are
+right. It is man's right to do what he can. Get up and fight. Fight
+and I'll get on the other side and you can fight me. I'll help drive
+you back into your holes."
+
+Beaut ceased speaking and jumping over the logs ran down the road.
+Among the first of the miner's houses he stopped and laughed
+awkwardly. "I am cracked also," he thought, "shouting at emptiness on
+a hillside." He went on in a reflective mood, wondering what power had
+taken hold of him. "I would like a fight--a fight against odds," he
+thought. "I will stir things up when I am a lawyer in the city."
+
+Mike Hartnet came running down the road at the heels of McGregor.
+"Don't tell," he plead trembling. "Don't tell about me in the town.
+They will laugh and call names after me. I want to be let alone."
+
+Beaut shook himself loose from the detaining hand and went on down the
+hill. When he had passed out of sight of Hartnet he sat down on the
+ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought of
+himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of the thing that had
+happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the blue eyes of McGregor anger flashed quick and sudden. Upon the
+streets of Coal Creek he walked, swinging along, his great body
+inspiring fear. His mother grown grave and silent worked in the
+offices of the mines. Again she had a habit of silence in her own home
+and looked at her son, half fearing him. All day she worked in the
+mine offices and in the evening sat silently in a chair on the porch
+before her house and looked down into Main Street.
+
+Beaut McGregor did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and
+talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a
+stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently
+go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to
+look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing body.
+The miners passed him in silence hating him and dreading his wrath.
+Walking among the hills he thought much of himself. "I am capable of
+anything," he thought, lifting his head and looking at the towering
+hills, "I wonder why I stay on here."
+
+When he was eighteen Beaut's mother fell ill. All day she lay on her
+back in bed in the room above the empty bakery. Beaut shook himself
+out of his waking stupor and went about seeking work. He had not felt
+that he was indolent. He had been waiting. Now he bestirred himself.
+"I'll not go into the mines," he said, "nothing shall get me down
+there."
+
+He got work in a livery stable cleaning and feeding the horses. His
+mother got out of bed and began going again to the mine offices.
+Having started to work Beaut stayed on, thinking it but a way station
+to the position he would one day achieve in the city.
+
+In the stable worked two young boys, sons of coal miners. They drove
+travelling men from the trains to farming towns in valleys back among
+the hills and in the evening with Beaut McGregor they sat on a bench
+before the barn and shouted at people going past the stable up the
+hill.
+
+The livery stable in Coal Creek was owned by a hunchback named Weller
+who lived in the city and went home at night. During the day he sat
+about the stable talking to red-haired McGregor. "You're a big beast,"
+he said laughing. "You talk about going away to the city and making
+something of yourself and still you stay on here doing nothing. You
+want to quit this talking about being a lawyer and become a prize
+fighter. Law is a place for brains not muscles." He walked through the
+stables leaning his head to one side and looking up at the big fellow
+who brushed the horses. McGregor watched him and grinned. "I'll show
+you," he said.
+
+The hunchback was pleased when he strutted before McGregor. He had
+heard men talk of the strength and the evil temper of his stableman
+and it pleased him to have so fierce a fellow cleaning the horses. At
+night in the city he sat under the lamp with his wife and boasted. "I
+make him step about," he said.
+
+In the stable the hunchback kept at the heels of McGregor. "And
+there's something else," he said, putting his hand in his pockets and
+raising himself on his toes. "You look out for that undertaker's
+daughter. She wants you. If she gets you there will be no law study
+but a place in the mines for you. You let her alone and begin taking
+care of your mother."
+
+Beaut went on cleaning the horses and thinking of what the hunchback
+had said. He thought there was sense to it. He also was afraid of the
+tall pale girl. Sometimes when he looked at her a pain shot through
+him and a combination of fear and desire gripped him. He walked away
+from it and went free as he went free from the life in the darkness
+down in the mine. "He has a kind of genius for keeping away from the
+things he don't like," said the liveryman, talking to Uncle Charlie
+Wheeler in the sun before the door of the post office.
+
+One afternoon the two boys who worked in the livery stable with
+McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a rude joke, elaborately
+planned. The hunchback had stayed in the city for the day and no
+travelling men got off the trains to be driven over the hills. In the
+afternoon hay brought over the hill from the fruitful valley was being
+put into the loft of the barn and between loads McGregor and the two
+boys sat on the bench by the stable door. The two boys went to the
+saloon and brought back beer, paying for it from a fund kept for that
+purpose. The fund was the result of a system worked out by the two
+drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day
+of driving he put it into the common fund. When the fund had grown to
+some size the two went to the saloon and stood before the bar drinking
+until it was spent and then came back to sleep off their stupor on the
+hay in the barn. After a prosperous week the hunchback occasionally
+gave them a dollar for the fund.
+
+Of the beer McGregor drank but one foaming glass. For all his idling
+about Coal Creek he had never before tasted beer and it was strong and
+bitter in his mouth. He threw up his head and gulped it then turned
+and walked toward the rear of the stable to conceal the tears that the
+taste of the stuff had forced into his eyes.
+
+The two drivers sat on the bench and laughed. The drink they had given
+Beaut was a horrible mess concocted by the laughing bartender at their
+suggestion. "We will get the big fellow drunk and hear him roar," the
+bartender had said.
+
+As he walked toward the back of the stable a convulsive nausea seized
+Beaut. He stumbled and pitched forward, cutting his face on the floor.
+Then he rolled over on his back and groaned and a little stream of
+blood ran down his cheek.
+
+The two boys jumped up from the bench and ran toward him. They stood
+looking at his pale lips. Fear seized them. They tried to lift him but
+he fell from their arms and lay again on the stable floor, white and
+motionless. Filled with fright they ran from the stable and through
+Main Street. "We must get a doctor," they said as they hurried along,
+"He is mighty sick--that fellow."
+
+In the doorway leading to the rooms over the undertaker's shop stood
+the tall pale girl. One of the running boys stopped and addressed her,
+"Your red-head," he shouted, "is blind drunk lying on the stable
+floor. He has cut his head and is bleeding."
+
+The tall girl ran down the street to the offices of the mine. With
+Nance McGregor she hurried to the stable. The store keepers along Main
+Street looked out of their doors and saw the two women pale and with
+set faces half-carrying the huge form of Beaut McGregor along the
+street and in at the door of the bakery.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At eight o'clock that evening Beaut McGregor, his legs still unsteady,
+his face white, climbed aboard a passenger train and passed out of the
+life of Coal Creek. On the seat beside him a bag contained all his
+clothes. In his pocket lay a ticket to Chicago and eighty-five
+dollars, the last of Cracked McGregor's savings. He looked out of the
+car window at the little woman thin and worn standing alone on the
+station platform and a great wave of anger passed through him. "I'll
+show them," he muttered. The woman looked at him and forced a smile to
+her lips. The train began to move into the west. Beaut looked at his
+mother and at the deserted streets of Coal Creek and put his head down
+upon his hands and in the crowded car before the gaping people wept
+with joy that he had seen the last of youth. He looked back at Coal
+Creek, full of hate. Like Nero he might have wished that all of the
+people of the town had but one head so that he might have cut it off
+with a sweep of a sword or knocked it into the gutter with one
+swinging blow.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+It was late in the summer of 1893 when McGregor came to Chicago, an
+ill time for boy or man in that city. The big exposition of the year
+before had brought multiplied thousands of restless labourers into the
+city and its leading citizens, who had clamoured for the exposition
+and had loudly talked of the great growth that was to come, did not
+know what to do with the growth now that it had come. The depression
+that followed on the heels of the great show and the financial panic
+that ran over the country in that year had set thousands of hungry men
+to wait dumbly on park benches poring over want advertisements in the
+daily papers and looking vacantly at the lake or had driven them to
+tramp aimlessly through the streets, filled with forebodings.
+
+In time of plenty a great American city like Chicago goes on showing a
+more or less cheerful face to the world while in nooks and crannies
+down side-streets and alleys poverty and misery sit hunched up in
+little ill-smelling rooms breeding vice. In times of depression these
+creatures crawl forth and joined by thousands of the unemployed tramp
+the streets through the long nights or sleep upon benches in the
+parks. In the alleyways off Madison Street on the West Side and off
+State Street, on the South Side, eager women driven by want sold their
+bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the
+newspapers of one unfilled job brought a thousand men to block the
+streets at daylight before a factory door. In the crowds men swore and
+knocked each other about. Working-men driven to desperation went forth
+into quiet streets and knocking over citizens took their money and
+watches and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth
+Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by
+thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the
+University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked
+into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a
+position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to
+pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the
+brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street
+threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
+through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
+said.
+
+"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
+employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
+cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
+Lincoln suffering for mankind.
+
+Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
+McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
+untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
+snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
+prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
+to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.
+
+In a way McGregor had already sensed something the realisation of
+which will go far toward making any man a strong figure in the world.
+He was not to be bullied with words. Orators might have preached to
+him all day about the progress of mankind in America, flags might have
+been flapped and newspapers might have dinned the wonders of his
+country into his brain. He would only have shaken his big head. He did
+not yet know the whole story of how men, coming out of Europe and
+given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and
+forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have
+produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder
+of man. McGregor did not know the fullness of the tragic story of his
+race. He only knew that the men he had seen were for the most part
+pigmies. On the train coming to Chicago a change had come over him.
+The hatred of Coal Creek that burned in him had set fire to something
+else. He sat looking out of the car window at the stations running
+past during the night and the following day at the cornfields of
+Indiana, making his plans. In Chicago he meant to do something. Coming
+from a community where no man arose above a condition of silent brute
+labour he meant to step up into the light of power. Filled with hatred
+and contempt of mankind he meant that mankind should serve him. Raised
+among men who were but men he meant to be a master.
+
+And his equipment was better than he knew. In a disorderly haphazard
+world hatred is as effective an impulse to drive men forward to
+success as love and high hope. It is a world-old impulse sleeping in
+the heart of man since the day of Cain. In a way it rings true and
+strong above the hideous jangle of modern life. Inspiring fear it
+usurps power.
+
+McGregor was without fear. He had not yet met his master and looked
+with contempt upon the men and women he had known. Without knowing it
+he had, besides a huge body hard as adamant, a clear and lucid brain.
+The fact that he hated Coal Creek and thought it horrible proved his
+keenness. It was horrible. Well might Chicago have trembled and rich
+men strolling in the evening along Michigan Boulevard have looked
+fearfully about as this huge red fellow, carrying the cheap handbag
+and staring with his blue eyes at the restless moving mobs of people,
+walked for the first time through its streets. In his very frame there
+was the possibility of something, a blow, a shock, a thrust out of the
+lean soul of strength into the jelly-like fleshiness of weakness.
+
+In the world of men nothing is so rare as a knowledge of men. Christ
+himself found the merchants hawking their wares even on the floor of
+the temple and in his naive youth was stirred to wrath and drove them
+through the door like flies. And history has represented him in turn
+as a man of peace so that after these centuries the temples are again
+supported by the hawking of wares and his fine boyish wrath is
+forgotten. In France after the great revolution and the babbling of
+many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short
+and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of
+cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming
+across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong
+into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all
+in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word
+brotherhood died fighting brothers.
+
+In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to
+achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies
+and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe
+and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and
+for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By
+grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have
+made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the
+thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of
+his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his
+soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of
+brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat
+and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder
+against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned,
+instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the
+forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles
+or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for
+accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land,
+by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.
+
+In Chicago in 1893 and in the men who went aimlessly seeking work in
+the streets of Chicago in that year there were none of these signs.
+Like the coal mining town from which Beaut McGregor had come, the city
+lay sprawling and ineffective before him, a tawdry disorderly dwelling
+for millions of men, built not for the making of men but for the
+making of millions by a few odd meat-packers and drygoods merchants.
+
+With a slight lifting of his great shoulders McGregor sensed these
+things although he could not have expressed his sense of them and the
+hatred and contempt of men, born of his youth in the mining town, was
+rekindled by the sight of city men wandering afraid and bewildered
+through the streets of their own city.
+
+Knowing nothing of the customs of the unemployed McGregor did not walk
+the streets looking for signs marked "Men Wanted." He did not sit on
+park benches studying want advertisements, the want advertisements
+that so often proved but bait put out by suave men up dirty stairways
+to glean the last few pennies from pockets of the needy. Going along
+the street he swung his great body through the doorways leading to the
+offices of factories. When some pert young man tried to stop him he
+did not say words but drew back his fist threateningly and, glowering,
+walked in. The young men at the doors of factories looked at his blue
+eyes and let him pass unchallenged.
+
+In the afternoon of his first day of seeking Beaut got a place in an
+apple warehouse on the North Side, the third place offered him during
+the day and the one that he accepted. The chance came to him through
+an exhibition of strength. Two men, old and bent, struggled to get a
+barrel of apples from the sidewalk up to a platform that ran waist
+high along the front of the warehouse. The barrel had rolled to the
+sidewalk from a truck standing in the gutter. The driver of the truck
+stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A German with blond hair
+stood upon the platform swearing in broken English. McGregor stood
+upon the sidewalk and looked at the two men who were struggling with
+the barrel. A feeling of immense contempt for their feebleness shone
+in his eyes. Pushing them aside he grasped the barrel and with a great
+heave sent it up onto the platform and spinning through an open
+doorway into the receiving room of the warehouse. The two workmen
+stood on the sidewalk smiling sheepishly. Across the street a group of
+city firemen who lounged in the sun before an engine house clapped
+their hands. The truck driver turned and prepared to send another
+barrel along the plank extending from the truck across the sidewalk to
+the warehouse platform. At a window in the upper part of the warehouse
+a grey head protruded and a sharp voice called down to the tall
+German. "Hey Frank, hire that 'husky' and let about six of the dead
+ones you've got around here go home."
+
+McGregor jumped upon the platform and walked in at the warehouse door.
+The German followed, inventorying the size of the red-haired giant
+with something like disapproval. His look seemed to say, "I like
+strong fellows but you're too strong." He took the discomfiture of the
+two feeble workmen on the sidewalk as in some way reflecting upon
+himself. The two men stood in the receiving room and looked at each
+other. A bystander might have thought them preparing to fight.
+
+And then a freight elevator came slowly down from the upper part of
+the warehouse and from it jumped a small grey-haired man with a yard
+stick in his hand. He had a sharp restless eye and a short stubby grey
+beard. Striking the floor with a bound he began to talk. "We pay two
+dollars for nine hours' work here--begin at seven, quit at five. Will
+you come?" Without waiting for an answer he turned to the German.
+"Tell those two old 'rummies' to get their time and get out of here,"
+he said, turning again and looking expectantly at McGregor.
+
+McGregor liked the quick little man and grinned with approval of his
+decisiveness. He nodded his assent to the proposal and, looking at the
+German, laughed. The little man disappeared through a door leading to
+an office and McGregor walked out into the street. At a corner he
+turned and saw the German standing on the platform before the
+warehouse looking after him. "He is wondering whether or not he can
+whip me," thought McGregor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the apple warehouse McGregor worked for three years, rising during
+his second year to be foreman and replacing the tall German. The
+German expected trouble with McGregor and was determined to make short
+work of him. He had been offended by the action of the gray-haired
+superintendent in hiring the man and felt that a prerogative belonging
+to himself had been ignored. All day he followed McGregor with his
+eyes, trying to calculate the strength and courage in the huge body.
+He knew that hundreds of hungry men walked the streets and in the end
+decided that the need of work if not the spirit of the man would make
+him submissive. During the second week he put the question that burned
+in his brain to the test. He followed McGregor into a dimly-lighted
+upper room where barrels of apples, piled to the ceiling, left only
+narrow ways for passage. Standing in the semi-darkness he shouted,
+calling the man who worked among the apple barrels a foul name, "I
+won't have you loafing in there, you red-haired bastard," he shouted.
+
+McGregor said nothing. He was not offended by the vileness of the name
+the German had called him and took it merely as a challenge that he
+had been expecting and that he meant to accept. With a grim smile on
+his lips he walked toward the German and when but one apple barrel lay
+between them reached across and dragged the foreman sputtering and
+swearing down the passageway to a window at the end of the room. By
+the window he stopped and putting his hand to the throat of the
+struggling man began to choke him into submission. Blows fell on his
+face and body. Struggling terribly the German kicked McGregor's legs
+with desperate energy. Although his ears rang with the hammer-like
+blows that fell about his neck and cheeks McGregor stool silent under
+the storm. His blue eyes gleamed with hatred and the muscles of his
+great arms danced in the light from the window. As he looked into the
+protruding eyes of the writhing German he thought of fat Reverend
+Minot Weeks of Coal Creek and added an extra twitch to the flesh
+between his fingers. When a gesture of submission came from the man
+against the wall he stepped back and let go his grip. The German
+dropped to the floor. Standing over him McGregor delivered his
+ultimatum. "You report this or try to get me fired and I'll kill you
+outright," he said. "I'm going to stay here on this job until I get
+ready to leave it. You can tell me what to do and how to do it but
+when you speak to me again say 'McGregor'--Mr. McGregor, that's my
+name."
+
+The German got to his feet and began walking down the passageway
+between the rows of piled barrels. As he went he helped himself along
+with his hands. McGregor went back to work. After the retreating form
+of the German he shouted, "Get a new place when you can Dutch, I'll be
+taking this job away from you when I'm ready for it."
+
+That evening as McGregor walked to the car he saw the little grey-
+haired superintendent standing waiting for him before a saloon. The
+man made a sign and McGregor walked across and stood beside him. They
+went together into the saloon and stood leaning against the bar and
+looked at each other. A smile played about the lips of the little man.
+"What have you been doing to Frank?" he asked.
+
+McGregor turned to the bartender who stood waiting before him. He
+thought that the superintendent intended to try to patronise him by
+buying him a drink and he did not like the thought. "What will you
+have? I'll take a cigar for mine," he said quickly, defeating the
+superintendent's plan by being the first to speak. When the bartender
+brought the cigars McGregor paid for them and walked out at the door.
+He felt like one playing a game. "If Frank meant to bully me into
+submission this man also means something."
+
+On the sidewalk before the saloon McGregor stopped. "Look here," he
+said, turning and facing the superintendent, "I'm after Frank's place.
+I'm going to learn the business as fast as I can. I won't put it up to
+you to fire him. When I get ready for the place he won't be there."
+
+A light flashed into the eyes of the little man. He held the cigar
+McGregor had paid for as though about to throw it into the street.
+"How far do you think you can go with your big fists?" he asked, his
+voice rising.
+
+McGregor smiled. He thought he had earned another victory and lighting
+his cigar held the burning match before the little man. "Brains are
+intended to help fists," he said, "I've got both."
+
+The superintendent looked at the burning match and at the cigar
+between his fingers. "If I don't which will you use on me?" he asked.
+
+McGregor threw the match into the street. "Aw! don't bother asking,"
+he said, holding out another match.
+
+McGregor and the superintendent walked along the street. "I would like
+to fire you but I won't. Some day you'll run that warehouse like a
+clock," said the superintendent.
+
+McGregor sat in the street-car and thought of his day. It had been he
+felt a day of two battles. First the direct brutal battle of fists in
+the passageway and then this other battle with the superintendent. He
+thought he had won both fights. Of the fight with the tall German he
+thought little. He had expected to win that. The other was different.
+The superintendent he felt had wanted to patronise him, patting him on
+the back and buying him drinks. Instead he had patronised the
+superintendent. A battle had gone on in the brains of the two men and
+he had won. He had met a new kind of man, one who did not live by the
+raw strength of his muscles and he had given a good account of
+himself. The conviction that he had, besides a good pair of fists, a
+good brain swept in on him glorifying him. He thought of the sentence,
+"Brains are intended to help fists," and wondered how he had happened
+to think of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The street in which McGregor lived in Chicago was called Wycliff
+Place, after a family of that name that had once owned the land
+thereabout. The street was complete in its hideousness. Nothing more
+unlovely could be imagined. Given a free hand an indiscriminate lot of
+badly trained carpenters and bricklayers had builded houses beside the
+cobblestone road that touched the fantastic in their unsightliness and
+inconvenience.
+
+The great west side of Chicago has hundreds of such streets and the
+coal mining town out of which McGregor had come was more inspiring as
+a place in which to live. As an unemployed young man, not much given
+to chance companionships, Beaut had spent many long evenings wandering
+alone on the hillsides above his home town. There was a kind of
+dreadful loveliness about the place at night. The long black valley
+with its dense shroud of smoke that rose and fell and formed itself
+into fantastic shapes in the moonlight, the poor little houses
+clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry of a woman being beaten
+by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble of
+coal cars being pushed along the railroad tracks, all of these made a
+grim and rather inspiring impression on the young man's mind so that
+although he hated the mines and the miners he sometimes paused in his
+night wanderings and stood with his great shoulders lifted, breathing
+deeply and feeling things he had no words in him to express.
+
+In Wycliff Place McGregor got no such reactions. Foul dust filled the
+air. All day the street rumbled and roared under the wheels of trucks
+and light hurrying delivery wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys was
+caught up by the wind and having been mixed with powdered horse manure
+from the roadway flew into the eyes and the nostrils of pedestrians.
+Always a babble of voices went on. At a corner saloon teamsters
+stopped to have their drinking cans filled with beer and stood about
+swearing and shouting. In the evening women and children went back and
+forth from their houses carrying beer in pitchers from the same
+saloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men reeled along the sidewalk
+and the women of the town appeared in their cheap finery and paraded
+before the idlers about the saloon door.
+
+The woman who rented the room to McGregor boasted to him of Wycliff
+blood. It was that she told him that had brought her to Chicago from
+her home at Cairo, Illinois. "The place was left to me and not knowing
+what else to do with it I came here to live," she said. She explained
+to him that the Wycliffs had been people of note in the early history
+of Chicago. The huge old house with the cracked stone steps and the
+ROOMS TO RENT sign in the window had once been their family seat.
+
+The history of this woman was characteristic of the miss-fire quality
+of much of American life. She was at bottom a wholesome creature who
+should have lived in a neat frame house in a village and tended a
+garden. On Sunday she should have dressed herself with care and gone
+off to sit in a country church with her hands crossed and her soul at
+rest.
+
+The thought of owning a house in the city had however paralysed her
+brain. The house itself was worth a certain number of thousands of
+dollars and her mind could not rise above that fact, so her good broad
+face had become grimy with city dirt and her body weary from the
+endless toil of caring for roomers. On summer evenings she sat on the
+steps before her house clad in some bit of Wycliff finery taken from a
+trunk in the attic and when a lodger came out at the door she looked
+at him wistfully and said, "On such a night as this you could hear the
+whistles on the river steamers in Cairo."
+
+McGregor lived in a small room at the end of a tall on the second
+floor of the Wycliff house. The windows of the room looked down into a
+dirty little court almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room was
+furnished with a bed, a chair that vas always threatening to come to
+pieces and a desk with weak carved legs.
+
+In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise his
+Coal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of some
+account in the world. From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at a
+desk in a night school. From ten until midnight he read in his room.
+He did not think of his surroundings, of the vast disorder of life
+about him, but tried with all his strength to bring something like
+order and purpose into his own mind and his own life.
+
+In the little court under the window lay heaps of discarded newspaper
+tossed about by the wind. There in the heart of the city, walled in by
+the brick warehouse and half concealed under piles of chair legs cans
+and broken bottles, lay two logs in their time no doubt, a part of the
+grove that once lay about the house. The neighbourhood had passed so
+rapidly from country estate to homes and from homes to rented lodgings
+and huge brick warehouses that the marks of the lumberman's axe still
+showed in the butts of the logs.
+
+McGregor seldom saw the little court except when its ugliness was
+refined and glossed over by darkness or by the moonlight. On hot
+evenings he laid down his book and leaning far out of the window
+rubbed his eyes and watched the discarded newspapers, worried by the
+whirlpools of wind in the court, run here and there, dashing against
+the warehouse walls and vainly trying to escape over the roof. The
+sight fascinated him and brought a thought into his mind. He began to
+think that the lives of most of the people about him were much like
+the dirty newspaper harried by adverse winds and surrounded by ugly
+walls of facts. The thought drove him from the window to renewed
+effort among his books. "I'll do something here anyway. I'll show
+them," he growled.
+
+One living in the house with McGregor during those first years in the
+city might have thought his life stupid and commonplace but to him it
+did not seem so. It was for the miner's son a time of sudden and
+tremendous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength and
+quickness of his body he was beginning to have also confidence in the
+vigour and clearness of his brain. In the warehouse he went about with
+eyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods,
+watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounce
+upon the tall German's place as foreman.
+
+The superintendent of the warehouse, not understanding the turn of the
+talk with McGregor on the sidewalk before the saloon, decided to like
+him and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall German
+maintained a policy of sullen silence and went to laborious lengths to
+avoid addressing him.
+
+In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading each page
+over and over and thinking of what he had read through the next day as
+he rolled and piled apple barrels in the passages in the warehouse.
+
+McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts. He read law as
+another and gentler nature might have read poetry or old legends. What
+he read at night he remembered and thought about during the day. He
+had no dream of the glories of the law. The fact that these rules laid
+down by men to govern their social organisation were the result of
+ages of striving toward perfection did not greatly interest him and he
+only thought of them as weapons with which to attack and defend in the
+battle of brains he meant presently to fight. His mind gloated in
+anticipation of the battle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+And then a new element asserted itself in the life of McGregor. One of
+the hundreds of disintegrating forces that attack strong natures,
+striving to scatter their force in the back currents of life, attacked
+him. His big body began to feel with enervating persistency the call
+of sex.
+
+In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a mystery. By keeping
+silence he won a reputation for wisdom. The clerks in the hall
+bedrooms thought him a scientist. The woman from Cairo thought him a
+theological student. Down the hall a pretty girl with large black eyes
+who worked in a department store down town dreamed of him at night.
+When in the evening he banged the door to his room and strode down the
+hallway going to the night school she sat in a chair by the open door
+of her room. As he passed she raised her eyes and looked at him
+boldly. When he returned she was again by the door and again she
+looked boldly at him.
+
+In his room, after the meetings with the black-eyed girl McGregor
+found difficulty in keeping his mind on the reading. He felt as he had
+felt with the pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With her as
+with the pale girl he felt the need of defending himself. He began to
+make it a practice to hurry along past her door.
+
+The girl in the hall bedroom thought constantly of McGregor. When he
+had gone to night school another young man of the house who wore a
+Panama hat came from the floor above and, putting his hands on the
+door frames of her room, stood looking at her and talking. In his lips
+he held a cigarette, which when he talked hung limply from the corner
+of his mouth.
+
+This young man and the black-eyed girl kept up a continuous stream of
+comments on the doings of red-haired McGregor. Begun by the young man,
+who hated him because of his silence, the subject was kept alive by
+the girl who wanted to talk of McGregor.
+
+On Saturday nights the young man and the girl sometimes went together
+to the theatre. One night in the summer when they had returned to the
+front of the house the girl stopped. "Let's see what the big red-head
+is doing," she said.
+
+Going around the block they stole in the darkness down an alleyway and
+stood in the little dirty court looking up at McGregor who, with his
+feet in the window and a lamp burning at his shoulder, sat in his room
+reading.
+
+When they returned to the front of the house the black-eyed girl
+kissed the young man, closing her eyes and thinking of McGregor. In
+her room later she lay abed dreaming. She imagined herself assaulted
+by the young man who had crept into her room and that McGregor had
+come roaring down the hall to snatch him away and fling him outside
+the door.
+
+At the end of the hallway near the stairway leading to the street
+lived a barber. He had deserted a wife and four children in a town in
+Ohio and to prevent recognition had grown a black beard. Between this
+man and McGregor a companionship had sprung up and they went together
+on Sunday mornings to walk in the park. The black bearded man called
+himself Frank Turner.
+
+Frank Turner had a passion. Through the evenings and on Sunday
+afternoons he sat in his room making violins. He worked with a knife,
+glue, pieces of glass and sand paper and spent his earnings for
+ingredients for the making of varnishes. When he got hold of a piece
+of wood that seemed an answer to his prayers he took it to McGregor's
+room and holding it up to the light talked of what he would do with
+it. Sometimes he brought a violin and sitting in the open window
+tested the quality of its tone. One evening he took an hour of
+McGregor's time to talk of the varnish of Cremona and to read to him
+from a worn little book concerning the old Italian masters of violin
+making.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a bench in the park sat Turner, the maker of violins, the man who
+dreamed of the rediscovery of the varnish of Cremona, talking to
+McGregor, son of the Pennsylvania miner.
+
+It was a Sunday afternoon and the park was vibrant with life. All day
+the street cars had been unloading Chicagoans at the park entrance.
+They came in pairs and in parties, young men with their sweethearts
+and fathers with families at their heels. Now at the end of the day
+they continued to come, a steady stream of humanity flowing along the
+gravel walk past the bench where the two men sat in talk. Through the
+stream and crossing it went another stream homeward bound. Babies
+cried. Fathers called to the children at play on the grass. Cars
+coming to the park filled went away filled.
+
+McGregor looked about him and thought of himself and of the restless
+moving people. In him there was none of that vague fear of the
+multitude common to many solitary souls. His contempt of men and of
+the lives lived by men reinforced his native boldness. The odd little
+rounding of the shoulders of even the athletic young men made him
+straighten with pride his own shoulders and fat and lean, tall and
+short, he thought of all men as counters in some vast games at which
+he was presently to be a master player.
+
+The passion for form, that strange intuitive power that many men have
+felt and none but the masters of human life have understood, had begun
+to awaken in him. Already he had begun to sense out the fact that for
+him law was but an incident in some vast design and he was altogether
+untouched by the desire for getting on in the world, by the greedy
+little snatching at trifles that was the whole purpose of the lives of
+so many of the people about him. When somewhere in the park a band
+began to play he nodded his head up and down and ran his hand
+nervously up and down the legs of his trousers. Into his mind came the
+desire to boast to the barber, telling of the things he meant to do in
+the world, but he put the desire away. Instead he sat silently
+blinking his eyes and wondering at the persistent air of
+ineffectiveness in the people who passed. When a band went by playing
+march music and followed by some fifty men wearing white plumes in
+their hats and walking with self-conscious awkwardness, he was
+startled. Among the people he thought there was a change. Something
+like a running shadow passed over them. The babbling of voices ceased
+and like himself the people began to nod their heads. A thought,
+gigantic in its simplicity, began to come into his mind but was wiped
+out immediately by his impatience with the marchers. A madness to
+spring up and run among them knocking them about and making them march
+with the power that comes of abandonment almost lifted him from the
+bench. His mouth twitched and his fingers ached for action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In and out among the trees and on the green spaces moved the people.
+Along the shores of a pond sat men and women eating the evening meal
+from baskets or from white cloths spread on the grass. They laughed
+and shouted at each other and at the children, calling them back from
+the gravel driveways filled with moving carriages. Beaut saw a girl
+throw an egg shell and hit a young fellow between the eyes, and then
+run laughing away along the shore of the pond. Under a tree a woman
+nursed a babe, covering her breasts with a shawl so that just the
+black head of the babe showed. Its tiny hand clutched at the mouth of
+the woman. In an open space in the shadow of a building young men
+played baseball, the shouts of the spectators rising above the murmur
+of the voices of people on the gravel walk.
+
+A thought came into McGregor's mind that he wanted to discuss with the
+older man. He was moved by the sight of women about and shook himself
+like one awakening from a dream. Then he began looking at the ground
+and kicking up the gravel with his foot. "Look here," he said, turning
+to the barber, "what is a man to do about women, about getting what he
+wants from the women?"
+
+The barber seemed to understand. "It has come to that then?" he asked
+and looked quickly up. He lighted a pipe and sat looking at the
+people. It was then he told McGregor of the wife and four children in
+the Ohio town, describing the little brick house and the garden and
+the coop for chickens at the back like one who lingers over a place
+dear to his fancy. Something old and weary was in his voice as he
+finished.
+
+"It wasn't a matter for me to decide," he said. "I came away because I
+couldn't do anything else. I'm not excusing myself, I'm just telling
+you. There was something messy and disorderly about it all, about my
+life with her and with them. I couldn't stand it. I felt myself being
+submerged by something. I wanted to be orderly and to work, you see. I
+couldn't let violin making alone. Lord, how I tried--tried bluffing
+myself about it--calling it a fad."
+
+The barber looked nervously at McGregor to reassure himself of his
+interest. "I owned a shop on the main street of our town. Back of it
+was a blacksmith shop. During the day I stood by the chair in my shop
+talking to men being shaved about the love of women and a man's duty
+to his family. Summer afternoons I went and sat on a keg in the
+blacksmith shop and talked of the same thing with the smith but all
+that did me no good.
+
+"When I let myself go I dreamed not of my duty to my family but of
+working undisturbed as I do now here in the city in my room in the
+evenings and on Sundays."
+
+A sharpness came into the voice of the speaker. He turned to McGregor
+and talked vigorously like one making a defence. "My woman was a good
+enough sort," he said. "I suppose loving is an art like writing a book
+or drawing pictures or making violins. People try to do it and don't
+succeed. In the end we threw the job up and just lived together like
+most people do. Our lives got mussy and meaningless. That's how it
+was.
+
+"Before she married me my wife had been a stenographer in a factory
+that made tin cans. She liked that work. She could make her fingers
+dance along the keys. When she read a book at home she didn't think
+the writer amounted to much if he made mistakes about punctuation. Her
+boss was so proud of her that he would brag of her work to visitors
+and sometimes would go off fishing leaving the running of the business
+in her hands.
+
+"I don't know why she married me. She was happier there and she is
+happier back there now. We got to walking together on Sunday evenings
+and standing under the trees on side streets, kissing and looking at
+each other. We talked about a lot of things. We seemed to need each
+other. Then we got married and started living together.
+
+"It didn't work out. After we had been married a few years things
+changed. I don't know why. I thought I was the same as I had been and
+I think she was. We used to sit around quarrelling about it, each
+blaming the other. Anyway we didn't get along.
+
+"We would sit on the little front porch of our house in the evening,
+she bragging of the work she had done in the can factory and I
+dreaming of quietude and a chance to work on the violins. I thought I
+knew a way to increase the quality and beauty of tone and I had that
+idea about varnish I have talked to you about. I even dreamed of doing
+things those old fellows of Cremona didn't do.
+
+"When she had been talking of her work in the office for maybe a half
+hour she would look up and find that I hadn't been listening. We would
+quarrel. We even quarrelled before the children after they came. Once
+she said that she didn't see how it would matter if no violins had
+ever been made and that night I dreamed of choking her in bed. I woke
+up and lay there beside her thinking of it with something like real
+satisfaction in just the thought that one long hard grip of my fingers
+would get her out of my way for good.
+
+"We didn't always feel that way. Every little while a change would
+come over both of us and we would begin to take an interest in each
+other. I would be proud of the work she had done in the factory and
+would brag of it to men coming into the shop. In the evening she would
+be sympathetic about the violins and put the baby to bed to let me
+alone at my work in the kitchen.
+
+"Then we would begin to sit in the darkness in the house and hold each
+other's hands. We would forgive things that had been said and play a
+sort of game, chasing each other about the room in the darkness and
+knocking against the chairs and laughing. Then we would begin to look
+at each other and kiss. Presently there would be another baby."
+
+The barber threw up his hands with a gesture of impatience. His voice
+lost its softer, reminiscent quality. "Such times didn't last," he
+said. "On the whole it was no life to live. I came away. The children
+are in a state institution and she has gone back to her work in the
+office. The town hates me. They have made a heroine of her. I'm here
+talking to you with these whiskers on my face so that people from my
+town wouldn't know me if they came along. I'm a barber and I would
+shave them off fast enough if it wasn't for that."
+
+A woman walking past looked back at McGregor. In her eyes lurked an
+invitation. It reminded him of something in the eyes of the pale
+daughter of the undertaker of Coal Creek. An uneasy tremor ran through
+him. "What do you do about women now?" he asked.
+
+The voice of the smaller man arose harsh and excited in the evening
+air. "I get the feeling taken out of me as a man would have a tooth
+fixed," he said. "I pay money for the service and keep my mind on what
+I want to do. There are plenty of women for that, women who are good
+for that only. When I first came here I used to wander about at night,
+wanting to go to my room and work but with my mind and my will
+paralysed by that feeling. I don't do that now and I won't again. What
+I do many men do--good men--men who do good work. What's the use
+thinking about it when you only run against a stone wall and get
+hurt?"
+
+The black bearded man arose, thrust his hands into his trousers
+pockets and looked about him. Then he sat down again. He seemed to be
+filled with suppressed excitement. "There is a big hidden something
+going on in modern life," he said, talking rapidly and excitedly. "It
+used to touch only the men higher up, now it reaches down to men like
+me--barbers and workingmen. Men know about it but don't talk and don't
+dare think. Their women have changed. Women used to be willing to do
+anything for men, just be slaves to them. The best men don't ask that
+now and don't want that."
+
+He jumped to his feet and stood over McGregor. "Men don't understand
+what's going on and don't care," he said. "They are too busy getting
+things done or going to ball games or quarrelling about politics.
+
+"And what do they know about it if they are fools enough to think?
+They get thrown into false notions. They see about them a lot of fine
+purposeful women maybe caring for their children and they blame
+themselves for their vices and are ashamed. Then they turn to the
+other women anyway, shutting their eyes and going ahead. They pay for
+what they want as they would pay for a dinner, thinking no more of the
+women who serve them than they do of the waitresses who serve them in
+the restaurants. They refuse to think of the new kind of woman that is
+growing up. They know that if they get sentimental about her they'll
+get into trouble or get new tests put to them, be disturbed you see,
+and spoil their work or their peace of mind. They don't want to get
+into trouble or be disturbed. They want to get a better job or enjoy a
+ball game or build a bridge or write a book. They think that a man who
+gets sentimental about any woman is a fool and of course he is."
+
+"Do you mean that all of them do that?" asked McGregor. He wasn't
+upset by what had been said. It struck him as being true. For himself
+he was afraid of women. It seemed to him that a road was being built
+by his companion along which he might travel with safety. He wanted
+the man to go on talking. Into his brain flashed the thought that if
+he had the thing to do over there would have been a different ending
+to the afternoon spent with the pale girl on the hillside.
+
+The barber sat down upon the bench. The flush out of his cheeks. "Well
+I have done pretty well myself," he said, "but then you know I make
+violins and don't think of women. I've been in Chicago two years and
+I've spent just eleven dollars. I would like to know what the average
+man spends. I wish some fellow would get the facts and publish them.
+It would make people sit up. There must be millions spent here every
+year."
+
+"You see I'm not very strong and I stand all day on my feet in the
+barber shop." He looked at McGregor and laughed. "The black-eyed girl
+in the hall is after you," he said. "You'd better look out. You let
+her alone. Stick to your law books. You are not like me. You are big
+and red and strong. Eleven dollars won't pay your way here in Chicago
+for no two years."
+
+McGregor looked again at the people moving toward the park entrance in
+the gathering darkness. He thought it wonderful that a brain could
+think a thing out so clearly and words express thoughts so lucidly.
+His eagerness to follow the passing girls with his eyes was gone. He
+was interested in the older man's viewpoint. "And what about
+children?" he asked.
+
+The older man sat sideways on the bench. There was a troubled look in
+his eyes and a suppressed eager quality in his voice. "I'm going to
+tell you about that," he said. "I don't want to keep anything back.
+
+"Look here!" he demanded, sliding along the bench toward McGregor and
+emphasising his points by slapping one hand down upon the other.
+"Ain't all children my children?" He paused, trying to gather his
+scattered thoughts into words. When McGregor started to speak he put
+his hand up as though to ward off a new thought or another question.
+"I'm not trying to dodge," he said. "I'm trying to get thoughts that
+have been in my head day after day in shape to tell. I haven't tried
+to express them before. I know men and women cling to their children.
+It's the only thing they have left of the dream they had before they
+married. I felt that way. It held me for a long time. It would be
+holding me now only that the violins pulled so hard at me."
+
+He threw up his hand impatiently. "You see I had to find an answer. I
+couldn't think of being a skunk--running away--and I couldn't stay. I
+wasn't intended to stay. Some men are intended to work and take care
+of children and serve women perhaps but others have to keep trying for
+a vague something all their lives--like me trying for a tone on a
+violin. If they don't get it it doesn't matter, they have to keep
+trying.
+
+"My wife used to say I'd get tired of it. No woman ever really
+understands a man caring for anything except herself. I knocked that
+out of her."
+
+The little man looked up at McGregor. "Do you think I'm a skunk?" he
+asked.
+
+McGregor looked at him gravely. "I don't know," he said. "Go on and
+tell me about the children."
+
+"I said they were the last things to cling to. They are. We used to
+have religion. But that's pretty well gone now--the old kind. Now men
+think about children, I mean a certain kind of men--the ones that have
+work they want to get on with. Children and work are the only things
+that kind care about. If they have a sentiment about women it's only
+about their own--the one they have in the house with them. They want
+to keep that one finer than they are themselves. So they work the
+other feeling out on the paid women.
+
+"Women fuss about men loving children. Much they care. It's only a
+plan for demanding adulation for themselves that they don't earn.
+Once, when I first came to the city, I took a place as servant in a
+wealthy family. I wanted to stay under cover until my beard grew.
+Women used to come there to receptions and to meetings in the
+afternoon to talk about reforms they were interested in----Bah! They
+work and scheme trying to get at men. They are at it all their lives,
+flattering, diverting us, giving us false ideas, pretending to be weak
+and uncertain when they are strong and determined. They have no mercy.
+They wage war on us trying to make us slaves. They want to take us
+captive home to their houses as Caesar took captives home to Rome.
+
+"You look here!" He jumped to his feet again and shook his fingers at
+McGregor. "You just try something. You try being open and frank and
+square with a woman--any woman--as you would with a man. Let her live
+her own life and ask her to let you live yours. You try it. She won't.
+She will die first."
+
+He sat down again upon the bench and shook his head back and forth.
+"Lord how I wish I could talk!" he said. "I'm making a muddle of this
+and I wanted to tell you. Oh, how I wanted to tell you! It's part of
+my idea that a man should tell a boy all he knows. We've got to quit
+lying to them."
+
+McGregor looked at the ground. He was profoundly and deeply moved and
+interested as he had never before been moved by anything but hate.
+
+Two women coming along the gravel walk stopped under a tree and looked
+back. The barber smiled and raised his hat. When they smiled back at
+him he rose and started toward them. "Come on boy," he whispered
+behind his hand to McGregor. "Let's get them."
+
+When McGregor looked up the scene before his eyes infuriated him. The
+smiling barber with his hat in his hand, the two women waiting under
+the tree, the look of half-guilty innocence on the faces of all of
+them, stirred a blind fury in his brain. He sprang forward, clutching
+the shoulder of Turner with his hand. Whirling him about he threw him
+to his hands and knees. "Get out of here you females!" he roared at
+the women who ran off in terror down the walk.
+
+The barber sat again upon the bench beside McGregor. He rubbed his
+hands together to brush the bits of gravel out of the flesh. "What's
+got wrong with you?" he asked.
+
+McGregor hesitated. He wondered how he should tell what was in his
+mind. "Everything in its place," he said finally. "I wanted to go on
+with our talk."
+
+Lights flashed out of the darkness of the park. The two men sat on the
+bench thinking each his own thoughts.
+
+"I want to take some work out of the clamps to-night," the barber
+said, looking at his watch. Together the two men walked along the
+street. "Look here," said McGregor. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Those
+two women that came up and interfered with what we were working out
+made me furious."
+
+"Women always interfere," said the barber. "They raise hell with men."
+His mind ran out and began to play with the world-old problem of the
+sexes. "If a lot of women fall in the fight with us men and become our
+slaves--serving us as the paid women do--need they fuss about it? Let
+them be game and try to help work it out as men have been game and
+have worked and thought through ages of perplexity and defeat."
+
+The barber stopped on the street corner to fill and light his pipe.
+"Women can change everything when they want to," he said, looking at
+McGregor and letting the match burn out in his fingers. "They can have
+motherhood pensions and room to work out their own problem in the
+world or anything else that they really want. They can stand up face
+to face with men. They don't want to. They want to enslave us with
+their faces and their bodies. They want to carry on the old, old weary
+fight." He tapped McGregor on the arm. "If a few of us--wanting with
+all our might to get something done--beat them at their own game,
+don't we deserve the victory?" he asked.
+
+"But sometimes I think I would like a woman to live with, you know,
+just to sit and talk with me," said McGregor.
+
+The barber laughed. Puffing at his pipe he walked down the street. "To
+be sure! To be sure!" he said. "I would. Any man would. I like to sit
+in the room for a spell in the evening talking to you but I would hate
+to give up violin making and be bound all my life to serve you and
+your purposes just the same."
+
+In the hallway of their own house the barber spoke to McGregor as he
+looked down the hallway to where the door of the black eyed girl's
+room had just crept open. "You let women alone," he said; "when you
+feel you can't stay away from them any longer you come and talk it
+over with me."
+
+McGregor nodded and went along the hallway to his own room. In the
+darkness he stood by the window and looked down into the court. The
+feeling of hidden power, the ability to rise above the mess into which
+modern life had sunk that had come to him in the park, returned and he
+walked nervously about. When finally he sat down upon a chair and
+leaning forward put his head in his hands he felt like one who has
+started on a long journey through a strange and dangerous country and
+who has unexpectedly come upon a friend going the same way.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+The people of Chicago go home from their work at evening--drifting
+they go in droves, hurrying along. It is a startling thing to look
+closely at them. The people have bad mouths. Their mouths are slack
+and the jaws do not hang right. The mouths are like the shoes they
+wear. The shoes have become run down at the corners from too much
+pounding on the hard pavements and the mouths have become crooked from
+too much weariness of soul.
+
+Something is wrong with modern American life and we Americans do not
+want to look at it. We much prefer to call ourselves a great people
+and let it go at that.
+
+It is evening and the people of Chicago go home from work. Clatter,
+clatter, clatter, go the heels on the hard pavements, jaws wag, the
+wind blows and dirt drifts and sifts through the masses of the people.
+Every one has dirty ears. The stench in the street cars is horrible.
+The antiquated bridges over the rivers are packed with people. The
+suburban trains going away south and west are cheaply constructed and
+dangerous. A people calling itself great and living in a city also
+called great go to their houses a mere disorderly mass of humans
+cheaply equipped. Everything is cheap. When the people get home to
+their houses they sit on cheap chairs before cheap tables and eat
+cheap food. They have given their lives for cheap things. The poorest
+peasant of one of the old countries is surrounded by more beauty. His
+very equipment for living has more solidity.
+
+The modern man is satisfied with what is cheap and unlovely because he
+expects to rise in the world. He has given his life to that dreary
+dream and he is teaching his children to follow the same dream.
+McGregor was touched by it. Being confused by the matter of sex he had
+listened to the advice of the barber and meant to settle things in the
+cheap way. One evening a month after the talk in the park he hurried
+along Lake Street on the West Side with that end in view. It was near
+eight o'clock and growing dark and McGregor should have been at the
+night school. Instead he walked along the street looking at the ill-
+kept frame houses. A fever burned in his blood. An impulse, for the
+moment stronger than the impulse that kept him at work over books
+night after night there in the big disorderly city and as yet stronger
+than any new impulse toward a vigorous compelling march through life,
+had hold of him. His eyes stared into the windows. He hurried along
+filled with a lust that stultified his brain and will. A woman sitting
+at the window of a little frame house smiled and beckoned to him.
+
+McGregor walked along the path leading to the little frame house. The
+path ran through a squalid yard. It was a foul place like the court
+under his window behind the house in Wycliff Place. Here also
+discoloured papers worried by the wind ran about in crazy circles.
+McGregor's heart pounded and his mouth felt dry and unpleasant. He
+wondered what he should say and how he should say it when he came into
+the presence of the woman. He wished there were some one to be hit
+with his fist. He didn't want to make love, he wanted relief. He would
+have much preferred a fight.
+
+The veins in McGregor's neck began to swell and as he stood in the
+darkness before the door of the house he swore. He stared up and down
+the street but the sky, the sight of which might have helped him, was
+hidden from view by the structure of an elevated railroad. Pushing
+open the door of the house he stepped in. In the dim light he could
+see nothing but a form sprang out of the darkness and a pair of
+powerful arms pinned his hands to his sides. McGregor looked quickly
+about A man huge as himself held him tightly against the door. He had
+one glass eye and a stubby black beard and in the half light looked
+sinister and dangerous. The hand of the woman who had beckoned to him
+from the window fumbled in McGregor's pockets and came out clutching a
+little roll of money. Her face, set now and ugly like the man's,
+looked up at him from under the arms of her ally.
+
+In a moment McGregor's heart stopped pounding and the dry unpleasant
+taste went out of his mouth. He felt relieved and glad at this sudden
+turn to the affair.
+
+With a quick upward snap of his knees into the stomach of the man who
+had held him McGregor freed himself. A swinging blow to the neck sent
+his assailant groaning to the floor. McGregor sprang across the room.
+In the corner by the bed he caught the woman. Clutching her by the
+hair he whirled her about. "Hand over that money," he said fiercely.
+
+The woman put up her hands and plead with him. The grip of his hands
+in her hair brought the tears to her eyes. She thrust the roll of
+bills into his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he intended to
+kill her.
+
+A new feeling swept over McGregor. The thought of having come into the
+house at the invitation of this woman was revolting to him. He
+wondered how he could have been such a beast. As he stood in the dim
+light thinking of this and looking at the woman he became lost in
+thought and wondered why the idea given him by the barber, that had
+seemed so clear and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes stared
+at the woman as his mind returned to the black-bearded barber talking
+on the park bench and he was seized with a blind fury, a fury not
+directed at the people in the foul little room but at himself and his
+own blindness. Again a great hatred of the disorder of life took hold
+of him and as though all of the disorderly people of the world were
+personified in her he swore and shook the woman as a dog might have
+shaken a foul rag.
+
+"Sneak. Dodger. Mussy fool," he muttered, thinking of himself as a
+giant attacked by some nauseous beast. The woman screamed with terror.
+Seeing the look on her assailant's face and mistaking the meaning of
+his words she trembled and thought again of death. Reaching under the
+pillow on the bed she got another roll of bills and thrust that also
+into McGregor's hands. "Please go," she plead. "We were mistaken. We
+thought you were some one else."
+
+McGregor strode to the door past the man on the floor who groaned and
+rolled about. He walked around the corner to Madison Street and
+boarded a car for the night school. Sitting in the car he counted the
+money in the roll thrust into his hand by the kneeling woman and
+laughed so that the people in the car looked at him in amazement.
+"Turner has spent eleven dollars among them in two years and I have
+got twenty-seven dollars in one night," he thought. He jumped off the
+car and walked along under the street lights striving to think things
+out. "I can't depend on any one," he muttered. "I have to make my own
+way. The barber is as confused as the rest of them and he doesn't know
+it. There is a way out of the confusion and I'm going to find it, but
+I'll have to do it alone. I can't take any one's word for anything."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The matter of McGregor's attitude toward women and the call of sex was
+not of course settled by the fight in the house in Lake Street. He was
+a man who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed strongly
+to the mating instinct in women and more than once his purpose was to
+be shaken and his mind disturbed by the forms, the faces and the eyes
+of women.
+
+McGregor thought he had settled the matter. He forgot the black-eyed
+girl in the hallway and thought only of advancement in the warehouse
+and of study in his room at night. Now and then he took an evening off
+and went for a walk through the streets or in one of the parks.
+
+In the streets of Chicago, under the night lights, among the restless
+moving people he was a figure to be remembered. Sometimes he did not
+see the people at all but went swinging along in the same spirit in
+which he had walked in the Pennsylvania hills. He was striving to get
+a hold of some elusive quality in life that seemed to be forever out
+of reach. He did not want to be a lawyer or a warehouseman. What did
+he want? Along the street he went trying to make up his mind and
+because his was not a gentle nature his perplexity drove him to anger
+and he swore.
+
+Up and down Madison Street he went striding along, his lips muttering
+words. In a corner saloon some one played a piano. Groups of girls
+passed laughing and talking. He came to the bridge that led over the
+river into the loop district and then turned restlessly back. On the
+sidewalks along Canal Street he saw strong-bodied men loitering before
+cheap lodging houses. Their clothing was filthy with long wear and
+there was no light of determination in their faces. In the little fine
+interstices of the cloth of which their clothes were made was gathered
+the filth of the city in which they lived and in the stuff of their
+natures the filth and disorder of modern civilisation had also found
+lodging.
+
+On walked McGregor looking at man-made things and the flame of anger
+within burned stronger and stronger. He saw the drifting clouds of
+people of all nations that wander at night in Halstead Street and
+turning into a side street saw also the Italians, Poles and Russians
+that at evening gather on the sidewalks before tenements in that
+district.
+
+The desire in McGregor for some kind of activity became a madness. His
+body shook with the strength of his desire to end the vast disorder of
+life. With all the ardour of youth he wanted to see if with the
+strength of his arm he could shake mankind out of its sloth. A drunken
+man passed and following him came a large man with a pipe in his
+mouth. The large man did not walk with any suggestion of power in his
+legs. He shambled along. He was like a huge child with fat cheeks and
+great untrained body, a child without muscles and hardness, clinging
+to the skirts of life.
+
+McGregor could not bear the sight of the big ungainly figure. The man
+seemed to personify all of the things against which his soul was in
+revolt and he stopped and stood crouched, a ferocious light burning in
+his eyes.
+
+Into the gutter rolled the man stunned by the force of the blow dealt
+him by the miner's son. He crawled on his hands and knees and cried
+for help. His pipe had rolled away into the darkness. McGregor stood
+on the sidewalk and waited. A crowd of men standing before a tenement
+house started to run toward him. Again he crouched. He prayed that
+they would come on and let him fight them also. In anticipation of a
+great struggle joy shone in his eyes and his muscles twitched.
+
+And then the man in the gutter got to his feet and ran away. The men
+who had started to run toward him stopped and turned back. McGregor
+walked on, his heart heavy with the sense of defeat. He was a little
+sorry for the man he had struck and who had made so ridiculous a
+figure crawling about on his hands and knees and he was more perplexed
+than ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McGregor tried again to solve the problem of women. He had been much
+pleased by the outcome of the affair in the little frame house and the
+next day bought law books with the twenty-seven dollars thrust into
+his hand by the frightened woman. Later he stood in his room
+stretching his great body like a lion returned from the kill and
+thought of the little black-bearded barber in the room at the end of
+the hall stooping over his violin, his mind busy with the attempt to
+justify himself because he would not face one of life's problems. The
+feeling of resentment against the man had gone. He thought of the
+course laid out for himself by that philosopher and laughed. "There is
+something about it to avoid, like giving yourself up to digging in the
+dirt under the ground," he told himself.
+
+McGregor's second adventure began on a Saturday night and again he let
+himself be led into it by the barber. The night was hot and the
+younger man sat in his room filled with a desire to go forth and
+explore the city. The quiet of the house, the distant rumble of street
+cars, the sound of a band playing far down the street disturbed and
+diverted his mind. He wished that he might take a stick in his hands
+and go forth to prowl among the hills as he had gone on such nights in
+his youth in the Pennsylvania town.
+
+The door to his room opened and the barber came in. In his hand he
+held two tickets. He sat on the window sill to explain.
+
+"There is a dance in a hall on Monroe Street," said the barber
+excitedly. "I have two tickets here. A politician sold them to the
+boss in the shop where I work." The barber threw back his head and
+laughed. To his mind there was something delicious in the thought of
+the boss barber being forced by the politicians to buy dance tickets.
+"They cost two dollars each," he cried and shook with laughter "You
+should have seen my boss squirm. He didn't want the tickets but was
+afraid not to take them. The politician could make trouble for him and
+he knew it. You see we make a hand-book on the races in the shop and
+that is against the law. The politician could make trouble for us. The
+boss paid out the four dollars swearing under his breath and when the
+politician had gone out he threw them at me. 'There, take them,' he
+shouted, 'I don't want the rotten things. Is a man a horse trough at
+which every beast can stop to drink?'"
+
+McGregor and the barber sat in the room laughing at the boss barber
+who had smilingly bought the tickets while consumed with inward wrath.
+The barber urged McGregor to go with him to the dance. "We will make a
+night of it," he said. "We will see women there--two that I know. They
+live upstairs over a grocery store. I have been with them. They will
+open your eyes. They are a kind of women you haven't known, bold and
+clever and good fellows too."
+
+McGregor got up and pulled his shirt over his head. A wave of feverish
+excitement ran over his body. "We shall see about this," he said, "we
+shall see if this is another wrong trail you are starting me on. You
+go to your room and get ready. I am going to fix myself up."
+
+In the dance hall McGregor sat on a seat by the wall with one of the
+two women lauded by the barber and a third one who was frail and
+bloodless. To him the adventure had been a failure. The swing of the
+dance music struck no answering chord in him. He saw the couples on
+the floor clasped in each other's arms, writhing and turning, swaying
+back and forth, looking into each other's eyes and turned aside
+wishing himself back in his room among the law books.
+
+The barber talked to two of the women, bantering them. McGregor
+thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of
+things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures
+of which he knew nothing.
+
+The barber danced away with one of the women. She was tall and the
+head of the barber barely Passed her shoulder. His black beard shone
+against her white dress. The two women sat beside him and talked.
+McGregor gathered that the frail woman was a maker of hats. Something
+about her attracted him and he leaned against the wall and looked at
+her, not hearing the talk.
+
+A youth came up and took the other woman away. From across the hall
+the barber beckoned to him.
+
+A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside him was frail and
+thin and bloodless like the women of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy
+with her came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning the tall
+pale girl of Coal Creek when they together gether had climbed the hill
+to the eminence that looked down into the valley of farms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of
+McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two
+rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid
+of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on
+an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the
+show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the
+same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the
+sermon.
+
+On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked
+alone under the trees. If it threatened rain she sat in the larger of
+the two rooms back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself or
+for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the Indiana town and who
+had four children.
+
+Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with small brown
+spots on the iris. She was so slender that she wore pads about her
+body under her dress to fill it out. In her youth she had had a
+sweetheart--a fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm. Once
+they had gone together to the fair at the county seat and coming home
+in the buggy at night he had put his arm about her and kissed her.
+"You ain't very big," he had said.
+
+Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought the padding
+which she wore under her dress With it came an oil which she rubbed on
+herself. The label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great
+respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads wore raw places on
+her side against which her clothes rubbed but she bore the pain with
+grim stoicism, remembering what the fat boy had said.
+
+After Edith came to Chicago and opened a shop of her own she had a
+letter from her former admirer. "It pleases me to think that the same
+wind that blows over me blows also over you," it said. After that one
+letter she did not hear from him again. He had the phrase out of a
+book he had read and had written the letter to Edith that he might use
+it. After the letter had gone he thought of her frail figure and
+repented of the impulse that had tricked him into writing. Half in
+alarm he began courting and soon married another girl.
+
+Sometimes on her rare visits home Edith had seen her former lover
+driving along the road. The sister who had married the blacksmith said
+that he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear but a cheap
+calico dress and that on Saturday he drove off to town alone, leaving
+her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. Once he encountered
+Edith on the road and tried to get her into the wagon to ride with
+him. Although she had walked along the road ignoring him she took the
+letter about the wind that blew over them both out of a drawer on
+spring evenings or after a walk in the park and read it over. After
+she had read it she sat in the darkness at the front of the store
+looking through the screen door at people in the street and wondered
+what life would mean to her if she had a man on whom she could bestow
+her love. In her heart she believed that, unlike the wife of the fat
+youth, she would have borne children.
+
+In Chicago Edith Carson had made money. She had a genius for economy
+in the management of her business. In six years she had cleared a
+large debt from the shop and had a comfortable balance in the bank.
+Girls who worked in factories or in stores came and left most of their
+meagre surplus in her shop and other girls who didn't work came in,
+throwing dollars about and talking about "gentlemen friends." Edith
+hated the bargaining but attended to it with shrewdness and with a
+quiet disarming little smile on her face. What she liked was to sit
+quietly in the room and trim hats. When the business grew she had a
+woman to tend the shop and a girl to sit beside her and help with the
+hats. She had a friend, the wife of a motorman on the street-car line,
+who sometimes came to see her in the evening. The friend was a plump
+little woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, and she got Edith to
+make her several new hats a year for which she paid nothing.
+
+Edith went to the dance at which she met McGregor with the motorman's
+wife and a girl who lived upstairs over a bakery next door to the
+shop, The dance was held in a hall over a saloon and was given for the
+benefit of a political organisation in which the baker was a leader.
+The wife of the baker came in and sold Edith two tickets, one for
+herself and one for the wife of the motorman who happened to be
+sitting with her at the time.
+
+That evening after the motorman's wife had gone home Edith decided to
+go to the dance and the decision was something like an adventure in
+itself. The night was hot and sultry, lightning flashed in the sky and
+clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind
+the bolted screen door and looked at the people who hurried homeward
+down the street. A wave of revolt at the narrowness and emptiness of
+her life ran through her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed the
+shop door and going into the room at the back lighted the gas and
+stood looking at herself in the mirror. "I'll go to the dance," she
+thought. "Perhaps I shall get a man. If he won't marry me he can have
+what he wants of me anyway."
+
+In the dance hall Edith sat demurely by the wall near a window and
+watched the couples whirl about on the floor. Through an open door she
+could see couples sitting in another room around tables and drinking
+beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers went about
+on the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once he started
+across the floor toward Edith and her heart beat rapidly, but just
+when she thought he intended to speak to her and to the motorman's
+wife he turned and went to another part of the room. Edith followed
+him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and his shining white
+teeth.
+
+The wife of the motorman went away with a small straight man with a
+grey moustache whom Edith thought had unpleasant eyes and two girls
+came and sat beside her. They were customers of her store and lived
+together in a flat over a grocery on Monroe Street. Edith had heard
+the girl who sat in the workroom with her speak slightingly of them.
+The three sat together along the wall and talked of hats.
+
+And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red-
+haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women
+hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the
+little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on
+the floor with Edith's two companions. A dance struck up and taking
+one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the
+other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said
+nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes.
+Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.
+
+At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door
+into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-
+haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away
+with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall
+beside McGregor.
+
+"This place doesn't interest me," said McGregor quickly. "I don't like
+to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come
+with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk
+and get acquainted."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor,
+her heart jumping with excitement. "I've got a man," she thought,
+exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had
+heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded
+man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.
+
+Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness.
+Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving
+down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him.
+A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his
+eyes came over her. "This one could knock him over a six-rail fence,"
+she thought.
+
+"Where are we going now?" she asked.
+
+McGregor looked down at her. "To some place where we can talk," he
+said. "I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going.
+I'm going with you. You aren't going with me."
+
+McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take
+this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.
+
+As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she
+had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the
+shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She
+wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand
+trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through
+her.
+
+At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as
+she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a
+bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.
+
+In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and
+pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the
+room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted
+the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he
+might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and
+the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited
+hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.
+
+For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room
+and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely,
+letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people
+after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice
+confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite
+different.
+
+Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and
+prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and
+talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her.
+She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a
+faint grey streak of fear. "Of course he won't come back again," she
+thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith
+Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse
+and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing
+the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When
+he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and
+sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back
+room.
+
+About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly
+and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her
+cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind
+and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle
+insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and
+almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this
+strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs
+within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and
+wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little
+facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of
+his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires
+but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that
+nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.
+
+McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the
+figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who
+stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life.
+The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar,
+Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the
+other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon
+hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in
+the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers
+of laws.
+
+There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as
+virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills
+of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into
+power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of
+isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically
+as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and
+he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in
+the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and
+the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots
+that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three
+sentences to passers by.
+
+It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by
+his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such
+power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility
+of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go,
+socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers
+in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words,
+crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.
+
+The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens
+inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never
+change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us
+have marked them for their barrenness.
+
+And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word.
+He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub
+of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility
+within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that
+his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the
+words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his
+turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the
+gods.
+
+For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men
+whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He
+tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by
+himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new
+curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling
+apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of
+the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of
+their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered
+but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as
+he stood staring at them.
+
+McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that
+made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped,
+that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end
+mere slaves to words and formulas.
+
+The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to
+think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do
+with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened
+the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and
+only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from
+devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk
+concerning the matter with a at the warehouse. The talk came about in
+this way.
+
+In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting
+in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With
+downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime.
+Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to
+their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed
+young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little
+coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From
+time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with
+one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to
+compel attention. "They are no good," he said to himself, when in
+response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. "Although they get
+but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!" Like McGregor he had
+nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book.
+Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. "We are the kind
+who get things done," he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear
+and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class
+man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have
+contempt for himself.
+
+One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board
+platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage.
+"The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves,"
+said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he
+added heartily. "Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids
+around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play
+about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the
+evening."
+
+McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow
+within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the
+purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought
+against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon
+him. "Well how are you any better?" he asked bluntly. "Do you think
+your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better
+mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very
+striking figure as far as I can see."
+
+Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath
+McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to
+think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a
+workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes
+and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to
+take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had
+employed him rubbed his hands with delight.
+
+In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not
+want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim
+light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly.
+In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested
+to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely
+his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express
+what was in his brain. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor,"
+he muttered. "If they have children it is without order or orderly
+purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls
+into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is
+like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In
+the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the
+courage to try to do."
+
+With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat
+thing wandering aimlessly across the light. "I must not be confused by
+little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into
+the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and
+work just as there is in the mining town from which I came."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He
+wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he
+sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time
+shared his thoughts with her. "I am trying to discover why men are of
+so little importance," he said suddenly. "Are they mere tools for
+women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?"
+
+Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the
+book. "Oh well," he added "it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let
+any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her."
+
+Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of
+war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble.
+Then a new thought came to her. "He needs money to get on in the
+world," she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as
+she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she
+could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.
+
+"You're all right," said McGregor, preparing to depart. "You do not
+interfere with a man's thoughts."
+
+Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the
+floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she
+went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new
+pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would
+have given all to McGregor.
+
+And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He
+dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began
+again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so
+strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he
+stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water
+below. "Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?" he asked
+himself. "Why are the men who write books in some way less full of
+meaning than the men who do things?"
+
+McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and
+wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and
+trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and
+tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into
+his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of
+disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic
+machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each
+part without regard to the purpose of the whole. "There is danger in
+thinking too," he muttered vaguely. "Everywhere there is danger, in
+labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?"
+
+McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like
+a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see
+that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had
+appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had
+used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the
+courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep
+in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken
+hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they
+not pointed the way?
+
+Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly
+he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad
+tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before
+the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched
+past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the
+uncertain light. "They marched," whispered McGregor. "That's what made
+them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went
+swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them.
+That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant
+and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use
+their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all
+come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking.
+Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and
+tried to do each his own part.
+
+"I will do my part here," shouted McGregor. "I will find the way." His
+body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men
+stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking
+past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away
+toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be
+able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along
+through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again
+of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad
+he was not a part of it. "I will keep myself to myself and be ready
+for what happens," he said, burning with new courage.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went
+home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve
+dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor,
+working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a
+five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. "I will begin to take
+care of her now," he thought and with the rough sense of equity in
+such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving
+himself airs. "She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he
+told himself.
+
+The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the
+mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid
+begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat.
+Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out
+for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In
+the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more
+to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."
+
+Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance
+began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a
+woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving
+along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent
+little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling
+of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long
+letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by
+the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably
+romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a
+crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men.
+She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so
+unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of
+books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not
+lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her
+own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy
+sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her
+husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she
+thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the
+distant city.
+
+Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days
+of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and
+expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the
+women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called "trouble
+with the heart." Now and then she had "bad spells." On this spring
+evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought
+out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole
+in the woods.
+
+In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would
+die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the
+street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with
+their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life
+seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere,"
+said one of the men. "I've been in towns and cities I don't even
+remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in
+Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there."
+
+The other man laughed. "You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer,"
+he jeered.
+
+Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
+protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that
+life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from
+her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her
+ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below
+the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat
+men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a
+chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque,
+staring silently past her into the sky.
+
+Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
+bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not
+think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying
+hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to
+dream dreams.
+
+Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the
+old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had
+taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they
+had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming
+country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land
+spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more
+toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had
+made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy
+came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they
+found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought
+life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.
+
+Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy
+feet on the stairs. "That will be Beaut coming up from the shop," she
+muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a
+summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From
+the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had
+lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood
+bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room
+above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The
+voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood.
+Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear
+the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon
+the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when
+he came into the presence of the dead.
+
+Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to
+the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began
+to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a
+lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. "I will her
+among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful
+valley," he told himself. The details of a religious discussion
+between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at
+the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he
+for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a
+life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. "Anyway if
+Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting
+on the log on the hillside," he thought.
+
+With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside
+road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the
+burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed
+swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but
+looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little
+wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life.
+On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging
+into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had
+grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man
+who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a
+farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their
+heads and bawled lustily. "It is the place for the dead to lie,"
+whispered McGregor. "When my own time comes I shall be brought up
+here." An idea came to him. "I will have father's body moved," he told
+himself. "When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we
+shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors."
+
+The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased
+also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him
+throw back his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, father and me," he
+muttered, "two of a feather and mother has not understood either of
+us. Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us."
+
+Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began
+the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had
+gone down behind clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if any one
+understands," he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools
+clanking on his shoulder.
+
+McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in
+the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the
+dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out
+of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon
+he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and
+where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.
+
+And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he
+recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his
+throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel
+on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long
+enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. "I wanted to talk
+with you," she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.
+
+For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the
+town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale
+than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look
+critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat
+talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. "She is
+already becoming stooped," he thought. "I would not want to make love
+to her now."
+
+Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a
+swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began
+to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. "We
+have been friends since you went away," she explained. "She liked to
+talk of you and I liked that too."
+
+Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. "I do not want you
+to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not
+thinking of that."
+
+She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life
+with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her
+talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her
+in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but
+was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that
+for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him
+and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of
+tenderness. "I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the
+consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to
+the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her
+words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on
+the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked
+down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his
+mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind
+him. All were silent and embarrassed.
+
+McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who
+gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now
+nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him.
+"It is not because she is a woman, I know that," he told himself and
+tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in
+the street below.
+
+In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of
+the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once
+talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs
+and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked
+rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who,
+when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and
+anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.
+
+McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to
+sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell
+her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective
+all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought
+of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die.
+"It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march
+toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to
+achieve that," he whispered to himself.
+
+In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling
+socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he
+talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much
+wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without
+force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped
+about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.
+
+"Vote with us and the thing is done," he shouted. "Are you going to
+let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying
+tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle.
+You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so."
+
+"You will have to do something more than think," roared McGregor, as
+he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men
+saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks
+he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of
+disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town
+it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and
+loose badly knit bodies.
+
+"Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It
+should be ready to knock down what stands in its way," he cried,
+astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something
+like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in
+the darkened room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the minds
+of the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husband
+and the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the mother
+and wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as they
+pounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and they
+returned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had lost
+her man twice--once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded his
+brain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near the
+door to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in the
+mine--was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept a
+store and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.
+
+On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stood
+in groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men of
+the night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collars
+about their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front door
+and putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk looking
+silently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along the
+runway from the mines came other miners--men of the day shift. Setting
+their dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon and
+crossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces in
+the red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice of
+the preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and dark
+shadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train of
+loaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.
+
+McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. He
+stared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing,
+thinking his own thoughts.
+
+Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned
+forward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat with
+her face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across the
+voice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled with
+miners' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she was
+taken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry out
+of the room.
+
+After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a procession
+formed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups
+and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat
+the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each
+other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow
+the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the
+attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or
+not he wanted them to follow.
+
+And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage
+beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of
+the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he
+should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap
+dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on
+the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when
+he was a boy in the mining town.
+
+As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners
+McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that
+her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been
+quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man
+Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.
+McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He
+became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil
+dragging their weary legs up the hill.
+
+For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about looked
+at the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat and
+watched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought must
+be hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was the
+keynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and in
+which he had not believed.
+
+McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill and
+watching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden one
+of those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stout
+souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew it
+up the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the wind
+seemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes.
+At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the little
+stream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dull
+red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun
+setting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red stream
+flowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scene
+that burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came into
+his throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his old
+satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Long
+he looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marched
+up the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed
+to him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and
+the little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red river
+into something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like an
+animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. It
+seemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor to
+know the secret of that want.
+
+And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file of
+marching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to run
+through the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they also
+looking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawled
+across the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so that
+their shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life began
+to sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step.
+Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he had
+stood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birds
+and sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he had
+hated these men because they did not march with orderly precision like
+the soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he who
+had hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight he
+read a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behind
+his carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day a
+man will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into step
+like that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one another
+but the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wrecked
+by disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the
+ambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregor
+thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of
+his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching
+them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body
+tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the
+millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities,
+everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets
+to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few
+paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful
+scheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried.
+"Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Suppose
+they should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quit
+thinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children.
+Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Suppose
+they could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they should
+begin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enough
+to do--to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two or
+four or a thousand of them get together, to march."
+
+McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead his
+face grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," he
+whispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to your
+life. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, running
+down to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taught
+them that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must be
+different. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their own
+sakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder and
+purposelessness away. That must come first."
+
+McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside the
+minister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men,
+the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.
+
+"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," he
+muttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. That
+loose-jawed fellow in the street last night--there must be thousands
+of such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates.
+Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other men
+and is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will mean
+something. He will know then that he is a part of something real and
+he will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he is
+a part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin to
+feel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what the
+great leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have sold
+men out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make them
+serve their own little ends."
+
+McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of way
+to wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can be
+done," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one,
+sometime. Why not by me?"
+
+They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before the
+log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had secured
+permission of the mining company who owned the land to make this the
+burial place of the McGregors.
+
+When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him at
+the miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leading
+down into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them what
+was in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside the
+grave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved and
+across the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your cause
+shall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemies
+I shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past them
+and topping the hill went down toward the town into the gathering
+night.
+
+McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend in
+Coal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood at
+the foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker's
+daughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoon
+had subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who would
+also be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairs
+to stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up and
+knocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbed
+the hill.
+
+The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled to
+stop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to rise
+McGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted her
+thin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," he
+said. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."
+
+The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The long
+valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid
+little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Out
+of the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they are
+pushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattle
+one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car
+standing on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires are
+started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the
+tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild
+beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows
+of coke ovens.
+
+With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the
+hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play
+with his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had come
+to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine
+country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.
+
+The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to
+clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of
+life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's
+daughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood,
+picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die
+there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he became
+conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her
+shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again
+to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive
+strength and virility.
+
+"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered to
+himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western
+plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening
+with their bodies a song of new life.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits
+of its influence. It stands at the heart of America almost within
+sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields
+of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of men of all
+nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn--shipping
+towns to make their fortunes. On all sides men are busy making
+fortunes.
+
+In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, "In
+America one gets much money," and adventurous souls have set forth
+only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow
+ill--smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.
+
+In American villages the tale has been told. Here it has not been
+whispered but shouted. Magazines and newspapers have done the job. The
+word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind
+among the corn. The young men listen and run away to Chicago. They
+have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no
+tradition of devotion to anything but gain.
+
+Chicago is one vast gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain,
+the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result
+is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly,
+down at the heels.
+
+And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields that are not disorderly.
+There is hope in the corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It
+shoots up out of the black land and stands up in orderly rows. The
+corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. Fruition comes to the
+corn and it is cut down and disappears. Barns are filled to bursting
+with the yellow fruit of the corn.
+
+And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have
+forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the
+corn fields to live in the city.
+
+Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred.
+The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men
+marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action.
+Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages.
+The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.
+
+And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and
+prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the
+sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.
+
+It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses
+after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of
+the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities
+the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one
+hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.
+
+A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening
+sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths
+who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a
+factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the
+city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet,
+efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he
+respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He
+passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming
+light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He
+idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon
+the walls. A white--clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is
+good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind
+of universal fairness."
+
+And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man
+staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his
+hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant
+satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner
+at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money-
+spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work
+feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.
+
+My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and
+prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is
+satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the
+age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the
+whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life
+attending to the business in hand."
+
+The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from
+the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They
+wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and
+with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched
+fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the
+street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging
+black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge
+mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and
+rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.
+
+The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before
+him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky
+and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and
+ugliness of the face in the lamplight.
+
+Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street
+filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In
+his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers,
+feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he
+were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking
+under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of
+newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with
+the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children
+over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat
+alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over
+the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.
+
+The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a
+woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She
+makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker.
+A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue
+clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy--he can't be above
+six--runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses
+of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the
+din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.
+
+The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of
+a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone.
+He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but
+the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a
+pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he
+will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he
+turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow
+listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar
+he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and
+as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him
+from the factory door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he
+began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form.
+For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and
+shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and
+seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of
+North State Street in Chicago.
+
+McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he
+could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books
+without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and
+quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the
+little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get
+himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had
+raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt
+that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day
+McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son
+had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he
+sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among
+rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse
+wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.
+
+From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now
+worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below
+Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room
+whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was
+free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the
+restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.
+
+McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account
+belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a
+summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in
+the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose
+and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men
+at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood.
+He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with
+his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and
+thinking bitter thoughts.
+
+The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its
+possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He
+wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning
+rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever-
+present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the
+streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people
+before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be
+the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with
+meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his
+blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in
+his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.
+
+The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to
+tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and
+she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
+of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could
+quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.
+
+McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought
+of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the
+warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.
+
+"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the
+savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful
+look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there
+doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."
+
+Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she
+had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he
+will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."
+
+McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new
+notion of life and did not know how to begin.
+
+"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked
+himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to
+the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a
+trial. Yes, I'll take the money."
+
+Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was
+touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the
+undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under
+obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take
+it from."
+
+In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new
+plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he
+thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up
+into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use
+that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up
+by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."
+
+It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his
+pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the
+odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the
+intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he
+growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
+the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would
+like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run
+about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked
+about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through
+the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why
+the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To
+him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with
+its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled
+hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.
+
+One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the
+classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with
+thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the
+marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with
+blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was
+unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed
+eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of
+amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of
+Paper.
+
+At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth
+who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign
+against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick
+building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another
+city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he
+thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous
+and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the
+servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from
+his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With
+delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on
+the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red
+lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and
+was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his
+life in the commercial world.
+
+In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young
+man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very
+serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his
+talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor
+smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the
+professor struck chords.
+
+The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders
+and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged
+with excitement.
+
+"The world is full of unrest," he said; "men are struggling like
+chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy
+thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the
+Universities of Germany."
+
+The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by
+what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain
+himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on
+the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his
+foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large
+girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in
+McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled
+class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like
+the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the
+girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.
+
+"We go from room to room hearing talk," began McGregor. "On the street
+corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk
+and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They
+wabble about--saying nothing."
+
+McGregor's excitement grew. "If there is all this unrest why does it
+not come to something?" he demanded. "Why do not you who have trained
+brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this
+disorder? Why is something not done?"
+
+The professor ran up and down on the platform. "I do not know what you
+mean," he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the
+class. He tried to explain. "Why do not men lead their lives like
+men?" he asked. "They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands
+of men. Do you not think so?"
+
+McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. "The world should
+become a great camp," he cried. "The brains of the world should be at
+the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men
+chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the
+organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand
+what is meant let them be knocked down."
+
+The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at
+McGregor. "I understand your kind," he said, and his voice trembled.
+"The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here."
+
+The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the
+class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty
+class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he
+muttered to himself: "What's getting in here? What's getting into our
+schools?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of
+what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend
+any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to
+the study of law. Several young men came in.
+
+Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old.
+Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk.
+Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter
+Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk
+by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and
+enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman--a clean-
+looking youth with black curly hair and round pink--and--white cheeks,
+the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
+
+"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the
+spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand
+fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me
+tell you."
+
+He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors,
+business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
+
+McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he
+would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man
+who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him
+about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for
+him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the
+saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he
+sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother
+Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the
+streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible
+certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up
+by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
+
+"It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,"
+the curly-haired youth said. "It helps you get on, get in with the
+right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get
+in with the best fellows." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I
+don't mind telling you," he said with an outburst of frankness, "that
+one of our stronger men--Whiteside, the mathematician--wanted us to
+have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us
+and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you."
+
+McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the
+utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked
+down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in
+embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at
+his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to
+put his thoughts into words.
+
+"I can't do what you ask," he said. "I like you and like your asking
+me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University." His
+voice softened. "I would like to have you for friends," he added. "You
+say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to
+know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you
+after you become what you will become."
+
+McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk
+and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and
+he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened.
+"I hate hitting boys," he thought as he hurried away to his evening's
+work at the restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place
+among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop
+district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his
+profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other
+lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his
+ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.
+
+Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the
+matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the
+meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was
+tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of
+adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and
+forth along the American railroads.
+
+He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its
+patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve
+trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless
+thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so
+absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the
+door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and
+down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like
+cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns
+worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with
+painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that
+housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.
+
+In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State
+Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and
+made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging
+jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building
+opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist
+Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect
+expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did
+not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the
+socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.
+
+McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in
+meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the
+street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes
+and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched.
+Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine
+love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by
+some great passion into order and meaning was lost.
+
+In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and
+bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to
+drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman
+came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night
+have you had?" they asked each other.
+
+The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they
+talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from
+customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched
+them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with
+marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter
+eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.
+
+A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen
+and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried
+to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice
+he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some
+time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he
+talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make
+himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.
+
+McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to
+forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the
+great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been
+leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark
+intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a
+disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the
+disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men,
+half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to
+him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the
+tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came
+to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."
+
+The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor,
+each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like
+suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he
+had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he
+looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid
+children.
+
+One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red
+cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of
+white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter
+in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and
+she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in
+the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken
+raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece
+of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue
+flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking
+skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.
+
+"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as
+he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women
+working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I
+have only one and she crying and sick half the time."
+
+McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice
+spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The
+best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against
+this evil," it said.
+
+He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist
+lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the
+waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and
+closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf
+below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting
+his head upon his hands.
+
+McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in
+Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at
+night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went
+to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and
+through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that
+netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in
+Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted
+to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw
+the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people
+tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the
+miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to
+disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the
+swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering
+which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's
+and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of
+humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have
+seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the
+sea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through the
+streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in
+sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they
+struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth
+was drawn.
+
+The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the
+mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual
+physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power
+and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the
+great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.
+
+Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a
+dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes.
+At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along
+the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood,
+become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a
+meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the
+planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered,
+and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and
+disorder of the street below.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another
+desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an
+extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his
+coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on
+his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On
+the glass panel of the door was the inscription, "Henry Hunt, Real
+Estate Broker." When he had finished with the morning papers he
+disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.
+
+The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought
+and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a
+pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he
+specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde
+Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at
+the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If
+any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for
+a while."
+
+Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the
+first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward
+interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he
+carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In
+the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened
+to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his
+place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois
+Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and
+living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the
+merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an
+Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself
+again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening
+and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the
+deep dust.
+
+It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to
+the "boss" of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's
+appearance as a public character in Chicago.
+
+One night a young man--son of one of the city's plunging millionaire
+wheat speculators--was found dead in a little blind alley back of a
+resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a
+board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A
+policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner
+of the alley.
+
+For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light
+swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched
+him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the
+alley the young man ran away up the street.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the
+identity of the dead man became known. The "boss," a mild-looking
+blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache,
+stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then
+he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police
+official.
+
+For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a
+campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward.
+Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the
+front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires
+who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown
+Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places,
+their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage.
+A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second
+Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the
+front page of the morning papers.
+
+Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with
+fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation
+disclosed.
+
+The powers that ruled the First--quiet shrewd men who knew how to make
+and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism--were
+frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real
+opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had
+been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In
+their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something
+foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who
+had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory
+for years.
+
+Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the
+small soft-speaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively.
+Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of
+prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries.
+Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward.
+From house to house he uttered his cry--"Lay low! Pull off nothing."
+
+The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from
+Henry Hunt to the police official. "It is no time for hesitation," he
+said. "It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest
+and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have
+action."
+
+Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends
+of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of
+range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his
+daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in
+glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of
+abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror
+his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. "It might
+have been Andy Brown," he said, puffing at the stogie.
+
+The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the
+papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again
+soft and mild. "It was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word about.
+Let a _Tribune_ man locate Brown for you. Handle this right and
+you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of
+the First."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the
+shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry
+for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown.
+Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried
+sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on
+the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the
+heads of articles on "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."
+
+An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown
+as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by
+the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly
+industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State
+Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men--a
+storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused
+city.
+
+The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in
+the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity
+for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The
+yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled
+mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet
+hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and
+talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his
+eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he
+who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange
+savage land--"Judge Mac, the Big 'un."
+
+When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him
+charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In
+a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a
+guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said
+what he thought should be said. "You are in a hole," he began. "You
+don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over
+there." He waved his hand in the direction of the First. "They're
+going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job
+for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and
+I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him."
+
+Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he
+spoke quickly and determinedly. "You do what I say," he growled. "You
+take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it
+was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in
+the cards. But you get the job just the same."
+
+He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His
+voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here,
+Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm
+going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and
+you get it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for
+McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago.
+He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the
+endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening
+after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at
+the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from
+life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had
+been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his
+and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of
+the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.
+
+McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep
+human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his
+Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern
+tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of
+success that is equally meaningless.
+
+On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook
+County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of
+McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked
+along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into
+the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and
+the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked
+over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be
+filled with contempt for them.
+
+He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a
+west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing
+crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left,
+gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set
+himself up before the eyes of men.
+
+When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening
+and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood
+looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his
+contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness.
+"They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be
+Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail
+shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over
+and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown--
+the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on
+me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.
+
+At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to
+go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red
+hair.
+
+"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of
+herself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and
+on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined
+and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After
+each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written
+into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried
+through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for
+the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry
+in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through
+their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the
+market reports.
+
+And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might
+have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today
+spreads its terrible details over everything.
+
+Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring
+the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the
+tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and
+exhaustively the story of a crime.
+
+And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible
+stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled
+himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of
+Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on
+looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no
+progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to
+the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She
+won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find
+out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of
+womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a
+good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for
+existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the
+man.
+
+Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life.
+She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust
+with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine
+assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the
+Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous
+and intense.
+
+With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter
+security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad,
+went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all
+women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to
+herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive
+McGregor to approach with caution.
+
+Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went
+in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk
+facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First
+Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined
+that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her
+across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse
+sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.
+
+"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me
+what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've
+come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that
+want to be useful."
+
+The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern
+daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had
+she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and
+sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business-
+like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.
+
+"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your
+beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing
+the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.
+
+"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy
+in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a
+fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to
+look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the
+parlour of their houses.
+
+"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them
+tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that
+killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to
+tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they
+half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.
+
+"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here.
+They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of
+these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching
+you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You
+can do the job if you're any good."
+
+After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him.
+For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no
+way diverted by her beauty nor her self--possession. A hot wave, half
+anger, half admiration, swept over her.
+
+McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he
+said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and
+I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a
+girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your
+way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women
+talk and tell you and then you tell me."
+
+When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the
+settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's
+office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech
+and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise
+that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about
+her in the First Ward. Her self--possession was shaken. "If they are
+children--these women of the town--then I am a child, a child swimming
+with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."
+
+A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child--that McGregor.
+He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."
+
+She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the
+man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of
+the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom
+we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."
+
+In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she
+realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to
+pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I
+will have to do that," she whispered to herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial
+McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic
+climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic
+moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and
+that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading
+of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of
+fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had
+given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age-
+old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor
+had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against
+all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed
+that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and
+purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful
+weakness of his fellows.
+
+In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State
+build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out
+from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a
+bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case.
+Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning,
+the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned
+Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of
+a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before
+him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the
+court room he sat waiting and watching.
+
+When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the
+courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the
+silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he
+shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting
+among the witnesses. "They have tricked you Mary," he roared. "The
+tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're
+stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell
+the naked truth or his blood be on your hands."
+
+A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet,
+objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice.
+"Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here," he
+shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the
+stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."
+
+The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the
+joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the
+words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help
+of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her
+suggestion.
+
+"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart."
+
+In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of
+O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the
+sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a
+woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed
+little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before
+which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick--the story of
+a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son
+--of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager
+lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl--of the blow with
+the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man--of
+the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily
+pitched into the passageway.
+
+"They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over," wailed the
+woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of
+victory was on him and he strode along with his heart beating high.
+His way led over a bridge into the North Side and in his wanderings he
+passed the apple warehouse where he had made his start in the city and
+where he had fought with the German. When night came he walked in
+North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting of his victory.
+Before him danced a new vision, a vision of himself as a big figure in
+the city. Within himself he felt the power to stand forth among men,
+to outwit them and outfight them, to get for himself power and place
+in the world.
+
+The miner's son was half drunk with the new sense of achievement that
+swept in on him. Out of Clark Street he went and walked east along a
+residence street to the lake. By the lake he saw a street of great
+houses surrounded by gardens and the thought came that at some time he
+might have such a house of his own. The disorderly clatter of modern
+life seemed very far away. When he came to the lake he stood in the
+darkness thinking of the useless rowdy of the mining town suddenly
+become a great lawyer in the city and the blood ran swiftly through
+his body. "I am to be one of the victors, one of the few who emerge,"
+he whispered to himself and with a jump of the heart thought also of
+Margaret Ormsby looking at him with her fine questioning eyes as he
+stood before the men in the court room and by the force of his
+personality pushed his way through a fog of lies to victory and truth.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of American
+social life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Although
+her father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his position
+and his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during his
+early life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had made
+it his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. The
+girl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the fine
+distinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensive
+and clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a room
+and how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and an
+active mind. Added to these things she had, without the least
+knowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in her
+ability to meet life.
+
+During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up her
+mind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dull
+or uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to the
+college to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat down
+upon a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools,"
+Margaret had declared. "If Father and Mother think that I am going to
+come home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I have
+learned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine.
+That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to much
+either but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I think
+of how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil things
+away from us--Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girls
+here feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day some
+little whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care of
+me. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growing
+up and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to taste
+life strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make up
+their minds to that."
+
+The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mild
+looking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above her
+head as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fine
+young animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflected
+the intoxication of her mood. "I want all of life," she cried; "I want
+the lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of the
+new women, the saviours of our sex."
+
+Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Six
+foot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strength
+and dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed his
+strength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired.
+Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the details
+of a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command which
+inspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled with
+excitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to a
+workman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmen
+going from village to village to sell ploughs became under his
+influence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel to
+the unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to him
+with rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks for
+new assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back their
+faith in business and their faith in men.
+
+To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his type
+he had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thought
+of himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his daily
+associates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency tried
+to keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world by
+reading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimes
+spent half the night over a book in his room.
+
+As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source of
+anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an
+awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new
+kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One
+day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her
+homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst
+from an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at evening
+in his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmaker
+should have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind of
+living that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.
+
+And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and
+commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table
+and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On
+his desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He
+had the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had
+been trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women
+in the house with him.
+
+Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure.
+Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft
+brown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge
+caught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something
+of her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires
+of her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival
+she announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. "I
+am going to know things I can not get from books," she said. "I am
+going to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my
+mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't
+be cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir
+or to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see.
+I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live."
+
+In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing
+were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way
+she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused
+and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and
+made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and
+who talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free
+men and artists.
+
+Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an
+appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer
+who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live and
+who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and
+position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David
+Ormsby. "My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man
+than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived," she declared. "He
+makes ploughs anyway--makes them well--millions of them. He does not
+spend his time talking and running his ringers through his hair. He
+works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the
+talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered."
+
+In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a common
+fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to
+know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he
+was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in
+the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life
+she would have been splendid.
+
+She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of
+something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob
+of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the
+midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with
+impatience.
+
+The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the
+keynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but the
+father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him
+to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half
+serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was
+happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his
+daughter went to college had come back to live with him.
+
+After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her
+father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din
+that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege.
+Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating
+place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and
+talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other
+they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn
+treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly.
+Secretly neither believed as he talked.
+
+In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating
+in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her
+father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean and
+important work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."
+
+At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his
+daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "She
+is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Her
+whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she
+once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."
+
+On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as
+usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long
+carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at
+Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung
+over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished
+so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating in
+Margaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its
+stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face--the face of the man
+who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby
+daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could
+serve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mind
+haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father.
+She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth
+and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get
+back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself
+in at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recalling
+certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality
+of his face.
+
+Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after
+day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence,
+Margaret suddenly burst into tears.
+
+"I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to
+do," she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him
+through the tears that glistened in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel
+Boulevard. The house had a history. It was owned by a banker who was a
+large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust. Like
+all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability
+and integrity of David Ormsby. When the ploughmaker came to the city
+from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he
+offered him the house to use.
+
+The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined
+old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by
+half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years. In his
+old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth
+had given him. It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of
+expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels. In
+the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that
+had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars. The stairway leading to
+the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been
+bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.
+
+The banker who inherited the house did not want to live in it. Even
+before the death of his father and after his own unsuccessful marriage
+he lived at a down town club. In his old age the merchant, retired
+from business, lived in the house with another old man, an inventor.
+He could not rest although he had given up business with that end in
+view. Digging a trench in the lawn at the back of the house he with
+his friend spent his days trying to reduce the refuse of one of his
+factories to something having commercial value. Fires burned in the
+trench and at night the grim old man, hands covered with tar, sat in
+the house under the chandelier. After the death of the merchant the
+house stood empty, staring at passers-by in the street, its walks and
+paths overgrown with weeds and rank grass.
+
+David Ormsby fitted into his house. Walking through the long halls or
+sitting smoking his cigar in an easy chair on the wide lawn he looked
+arrayed and environed. The house became a part of him like a well-made
+and intelligently worn suit of clothes. Into the drawing room under
+the ten thousand dollar chandelier he moved a billiard table and the
+click of ivory balls banished the churchliness of the place.
+
+Up and down the stairway moved American girls, friends of Margaret,
+their skirts rustling and their voices running through the huge rooms.
+In the evening after dinner David played billiards. The careful
+calculation of the angles and the English interested him. Playing in
+the evening with Margaret or with a man friend the fatigue of the day
+passed and his honest voice and reverberating laugh brought a smile to
+the lips of people passing in the street. In the evening David brought
+his friends to sit in talk with him on the wide verandas. At times he
+went alone to his room at the top of the house and buried himself in
+books. On Saturday evenings he had a debauch and with a group of
+friends from town sat at a card table in the long parlour playing
+poker and drinking highballs.
+
+Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, had never seemed a real part of the
+life about her. Even as a child the daughter had thought her
+hopelessly romantic. Life had treated her too well and from every one
+about her she expected qualities and reactions which in her own person
+she would not have tried to achieve.
+
+David had already begun to rise when he married her, the slender
+brown-haired daughter of a village shoemaker, and even in those days
+the little plough company with its ownership scattered among the
+merchants and farmers of the vicinity had started under his hand to
+make progress in the state. People already spoke of its master as a
+coming man and of Laura as the wife of a coming man.
+
+To Laura this was in some way unsatisfactory. Sitting at home and
+doing nothing she had still a passionate wish to be known as a
+character, an individual, a woman of action. On the street as she
+walked beside her husband, she beamed upon people but when the same
+people spoke, calling them a handsome couple, a flush rose to her
+cheeks and a flash of indignation ran through her brain.
+
+Laura Ormsby lay awake in her bed at night thinking of her life. She
+had a world of fancies in which she at such times lived. In her dream
+world a thousand stirring adventures came to her. She imagined a
+letter received through the mail, telling of an intrigue in which
+David's name was coupled with that of another woman and lay abed
+quietly hugging the thought. She looked at the face of the sleeping
+David tenderly. "Poor hard-pressed boy," she muttered. "I shall be
+resigned and cheerful and lead him gently back to his old place in my
+heart."
+
+In the morning after a night spent in this dream world Laura looked at
+David, so cool and efficient, and was irritated by his efficiency.
+When he playfully dropped his hand upon her shoulder she drew away and
+sitting opposite him at breakfast watched him reading the morning
+paper all unconscious of the rebel thoughts in her mind.
+
+Once after she had moved to Chicago and after Margaret's return from
+college Laura had the faint suggestion of an adventure. Although it
+turned out tamely it lingered in her mind and in some way sweetened
+her thoughts.
+
+She was alone on a sleeping car coming from New York. A young man sat
+in a seat opposite her and the two fell into talk. As she talked Laura
+imagined herself eloping with the young man and under her lashes
+looked sharply at his weak and pleasant face. She kept the talk alive
+as others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green
+swaying curtains.
+
+With the young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading
+Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions
+and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that
+might arouse her indignation.
+
+The young man did not understand the middle-aged woman who sat beside
+him and talked so boldly. He knew of but one prominent man named Shaw
+and that man had been governor of Iowa and later a member of the
+cabinet of President McKinley. It startled him to think that a
+prominent member of the Republican party should have such thoughts or
+express such opinions. He talked of fishing in Canada and of a comic
+opera he had seen in New York and at eleven o'clock yawned and
+disappeared behind the green curtains. As the young man lay in his
+berth he muttered to himself, "Now what did that woman want?" A
+thought came into his mind and he reached up to where his trousers
+swung in a little hammock above the window and looked to see that his
+watch and pocket-book were still there.
+
+At home Laura Ormsby nursed the thought of the talk with the strange
+man on the train. In her mind he became something romantic and daring,
+a streak of light across what she was pleased to think of as her
+sombre life.
+
+Sitting at dinner she talked of him describing his charms. "He had a
+wonderful mind and we sat late into the night talking," she said,
+watching the face of David.
+
+When she had spoken Margaret looked up and said laughingly, "Have a
+heart Dad. Here is romance. Do not be blind to it. Mother is trying to
+scare you about an alleged love affair."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+One evening three weeks after the great murder trial McGregor took a
+long walk in the streets of Chicago and tried to plan out his life. He
+was troubled and disconcerted by the event that had crowded in upon
+the heels of his dramatic success in the court room and more than
+troubled by the fact that his mind constantly played with the dream of
+having Margaret Ormsby as his wife. In the city he had become a power
+and instead of the names and the pictures of criminals and keepers of
+disorderly houses his name and his picture now appeared on the front
+pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the political representative
+in Chicago of a rich and successful publisher of sensational
+newspapers, had visited him in his office and had proposed to make him
+a political figure in the city. Finley a noted criminal lawyer had
+offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small smiling man with white
+teeth, had not asked McGregor for an immediate decision. In a way he
+had taken the decision for granted. Smiling genially and rolling a
+cigar across McGregor's desk he had spent an hour telling stories of
+famous court room triumphs.
+
+"One such triumph is enough to make a man," he declared. "You have no
+idea how far such a success will carry you. The word of it keeps
+running through men's minds. A tradition is built up. The remembrance
+of it acts upon the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you by the mere
+connection of your name with the case."
+
+McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets without seeing
+the people. In Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street he stopped in a
+saloon and drank beer. The saloon was in a room below the level of the
+sidewalk and the floor was covered with sawdust. Two half drunken
+labourers stood by the bar quarrelling. One of the labourers who was a
+socialist continually cursed the army and his words started McGregor
+to thinking of the dream he had so long held and that now seemed
+fading. "I was in the army and I know what I am talking about,"
+declared the socialist. "There is nothing national about the army. It
+is a privately owned thing. Here it is secretly owned by the
+capitalists and in Europe by the aristocracy. Don't tell me--I know.
+The army is made up of bums. If I'm a bum I became one then. You will
+see fast enough what fellows are in the army if the country is ever
+caught and drawn into a great war."
+
+Becoming excited the socialist raised his voice and pounded on the
+bar. "Hell, we don't know ourselves at all," he cried. "We never have
+been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we are rich. We
+are like a fat boy who has had too much pie. Yes sir--that's what we
+are here in America and as far as our army goes it is a fat boy's
+plaything. Keep away from it."
+
+McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon and looked about. Men came in
+and went out at the door. A child carried a pail down the short flight
+of steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice,
+thin and sharp, pierced through the babble of men's voices. "Ten
+cents' worth--give me plenty," she pleaded, raising the pail above her
+head and putting it on the bar.
+
+The confident smiling face of Finley the lawyer came back into
+McGregor's mind. Like David Ormsby the successful maker of ploughs the
+lawyer looked upon men as pawns in a great game and like the
+ploughmaker his intentions were honourable and his purpose clear. He
+was intent upon making much of his life, being successful. If he
+played the game on the side of the criminal that was but a chance.
+Things had fallen out so. In his mind was something else--the
+expression of his own purpose.
+
+McGregor rose and went out of the saloon. In the street men stood
+about in groups. At Thirty-ninth Street a crowd of youths scuffling on
+the sidewalk pushed against the tall muttering man who passed with his
+hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of
+something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The
+pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long
+procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of
+the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he
+realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages
+of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their
+deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. Like
+the men passing in the street they went across the face of things and
+disappeared into the darkness.
+
+"Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right," he whispered. "They get what
+they can, they have the good sense to know that life runs quickly like
+a flying bird passing an open window. They know that if a man thinks
+of anything else he is likely to become another sentimentalist and
+spend his life being hypnotised by the wagging of his own jaw."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In his wanderings McGregor came to an out-of-door restaurant and
+garden far out on the south side. The garden had been built for the
+amusement of the rich and successful. Upon a little platform a band
+played. Although the garden was walled about it was open to the sky
+and above the laughing people seated at the tables shone the stars.
+
+McGregor sat alone at a little table on a balcony beneath a shaded
+light. Below him along a terrace were other tables occupied by men and
+women. On a platform in the centre of the garden dancers appeared.
+
+McGregor who had ordered a dinner left it untouched. A tall graceful
+girl, strongly suggestive of Margaret Ormsby, danced upon the
+platform. With infinite grace her body gave expression to the
+movements of the dance and like a thing blown by the wind she moved
+here and there in the arms of her partner, a slender youth with long
+black hair. In the figure of the dancing woman there was expressed
+much of the idealism man has sought to materialise in women and
+McGregor was thrilled by it. A sensualism so delicate that it did not
+appear to be sensualism began to invade him. With a new hunger he
+looked forward to the time when he would again see Margaret.
+
+Upon the platform in the garden appeared other dancers. The lights at
+the tables were turned low. From the darkness laughter arose. McGregor
+stared about. The people seated at the tables on the terrace caught
+and held his attention and he began looking sharply at the faces of
+the men. How cunning they were, these men who had been successful in
+life. Were they not after all the wise men? Behind the flesh that had
+grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes. There was a game of
+life and they had played it. The garden was a part of the game. It was
+beautiful and did not all that was beautiful in the world end by
+serving them? The arts of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses
+toward loveliness that came into the minds of men and women, did not
+all these things work solely to lighten the hours of the successful?
+The eyes of the men at the tables as they looked at the women who
+danced were not too greedy. They were filled with assurance. Was it
+not for them that the dancers turned here and there revealing their
+grace? If life was a struggle had they not been successful in the
+struggle?
+
+McGregor arose from the table and left his food untouched. Near the
+entrance to the gardens he stopped and leaning against a pillar looked
+again at the scene before him. Upon the platform appeared a whole
+troupe of women-dancers. They were dressed in many-coloured garments
+and danced a folk dance. As McGregor watched a light began to creep
+back into his eyes. The women who now danced were unlike her who had
+reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short of stature and there
+was something rugged in their faces. Back and forth across the
+platform they moved in masses. By their dancing they were striving to
+convey a message. A thought came to McGregor. "It is the dance of
+labour," he muttered. "Here in this garden it is corrupted but the
+note of labour is not lost. There is a hint of it left in these
+figures who toil even as they dance."
+
+McGregor moved away from the shadows of the pillar and stood, hat in
+hand, beneath the garden lights waiting as though for a call out of
+the ranks of the dancers. How furiously they worked. How the bodies
+twisted and squirmed. Out of sympathy with their efforts sweat
+appeared on the face of the man who stood watching. "What a storm must
+be going on just below the surface of labour," he muttered.
+"Everywhere dumb brutalised men and women must be waiting for
+something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my purpose but
+I will not give up Margaret," he said aloud, turning and half running
+out of the garden and into the street.
+
+In his sleep that night McGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of
+soft phrases and gentle hands that stilled the rising brute in man. It
+was a world-old dream, the dream out of which such women as Margaret
+Ormsby have been created. The long slender hands he had seen lying on
+the desk in the settlement house now touched his hands. Uneasily he
+rolled about in bed and desire came to him so that he awakened. On the
+Boulevard people still passed up and down. McGregor arose and stood in
+the darkness by the window of his room watching. A theatre had just
+spat forth its portion of richly dressed men and women and when he had
+opened the window the voices of the women came clear and sharp to his
+ears.
+
+The distracted man stared into the darkness and his blue eyes were
+troubled. The vision of the disordered and disorganised band of miners
+marching silently in the wake of his mother's funeral into whose lives
+he by some supreme effort was to bring order was disturbed and
+shattered by the more definite and lovely vision that had come to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+During the days since she had seen McGregor Margaret had thought of
+him almost constantly. She weighed and balanced her own inclinations
+and decided that if the opportunity came she would marry the man whose
+force and courage had so appealed to her. She was half disappointed
+that the opposition she had seen in her father's face when she had
+told him of McGregor and had betrayed herself by her tears did not
+become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had
+secretly chosen. When nothing was said of the matter she went to her
+mother and tried to explain. "We will have him here," the mother said
+quickly. "I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the chief
+figure. Let me have his name and address and I will attend to the
+matter."
+
+Laura arose and went into the house. A shrewd gleam came into her
+eyes. "He will act like a fool before our people," she told herself.
+"He is a brute and will be made to look like a brute." She could not
+restrain her impatience and sought out David. "He is a man to fear,"
+she said; "he would stop at nothing. You must think of some way to put
+an end to Margaret's interest in him. Do you know of a better plan
+than to have him here where he will look the fool?"
+
+David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that
+an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion.
+In his heart he also feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply.
+"She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any
+other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda
+into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They
+do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go
+forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up
+understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up
+understanding Margaret."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit
+he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and
+rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides
+crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at
+ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he
+among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and
+laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the
+midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and
+ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They
+thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite
+the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would
+be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and
+come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of
+the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply
+and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.
+
+In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the
+person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his
+speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled
+their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the
+Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey
+mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed
+the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself
+dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired
+outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust
+for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
+
+Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no
+fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered
+and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the
+inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an
+unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest.
+Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's
+restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had
+a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.
+
+One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her
+world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him
+in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and
+the people. He stood by the wall bowing and staring boldly about and
+thought that the confusion and distraction of mind that had followed
+his first visit to Margaret at the settlement house was being
+increased immeasurably with every passing moment. He looked at the
+glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people moving about--
+the men at ease, comfortable--the women with wonderfully delicate
+expressive hands and with their round white necks and shoulders
+showing above their gowns and a feeling of utter helplessness pervaded
+him. Never before had he been in a company so feminine. He thought of
+the beautiful women about him, seeing them in his direct crude and
+forceful way merely as females at work among males, carrying forward
+some purpose. "With all the softly suggestive sensuality of their
+dress and their persons they must in some way have sapped the strength
+and the purpose of these men who move among them so indifferently," he
+thought. Within himself he knew of nothing to set up as a defence
+against what he believed such beauty must become to the man who lived
+with it. Its power he thought must be something monumental and he
+looked with admiration at the quiet face of Margaret's father, moving
+among his guests.
+
+McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the
+veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older
+woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on
+him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. "The fine
+lady," he thought, "is no better than the women of the First Ward. She
+has an idea I will surrender without a fight."
+
+Out of his mind went the fear of the assurance and stability of
+Margaret's people that had almost overcome him in the house. The woman
+who had all her life thought of herself as one waiting only the
+opportunity to appear as a commanding figure in affairs made by her
+presence a failure of the effort to submerge McGregor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the veranda stood the three people. McGregor the silent became the
+talkative. Seized with one of the inspirations that were a part of his
+nature he threw talk about, sparring and returning thrust for thrust
+with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought that the time had come for him to
+get at the thing that was in his mind he went into the house and
+presently came out carrying his hat. The quality of harshness that
+crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura
+Ormsby. Looking down at her, he said, "I am going to take your
+daughter for a walk in the street. I want to talk with her."
+
+Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She determined to speak out,
+to be like the man crude and direct. When she had her mind fixed and
+ready Margaret and McGregor were already half way down the gravel walk
+to the gate and the opportunity to distinguish herself had passed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McGregor walked beside Margaret, absorbed in thoughts of her. "I am
+engaged in a work here," he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the
+city. "It is a big work and it takes a lot out of me. I have not come
+to see you, because I've been uncertain. I've been afraid you would
+overcome me and drive thoughts of the work out of my head."
+
+By the iron gate at the end of the gravel walk they turned and faced
+each other. McGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her.
+"I want you to marry me," he said. "I think of you constantly.
+Thinking of you I can only half do my work. I get to thinking that
+another man may come and take you and I waste hour after hour being
+afraid."
+
+She put a trembling hand upon his arm and he thinking to check an
+attempt at an answer before he had finished, hurried on.
+
+"There are things to be said and understood between us before I can
+come to you as a suitor. I did not think I should feel toward a woman
+as I feel toward you and I have certain adjustments to make. I thought
+I could get along without your kind of women. I thought you were not
+for me--with the work I have thought out to do in the world. If you
+will not marry me I'll be glad to know now so that I can get my mind
+straightened out."
+
+Margaret raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder. The act was a
+kind of acknowledgment of his right to talk to her so directly. She
+said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness
+she longed to pour into his ear she stood in silence on the gravel
+path with her hand on his shoulder.
+
+And then an absurd thing happened. The fear that Margaret might come
+to some quick decision that would affect all of their future together
+made McGregor frantic. He did not want her to speak and wished his own
+words unsaid. "Wait. Not now," he cried and threw up his hand
+intending to take her hand. His fist struck the arm that lay on his
+shoulder and it in turn knocked his hat flying into the road. McGregor
+started to run after it and then stopped. He put his hand to his head
+and appeared lost in thought. When he turned again to pursue the hat
+Margaret, unable longer to control herself, shouted with laughter.
+
+Hatless, McGregor walked up Drexel Boulevard in the soft stillness of
+the summer night. He was annoyed at the outcome of the evening and in
+his heart half wished that Margaret had sent him away defeated. His
+arms ached to have her against his breast but his mind kept presenting
+one after another the objections to marriage with her. "Men are
+submerged by such women and forget their work," he told himself. "They
+sit looking into the soft brown eyes of their beloved, thinking of
+happiness. A man should go about his work thinking of that. The fire
+that runs through the veins of his body should light his mind. One
+wants to take the love of woman as an end in life and the woman
+accepts that and is made happy by it." He thought with gratitude of
+Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. "I do not sit in my room at night
+dreaming of taking her in my arms and pouring kisses on her lips," he
+whispered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the door of her house Mrs. Ormsby had stood watching McGregor and
+Margaret. She had seen them stop at the end of the walk. The figure of
+the man was lost in shadows and that of Margaret stood alone, outlined
+against a distant light. She saw Margaret's hand thrust out--was she
+clutching his sleeve--and heard the murmur of voices. And then the man
+precipitating himself into the street. His hat catapulted ahead of him
+and a quick outburst of half-hysterical laughter broke the stillness.
+
+Laura Ormsby was furious. Although she hated McGregor she could not
+bear the thought that laughter should break the spell of romance. "She
+is just like her father," she muttered. "At least she might show some
+spirit and not be like a wooden thing, ending her first talk with a
+lover with a laugh like that."
+
+As for Margaret she stood in the darkness trembling with happiness.
+She imagined herself going up the dark stairway to McGregor's office
+in Van Buren Street where once she had gone to take him news of the
+murder case--laying her hand upon his shoulder and saying, "Take me in
+your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am
+ready to renounce my people and my world and to live your life for
+your sake." Margaret, standing in the darkness before the huge old
+house in Drexel Boulevard, imagined herself with Beaut McGregor--
+living with him as his wife in a small apartment over a fish market on
+a West Side street. Why a fish market she could not have said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Edith Carson was six years older than McGregor and lived entirely
+within herself. Hers was one of those natures that do not express
+themselves in words. Although at his coming into the shop her heart
+beat high no colour came to her cheeks and her pale eyes did not flash
+back into his a message. Day after day she sat in her shop at work,
+quiet, strong in her own kind of faith, ready to give her money, her
+reputation, and if need be her life to the working out of her own
+dream of womanhood. She did not see in McGregor the making of a man of
+genius as did Margaret and did not hope to express through him a
+secret desire for power. She was a working woman and to her he
+represented all men. In her secret heart she thought of him merely as
+the man--her man.
+
+And to McGregor Edith was companion and friend. He saw her sitting
+year after year in her shop, putting money into the savings bank,
+keeping a cheerful front before the world, never assertive, kindly, in
+her own way sure of herself. "We could go on forever as we are now and
+she be none the less pleased," he told himself.
+
+One afternoon after a particularly hard week of work he went out to
+her place to sit in her little workroom and think out the matter of
+marrying Margaret Ormsby. It was a quiet season in Edith's trade and
+she was alone in the shop serving a customer. McGregor lay down upon
+the little couch in the workroom. For a week he had been speaking to
+gatherings of workmen night after night and later had sat in his own
+room thinking of Margaret. Now on the couch with the murmur of voices
+in his ears he fell asleep.
+
+When he awoke it was late in the night and on the floor by the side of
+the couch sat Edith with her ringers in his hair.
+
+McGregor opened his eyes quietly and looked at her. He could see a
+tear running down her cheek. She was staring straight ahead at the
+wall of the room and by the dim light that came through a window he
+could see the drawn cords of her little neck and the knot of mouse
+coloured hair on her head.
+
+McGregor closed his eyes quickly. He felt like one who has been
+aroused out of sleep by a dash of cold water across his breast. It
+came over him with a rush that Edith Carson had been expecting
+something from him--something he was not prepared to give.
+
+She got up after a time and crept quietly away into the shop and with
+a great clatter and bustle he arose also and began calling loudly. He
+demanded the time and complained about a missed appointment. Turning
+up the gas, Edith walked with him to the door. On her face sat the old
+placid smile. McGregor hurried away into the darkness and spent the
+rest of the night walking in the streets.
+
+The next day he went to Margaret Ormsby at the settlement house. With
+her he used no art. Driving straight to the point he told her of the
+undertaker's daughter sitting beside him on the eminence above Coal
+Creek, of the barber and his talk of women on the park bench and how
+that had led him to that other woman kneeling on the floor in the
+little frame house, his fists in her hair and of Edith Carson whose
+companionship had saved him from all of these.
+
+"If you can't hear all of this and still want life with me," he said,
+"there is no future for us together. I want you. I'm afraid of you and
+afraid of my love for you but still I want you. I've been seeing your
+face floating above the audiences in the halls where I've been at
+work. I've looked at babies in the arms of workingmen's wives and
+wanted to see my babe in your arms. I care more for what I am doing
+than I do for you but I love you."
+
+McGregor arose and stood over her. "I love you with my arms aching to
+close about you, with my brain planning the triumph of the workers,
+with all of the old perplexing human love that I had almost thought I
+would never want.
+
+"I can't bear this waiting. I can't bear this not knowing so that I
+can tell Edith. I can't have my mind filled with the need of you just
+as men are beginning to catch the infection of an idea and are looking
+to me for clear-headed leadership. Take me or let me go and live my
+life."
+
+Margaret Ormsby looked at McGregor. When she spoke her voice was as
+quiet as the voice of her father telling a workman in the shop what to
+do with a broken machine.
+
+"I am going to marry you," she said simply. "I am full of the thought
+of it. I want you, want you so blindly that I think you can't
+understand."
+
+She stood up facing him and looked into his eyes.
+
+"You must wait," she said. "I must see Edith, I myself must do that.
+All these years she has served you--she has had that privilege."
+
+McGregor looked across the table into the beautiful eyes of the woman
+he loved.
+
+"You belong to me even if I do belong to Edith," he said.
+
+"I will see Edith," Margaret answered again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+McGregor left the telling of the story of his love to Margaret. Edith
+Carson who knew defeat so well and who had in her the courage of
+defeat was to meet defeat at his hands through the undefeated woman
+and he let himself forget the whole matter. For a month he had been
+trying to get workingmen to take up the idea of the Marching Men
+without success and after the talk with Margaret he kept doggedly at
+the work.
+
+And then one evening something happened that aroused him. The Marching
+Men idea that had become more than half intellectualised became again
+a burning passion and the matter of his life with women got itself
+cleared up swiftly and finally.
+
+It was night and McGregor stood upon the platform of the Elevated
+Railroad at State and Van Buren Streets. He had been feeling guilty
+concerning Edith and had been intending to go out to her place but the
+scene in the street below fascinated him and he remained standing,
+looking along the lighted thoroughfare.
+
+For a week there had been a strike of teamsters in the city and that
+afternoon there had been a riot. Windows had been smashed and several
+men injured. Now the evening crowds gathered and speakers climbed upon
+boxes to talk. Everywhere there was a great wagging of jaws and waving
+of arms. McGregor grew reminiscent. Into his mind came the little
+mining town and he saw himself again a boy sitting in the darkness on
+the steps before his mother's bake shop and trying to think. Again in
+fancy he saw the disorganised miners tumbling out of the saloon to
+stand on the street swearing and threatening and again he was filled
+with contempt for them.
+
+And then in the heart of the great western city the same thing
+happened that had happened when he was a boy in Pennsylvania. The
+officials of the city, having decided to startle the striking
+teamsters by a display of force, sent a regiment of state troops
+marching through the streets. The soldiers were dressed in brown
+uniforms. They were silent. As McGregor looked down they turned out of
+Polk Street and came with swinging measured tread up State Street past
+the disorderly mobs on the sidewalk and the equally disorderly
+speakers on the curb.
+
+McGregor's heart beat so that he nearly choked. The men in the
+uniforms, each in himself meaning nothing, had become by their
+marching together all alive with meaning. Again he wanted to shout, to
+run down into the street and embrace them. The strength in them seemed
+to kiss, as with the kiss of a lover, the strength within himself and
+when they had passed and the disorderly jangle of voices broke out
+again he got on a car and went out to Edith's with his heart afire
+with resolution.
+
+Edith Carson's millinery shop was in the hands of a new owner. She had
+sold out and fled. McGregor stood in the show room looking about him
+at the cases filled with their feathery finery and at the hats along
+the wall. The light from a street lamp that came in at the window
+started millions of tiny motes dancing before his eyes.
+
+Out of the room at the back of the shop--the room where he had seen
+the tears of suffering in Edith's eyes--came a woman who told him of
+Edith's having sold the business. She was excited by the message she
+had to deliver and walked past the waiting man, going to the screen
+door to stand with her back to him and look up the street.
+
+Out of the corners of her eyes the woman looked at him. She was a
+small black-haired woman with two gleaming gold teeth and with glasses
+on her nose. "There has been a lovers' quarrel here," she told
+herself.
+
+"I have bought the store," she said aloud. "She told me to tell you
+that she had gone."
+
+McGregor did not wait for more but hurried past the woman into the
+street. In his heart was a feeling of dumb aching loss. On an impulse
+he turned and ran back.
+
+Standing in the street by the screen door he shouted hoarsely. "Where
+did she go?" he demanded.
+
+The woman laughed merrily. She felt that she was getting with the shop
+a flavour of romance and adventure very attractive to her. Then she
+walked to the door and smiled through the screen. "She has only just
+left," she said. "She went to the Burlington station. I think she has
+gone West. I heard her tell the man about her trunk. She has been
+around here for two days since I bought the shop. I think she has been
+waiting for you to come. You did not come and now she has gone and
+perhaps you won't find her. She did not look like one who would
+quarrel with a lover."
+
+The woman in the shop laughed softly as McGregor hurried away. "Now
+who would think that quiet little woman would have such a lover?" she
+asked herself.
+
+Down the street ran McGregor and raising his hand stopped a passing
+automobile. The woman saw him seated in the automobile talking to a
+grey-haired man at the wheel and then the machine turned and
+disappeared up the street at a law-breaking pace.
+
+McGregor had again a new light on the character of Edith Carson. "I
+can see her doing it," he told himself--"cheerfully telling Margaret
+that it didn't matter and all the time planning this in the back of
+her head. Here all of these years she has been leading a life of her
+own. The secret longings, the desires and the old human hunger for
+love and happiness and expression have been going on under her placid
+exterior as they have under my own."
+
+McGregor thought of the busy days behind him and realised with shame
+how little Edith had seen of him. It was in the days when his big
+movement of The Marching Men was just coming into the light and on the
+night before he had been in a conference of labour men who had wanted
+him to make a public demonstration of the power he had secretly been
+building up. Every day his office was filled with newspaper men who
+asked questions and demanded explanations. And in the meantime Edith
+had been selling her shop to that woman and getting ready to
+disappear.
+
+In the railroad station McGregor found Edith sitting in a corner with
+her face buried in the crook of her arm. Gone was the placid exterior.
+Her shoulders seemed narrower. Her hand, hanging over the back of the
+seat in front of her, was white and lifeless.
+
+McGregor said nothing but snatched up the brown leather bag that sat
+beside her on the floor and taking her by the arm led her up a flight
+of stone steps to the street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+In the Ormsby household father and daughter sat in the darkness on the
+veranda. After Laura Ormsby's encounter with McGregor there had been
+another talk between her and David. Now she had gone on a visit to her
+home-town in Wisconsin and father and daughter sat together.
+
+To his wife David had talked pointedly of Margaret's affair. "It is
+not a matter of good sense," he had said; "one can not pretend there
+is a prospect of happiness in such an affair. The man is no fool and
+may some day be a big man but it will not be the kind of bigness that
+will bring either happiness or contentment to a woman like Margaret.
+He may end his life in jail."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McGregor and Edith walked up the gravel walk and stood by the front
+door of the Ormsby house. From the darkness on the veranda came the
+hearty voice of David. "Come and sit out here," he said.
+
+McGregor stood silently waiting. Edith clung to his arm. Margaret got
+up and coming forward stood looking at them. With a jump at her heart
+she sensed the crisis suggested by the presence of these two people.
+Her voice trembled with alarm. "Come in," she said, turning and
+leading the way into the house.
+
+The man and woman followed Margaret. At the door McGregor stopped and
+called to David. "We want you in here with us," he said harshly.
+
+In the drawing room the four people waited. The great chandelier threw
+its light down upon them. In her chair Edith sat and looked at the
+floor.
+
+"I've made a mistake," said McGregor. "I've been going on and on
+making a mistake." He turned to Margaret. "We didn't count on
+something here. There is Edith. She isn't what we thought."
+
+Edith said nothing. The weary stoop stayed in her shoulders. She felt
+that if McGregor had brought her to the house and to this woman he
+loved to seal their parting she would sit quietly until that was over
+and then go on to the loneliness she believed must be her portion.
+
+To Margaret the coming of the man and woman was a portent of evil. She
+also was silent, expecting a shock. When her lover spoke she also
+looked at the floor. To herself she was saying, "He is going to take
+himself away and marry this other woman. I must be prepared to hear
+him say that." In the doorway stood David. "He is going to give me
+back Margaret," he thought, and his heart danced with happiness.
+
+McGregor walked across the room and stood looking at the two women.
+His blue eyes were cold and filled with intense curiosity concerning
+them and himself. He wanted to test them and to test himself. "If I am
+clear-headed now I shall go on with the dream," he thought. "If I fail
+in this I shall fail in everything." Turning he took hold of the
+sleeve of David's coat and pulled him across the room so that the two
+men stood together. Then he looked hard at Margaret. As he talked to
+her he continued to stand thus with his hand on her father's arm. The
+action caught David's fancy and a thrill of admiration ran through
+him. "Here is a man," he told himself.
+
+"You thought Edith was ready to see us get married. Well she was. She
+is now and you see what it has done to her," said McGregor.
+
+The daughter of the ploughmaker started to speak. Her face was chalky
+white. McGregor threw up his hands.
+
+"Wait," he said, "a man and woman can't live together for years and
+then part like two men friends. Something gets into them to prevent.
+They find they love each other. I've found out that though I want you,
+I love Edith. She loves me. Look at her."
+
+Margaret half arose from her chair. McGregor went on. Into his voice
+came the harsh quality that made men fear and follow him. "Oh, we'll
+be married, Margaret and I," he said; "her beauty has won me. I follow
+beauty. I want beautiful children. That is my right."
+
+He turned to Edith and stood staring at her.
+
+"You and I could never have the feeling Margaret and I had when we
+looked into each other's eyes. We ached with it--each wanting the
+other. You are made to endure. You would get over anything and be
+cheerful after a while. You know that--don't you?"
+
+The eyes of Edith came up level with his own.
+
+"Yes I know," she said.
+
+Margaret Ormsby jumped up from her chair, her eyes swimming.
+
+"Stop," she cried. "I do not want you. I would never marry you now.
+You belong to her. You are Edith's."
+
+McGregor's voice became soft and quiet.
+
+"Oh, I know," he said; "I know! I know! But I want children. Look at
+Edith. Do you think she could bear children to me?"
+
+A change came over Edith Carson. Her eyes hardened and her shoulders
+straightened.
+
+"That's for me to say," she cried, springing forward and clutching his
+arm. "That is between me and God. If you intend to marry me come now
+and do it. I was not afraid to give you up and I'm not afraid that I
+shall die bearing children."
+
+Dropping McGregor's arm Edith ran across the room and stood before
+Margaret. "How do you know you are more beautiful or can bear more
+beautiful children?" she demanded. "What do you mean by beauty anyway?
+I deny your beauty." She turned to McGregor. "Look," she cried, "she
+does not stand the test."
+
+Pride swept over the woman that had come to life within the body of
+the little milliner. With calm eyes she stared at the people in the
+room and when she looked again toward Margaret there was a challenge
+in her voice.
+
+"Beauty has to endure," she said swiftly. "It has to be daring. It has
+to outlive long years of life and many defeats." A hard look came into
+her eyes as she challenged the daughter of wealth. "I had the courage
+to be defeated and I have the courage to take what I want," she said.
+"Have you that courage? If you have take this man. You want him and so
+do I. Take his arm and walk away with him. Do it now, here before my
+eyes."
+
+Margaret shook her head. Her body trembled and her eyes looked wildly
+about. She turned to David Ormsby. "I did not know that life could be
+like this," she said. "Why didn't you tell me? She is right. I am
+afraid."
+
+A light came into McGregor's eyes and he turned quickly about. "I
+see," he said, looking sharply at Edith, "you have also your purpose."
+Turning again he looked into the eyes of David.
+
+"There is something to be decided here. It is perhaps the supreme test
+of a man's life. One struggles to keep a thought in mind, to be
+impersonal, to see that life has a purpose outside his own purpose.
+You have perhaps made that struggle. You see I'm making it now. I'm
+going to take Edith and go back to work."
+
+At the door McGregor stopped and put out his hand to David who took it
+and looked at the big lawyer respectfully.
+
+"I'm glad to see you go," said the ploughmaker briefly.
+
+"I'm glad to be going," said McGregor, understanding that there was
+nothing but relief and honest antagonism in the voice and in the mind
+of David Ormsby.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The Marching Men Movement was never a thing to intellectualise. For
+years McGregor tried to get it under way by talking. He did not
+succeed. The rhythm and swing that was at the heart of the movement
+hung fire. The man passed through long periods of depression and had
+to drive himself forward. And then after the scene with Margaret and
+Edith in the Ormsby house came action.
+
+There was a man named Mosby about whose figure the action for a time
+revolved. He was bartender for Neil Hunt, a notorious character of
+South State Street, and had once been a lieutenant in the army. Mosby
+was what in modern society is called a rascal. After West Point and a
+few years at some isolated army post he began to drink and one night
+during a debauch and when half crazed by the dullness of his life he
+shot a private through the shoulder. He was arrested and put on his
+honour not to escape but did escape. For years he drifted about the
+world a haggard cynical figure who got drunk whenever money came his
+way and who would do anything to break the monotony of existence.
+
+Mosby was enthusiastic about the Marching Men idea. He saw in it an
+opportunity to worry and alarm his fellow men. He talked a union of
+bartenders and waiters to which he belonged into giving the idea a
+trial and in the morning they began to march up and down in the strip
+of parkland that faced the lake at the edge of the First Ward. "Keep
+your mouths shut," commanded Mosby. "We can worry the officials of
+this town like the devil if we work this right. When you are asked
+questions say nothing. If the police try to arrest us we will swear we
+are only doing it for the sake of exercise."
+
+Mosby's plan worked. Within a week crowds began to gather in the
+morning to watch the Marching Men and the police started to make
+inquiry. Mosby was delighted. He threw up his job as bartender and
+recruited a motley company of young roughs whom he induced to practise
+the march step during the afternoons. When he was arrested and dragged
+into court McGregor acted as his lawyer and he was discharged. "I want
+to get these men out into the open," Mosby declared, looking very
+innocent and guileless. "You can see for yourself that waiters and
+bartenders get pale and stoop-shouldered at their work and as for
+these young roughs isn't it better for society to have them out there
+marching about than idling in bar rooms and planning God knows what
+mischief?"
+
+A grin appeared over the face of the First Ward. McGregor and Mosby
+organised another company of marchers and a young man who had been a
+sergeant in a company of regulars was induced to help with the
+drilling. To the men themselves it was all a joke, a game that
+appealed to the mischievous boy in them. Everybody was curious and
+that gave the thing tang. They grinned as they marched up and down.
+For a while they exchanged gibes with the spectators but McGregor put
+a stop to that. "Be silent," he said, going about among the men during
+the rest periods. "That's the best thing to do. Be silent and attend
+to business and your marching will be ten times as effective."
+
+The Marching Men Movement grew. A young Jewish newspaper man, half
+rascal, half poet, wrote a scare-head story for one of the Sunday
+papers announcing the birth of the Republic of Labour. The story was
+illustrated by a drawing showing McGregor leading a vast horde of men
+across an open plain toward a city whose tall chimneys belched forth
+clouds of smoke. Beside McGregor in the picture and arrayed in a gaudy
+uniform was Mosby the ex-army officer. In the article he was called
+the war lord of "The secret republic growing up within a great
+capitalistic empire."
+
+It had begun to take form--the movement of the Marching Men. Rumours
+began to run here and there. There was a question in men's eyes.
+Slowly at first it began to rumble through their minds. There was the
+tap of feet clicking sharply on pavements. Groups formed, men laughed,
+the groups disappeared only to again reappear. In the sun before
+factory doors men stood talking, half understanding, beginning to
+sense the fact that there was something big in the wind.
+
+At first the movement did not get anywhere with the ranks of labour.
+There would be a meeting, perhaps a series of meetings in one of the
+little halls where labourers gather to attend to the affairs of their
+unions. McGregor would speak. His voice harsh and commanding could be
+heard in the streets below. Merchants came out of the stores and stood
+in the doorways listening. Young fellows who smoked cigarettes stopped
+looking at passing girls and gathered in crowds below the open
+windows. The slow working brain of labour was being aroused.
+
+After a time a few young men, fellows who worked at the saws in a box
+factory and others who ran machines in a factory where bicycles were
+made, volunteered to follow the lead of the men of the First Ward. On
+summer evenings they gathered in vacant lots and marched back and
+forth looking at their feet and laughing.
+
+McGregor insisted upon the training. He never had any intention of
+letting his Marching Men Movement become merely a disorganised band of
+walkers such as we have all seen in many a labour parade. He meant
+that they should learn to march rhythmically, swinging along like
+veterans. He was determined that the thresh of feet should come
+finally to sing a great song, carrying the message of a powerful
+brotherhood into the hearts and brains of the marchers.
+
+McGregor gave all of his time to the movement. He made a scant living
+by the practice of his profession but gave it no thought. The murder
+case had brought him other cases and he had taken a partner, a ferret-
+eyed little man who worked out the details of what cases came to the
+firm and collected the fees, half of which he gave to the partner who
+was intent upon something else. Day after day, week after week, month
+after month, McGregor went up and down the city, talking to workers,
+learning to talk, striving to make his idea understood.
+
+One evening in September he stood in the shadow of a factory wall
+watching a group of men who marched in a vacant lot. The movement had
+become by that time really big. A flame burned in his heart at the
+thought of what it might become. It was growing dark and the clouds of
+dust raised by the feet of the men swept across the face of the
+departing sun. In the field before him marched some two hundred men,
+the largest company he had been able to get together. For a week they
+had stayed at the marching evening after evening and were beginning a
+little to understand the spirit of it. Their leader on the field, a
+tall square shouldered man, had once been a captain in the State
+Militia and now worked as engineer in a factory where soap was made.
+His commands rang out sharp and crisp on the evening air. "Fours right
+into line," he cried. The words were barked forth. The men
+straightened their shoulders and swung out vigorously. They had begun
+to enjoy the marching.
+
+In the shadow of the factory wall McGregor moved uneasily about. He
+felt that this was the beginning, the real birth of his movement, that
+these men had really come out of the ranks of labour and that in the
+breasts of the marching figures there in the open space understanding
+was growing.
+
+He muttered and walked back and forth. A young man, a reporter on one
+of the city's great daily papers, leaped from a passing street car and
+came to stand near him. "What's up here? What's this going on? What's
+it all about? You better tell me," he said.
+
+In the dim light McGregor raised his fists above his head and talked
+aloud. "It's creeping in among them," he said. "The thing that can't
+be put into words is getting itself expressed. Something is being done
+here in this field. A new force is coming into the world."
+
+Half beside himself McGregor ran up and down swinging his arms. Again
+turning to the reporter who stood by a factory wall--a rather
+dandified figure he was with a tiny moustache--he shouted:
+
+"Don't you see?" he cried. His voice was harsh. "See how they march!
+They are finding out what I mean. They have caught the spirit of it!"
+
+McGregor began to explain. He talked hurriedly, his words coming forth
+in short broken sentences. "For ages there has been talk of
+brotherhood. Always men have babbled of brotherhood. The words have
+meant nothing. The words and the talking have but bred a loose-jawed
+race. The jaws of men wabble about but the legs of these men do not
+wabble."
+
+He again walked up and down, dragging the half-frightened man along
+the deepening shadow of the factory wall.
+
+"You see it begins--now in this field it begins. The legs and the feet
+of men, hundreds of legs and feet make a kind of music. Presently
+there will be thousands, hundreds of thousands. For a time men will
+cease to be individuals. They will become a mass, a moving all-
+powerful mass. They will not put their thoughts into words but
+nevertheless there will be a thought growing up in them. They will of
+a sudden begin to realise that they are a part of something vast and
+mighty, a thing that moves, that is seeking new expression. They have
+been told of the power of labour but now, you see, they will become
+the power of labour."
+
+Swept along by his own words and perhaps by something rhythmical in
+the moving mass of men McGregor became feverishly anxious that the
+dapper young man should understand. "Do you remember--when you were a
+boy--some man who had been a soldier telling you that the men who
+marched had to break step and go in a disorderly mob across a bridge
+because their orderly stride would have shaken the bridge to pieces?"
+
+A shiver ran over the body of the young man. In his off hours he was a
+writer of plays and stories and his trained dramatic sense caught
+quickly the import of McGregor's words. Into his mind came a scene on
+a village street of his own place in Ohio. In fancy he saw the village
+fife and drum corps marching past. His mind recalled the swing and the
+cadence of the tune and again as when he was a boy his legs ached to
+run out among the men and go marching away.
+
+Filled with excitement he began also to talk. "I see," he cried; "you
+think there is a thought in that, a big thought that men have not
+understood?"
+
+On the field the men, becoming bolder as they became less self-
+conscious, came sweeping by, their bodies falling into a long swinging
+stride.
+
+The young man pondered. "I see. I see. Every one who stood watching as
+I did when the fife and drum corps went past felt what I felt. They
+were hiding behind a mask. Their legs also tingled and the same wild
+militant thumping went on in their hearts. You have found that out,
+eh? You mean to lead labour that way?"
+
+With open mouth the young man stared at the field and at the moving
+mass of men. He became oratorical in his thoughts. "Here is a big
+man," he muttered. "Here is a Napoleon, a Caesar of labour come to
+Chicago. He is not like the little leaders. His mind is not sicklied
+over with the pale cast of thought. He does not think that the big
+natural impulses of men are foolish and absurd. He has got hold of
+something here that will work. The world had better watch this man."
+
+Half beside himself he walked up and down at the edge of the field,
+his body trembling.
+
+Out of the ranks of the marching men came a workman. In the field
+words arose. A petulant quality came into the voice of the captain who
+gave commands. The newspaper man listened anxiously. "That's what will
+spoil everything. The men will begin to lose heart and will quit," he
+thought, leaning forward and waiting.
+
+"I've worked all day and I can't march up and down here all night,"
+complained the voice of the workman.
+
+Past the shoulder of the young man went a, shadow. Before his eyes on
+the field, fronting the waiting ranks of men, stood McGregor. His fist
+shot out and the complaining workman crumpled to the ground.
+
+"This is no time for words," said the harsh voice. "Get back in there.
+This is not a game. It's the beginning of men's realisation of
+themselves. Get in there and say nothing. If you can't march with us
+get out. The movement we have started can pay no attention to
+whimperers."
+
+Among the ranks of men a cheer arose. By the factory wall the excited
+newspaper man danced up and down. At a word of command from the
+captain the line of marching men again swept down the field and he
+watched them with tears standing in his eyes. "It's going to work," he
+cried. "It's bound to work. At last a man has come to lead the men of
+labor."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+John Van Moore a young Chicago advertising man went one afternoon to
+the offices of the Wheelright Bicycle Company. The company had both
+its factory and offices far out on the west side. The factory was a
+huge brick affair fronted by a broad cement sidewalk and a narrow
+green lawn spotted with flower beds. The building used for offices was
+smaller and had a veranda facing the street. Up the sides of the
+office building vines grew.
+
+Like the reporter who had watched the Marching Men in the field by the
+factory wall John Van Moore was a dapper young man with a moustache.
+In his leisure hours he played a clarinet. "It gives a man something
+to cling to," he explained to his friends. "One sees life going past
+and feels that he is not a mere drifting log in the stream of things.
+Although as a musician I amount to nothing, it at least makes me
+dream."
+
+Among the men in the advertising office where he worked Van Moore was
+known as something of a fool, redeemed by his ability to string words
+together. He wore a heavy black braided watch chain and carried a cane
+and he had a wife who after marriage had studied medicine and with
+whom he did not live. Sometimes on a Saturday evening the two met at
+some restaurant and sat for hours drinking and laughing. When the wife
+had gone to her own place the advertising man continued the fun, going
+from saloon to saloon and making long speeches setting forth his
+philosophy of life. "I am an individualist," he declared, strutting up
+and down and swinging the cane about. "I am a dabbler, an experimenter
+if you will. Before I die it is my dream that I will discover a new
+quality in existence."
+
+For the bicycle company the advertising man was to write a booklet
+telling in romantic and readable form the history of the company. When
+finished the booklet would be sent out to those who had answered
+advertisements put into magazines and newspapers. The company had a
+process of manufacture peculiar to Wheelright bicycles and in the
+booklet this was to be much emphasised.
+
+The manufacturing process in regard to which John Van Moore was to wax
+eloquent had been conceived in the brain of a workman and was
+responsible for the company's success. Now the workman was dead and
+the president of the company had decided that he would take credit for
+the idea. He had thought a good deal of the matter and had decided
+that in truth the notion must have been more than a little his own.
+"It must have been so," he told himself, "otherwise it would not have
+worked out so well."
+
+In the offices of the bicycle company the president, a grey gross man
+with tiny eyes, walked up and down a long room heavily carpeted. In
+reply to questions asked by the advertising man, who sat at a table
+with a pad of paper before him, he raised himself on his toes, put a
+thumb in the armhole of his vest and told a long rambling tale of
+which he was the hero.
+
+The tale concerned a purely imaginary young workman who spent all of
+the earlier years of his life labouring terribly. At evening he ran
+quickly from the shop where he was employed and going without sleep
+toiled for long hours in a little garret. When the workman had
+discovered the secret that made successful the Wheelright bicycle he
+opened a shop and began to reap the reward of his efforts.
+
+"That was me. I was that fellow," cried the fat man who in reality had
+bought his interest in the bicycle company after the age of forty.
+Tapping himself on the breast he paused as though overcome with
+feeling. Tears came into his eyes. The young workman had become a
+reality to him. "All day I ran about the little shop crying 'Quality!
+Quality!' I do that now. It is a fetish with me. I do not make
+bicycles for money but because I am a workman with pride in my work.
+You may put that in the book. You may quote me as saying that. A big
+point should be made of my pride in my work." The advertising man
+nodded his head and scribbled upon the pad of paper. Almost he could
+have written the story without the visit to the factory. When the fat
+man was not looking he turned his face to one side and listened
+attentively. With a whole heart he wished the president would go away
+and leave him alone to wander in the factory.
+
+On the evening before, John Van Moore had taken part in an adventure.
+With a companion, a fellow who drew cartoons for the daily papers, he
+had gone into a saloon and there had met another man of the
+newspapers.
+
+In the saloon the three men had sat until late into the night drinking
+and talking. The second newspaper man--that same dapper fellow who had
+watched the marchers by the factory wall--had told over and over the
+story of McGregor and his Marchers. "I tell you there is something
+growing up here," he had said. "I have seen this McGregor and I know.
+You may believe me or not but the fact is that he has found out
+something. There is an element in men that up to now has not been
+understood--there is a thought hidden away within the breast of
+labour, a big unspoken thought--it is a part of men's bodies as well
+as their minds. Suppose this fellow has figured that out and
+understands it, eh!"
+
+Becoming more and more excited as he continued to drink the newspaper
+man had been half wild in his conjectures as to what was to happen in
+the world. Thumping with his fist upon a table wet with beer he had
+addressed the writer of advertisements. "There are things that animals
+know that have not been understood by men," he cried. "Consider the
+bees. Have you thought that man has not tried to work out a collective
+intellect? Why should man not try to work that out?"
+
+The newspaper man's voice became low and tense. "When you go into a
+factory I want you to keep your eyes and your ears open," he said. "Go
+into one of the great rooms where many men are at work. Stand
+perfectly still. Don't try to think. Wait."
+
+Jumping out of his seat the excited man had walked up and down before
+his companions. A group of men standing before the bar listened, their
+glasses held half way to their lips.
+
+"I tell you there is already a song of labour. It has not got itself
+expressed and understood but it is in every shop, in every field where
+men work. In a dim way the men who work are conscious of the song
+although if you talk of the matter they only laugh. The song is low
+harsh rhythmical. I tell you it comes out of the very soul of labour.
+It is akin to the thing that artists understand and that is called
+form. This McGregor understands something of that. He is the first
+leader of labour that has understood. The world shall hear from him.
+One of these days the world shall ring with his name."
+
+In the bicycle factory John Van Moore looked at the pad of paper
+before him and thought of the words of the half drunken man in the
+saloon. In the great shop at his back there was the steady grinding
+roar of many machines. The fat man, hypnotised by his own words,
+continued to walk up and down telling of the hardship that had once
+confronted the imaginary young workman and above which he had risen
+triumphant. "We hear much of the power of labour but there has been a
+mistake made," he said. "Such men as myself--we are the power. Do you
+see we have come out of the mass? We stand forth."
+
+Stopping before the advertising man and looking down the fat man
+winked. "You do not need to say that in the book. There is no need of
+quoting me there. Our bicycles are being bought by workingmen and it
+would be foolish to offend them but what I say is nevertheless true.
+Do not such men as I, with our cunning brains and our power of
+patience build these great modern organisations?"
+
+The fat man waved his arm toward the shops from which the roar of
+machinery came. The advertising man absentmindedly nodded his head. He
+was trying to hear the song of labour talked of by the drunken man. It
+was quitting time and there was the sound of many feet moving about
+the floor of the factory. The roar of the machinery stopped.
+
+Again the fat man walked up and down talking of the career of the
+labourer who had come forth from the ranks of labour. From the factory
+the men began filing out into the open. There was the sound of feet
+scuffling along the wide cement sidewalk past the flowerbeds.
+
+Of a sudden the fat man stopped. The advertising man sat with pencil
+suspended above the paper. From the walk below sharp commands rang
+out. Again the sound of men moving about came in through the windows.
+
+The president of the bicycle company and the advertising man ran to
+the window. There on the cement sidewalk stood the men of the company
+formed into columns of fours and separated into companies. At the head
+of each company stood a captain. The captains swung the men about.
+"Forward! March!" they shouted.
+
+The fat man stood with his mouth open and looked at the men. "What's
+going on down there? What do you mean? Quit that!" he bawled.
+
+A derisive laugh floated up through the window.
+
+"Attention! Forward, guide right!" shouted a captain.
+
+The men went swinging down the broad cement sidewalk past the window
+and the advertising man. In their faces was something determined and
+grim. A sickly smile flitted across the face of the grey-haired man
+and then faded. The advertising man, without knowing just what was
+going on felt that the older man was afraid. He sensed the terror in
+his face. In his heart he was glad to see it.
+
+The manufacturer began to talk excitedly. "Now what's this?" he
+demanded. "What's going on? What kind of a volcano are we men of
+affairs walking over? Haven't we had enough trouble with labour? What
+are they doing now?" Again he walked up and down past the table where
+the advertising man sat looking at him. "We'll let the book go," he
+said. "Come to-morrow. Come any time. I want to look into this. I want
+to find out what's going on."
+
+Leaving the office of the bicycle company John Van Moore ran along the
+street past stores and houses. He did not try to follow the Marching
+Men but ran forward blindly, filled with excitement. He remembered the
+words of the newspaper man about the song of labour, and was drunk
+with the thought that he had caught the swing of it. A hundred times
+he had seen men pouring out of factory doors at the end of the day.
+Always before they had been just a mass of individuals. Each had been
+thinking of his own affairs and each man had shuffled off into his own
+street and had been lost in the dim alleyways between the tall grimy
+buildings. Now all of this was changed. The men did not shuffle off
+alone but marched along the street shoulder to shoulder.
+
+A lump came also into the throat of this man and he like that other by
+the factory wall began to say words. "The song of labour is here. It
+has begun to get itself sung!" he cried.
+
+John Van Moore was beside himself. The face of the fat man pale with
+terror came back into his mind. On the sidewalk before a grocery store
+he stopped and shouted with delight. Then he began dancing wildly
+about, startling a group of children who with fingers in their mouths
+stood with staring eyes watching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+All through the early months of that year in Chicago, rumours of a new
+and not understandable movement among labourers ran about among men of
+affairs. In a way the labourers understood the undercurrent of terror
+their marching together had inspired and like the advertising man
+dancing on the sidewalk before the grocery were made happy by it. Grim
+satisfaction dwelt in their hearts. Remembering their boyhoods and the
+creeping terror that invaded their fathers' houses in times of
+depression they were glad to spread terror among the homes of the rich
+and the well-to-do. For years they had been going through life
+blindly, striving to forget age and poverty. Now they felt that life
+had a purpose, that they were marching toward some end. When in the
+past they had been told that power dwelt in them they had not
+believed. "He is not to be trusted," thought the man at the machine
+looking at the man at work at the next machine. "I have heard him talk
+and at bottom he is a fool."
+
+Now the man at the machine did not think of his brother at the next
+machine. In his dreams at night he was beginning to have a new vision.
+Power had breathed its message into his brain. Of a sudden he saw
+himself as a part of a giant walking in the world. "I am like a drop
+of blood running through the veins of labour," he whispered to
+himself. "In my own way I am adding strength to the heart and the
+brain of labour. I have become a part of this thing that has begun to
+move. I will not talk but will wait. If this marching is the thing
+then I will march. Though I am weary at the end of the day that shall
+not stop me. Many times I have been weary and was alone. Now I am a
+part of something vast. This I know, that a consciousness of power has
+crept into my brain and although I be persecuted I shall not surrender
+what I have gained."
+
+In the offices of the plough trust a meeting of men of affairs was
+called. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the movement going
+on among the workers. At the plough works it had broken out. No more
+at evening did the men shuffle along, like a disorderly mob but
+marched in companies along the brick-paved street that ran by the
+factory door.
+
+At the meeting David Ormsby had been as always quiet and self-
+possessed. A halo of kindly intent hung over him and when a banker,
+one of the directors of the company, had finished a speech he arose
+and walked up and down, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets.
+The banker was a fat man with thin brown hair and delicate hands. As
+he talked he held a pair of yellow gloves and beat with them on a long
+table at the centre of the room. The soft thump of the gloves upon the
+table made a chorus to the things he had to say. David motioned for
+him to be seated. "I will myself go to see this McGregor," he said,
+walking across the room and putting an arm about the shoulder of the
+banker. "Perhaps there is as you say a new and terrible danger here
+but I do not think so. For thousands, no doubt for millions of years,
+the world has gone on its way and I do not think it is to be stopped
+now.
+
+"It has been my fortune to see and to know this McGregor," added David
+smiling at the others in the room. "He is a man and not a Joshua to
+make the sun stand still."
+
+In the office in Van Buren Street, David, the grey and confident,
+stood before the desk at which sat McGregor. "We will get out of here
+if you do not mind," he said. "I want to talk to you and I would not
+like being interrupted. I have a fancy that we talk out of doors."
+
+The two men went in a street car to Jackson Park and, forgetting to
+dine, walked for an hour along the paths under the trees. The wind
+from the lake had chilled the air and the park was deserted.
+
+They went to stand on a pier that ran out into the lake. On the pier
+David tried to begin the talk that was the object of their being
+together but felt that the wind and the water that beat against the
+piling of the pier made talk too difficult. Although he could not have
+told why, he was relieved by the necessity of delay. Into the park
+they went again and found a seat upon a bench facing a lagoon.
+
+In the presence of the silent McGregor David felt suddenly embarrassed
+and awkward. "By what right do I question him?" he asked himself and
+in his mind could find no answer. A half dozen times he started to say
+what he had come to say but stopped and his talk ran off into
+trivialities. "There are men in the world you have not taken into
+consideration," he said finally, forcing himself to begin. With a
+laugh he went on, relieved that the silence had been broken. "You see
+the very inner secret of strong men has been missed by you and
+others."
+
+David Ormsby looked sharply at McGregor. "I do not believe that you
+believe we are after money, we men of affairs. I trust you see beyond
+that. We have our purpose and we keep to our purpose quietly and
+doggedly."
+
+Again David looked at the silent figure sitting in the dim light and
+again his mind ran out, striving to penetrate the silence. "I am not a
+fool and perhaps I know that the movement you have started among the
+workers is something new. There is power in it as in all great ideas.
+Perhaps I think there is power in you. Why else should I be here?"
+
+Again David laughed uncertainly. "In a way I am in sympathy with you,"
+he said. "Although all through my life I have served money I have not
+been owned by it. You are not to suppose that men like me have not
+something beyond money in mind."
+
+The old plough maker looked away over McGregor's shoulder to where the
+leaves of the trees shook in the wind from the lake. "There have been
+men and great leaders who have understood the silent competent
+servants of wealth," he said half petulantly. "I want you to
+understand these men. I should like to see you become such a one
+yourself--not for the wealth it would bring but because in the end you
+would thus serve all men. You would get at truth thus. The power that
+is in you would be conserved and used more intelligently."
+
+"To be sure, history has taken little or no account of the men of whom
+I speak. They have passed through life unnoticed, doing great work
+quietly."
+
+The plough maker paused. Although McGregor had said nothing the older
+man felt that the interview was not going as it should. "I should like
+to know what you have in mind, what in the end you hope to gain for
+yourself or for these men," he said somewhat sharply. "There is after
+all no point to our beating about the bush."
+
+McGregor said nothing. Arising from the bench he began again to walk
+along the path with Ormsby at his side.
+
+"The really strong men of the world have had no place in history,"
+declared Ormsby bitterly. "They have not asked that. They were in Rome
+and in Germany in the time of Martin Luther but nothing is said of
+them. Although they do not mind the silence of history they would like
+other strong men to understand. The march of the world is a greater
+thing than the dust raised by the heels of some few workers walking
+through the streets and these men are responsible for the march of the
+world. You are making a mistake. I invite you to become one of us. If
+you plan to upset things you may get yourself into history but you
+will not really count. What you are trying to do will not work. You
+will come to a bad end."
+
+When the two men emerged from the park the older man had again the
+feeling that the interview had not been a success. He was sorry. The
+evening he felt had marked for him a failure and he was not accustomed
+to failures. "There is a wall here that I cannot penetrate," he
+thought.
+
+Along the front of the park beneath a grove of trees they walked in
+silence. McGregor seemed not to have heard the words addressed to him.
+When they came to where a long row of vacant lots faced the park he
+stopped and stood leaning against a tree to look away into the park,
+lost in thought.
+
+David Ormsby also became silent. He thought of his youth in the little
+village plough factory, of his efforts to get on in the world, of the
+long evenings spent reading books and trying to understand the
+movements of men.
+
+"Is there an element in nature and in youth that we do not understand
+or that we lose sight of?" he asked. "Are the efforts of the patient
+workers of the world always to be abortive? Can some new phase of life
+arise suddenly upsetting all of our plans? Do you, can you, think of
+men like me as but part of a vast whole? Do you deny to us
+individuality, the right to stand forth, the right to work things out
+and to control?"
+
+The ploughmaker looked at the huge figure standing beside the tree.
+Again he was irritated and kept lighting cigars which after two or
+three puffs he threw away. In the bushes at the back of the bench
+insects began to sing. The wind coming now in gentle gusts swayed
+slowly the branches of the trees overhead.
+
+"Is there an eternal youth in the world, a state out of which men pass
+unknowingly, a youth that forever destroys, tearing down what has been
+built?" he asked. "Are the mature lives of strong men of so little
+account? Have you like the empty fields that bask in the sun in the
+summer the right to remain silent in the presence of men who have had
+thoughts and have tried to put their thoughts into deeds?"
+
+Still saying nothing McGregor pointed with his finger along the road
+that faced the park. From a side street a body of men swung about a
+corner, coming with long strides toward the two. As they passed
+beneath a street lamp that swung gently in the wind their faces
+flashing in and out of the light seemed to be mocking David Ormsby.
+For a moment anger burned in him and then something, perhaps the
+rhythm of the moving mass of men, brought a gentler mood. The men
+swinging past turned another corner and disappeared beneath the
+structure of an elevated railroad.
+
+The ploughmaker walked away from McGregor. Something in the interview,
+terminating thus with, the presence of the marching figures had he
+felt unmanned him. "After all there is youth and the hope of youth.
+What he has in mind may work," he thought as he climbed aboard a
+street car.
+
+In the car David put his head out at the window and looked at the long
+line of apartment buildings that lined the streets. He thought again
+of his own youth and of the evenings in the Wisconsin village when,
+himself a youth, he went with other young men singing and marching in
+the moonlight.
+
+In a vacant lot he again saw a body of the Marching Men moving back
+and forth and responding quickly to the commands given by a slender
+young man who stood on the sidewalk beneath a street lamp and held a
+stick in his hand.
+
+In the car the grey-haired man of affairs put his head down upon the
+back of the seat in front. Half unconscious of his own thoughts his
+mind began to dwell upon the figure of his daughter. "Had I been
+Margaret I should not have let him go. No matter what the cost I
+should have clung to the man," he muttered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+It is difficult not to be of two minds about the manifestation now
+called, and perhaps rightly, "The Madness of the Marching Men." In one
+mood it comes back to the mind as something unspeakably big and
+inspiring. We go each of us through the treadmill of our lives caught
+and caged like little animals in some vast menagerie. In turn we love,
+marry, breed children, have our moments of blind futile passion and
+then something happens. All unconsciously a change creeps over us.
+Youth passes. We become shrewd, careful, submerged in little things.
+Life, art, great passions, dreams, all of these pass. Under the night
+sky the suburbanite stands in the moonlight. He is hoeing his radishes
+and worrying because the laundry has torn one of his white collars.
+The railroad is to put on an extra morning train. He remembers that
+fact heard at the store. For him the night becomes more beautiful. For
+ten minutes longer he can stay with the radishes each morning. There
+is much of man's life in the figure of the suburbanite standing
+absorbed in his own thoughts in the midst of his radishes.
+
+And so about the business of our lives we go and then of a sudden
+there comes again the feeling that crept over us all in the year of
+the Marching Men. In a moment we are again a part of the moving mass.
+The old religious exaltation, strange emanation from the man McGregor,
+returns. In fancy we feel the earth tremble under the feet of the men
+--the marchers. With a conscious straining of the mind we strive to
+grasp the processes of the mind of the leader during that year when
+men sensed his meaning, when they saw as he saw the workers--saw them
+massed and moving through the world.
+
+My own mind, striving feebly to follow that greater and simpler mind,
+gropes about. I remember sharply the words of a writer who said that
+men make their own gods and realise that I myself saw something of the
+birth of such a god. For he was near to being a god then--our
+McGregor. The thing he did rumbles in the minds of men yet. His long
+shadow will fall across men's thoughts for ages. The tantalising
+effort to understand his meaning will tempt us always into endless
+speculation.
+
+Only last week I met a man--he was a steward in a club and lingered
+talking to me by a cigar case in an empty billiard-room--who suddenly
+turned away to conceal from me two large tears that had jumped into
+his eyes because of a kind of tenderness in my voice at the mention of
+the Marching Men.
+
+Another mood comes. It may be the right mood. I see sparrows jumping
+about in an ordinary roadway as I walk to my office. From the maple
+trees the little winged seeds come fluttering down before my eyes. A
+boy goes past sitting in a grocery wagon and over-driving a rather
+bony horse. As I walk I overtake two workmen shuffling along. They
+remind me of those other workers and I say to myself that thus men
+have always shuffled, that never did they swing forward into that
+world-wide rhythmical march of the workers.
+
+"You were drunk with youth and a kind of world madness," says my
+normal self as I go forward again, striving to think things out.
+
+Chicago is still here--Chicago after McGregor and the Marching Men.
+The elevated trains still clatter over the frogs at the turning into
+Wabash Avenue; the surface cars clang their bells; the crowds pour up
+in the morning from the runway leading to the Illinois Central trains;
+life goes on. And men in their offices sit in their chairs and say
+that the thing that happened was abortive, a brain storm, a wild
+outbreak of the rebellious the disorderly and the hunger in the minds
+of men.
+
+What begging of the question. The very soul of the Marching Men was a
+sense of order. That was the message of it, the thing that the world
+has not come up to yet. Men have not learned that we must come to
+understand the impulse toward order, have that burned into our
+consciousness, before we move on to other things. There is in us this
+madness for individual expression. For each of us the little moment of
+running forward and lifting our thin childish voices in the midst of
+the great silence. We have not learned that out of us all, walking
+shoulder to shoulder, there might arise a greater voice, something to
+make the waters of the very seas to tremble.
+
+McGregor knew. He had a mind not sick with much thinking of trifles.
+When he had a great idea he thought it would work and he meant to see
+that it did work.
+
+Mightily was he equipped. I have seen the man in halls talking, his
+huge body swaying back and forth, his great fists in the air, his
+voice harsh, persistent, insistent--with something of the quality of
+the drums in it--beating down into the upturned faces of the men
+crowded into the stuffy little places.
+
+I remember that newspaper men used to sit in their little holes and
+write saying of him that the times made McGregor. I do not know about
+that. The city caught fire from the man at the time of that terrible
+speech of his in the court room when Polk Street Mary grew afraid and
+told the truth. There he stood, the raw untried red-haired miner from
+the mines and the Tenderloin, facing an angry court and a swarm of
+protesting lawyers and uttering that city-shaking philippic against
+the old rotten first ward and the creeping cowardice in men that lets
+vice and disease go on and pervade all modern life. It was in a way
+another "J'Accuse!" from the lips of another Zola. Men who heard it
+have told me that when he had finished in the whole court no man spoke
+and no man dared feel guiltless. "For the moment something--a section,
+a cell, a figment, of men's brains opened--and in that terrible
+illuminating instant they saw themselves as they were and what they
+had let life become."
+
+They saw something else, or thought they did, saw McGregor a new force
+for Chicago to reckon with. After the trial one young newspaper man
+returned to his office and running from desk to desk yelled in the
+faces of his brother reporters: "Hell's out for noon. We've got a big
+red-haired Scotch lawyer up here on Van Buren Street that is a kind of
+a new scourge of the world. Watch the First Ward get it."
+
+But McGregor never looked at the First Ward. That wasn't bothering
+him. From the court room he went to march with men in a new field.
+
+Followed the time of waiting and of patient quiet work. In the
+evenings McGregor worked at the law cases in the bare room in Van
+Buren Street. That queer bird Henry Hunt still stayed with him,
+collecting tithes for the gang and going to his respectable home at
+night--a strange triumph of the small that had escaped the tongue of
+McGregor on that day in court when so many men had their names bruited
+to the world in McGregor's roll call--the roll call of the men who
+were but merchants, brothers of vice, the men who should have been
+masters in the city.
+
+And then the movement of the Marching Men began to come to the
+surface. It got into the blood of men. That harsh drumming voice began
+to shake their hearts and their legs.
+
+Everywhere men began to see and hear of the Marchers. From lip to lip
+ran the question, "What's going on?"
+
+"What's going on?" How that cry ran over Chicago. Every newspaper man
+in town got assignments on the story. The papers were loaded with it
+every day. All over the city they appeared, everywhere--the Marching
+Men.
+
+There were leaders enough! The Cuban War and the State Militia had
+taught too many men the swing of the march step for there not to be at
+least two or three competent drill masters in every little company of
+men.
+
+And there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Who
+could forget it? Its high pitched harsh feminine strain rang in the
+brain. How it went pitching and tumbling along in that wailing calling
+endless high note. It had strange breaks and intervals in the
+rendering. The men did not sing it. They chanted it. There was in it
+just the weird haunting something the Russians know how to put into
+their songs and into the books they write. It isn't the quality of the
+soil. Some of our own music has that. But in this Russian song there
+was something else, something world-wide and religious--a soul, a
+spirit. Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strange
+land and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.
+
+Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thing
+Americans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, the
+offices, the alleys and in the air overhead--the wail--half shout. No
+noise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.
+
+And there was the fellow who wrote the music down for McGregor. He was
+the real thing and he bore the marks of the shackles on his legs. He
+had remembered the march from hearing the men sing it as they went
+over the Steppes to Siberia, the men who were going up out of misery
+to more misery. "It would come out of the air," he explained. "The
+guards would run down the line of men to shout and strike out with
+their short whips. 'Stop it!' they cried. And still it went on for
+hours, defying everything, there on the cold cheerless plains."
+
+And he had brought it to America and put it to music for McGregor's
+marchers.
+
+Of course the police tried to stop the marchers. Into a street they
+would run crying "Disperse!" The men did disperse only to appear again
+on some vacant lot working away at the perfection of the marching.
+Once an excited squad of police captured a company of them. The same
+men were back in line the next evening. The police could not arrest a
+hundred thousand men because they marched shoulder to shoulder along
+the streets and chanted a weird march song as they went.
+
+The whole thing was not an outbreak of labour. It was something
+different from anything that had come into the world before. The
+unions were in it but besides the unions there were the Poles, the
+Russian Jews, the Hunks from the stockyards and the steel works in
+South Chicago. They had their own leaders, speaking their own
+languages. And how they could throw their legs into the march! The
+armies of the old world had for years been training men for the
+strange demonstration that had broken out in Chicago.
+
+The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it
+now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers
+of that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught and held.
+
+Every train brought writers tumbling into Chicago. In the evening
+fifty of them would gather in the back room at Weingardner's
+restaurant where such men congregate.
+
+And then the thing broke out all over the country, in steel towns like
+Pittsburgh and Johnstown and Lorain and McKeesport and men working in
+little independent factories in towns down in Indiana began drilling
+and chanting the march song on summer evenings on the village baseball
+ground.
+
+How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle class people were
+afraid! It swept over the country like a religious revival, the
+creeping dread.
+
+The writing men got to McGregor, the brain back of it all, fast
+enough. Everywhere his influence appeared. In the afternoon there
+would be a hundred newspaper men standing on the stairway leading up
+to the big bare office in Van Buren Street. At his desk he sat, big
+and red and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose the
+thing that was in their minds had something to do with the way men
+looked at him but in any case the crowd in Weingardner's agreed that
+there was in the man something of the same fear-inspiring bigness
+there was in the movement he had started and was guiding.
+
+It seems absurdly simple now. There he sat at his desk. The police
+might have walked in and arrested him. But if you begin figuring that
+way the whole thing was absurd. What differs it if men march coming
+from work, swinging along shoulder to shoulder or shuffle aimlessly
+along, and what harm can come out of the singing of a song?
+
+You see McGregor understood something that all of us had not counted
+on. He knew that every one has an imagination. He was at war with
+men's minds. He challenged something in us that we hardly realised was
+there. He had been sitting there for years thinking it out. He had
+watched Dr. Dowie and Mrs. Eddy. He knew what he was doing.
+
+A crowd of newspaper men went one night to hear McGregor at a big
+outdoor meeting up on the North Side. Dr. Cowell was with them--the
+big English statesman and writer who later was drowned on the
+_Titanic._ He was a big man, physically and mentally, and was in
+Chicago to see McGregor and try to understand what he was doing.
+
+And McGregor got him as he had all men. Out there under the sky the
+men stood silent, Cowell's head sticking up above the sea of faces,
+and McGregor talked. The newspaper men declared he could not talk.
+They were wrong about that. McGregor had a way of throwing up his arms
+and straining and shouting out his sentences, that got to the souls of
+men.
+
+He was a kind of crude artist drawing pictures on the mind.
+
+That night he talked about labour as always--labour personified--huge
+crude old Labour. How he made the men before him see and feel the
+blind giant who has lived in the world since time began and who still
+goes stumbling blindly about, rubbing his eyes and lying down to sleep
+away centuries in the dust of the fields and the factories.
+
+A man arose in the audience and climbed upon the platform beside
+McGregor. It was a daring thing to do and men's knees trembled. While
+the man was crawling up to the platform shouts arose. One has in mind
+a picture of a bustling little fellow going into the house and into
+the upper room where Jesus and his followers were having the last
+supper together, going in there to wrangle about the price to be paid
+for the wine.
+
+The man who got on the platform with McGregor was a socialist. He
+wanted to argue.
+
+But McGregor did not argue with him. He sprang forward, it was a quick
+tiger-like movement, and spun the socialist about, making him stand
+small and blinking and comical before the crowd.
+
+Then McGregor began to talk. He made of the little stuttering arguing
+socialist a figure representing all labour, made him the
+personification of the old weary struggle of the world. And the
+socialist who went to argue stood with tears in his eyes, proud of his
+position in men's eyes.
+
+All over the city McGregor talked of old Labour and how he was to be
+built up and put before men's eyes by the movement of the Marching
+Men. How our legs tingled to fall in step and go marching away with
+him.
+
+Out of the crowds there came the note of that wailing march. Some one
+always started that.
+
+That night on the North Side Doctor Cowell got hold of the shoulder of
+a newspaper man and led him to a car. He who knew Bismarck and who had
+sat in council with kings went walking and babbling half the night
+through the empty streets.
+
+It is amusing now to think of the things men said under the influence
+of McGregor. Like old Doctor Johnson and his friend Savage they walked
+half drunk through the streets swearing that whatever happened they
+would stick to the movement. Doctor Cowell himself said things just as
+absurd as that.
+
+And all over the country men were getting the idea--the Marching Men--
+old Labour in one mass marching before the eyes of men--old Labour
+that was going to make the world see--see and feel its bigness at
+last. Men were to come to the end of strife--men united--Marching!
+Marching! Marching!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+In all of the time of The Marching Men there was but one bit of
+written matter from the leader McGregor. It had a circulation running
+into the millions and was printed in every tongue spoken in America. A
+copy of the little circular lies before me now.
+
+THE MARCHERS
+
+   "They ask us what we mean.
+   Well, here is our answer.
+   We mean to go on marching.
+   We mean to march in the morning and in the evening when the sun
+goes down.
+   On Sundays they may sit on their porches or shout at men playing
+ball in a field
+   But we will march.
+   On the hard cobblestones of the city streets and through the dust
+of country roads we will march.
+   Our legs may be weary and our throats hot and dry,
+   But still we will march, shoulder to shoulder.
+   We will march until the ground shakes and tall buildings tremble.
+   Shoulder to shoulder we will go--all of us--
+   On and on forever.
+   We will not talk nor listen to talk.
+   We will march and we will teach our sons and our daughters to
+march.
+   Their minds are troubled. Our minds are clear.
+   We do not think and banter words.
+   We march.
+   Our faces are coarse and there is dust in our hair and beards.
+   See, the inner parts of our hands are rough.
+   And still we march--we the workers."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Who will ever forget that Labour Day in Chicago? How they marched!--
+thousands and thousands and more thousands! They filled the streets.
+The cars stopped. Men trembled with the import of the impending hour.
+
+Here they come! How the ground trembles! The chant chant chant of that
+song! It must have been thus that Grant felt at the great review of
+the veterans in Washington when all day long they marched past him,
+the men of the Civil War, the whites of their eyes showing in the tan
+of their faces. McGregor stood on the stone curbing above the tracks
+in Grant Park. As the men marched they massed in there about him,
+thousands of them, steel workers and iron workers and great red-necked
+butchers and teamsters.
+
+And in the air wailed the marching song of the workers.
+
+All of the world that was not marching jammed into the buildings
+facing Michigan Boulevard and waited. Margaret Ormsby was there. She
+sat with her father in a carriage near where Van Buren Street ends at
+the Boulevard. As the men kept crowding in about them she clutched
+nervously at the sleeve of David Ormsby's coat. "He is going to
+speak," she whispered and pointed. Her tense air of expectancy
+expressed much of the feeling of the crowd. "See, listen, he is going
+to speak out."
+
+It must have been five in the afternoon when the men got through
+marching. They were massed in there clear down to the Twelfth Street
+Station of the Illinois Central. McGregor lifted his hands. In the
+hush his harsh voice carried far. "We are at the beginning," he
+shouted and silence fell upon the people. In the stillness one
+standing near her might have heard Margaret Ormsby weeping softly.
+There was the gentle murmur that always prevails where many people
+stand at attention. The weeping of the woman was scarcely audible but
+it persisted like the sound of little waves on a beach at the end of
+the day.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The idea prevalent among men that the woman to be beautiful must be
+hedged about and protected from the facts of life has done something
+more than produce a race of women not physically vigorous. It has made
+them deficient in strength of soul also. After the evening when she
+stood facing Edith and when she had been unable to arise to the
+challenge flung at her by the little milliner Margaret Ormsby was
+forced to stand facing her own soul and there was no strength in her
+for the test. Her mind insisted on justifying her failure. A woman of
+the people placed in such a position would have been able to face it
+calmly. She would have gone soberly and steadily about her work and
+after a few months of pulling weeds in a field, trimming hats in a
+shop or instructing children in a schoolroom would have been ready to
+thrust out again, making another trial at life. Having met many
+defeats she would have been armed and ready for defeat. Like a little
+animal in a forest inhabited by other and larger animals she would
+have known the effectiveness of lying perfectly still for a long
+period, making her patience a part of her equipment for living.
+
+Margaret had decided that she hated McGregor. After the scene in her
+house she gave up her work in the settlement house and for a long time
+went about nursing her hatred. In the street as she walked about her
+mind kept bringing accusations against him and in her room at night
+she sat by the window looking at the stars and said strong words. "He
+is a brute," she declared hotly, "a mere animal untouched by the
+culture that makes for gentleness. There is something animal-like and
+horrible in my nature that has made me care for him. I shall pluck it
+out. In the future I shall make it my business to forget the man and
+all of the dreadful lower strata of life that he represents."
+
+Filled with this idea Margaret went about among her own people and
+tried to become interested in the men and women she met at dinners and
+receptions. It did not work and when, after a few evenings spent in
+the company of men absorbed in the getting of money, she found them
+only dull creatures whose mouths were filled with meaningless words,
+her irritation grew and she blamed McGregor for that also. "He had no
+right to come into my consciousness and then take himself off," she
+declared bitterly. "The man is more of a brute than I thought. He no
+doubt preys upon everyone as he has preyed upon me. He is without
+tenderness, knows nothing of the meaning of tenderness. The colourless
+creature he has married will serve his body. That is what he wants. He
+does not want beauty. He is a coward who dare not stand up to beauty
+and is afraid of me."
+
+When the Marching Men Movement began to make a stir in Chicago
+Margaret went on a visit to New York. For a month she lived with two
+women friends at a big hotel near the sea and then hurried home. "I
+will see the man and hear him talk," she told herself. "I cannot cure
+myself of the consciousness of him by running away. Perhaps I am
+myself a coward. I shall go into his presence. When I hear his brutal
+words and see again the hard gleam that sometimes comes into his eyes
+I shall be cured."
+
+Margaret went to hear McGregor talk to a gathering of workingmen in a
+West Side hall and came away more alive to him than ever. In the hall
+she sat concealed in deep shadows by the door and waited with
+trembling eagerness.
+
+On all sides of her were men crowded together. Their faces were washed
+but the grime of the shops was not quite effaced. Men from the steel
+mills with the cooked look that follows long exposure to intense
+artificial heat, men of the building trades with their broad hands,
+big men and small men, misshapen and straight, labouring men, all sat
+at attention, waiting.
+
+Margaret noticed that as McGregor talked the lips of the working men
+moved. Fists were clenched. Applause came quick and sharp like the
+report of guns.
+
+In the shadows at the further side of the hall the black coats of the
+workers made a blot out of which intense faces looked and across which
+the flickering gas jets in the centre of the hall threw dancing
+lights.
+
+The words of the speaker were shot forth. The sentences seemed broken
+and disconnected. As he talked giant pictures flashed through the
+minds of the hearers. Men felt themselves big and exalted. A little
+steel worker sitting near Margaret, who earlier in the evening had
+been abused by his wife because he wanted to come to the meeting
+instead of helping with the dishes at home, stared fiercely about. He
+thought he would like to fight hand in hand with a wild animal in a
+forest.
+
+Standing on the narrow stage McGregor seemed a giant seeking
+expression. His mouth worked, the sweat stood upon his forehead and he
+moved restlessly up and down. At times, with his hands advanced and
+with the eager forward crouch of his body, he was like a wrestler
+waiting to grapple with an opponent.
+
+Margaret was deeply moved. Her years of training and of refinement
+were stripped off and she felt that, like the women of the French
+Revolution, she would like to go out into the streets and march
+screaming and fighting in feminine rage for the things of this man's
+mind.
+
+McGregor had scarcely begun to talk. His personality, the big eager
+something in him, had caught and held this audience as it had caught
+and held other audiences in other halls and was to hold them night
+after night for months.
+
+McGregor was something the men to whom he talked understood. He was
+themselves become expressive and he moved them as no other leader had
+ever moved them before. His very lack of glibness, the things in him
+wanting expression and not getting expressed, made him seem like one
+of them. He did not confuse their minds but drew for them great
+scrawling pictures and to them he cried, "March!" and for marching he
+promised them realisation of themselves.
+
+"I have heard men in colleges and speakers in halls talk of the
+brotherhood of man," he cried. "They do not want such a brotherhood.
+They would flee before it. But we will make by our marching such a
+brotherhood that they will tremble and say to one another, 'See, Old
+Labour is awake. He has found his strength.' They will hide themselves
+and eat their words of brotherhood.
+
+"A clamour of voices will arise, many voices, crying out, 'Disperse!
+Cease marching! I am afraid!'
+
+"This talk of brotherhood. The words mean nothing. Man cannot love
+man. We do not know what they mean by such love. They hurt us and
+underpay us. Sometimes one of us gets an arm torn off. Are we to lie
+in our beds loving the man who gets rich from the iron machine that
+ripped the arm from the shoulder?
+
+"On our knees and in our arms we have borne their children. On the
+streets we see them--the petted children of our madness. See we have
+let them run about misbehaving. We have given them automobiles and
+wives with soft clinging dresses. When they have cried we have cared
+for them.
+
+"And they being children with the minds of children are confused. The
+noise of affairs alarms them. They run about shaking their ringers and
+commanding. They speak with pity of us--Labour--their father.
+
+"And now we will show them their father in his might. The little
+machines they have in their factories are toys we have given them and
+that for the time we leave in their hands. We do not think of the toys
+nor the soft-bodied women. We make of ourselves a mighty army, a
+marching army going along shoulder to shoulder. We can love that.
+
+"When they see us, hundreds of thousands of us, marching into their
+minds and into their consciousness, then will they be afraid. And at
+the little meetings they have when three or four of them sit talking,
+daring to decide what things we shall have from life, there will be in
+their minds a picture. We will stamp it there.
+
+"They have forgotten our power. Let us reawaken it. See, I shake Old
+Labour by the shoulder. He arouses. He sits up. He thrusts his huge
+form up from where he was asleep in the dust and the smoke of the
+mills. They look at him and are afraid. See, they tremble and run
+away, falling over each other. The did not know Old Labour was so big.
+
+"But you workers are not afraid. You are the arms and the legs and the
+hands and the eyes of Labour. You have thought yourself small. You
+have not got yourself into one mass so that I could shake and arouse
+you.
+
+"You must get that way. You must march shoulder to shoulder. You must
+march so that you yourselves shall come to know what a giant you are.
+If one of your number whines or complains or stands upon a box
+throwing words about knock him down and keep marching.
+
+"When you have marched until you are one giant body then will happen a
+miracle. A brain will grow in the giant you have made.
+
+"Will you march with me?"
+
+Like a volley from a battery of guns came the sharp reply from the
+eager upturned faces of the audience. "We will! Let us march!" they
+shouted.
+
+Margaret Ormsby went out at the door and into the crowds on Madison
+Street. As she walked in the press she lifted her head in pride that a
+man possessed of such a brain and of the simple courage to try to
+express such magnificent ideas through human beings had ever shown
+favour toward her. Humbleness swept over her and she blamed herself
+for the petty thoughts concerning him that had been in her mind. "It
+does not matter," she whispered to herself. "Now I know that nothing
+matters, nothing but his success. He must do this thing he has set out
+to do. He must not be denied. I would give the blood out of my body or
+expose my body to shame if that could bring him success."
+
+Margaret became exalted in her humbleness. When her carriage had taken
+her to her house she ran quickly upstairs to her own room and knelt by
+her bed. She started to pray but presently stopped and sprang to her
+feet. Running to the window she looked off across the city. "He must
+succeed," she cried again. "I shall myself be one of his marchers. I
+will do anything for him. He is tearing the veil from my eyes, from
+all men's eyes. We are children in the hands of this giant and he must
+not meet defeat at the hands of children."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+On the day of the great demonstration, when McGregor's power over the
+minds and the bodies of the men of labour sent hundreds of thousands
+marching and singing in the streets, there was one man who was
+untouched by the song of labour expressed in the threshing of feet.
+David Ormsby had in his quiet way thought things out. He expected that
+the new impetus given to solidity in the ranks of labour would make
+trouble for him and his kind, that it would express itself finally in
+strikes and in wide-spread industrial disturbance. He was not worried.
+In the end he thought that the silent patient power of money would
+bring his people the victory. On that day he did not go to his office
+but in the morning stayed in his own room thinking of McGregor and of
+his daughter. Laura Ormsby was out of the city but Margaret was at
+home. David believed he had measured accurately the power of McGregor
+over her mind but occasional doubts came to him. "Well the time has
+come to have it out with her," he decided. "I must reassert my
+ascendency over her mind. The thing that is going on here is really a
+struggle of minds. McGregor differs from other leaders of labour as I
+differ from most leaders of the forces of money. He has brains. Very
+well. I shall meet him on that level. Then, when I have made Margaret
+think as I think, she will return to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he was still a small manufacturer in the Wisconsin town David had
+been in the habit of driving out in the evening with his daughter.
+During the drives he had been almost a lover in his attentions to the
+child and now when he thought of the forces at work within her he was
+convinced that she was still a child. Early in the afternoon he had a
+carriage brought to the door and drove off with her to the city. "She
+will want to see the man in the height of his power. If I am right in
+thinking that she is still under the influence of his personality
+there will be a romantic desire for that.
+
+"I will give her the chance," he thought proudly. "In this struggle I
+ask no quarter from him and shall not make the common mistake of
+parents in such cases. She is fascinated by the figure he has made of
+himself. Showy men who stand out from the crowd have that power. She
+is still under his influence. Why else her constant distraction and
+her want of interest in other things? Now I will be with her when the
+man is most powerful, when he shows to the greatest advantage, and
+then I will make my fight for her. I will point out to her another
+road, the road along which the real victors in life must learn to
+travel."
+
+Together David the quiet efficient representative of wealth and his
+woman child sat in the carriage on the day of McGregor's triumph. For
+the moment an impassable gulf seemed to separate them and with intense
+eyes each watched the hordes of men who massed themselves about the
+labour leader. At the moment McGregor seemed to have caught all men in
+the sweep of his movement. Business men had closed their desks, labour
+was exultant, writers and men given to speculation in thought walked
+about dreaming of the realisation of the brotherhood of man. In the
+long narrow treeless park the music made by the steady never-ending
+thresh of feet arose to something vast and rhythmical. It was like a
+mighty chorus come up out of the hearts of men. David was unmoved.
+Occasionally he spoke to the horses and looked from the faces of the
+men massed about him to his daughter's face. In the coarse faces of
+the men he thought he saw only a crude sort of intoxication, the
+result of a new kind of emotionalism. "It will not outlast thirty days
+of ordinary living in their squalid surroundings," he thought grimly.
+"It is not the kind of exaltation for Margaret. I can sing her a more
+wonderful song. I must get myself ready for that."
+
+When McGregor arose to speak Margaret was overcome with emotions.
+Dropping to her knees in the carriage she put her head down upon her
+father's arm. For days she had been telling herself that in the future
+of the man she loved there was no place for failure. Now again she
+whispered to herself that this great sturdy figure must not be denied
+the fulfilment of its purpose. When in the hush that followed the
+massing of the labourers about him the harsh booming voice floated
+over the heads of the people her body shook as with a chill.
+Extravagant fancies invaded her mind and she wished it were possible
+for her to do something heroic, something that would make her live
+again in the mind of McGregor. She wanted to serve him, to give him
+something out of herself, and thought wildly that there might yet come
+a time and a way by which the beauty of her body could be laid like a
+gift before him. The half mythical figure of Mary the lover of Jesus
+came into her mind and she aspired to be such another. With her body
+shaken with emotions she pulled at the sleeve of her father's coat.
+"Listen! It is going to come now," she murmured. "The brain of labour
+is going to express the dream of labour. An impulse sweet and lasting
+is going to come into the world."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+David Ormsby said nothing. When McGregor had begun to speak he touched
+the horses with the whip and drove slowly along Van Buren Street past
+the silent attentive ranks of men. When he had got into one of the
+streets near the river a vast cheer arose. It seemed to shake the city
+and the horses reared and leaped forward over the rough cobblestones.
+With one hand David quieted them while with the other he gripped the
+hand of his daughter. They drove over a bridge and into the West Side
+and as they went the marching song of the workers rising up out of
+thousands of throats rang in their ears. For a time the air seemed to
+pulsate with it but as they went westward it grew continually less and
+less distinct. At last when they had turned into a street lined by
+tall factories it died out altogether. "That is the end of him for me
+and mine," thought David and again set himself for the task he had to
+perform.
+
+Through street after street David let the horses wander while he clung
+to his daughter's hand and thought of what he wanted to say. Not all
+of the streets were lined with factories. Some, and these in the
+evening light were the most hideous, were bordered by the homes of
+workers. The houses of the workers, jammed closely together and black
+with grime, were filled with noisy life. Women sat in the doorways and
+children ran screaming and shouting in the road. Dogs barked and
+howled. Everywhere was dirt and disorder, the terrible evidence of
+men's failure in the difficult and delicate art of living. In one of
+the streets a little girl child who sat on the post of a fence made a
+ludicrous figure. As David and Margaret drove past she beat with her
+heels against the sides of the post and screamed. Tears ran down her
+cheeks and her dishevelled hair was black with dirt. "I want a banana!
+I want a banana!" she howled, staring at the blank walls of one of the
+houses. In spite of herself Margaret was touched and her mind left the
+figure of McGregor. By an odd chance the child on the post was the
+daughter of that socialist orator who one night on the North Side had
+climbed upon a platform to confront McGregor with the propaganda of
+the Socialist Party.
+
+David turned the horses into a wide boulevard that ran south through
+the factory district of the west. As they came out into the boulevard
+they saw sitting on the sidewalk before a saloon a drunkard with a
+drum in his hand. The drunkard beat upon the drum and tried to sing
+the marching song of the workers but succeeded only in making a queer
+grunting noise like a distressed animal. The sight brought a smile to
+David's lips. "Already it has begun to disintegrate," he muttered. "I
+brought you into this part of town on purpose," he said to Margaret.
+"I wanted you to see with your own eyes how much the world needs the
+thing he is trying to do. The man is terribly right about the need for
+discipline and order. He is a big man doing a big thing and I admire
+his courage. He would be a really big man had he the greater courage."
+
+On the boulevard into which they had turned all was quiet. The summer
+sun was setting and over the roofs of buildings the west was ablaze
+with light. They passed a factory surrounded by little patches of
+garden. Some employer of labour had tried thus feebly to bring beauty
+into the neighbourhood of the place where his men worked. David
+pointed with the whip. "Life is a husk," he said, "and we men of
+affairs who take ourselves so seriously because the fates have been
+good to us have odd silly little fancies. See what this fellow has
+been at, patching away, striving to create beauty on the shell of
+things. He is like McGregor you see. I wonder if the man has made
+himself beautiful, if either he or McGregor has seen to it that there
+is something lovely inside the husk he wears around and that he calls
+his body, if he has seen through life to the spirit of life. I do not
+believe in patching nor do I believe in disturbing the shell of things
+as McGregor has dared to do. I have my own beliefs and they are the
+beliefs of my kind. This man here, this maker of little gardens, is
+like McGregor. He might better let men find their own beauty. That is
+my way. I have, I want to think, kept myself for the sweeter and more
+daring effort."
+
+David turned and looked hard at Margaret who had begun to be
+influenced by his mood. She waited, looking with averted face at the
+sky over the roofs of buildings. David began to talk of himself in
+relation to her and her mother. A note of impatience came into his
+voice.
+
+"How far you have been carried away, haven't you?" he said sharply.
+"Listen. I am not talking to you now as your father nor as Laura's
+daughter. Let us be clear about that I love you and am in a contest to
+win your love. I am McGregor's rival. I accept the handicap of
+fatherhood. I love you. You see I have let something within myself
+alight upon you. McGregor has not done that. He refused what you had
+to offer but I do not. I have centred my life upon you and have done
+it quite knowingly and after much thought. The feeling I have is
+something quite special. I am an individualist but believe in the
+oneness of man and woman. I would dare venture into but one other life
+beyond my own and that the life of a woman. I have chosen to ask you
+to let me venture so into your life. We will talk of it."
+
+Margaret turned and looked at her father. Later she thought that some
+strange phenomena must have happened at the moment Something like a
+film was torn from her eyes and she saw the man David, not as a shrewd
+and calculating man of affairs, but as something magnificently young.
+Not only was he strong and solid but in his face there was at the
+moment the deep lines of thought and suffering she had seen on the
+countenance of McGregor. "It is strange," she thought. "They are so
+unlike and yet the two men are both beautiful."
+
+"I married your mother when I was a child as you are a child now,"
+David went on. "To be sure I had a passion for her and she had one for
+me. It passed but it was beautiful enough while it lasted. It did not
+have depth or meaning. I want to tell you why. Then I am going to make
+you understand McGregor so that you may take your measure of the man.
+I am coming to that. I have to begin at the beginning.
+
+"My factory began to grow and as an employer of labour I became
+concerned in the lives of a good many men."
+
+His voice again became sharp. "I have been impatient with you," he
+said. "Do you think this McGregor is the only man who has seen and
+thought of other men in the mass? I have done that and have been
+tempted. I also might have become sentimental and destroyed myself. I
+did not. Loving a woman saved me. Laura did that for me although when
+it came to the real test of our love, understanding, she failed. I am
+nevertheless grateful to her that she was once the object of my love.
+I believe in the beauty of that."
+
+Again David paused and began to tell his story in a new way. The
+figure of McGregor came back into Margaret's mind and her father began
+to feel that to take it entirely away would be an accomplishment full
+of significance. "If I can take her from him, I and my kind can take
+the world from him also," he thought. "It will be another victory for
+the aristocracy in the never-ending battle with the mob."
+
+"I came to a turning point," he said aloud. "All men come to that
+point. To be sure the great mass of people drift quite stupidly but we
+are not now talking of people in general. There is you and me and
+there is the thing McGregor might be. We are each in our way something
+special. We come, people like us, to a place where there are two roads
+to take. I took one and McGregor has taken another. I know why and
+perhaps he knows why. I concede to him knowledge of what he has done.
+But now it is time for you to decide which road you will take. You
+have seen the crowds moving along the broad way he has chosen and now
+you will set out on your own way. I want you to look down my road with
+me."
+
+They came to a bridge over a canal and David stopped the horses. A
+body of McGregor's marchers passed and Margaret's pulse began to beat
+high again. When she looked at her father however he was unmoved and
+she was a little ashamed of her emotions. For a moment David waited,
+as though for inspiration, and when the horses started on again he
+began to talk. "A labour leader came to my factory, a miniature
+McGregor with a crooked twist to him. He was a rascal but the things
+he said to my men were all true enough. I was making money for my
+investors, a lot of it. They might have won in a fight with me. One
+evening I went out into the country to walk alone under the trees and
+think it over."
+
+David's voice became harsh and Margaret thought it had become
+strangely like the voice of McGregor talking to workingmen. "I bought
+the man off," David said. "I used the cruel weapon men like me have to
+use. I gave him money and told him to get out, to let me alone. I did
+it because I had to win. My kind of men always have to win. During the
+walk I took alone I got hold of my dream, my belief. I have the same
+dream now. It means more to me than the welfare of a million men. For
+it I would crush whatever opposed me. I am going to tell you of the
+dream.
+
+"It is too bad one has to talk. Talk kills dreams and talk will also
+kill all such men as McGregor. Now that he has begun to talk we will
+get the best of him. I do not worry about McGregor. Time and talk will
+bring about his destruction."
+
+David's mind ran off in a new direction. "I do not think a man's life
+is of much importance," he said. "No man is big enough to grasp all of
+life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he
+cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One
+has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of many lives and many
+impulses.
+
+"The man must strike at beauty. That is the realisation maturity
+brings and that is where the woman conies in. That is what McGregor
+was not wise enough to understand. He is a child you see in a land of
+excitable children."
+
+The quality of David's voice changed. Putting his arm about his
+daughter he drew her face down beside his own. Night descended upon
+them. The woman who was tired from much thinking began to feel
+grateful for the touch of the strong hand on her shoulder. David had
+accomplished his purpose. He had for the moment made his daughter
+forget that she was his daughter. There was something hypnotic in the
+quiet strength of his mood.
+
+"I come now to women, to your part," he said. "We will talk of the
+thing I want to make you understand. Laura failed as the woman. She
+never saw the point. As I grew she did not grow with me. Because I did
+not talk of love she did not understand me as a lover, did not know
+what I wanted, what I demanded of her.
+
+"I wanted to fit my love down upon her figure as one puts a glove on
+his hand. You see I was the adventurer, the man mussed and moiled by
+life and its problems. The struggle to exist, to get money, could not
+be avoided. I had to make that struggle. She did not. Why could she
+not understand that I did not want to come into her presence to rest
+or to say empty words. I wanted her to help me create beauty. We
+should have been partners in that. Together we should have undertaken
+the most delicate and difficult of all struggles, the struggle for
+living beauty in our everyday affairs."
+
+Bitterness swept over the old ploughmaker and he used strong words.
+"The whole point is in what I am now saying. That was my cry to the
+woman. It came out of my soul. It was the only cry to another I have
+ever made. Laura was a little fool. Her mind flitted away to little
+things. I do not know what she wanted me to be and now I do not care.
+Perhaps she wanted me to be a poet, a stringer together of words, one
+to write shrill little songs about her eyes and lips. It does not
+matter now what she wanted.
+
+"But you matter."
+
+David's voice cut through the fog of new thoughts that were confusing
+his daughter's mind and she could feel his body stiffen. A thrill ran
+through her own body and she forgot McGregor. With all the strength of
+her spirit she was absorbed in what David was saying. In the challenge
+that was coming from the lips of her father she began to feel there
+would be born in her own life a definite purpose.
+
+"Women want to push out into life, to share with men the disorder and
+mussiness of little things. What a desire! Let them try it if they
+wish. They will sicken of the attempt. They lose sight of something
+bigger they might undertake. They have forgotten the old things, Ruth
+in the corn and Mary with the jar of precious ointment, they have
+forgotten the beauty they were meant to help men create.
+
+"Let them share only in man's attempt to create beauty. That is the
+big, the delicate task to which they should consecrate themselves. Why
+attempt instead the cheaper, the secondary task? They are like this
+McGregor."
+
+The ploughmaker became silent. Taking up the whip he drove the horses
+rapidly along. He thought that his point was made and was satisfied to
+let the imagination of his daughter do the rest. They turned off the
+boulevard and passed through a street of small stores. Before a saloon
+a troop of street urchins led by a drunken man without a hat gave a
+grotesque imitation of McGregor's Marchers before a crowd of laughing
+idlers. With a sinking heart Margaret realised that even at the height
+of his power the forces that would eventually destroy the impulses
+back of McGregor's Marchers were at work. She crept closer to David.
+"I love you," she said. "Some day I may have a lover but always I
+shall love you. I shall try to be what you want of me."
+
+It was past two o'clock that night when David arose from the chair
+where he had been for several hours quietly reading. With a smile on
+his face he went to a window facing north toward the city. All through
+the evening groups of men had been passing the house. Some had gone
+scuffling along, a mere disorderly mob, some had gone shoulder to
+shoulder chanting the marching song of the workers and a few, under
+the influence of drink, had stopped before the house to roar out
+threats. Now all was quiet. David lighted a cigar and stood for a long
+time looking out over the city. He was thinking of McGregor and
+wondering what excited dream of power the day had brought into the
+man's head. Then he thought of his daughter and of her escape. A soft
+light came into his eyes. He was happy but when he had partially
+undressed a new mood came and he turned out the lights in the room and
+went again to the window. In the room above Margaret had been unable
+to sleep and had also crept to the window. She was thinking again of
+McGregor and was ashamed of her thoughts. By chance both father and
+daughter began at the same moment to doubt the truth of what David had
+said during the drive along the boulevard. Margaret could not express
+her doubts in words but tears came into her eyes.
+
+As for David, he put his hand on the sill of the window and for just a
+moment his body trembled as with age and weariness. "I wonder," he
+muttered--"if I had youth--perhaps McGregor knew he would fail and yet
+had the courage of failure, I wonder if both Margaret and myself lack
+the greater courage, if that evening long ago when I walked under the
+trees I made a mistake? What if after all this McGregor and his woman
+knew both roads. What if they, after looking deliberately along the
+road toward success in life, went without regret along the road to
+failure? What if McGregor and not myself knew the road to beauty?"
+
+END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Marching Men, by Sherwood Anderson
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCHING MEN ***
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