CHAPTER I

Produced by Juliet Sutherland

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 fingers 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 was 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 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 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 fingers 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 fingers 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.”