Шервуд Андерсен. Марширующие люди (engl)
страница №4
...ght swept likea 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
amo...
