CHAPTER I
The idea prevalent among men that the woman to be beautiful must be
hedged about and protected from the facts of life has done something
more than produce a race of women not physically vigorous. It has made
them deficient in strength of soul also. After the evening when
she stood facing Edith and when she had been unable to arise to the
challenge flung at her by the little milliner Margaret Ormsby was forced
to stand facing her own soul and there was no strength in her for the
test. Her mind insisted on justifying her failure. A woman of the people
placed in such a position would have been able to face it calmly. She
would have gone soberly and steadily about her work and after a
few months of pulling weeds in a field, trimming hats in a shop or
instructing children in a schoolroom would have been ready to thrust out
again, making another trial at life. Having met many defeats she would
have been armed and ready for defeat. Like a little animal in a
forest inhabited by other and larger animals she would have known the
effectiveness of lying perfectly still for a long period, making her
patience a part of her equipment for living.
Margaret had decided that she hated McGregor. After the scene in her
house she gave up her work in the settlement house and for a long time
went about nursing her hatred. In the street as she walked about her
mind kept bringing accusations against him and in her room at night she
sat by the window looking at the stars and said strong words. “He is a
brute,” she declared hotly, “a mere animal untouched by the culture that
makes for gentleness. There is something animal-like and horrible in
my nature that has made me care for him. I shall pluck it out. In the
future I shall make it my business to forget the man and all of the
dreadful lower strata of life that he represents.”
Filled with this idea Margaret went about among her own people and
tried to become interested in the men and women she met at dinners and
receptions. It did not work and when, after a few evenings spent in the
company of men absorbed in the getting of money, she found them only
dull creatures whose mouths were filled with meaningless words, her
irritation grew and she blamed McGregor for that also. “He had no right
to come into my consciousness and then take himself off,” she declared
bitterly. “The man is more of a brute than I thought. He no doubt preys
upon everyone as he has preyed upon me. He is without tenderness, knows
nothing of the meaning of tenderness. The colourless creature he has
married will serve his body. That is what he wants. He does not want
beauty. He is a coward who dare not stand up to beauty and is afraid of
me.”
When the Marching Men Movement began to make a stir in Chicago Margaret
went on a visit to New York. For a month she lived with two women
friends at a big hotel near the sea and then hurried home. “I will see
the man and hear him talk,” she told herself. “I cannot cure myself of
the consciousness of him by running away. Perhaps I am myself a coward.
I shall go into his presence. When I hear his brutal words and see again
the hard gleam that sometimes comes into his eyes I shall be cured.”
Margaret went to hear McGregor talk to a gathering of workingmen in a
West Side hall and came away more alive to him than ever. In the hall
she sat concealed in deep shadows by the door and waited with trembling
eagerness.
On all sides of her were men crowded together. Their faces were washed
but the grime of the shops was not quite effaced. Men from the steel
mills with the cooked look that follows long exposure to intense
artificial heat, men of the building trades with their broad hands, big
men and small men, misshapen and straight, labouring men, all sat at
attention, waiting.
Margaret noticed that as McGregor talked the lips of the working men
moved. Fists were clenched. Applause came quick and sharp like the
report of guns.
In the shadows at the further side of the hall the black coats of the
workers made a blot out of which intense faces looked and across which
the flickering gas jets in the centre of the hall threw dancing lights.
The words of the speaker were shot forth. The sentences seemed broken
and disconnected. As he talked giant pictures flashed through the minds
of the hearers. Men felt themselves big and exalted. A little steel
worker sitting near Margaret, who earlier in the evening had been abused
by his wife because he wanted to come to the meeting instead of helping
with the dishes at home, stared fiercely about. He thought he would like
to fight hand in hand with a wild animal in a forest.
Standing on the narrow stage McGregor seemed a giant seeking expression.
His mouth worked, the sweat stood upon his forehead and he moved
restlessly up and down. At times, with his hands advanced and with the
eager forward crouch of his body, he was like a wrestler waiting to
grapple with an opponent.
Margaret was deeply moved. Her years of training and of refinement were
stripped off and she felt that, like the women of the French Revolution,
she would like to go out into the streets and march screaming and
fighting in feminine rage for the things of this man's mind.
McGregor had scarcely begun to talk. His personality, the big eager
something in him, had caught and held this audience as it had caught
and held other audiences in other halls and was to hold them night after
night for months.
McGregor was something the men to whom he talked understood. He was
themselves become expressive and he moved them as no other leader had
ever moved them before. His very lack of glibness, the things in him
wanting expression and not getting expressed, made him seem like one of
them. He did not confuse their minds but drew for them great scrawling
pictures and to them he cried, “March!” and for marching he promised
them realisation of themselves.
“I have heard men in colleges and speakers in halls talk of the
brotherhood of man,” he cried. “They do not want such a brotherhood.
They would flee before it. But we will make by our marching such a
brotherhood that they will tremble and say to one another, 'See, Old
Labour is awake. He has found his strength.' They will hide themselves
and eat their words of brotherhood.
“A clamour of voices will arise, many voices, crying out, 'Disperse!
Cease marching! I am afraid!'
“This talk of brotherhood. The words mean nothing. Man cannot love man.
We do not know what they mean by such love. They hurt us and underpay
us. Sometimes one of us gets an arm torn off. Are we to lie in our beds
loving the man who gets rich from the iron machine that ripped the arm
from the shoulder?
“On our knees and in our arms we have borne their children. On the
streets we see them--the petted children of our madness. See we have
let them run about misbehaving. We have given them automobiles and wives
with soft clinging dresses. When they have cried we have cared for them.
“And they being children with the minds of children are confused. The
noise of affairs alarms them. They run about shaking their fingers and
commanding. They speak with pity of us--Labour--their father.
“And now we will show them their father in his might. The little
machines they have in their factories are toys we have given them and
that for the time we leave in their hands. We do not think of the
toys nor the soft-bodied women. We make of ourselves a mighty army, a
marching army going along shoulder to shoulder. We can love that.
“When they see us, hundreds of thousands of us, marching into their
minds and into their consciousness, then will they be afraid. And at the
little meetings they have when three or four of them sit talking, daring
to decide what things we shall have from life, there will be in their
minds a picture. We will stamp it there.
“They have forgotten our power. Let us reawaken it. See, I shake Old
Labour by the shoulder. He arouses. He sits up. He thrusts his huge form
up from where he was asleep in the dust and the smoke of the mills. They
look at him and are afraid. See, they tremble and run away, falling over
each other. The did not know Old Labour was so big.
“But you workers are not afraid. You are the arms and the legs and the
hands and the eyes of Labour. You have thought yourself small. You have
not got yourself into one mass so that I could shake and arouse you.
“You must get that way. You must march shoulder to shoulder. You must
march so that you yourselves shall come to know what a giant you are.
If one of your number whines or complains or stands upon a box throwing
words about knock him down and keep marching.
“When you have marched until you are one giant body then will happen a
miracle. A brain will grow in the giant you have made.
“Will you march with me?”
Like a volley from a battery of guns came the sharp reply from the eager
upturned faces of the audience. “We will! Let us march!” they shouted.
Margaret Ormsby went out at the door and into the crowds on Madison
Street. As she walked in the press she lifted her head in pride that
a man possessed of such a brain and of the simple courage to try to
express such magnificent ideas through human beings had ever shown
favour toward her. Humbleness swept over her and she blamed herself for
the petty thoughts concerning him that had been in her mind. “It does
not matter,” she whispered to herself. “Now I know that nothing matters,
nothing but his success. He must do this thing he has set out to do. He
must not be denied. I would give the blood out of my body or expose my
body to shame if that could bring him success.”
Margaret became exalted in her humbleness. When her carriage had taken
her to her house she ran quickly upstairs to her own room and knelt by
her bed. She started to pray but presently stopped and sprang to her
feet. Running to the window she looked off across the city. “He must
succeed,” she cried again. “I shall myself be one of his marchers. I
will do anything for him. He is tearing the veil from my eyes, from all
men's eyes. We are children in the hands of this giant and he must not
meet defeat at the hands of children.”
CHAPTER II
On the day of the great demonstration, when McGregor's power over the
minds and the bodies of the men of labour sent hundreds of thousands
marching and singing in the streets, there was one man who was untouched
by the song of labour expressed in the threshing of feet. David Ormsby
had in his quiet way thought things out. He expected that the new
impetus given to solidity in the ranks of labour would make trouble for
him and his kind, that it would express itself finally in strikes and
in wide-spread industrial disturbance. He was not worried. In the end
he thought that the silent patient power of money would bring his people
the victory. On that day he did not go to his office but in the morning
stayed in his own room thinking of McGregor and of his daughter. Laura
Ormsby was out of the city but Margaret was at home. David believed
he had measured accurately the power of McGregor over her mind but
occasional doubts came to him. “Well the time has come to have it out
with her,” he decided. “I must reassert my ascendency over her mind.
The thing that is going on here is really a struggle of minds. McGregor
differs from other leaders of labour as I differ from most leaders of
the forces of money. He has brains. Very well. I shall meet him on that
level. Then, when I have made Margaret think as I think, she will return
to me.”
* * * * *
When he was still a small manufacturer in the Wisconsin town David
had been in the habit of driving out in the evening with his daughter.
During the drives he had been almost a lover in his attentions to the
child and now when he thought of the forces at work within her he was
convinced that she was still a child. Early in the afternoon he had a
carriage brought to the door and drove off with her to the city. “She
will want to see the man in the height of his power. If I am right in
thinking that she is still under the influence of his personality there
will be a romantic desire for that.
“I will give her the chance,” he thought proudly. “In this struggle I
ask no quarter from him and shall not make the common mistake of parents
in such cases. She is fascinated by the figure he has made of himself.
Showy men who stand out from the crowd have that power. She is still
under his influence. Why else her constant distraction and her want of
interest in other things? Now I will be with her when the man is most
powerful, when he shows to the greatest advantage, and then I will make
my fight for her. I will point out to her another road, the road along
which the real victors in life must learn to travel.”
Together David the quiet efficient representative of wealth and his
woman child sat in the carriage on the day of McGregor's triumph. For
the moment an impassable gulf seemed to separate them and with intense
eyes each watched the hordes of men who massed themselves about the
labour leader. At the moment McGregor seemed to have caught all men in
the sweep of his movement. Business men had closed their desks, labour
was exultant, writers and men given to speculation in thought walked
about dreaming of the realisation of the brotherhood of man. In the long
narrow treeless park the music made by the steady never-ending thresh of
feet arose to something vast and rhythmical. It was like a mighty chorus
come up out of the hearts of men. David was unmoved. Occasionally he
spoke to the horses and looked from the faces of the men massed about
him to his daughter's face. In the coarse faces of the men he thought
he saw only a crude sort of intoxication, the result of a new kind of
emotionalism. “It will not outlast thirty days of ordinary living in
their squalid surroundings,” he thought grimly. “It is not the kind of
exaltation for Margaret. I can sing her a more wonderful song. I must
get myself ready for that.”
When McGregor arose to speak Margaret was overcome with emotions.
Dropping to her knees in the carriage she put her head down upon her
father's arm. For days she had been telling herself that in the future
of the man she loved there was no place for failure. Now again she
whispered to herself that this great sturdy figure must not be denied
the fulfilment of its purpose. When in the hush that followed the
massing of the labourers about him the harsh booming voice floated over
the heads of the people her body shook as with a chill. Extravagant
fancies invaded her mind and she wished it were possible for her to do
something heroic, something that would make her live again in the mind
of McGregor. She wanted to serve him, to give him something out of
herself, and thought wildly that there might yet come a time and a way
by which the beauty of her body could be laid like a gift before him.
The half mythical figure of Mary the lover of Jesus came into her mind
and she aspired to be such another. With her body shaken with emotions
she pulled at the sleeve of her father's coat. “Listen! It is going to
come now,” she murmured. “The brain of labour is going to express the
dream of labour. An impulse sweet and lasting is going to come into the
world.”
* * * * *
David Ormsby said nothing. When McGregor had begun to speak he touched
the horses with the whip and drove slowly along Van Buren Street past
the silent attentive ranks of men. When he had got into one of the
streets near the river a vast cheer arose. It seemed to shake the city
and the horses reared and leaped forward over the rough cobblestones.
With one hand David quieted them while with the other he gripped the
hand of his daughter. They drove over a bridge and into the West Side
and as they went the marching song of the workers rising up out of
thousands of throats rang in their ears. For a time the air seemed to
pulsate with it but as they went westward it grew continually less and
less distinct. At last when they had turned into a street lined by tall
factories it died out altogether. “That is the end of him for me and
mine,” thought David and again set himself for the task he had to
perform.
Through street after street David let the horses wander while he clung
to his daughter's hand and thought of what he wanted to say. Not all of
the streets were lined with factories. Some, and these in the evening
light were the most hideous, were bordered by the homes of workers. The
houses of the workers, jammed closely together and black with grime,
were filled with noisy life. Women sat in the doorways and children ran
screaming and shouting in the road. Dogs barked and howled. Everywhere
was dirt and disorder, the terrible evidence of men's failure in the
difficult and delicate art of living. In one of the streets a little
girl child who sat on the post of a fence made a ludicrous figure. As
David and Margaret drove past she beat with her heels against the sides
of the post and screamed. Tears ran down her cheeks and her dishevelled
hair was black with dirt. “I want a banana! I want a banana!” she
howled, staring at the blank walls of one of the houses. In spite of
herself Margaret was touched and her mind left the figure of McGregor.
By an odd chance the child on the post was the daughter of that
socialist orator who one night on the North Side had climbed upon a
platform to confront McGregor with the propaganda of the Socialist
Party.
David turned the horses into a wide boulevard that ran south through the
factory district of the west. As they came out into the boulevard they
saw sitting on the sidewalk before a saloon a drunkard with a drum in
his hand. The drunkard beat upon the drum and tried to sing the marching
song of the workers but succeeded only in making a queer grunting noise
like a distressed animal. The sight brought a smile to David's lips.
“Already it has begun to disintegrate,” he muttered. “I brought you into
this part of town on purpose,” he said to Margaret. “I wanted you to see
with your own eyes how much the world needs the thing he is trying to
do. The man is terribly right about the need for discipline and order.
He is a big man doing a big thing and I admire his courage. He would be
a really big man had he the greater courage.”
On the boulevard into which they had turned all was quiet. The summer
sun was setting and over the roofs of buildings the west was ablaze with
light. They passed a factory surrounded by little patches of garden.
Some employer of labour had tried thus feebly to bring beauty into the
neighbourhood of the place where his men worked. David pointed with
the whip. “Life is a husk,” he said, “and we men of affairs who take
ourselves so seriously because the fates have been good to us have odd
silly little fancies. See what this fellow has been at, patching away,
striving to create beauty on the shell of things. He is like McGregor
you see. I wonder if the man has made himself beautiful, if either he or
McGregor has seen to it that there is something lovely inside the husk
he wears around and that he calls his body, if he has seen through life
to the spirit of life. I do not believe in patching nor do I believe in
disturbing the shell of things as McGregor has dared to do. I have my
own beliefs and they are the beliefs of my kind. This man here, this
maker of little gardens, is like McGregor. He might better let men find
their own beauty. That is my way. I have, I want to think, kept myself
for the sweeter and more daring effort.”
David turned and looked hard at Margaret who had begun to be influenced
by his mood. She waited, looking with averted face at the sky over the
roofs of buildings. David began to talk of himself in relation to her
and her mother. A note of impatience came into his voice.
“How far you have been carried away, haven't you?” he said sharply.
“Listen. I am not talking to you now as your father nor as Laura's
daughter. Let us be clear about that I love you and am in a contest
to win your love. I am McGregor's rival. I accept the handicap of
fatherhood. I love you. You see I have let something within myself
alight upon you. McGregor has not done that. He refused what you had
to offer but I do not. I have centred my life upon you and have done it
quite knowingly and after much thought. The feeling I have is something
quite special. I am an individualist but believe in the oneness of man
and woman. I would dare venture into but one other life beyond my own
and that the life of a woman. I have chosen to ask you to let me venture
so into your life. We will talk of it.”
Margaret turned and looked at her father. Later she thought that some
strange phenomena must have happened at the moment Something like a film
was torn from her eyes and she saw the man David, not as a shrewd and
calculating man of affairs, but as something magnificently young. Not
only was he strong and solid but in his face there was at the moment the
deep lines of thought and suffering she had seen on the countenance of
McGregor. “It is strange,” she thought. “They are so unlike and yet the
two men are both beautiful.”
“I married your mother when I was a child as you are a child now,” David
went on. “To be sure I had a passion for her and she had one for me.
It passed but it was beautiful enough while it lasted. It did not have
depth or meaning. I want to tell you why. Then I am going to make you
understand McGregor so that you may take your measure of the man. I am
coming to that. I have to begin at the beginning.
“My factory began to grow and as an employer of labour I became
concerned in the lives of a good many men.”
His voice again became sharp. “I have been impatient with you,” he said.
“Do you think this McGregor is the only man who has seen and thought of
other men in the mass? I have done that and have been tempted. I also
might have become sentimental and destroyed myself. I did not. Loving a
woman saved me. Laura did that for me although when it came to the real
test of our love, understanding, she failed. I am nevertheless grateful
to her that she was once the object of my love. I believe in the beauty
of that.”
Again David paused and began to tell his story in a new way. The figure
of McGregor came back into Margaret's mind and her father began to
feel that to take it entirely away would be an accomplishment full of
significance. “If I can take her from him, I and my kind can take the
world from him also,” he thought. “It will be another victory for the
aristocracy in the never-ending battle with the mob.”
“I came to a turning point,” he said aloud. “All men come to that point.
To be sure the great mass of people drift quite stupidly but we are not
now talking of people in general. There is you and me and there is the
thing McGregor might be. We are each in our way something special. We
come, people like us, to a place where there are two roads to take. I
took one and McGregor has taken another. I know why and perhaps he knows
why. I concede to him knowledge of what he has done. But now it is time
for you to decide which road you will take. You have seen the crowds
moving along the broad way he has chosen and now you will set out on
your own way. I want you to look down my road with me.”
They came to a bridge over a canal and David stopped the horses. A body
of McGregor's marchers passed and Margaret's pulse began to beat high
again. When she looked at her father however he was unmoved and she was
a little ashamed of her emotions. For a moment David waited, as though
for inspiration, and when the horses started on again he began to talk.
“A labour leader came to my factory, a miniature McGregor with a crooked
twist to him. He was a rascal but the things he said to my men were
all true enough. I was making money for my investors, a lot of it.
They might have won in a fight with me. One evening I went out into the
country to walk alone under the trees and think it over.”
David's voice became harsh and Margaret thought it had become strangely
like the voice of McGregor talking to workingmen. “I bought the man
off,” David said. “I used the cruel weapon men like me have to use.
I gave him money and told him to get out, to let me alone. I did it
because I had to win. My kind of men always have to win. During the walk
I took alone I got hold of my dream, my belief. I have the same dream
now. It means more to me than the welfare of a million men. For it I
would crush whatever opposed me. I am going to tell you of the dream.
“It is too bad one has to talk. Talk kills dreams and talk will also
kill all such men as McGregor. Now that he has begun to talk we will get
the best of him. I do not worry about McGregor. Time and talk will bring
about his destruction.”
David's mind ran off in a new direction. “I do not think a man's life
is of much importance,” he said. “No man is big enough to grasp all
of life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he
cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One
has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of many lives and many
impulses.
“The man must strike at beauty. That is the realisation maturity brings
and that is where the woman conies in. That is what McGregor was not
wise enough to understand. He is a child you see in a land of excitable
children.”
The quality of David's voice changed. Putting his arm about his daughter
he drew her face down beside his own. Night descended upon them. The
woman who was tired from much thinking began to feel grateful for the
touch of the strong hand on her shoulder. David had accomplished his
purpose. He had for the moment made his daughter forget that she was
his daughter. There was something hypnotic in the quiet strength of his
mood.
“I come now to women, to your part,” he said. “We will talk of the thing
I want to make you understand. Laura failed as the woman. She never saw
the point. As I grew she did not grow with me. Because I did not talk of
love she did not understand me as a lover, did not know what I wanted,
what I demanded of her.
“I wanted to fit my love down upon her figure as one puts a glove on his
hand. You see I was the adventurer, the man mussed and moiled by life
and its problems. The struggle to exist, to get money, could not be
avoided. I had to make that struggle. She did not. Why could she not
understand that I did not want to come into her presence to rest or to
say empty words. I wanted her to help me create beauty. We should have
been partners in that. Together we should have undertaken the most
delicate and difficult of all struggles, the struggle for living beauty
in our everyday affairs.”
Bitterness swept over the old ploughmaker and he used strong words. “The
whole point is in what I am now saying. That was my cry to the woman.
It came out of my soul. It was the only cry to another I have ever made.
Laura was a little fool. Her mind flitted away to little things. I do
not know what she wanted me to be and now I do not care. Perhaps she
wanted me to be a poet, a stringer together of words, one to write
shrill little songs about her eyes and lips. It does not matter now what
she wanted.
“But you matter.”
David's voice cut through the fog of new thoughts that were confusing
his daughter's mind and she could feel his body stiffen. A thrill ran
through her own body and she forgot McGregor. With all the strength of
her spirit she was absorbed in what David was saying. In the challenge
that was coming from the lips of her father she began to feel there
would be born in her own life a definite purpose.
“Women want to push out into life, to share with men the disorder and
mussiness of little things. What a desire! Let them try it if they wish.
They will sicken of the attempt. They lose sight of something bigger
they might undertake. They have forgotten the old things, Ruth in the
corn and Mary with the jar of precious ointment, they have forgotten the
beauty they were meant to help men create.
“Let them share only in man's attempt to create beauty. That is the
big, the delicate task to which they should consecrate themselves. Why
attempt instead the cheaper, the secondary task? They are like this
McGregor.”
The ploughmaker became silent. Taking up the whip he drove the horses
rapidly along. He thought that his point was made and was satisfied to
let the imagination of his daughter do the rest. They turned off the
boulevard and passed through a street of small stores. Before a saloon
a troop of street urchins led by a drunken man without a hat gave a
grotesque imitation of McGregor's Marchers before a crowd of laughing
idlers. With a sinking heart Margaret realised that even at the height
of his power the forces that would eventually destroy the impulses back
of McGregor's Marchers were at work. She crept closer to David. “I love
you,” she said. “Some day I may have a lover but always I shall love
you. I shall try to be what you want of me.”
It was past two o'clock that night when David arose from the chair where
he had been for several hours quietly reading. With a smile on his
face he went to a window facing north toward the city. All through
the evening groups of men had been passing the house. Some had gone
scuffling along, a mere disorderly mob, some had gone shoulder to
shoulder chanting the marching song of the workers and a few, under the
influence of drink, had stopped before the house to roar out threats.
Now all was quiet. David lighted a cigar and stood for a long time
looking out over the city. He was thinking of McGregor and wondering
what excited dream of power the day had brought into the man's head.
Then he thought of his daughter and of her escape. A soft light came
into his eyes. He was happy but when he had partially undressed a new
mood came and he turned out the lights in the room and went again to the
window. In the room above Margaret had been unable to sleep and had also
crept to the window. She was thinking again of McGregor and was ashamed
of her thoughts. By chance both father and daughter began at the same
moment to doubt the truth of what David had said during the drive along
the boulevard. Margaret could not express her doubts in words but tears
came into her eyes.
As for David, he put his hand on the sill of the window and for just
a moment his body trembled as with age and weariness. “I wonder,” he
muttered--“if I had youth--perhaps McGregor knew he would fail and yet
had the courage of failure, I wonder if both Margaret and myself lack
the greater courage, if that evening long ago when I walked under the
trees I made a mistake? What if after all this McGregor and his woman
knew both roads. What if they, after looking deliberately along the road
toward success in life, went without regret along the road to failure?
What if McGregor and not myself knew the road to beauty?”
END