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would be order and purpose in me were I not a fool. I am like Napoleon
in that I have utter contempt for men."
* * * * *
Again and again the words of the drunkard came back into the mind of
the McGregor boy influencing his thoughts. Grasping nothing of the
philosophy back of the man's words his imagination was yet touched by
the drunkard's tale of the great Frenchman, babbled into his ears, and
it in some way seemed to give point to his hatred of the disorganised
ineffectiveness of the life about him.
* * * * *
After Nance McGregor opened the bakery another strike came to disturb
the prosperity of the business. Again the miners walked idly through
the streets. Into the bakery they came to get bread and told Nance to
write the debt down against them. Beaut McGregor was disturbed. He saw
his father's money being spent for flour which when baked into loaves
went out of the shop under the arms of the miners who shuffled as they
walked. One night a man whose name appeared on their books followed by
a long record of charged loaves came reeling past the bakery. McGregor
went to his mother and protested. "They have money to get drunk," he
said, "let them pay for their loaves."
Nance McGregor went on trusting the miners. She thought of the women
and children in the houses on the hill and when she heard of the plans
of the mining company to evict the miners from their houses she
shuddered. "I was the wife of a miner and I will stick to them," she
thought.
One day the mine manager came into the bakery. He leaned over the
showcase and talked to Nance. The son went and stood by his mother's
side to listen. "It has got to be stopped," the manager was saying. "I
will not see you ruin yourself for these cattle. I want you to close
this place till the strike is over. If you won't close it I will. The
building belongs to us. They did not appreciate what your husband did
and why should you ruin yourself for them?"
The woman looked at him and answered in a low tone full of resolution.
"They thought he was crazy and he was," she said; "but what made him
so--the rotten timbers in the mine that broke and crushed him. You and
not they are responsible for my man and what he was."
Beaut McGregor interrupted. "Well I think he is right," he declared,
leaning over the counter beside his mother and looking into her face.
"The miners don't want better things for their families, they want
more money to get drunk. We will close the doors here. We will put no
more money into bread to go into their gullets. They hated father and
he hated them and now I hate them also."
Beaut walked around the end of the counter and went with the mine
manager to the door. He locked it and put the key into his pocket.
Then he walked to the rear of the bake shop where his mother sat on a
box weeping. "It is time a man took charge here," he said.
Nance McGregor and her son sat in the bakery and looked at each other.
Miners came along the street, tried the door and went away grumbling.
Word ran from lip to lip up the hillside. "The mine manager has closed
Nance McGregor's shop," said the women leaning over back fences.
Children sprawling on the floors of the houses put up their heads and
howled. Their lives were a succession of new terrors. When a day
passed that a new terror did not shake them they went to bed happy.
When the miner and his woman stood by the door talking in low tones
they cried, expecting to be put to bed hungry. When guarded talk did
not go on by the door the miner came home drunk and beat the mother
and the children lay in beds along the wall trembling with fright.
Late that night a party of miners came to the door of the bakery and
beat upon it with their fists. "Open up here!" they shouted. Beaut
came out of the rooms above the bakery and stood in the empty shop.
His mother sat in a chair in her room and trembled. He went to the
door and unlocking it stepped out. The miners stood in groups on the
wooden sidewalk and in the mud of the road. Among them stood the old
crone who had walked beside the horses and shouted at the soldiers. A
miner with a black beard came and stood before the boy. Waving his
hand at the crowd he said, "We have come to open the bakery. Some of
us have no ovens in our stoves. You give us the key and we will open
the place. We will break in the door if you don't want to do that. The
company can't blame you if we do it by force. You can keep account of
what we take. Then when the strike is settled we will pay you."
A flame shot into the eyes of the boy. He walked down the steps and
stood among the miners. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he peered
into their faces. When he spoke his voice resounded through the
street, "You jeered at my father, Cracked McGregor, when he went into
the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and
did not spend it buying you drinks. Now you come here to get bread his
money bought and you do not pay. Then you get drunk and go reeling
past this very door. Now let me tell you something." He thrust his
hands into the air and shouted. "The mine manager did not close this
place. I closed it. You jeered at Cracked McGregor, a better man than
any of you. You have had fun with me--laughing at me. Now I jeer at
you." He ran up the steps and unlocking the door stood in the doorway.
"Pay the money you owe this bakery and there will be bread for sale
here," he called, and went in and locked the door.
The miners walked off up the street. The boy stood within the bakery,
his hands trembling. "I've told them something," he thought, "I've
shown them they can't make a fool of me." He went up the stairway to
the rooms above. By the window his mother sat, her head in her hands,
looking down into the street. He sat in a chair and thought of the
situation. "They will be back here and smash the place like they tore
up that garden," he said.
The next evening Beaut sat in the darkness on the steps before the
bakery. In his hands he held a hammer. A dull hatred of the town and
of the miners burned in his brain. "I will make it hot for some of
them if they come here," he thought. He hoped they would come. As he
looked at the hammer in his hand a phrase from the lips of the drunken
old oculist babbling of Napoleon came into his mind. He began to think
that he also must be like the figure of which the drunkard had talked.
He remembered a story the oculist had told of a fight in the streets
of a European city and muttered and waved the hammer about. Upstairs
his mother sat by the window with her head in her hands. From the
saloon down the street a light gleamed out on the wet sidewalk. The
tall pale woman who had gone with him to the eminence overlooking the
valley came down the stairway from above the undertaker's shop. She
ran along the sidewalk. On her head she wore a shawl and as she ran
she clutched it with her hand. The other hand she held against her
side.
When the women reached the boy who sat in silence before the bakery
she put her hands on his shoulders and plead with him. "Come away,"
she said. "Get your mother and come to our place. They're going to
smash you up here. You'll get hurt."
Beaut arose and pushed her away. Her coming had given him new courage.
His heart jumped at the thought of her interest in him and he wished
that the miners might come so that he could fight them before her. "I
wish I could live among people as decent as she," he thought.
A train stopped at the station down the street. There came the sound
of tramping of men and quick sharp commands. A stream of men poured
out of the saloon onto the sidewalk. Down the street came a file of
soldiers with guns swung across their shoulders. Again Beaut was
thrilled by the sight of trained orderly men moving along shoulder to
shoulder. In the presence of these men the disorganized miners seemed
pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl pulled the shawl about her
head and ran up the street to disappear into the stairway. The boy
unlocked the door and went upstairs and to bed.
After the strike Nance McGregor who owned nothing but unpaid accounts
was unable to open the bakery. A small man with a white moustache, who
chewed tobacco, came from the mill and took the unused flour and
shipped it away. The boy and his mother continued living above the
bakery store room. Again she went in the morning to wash the windows
and scrub the floors in the offices of the mine and her red-haired son
stood upon the street or sat in the pool room and talked to the black-
haired boy. "Next week I'll be going to the city and will begin making
something of myself," he said. When the time came to go he waited and
idled in the streets. Once when a miner jeered at him for his idleness
he knocked him into the gutter. The miners who hated him for his
speech on the steps, admired him for his strength and brute courage.
CHAPTER IV
In a cellar-like house driven like a stake into the hillside above
Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with
the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor
did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half
running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along
with white intense face shook their heads. "He's cracked," they said.
"He'll hurt some one yet."
Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in
the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him
to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps
in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together
collections of birds' eggs which he sold to women in the trains that
stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put
beads in their eyesockets and sold them also. He proclaimed himself an
anarchist and like Cracked McGregor muttered to himself as he hurried
along.
One day Beaut came upon Mike Hartnet reading a book as he sat on a log
overlooking the town. A shock ran through McGregor when he looked over
the shoulder of the man and saw what book he read. "It is strange," he
thought, "that this fellow should stick to the same book that fat old
Weeks makes his living by."
Beaut sat on the log beside Hartnet and watched him. The reading man
looked up and nodded nervously then slid along the log to the farther
end. Beaut laughed. He looked down at the town and then at the
frightened nervous book-reading man on the log. An inspiration came to
him.
"If you had the power, Mike, what would you do to Coal Creek?" he
asked.
The nervous man jumped and tears came into his eyes. He stood before
the log and spread out his hands. "I would go among men like Christ,"
he cried, pitching his voice forward like one addressing an audience.
"Poor and humble, I would go teaching them of love." Spreading out his
hands like one pronouncing a benediction he shouted, "Oh men of Coal
Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil."
Beaut jumped up from the log and strode before the trembling figure.
He was strangely moved. Grasping the man he thrust him back upon the
log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a great roaring laugh.
"Men of Coal Creek," he shouted, mimicking the earnestness of Hartnet,
"listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you
jeered at my father and at me and because you cheated my mother, Nance
McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganised like
cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power of force. I
would like to slay you one by one, not with weapons but with my naked
fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole they are
right. It is man's right to do what he can. Get up and fight. Fight
and I'll get on the other side and you can fight me. I'll help drive
you back into your holes."
Beaut ceased speaking and jumping over the logs ran down the road.
Among the first of the miner's houses he stopped and laughed
awkwardly. "I am cracked also," he thought, "shouting at emptiness on
a hillside." He went on in a reflective mood, wondering what power had
taken hold of him. "I would like a fight--a fight against odds," he
thought. "I will stir things up when I am a lawyer in the city."
Mike Hartnet came running down the road at the heels of McGregor.
"Don't tell," he plead trembling. "Don't tell about me in the town.
They will laugh and call names after me. I want to be let alone."
Beaut shook himself loose from the detaining hand and went on down the
hill. When he had passed out of sight of Hartnet he sat down on the
ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought of
himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of the thing that had
happened.
* * * * *
In the blue eyes of McGregor anger flashed quick and sudden. Upon the
streets of Coal Creek he walked, swinging along, his great body
inspiring fear. His mother grown grave and silent worked in the
offices of the mines. Again she had a habit of silence in her own home
and looked at her son, half fearing him. All day she worked in the
mine offices and in the evening sat silently in a chair on the porch
before her house and looked down into Main Street.
Beaut McGregor did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and
talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a
stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently
go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to
look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing body.
The miners passed him in silence hating him and dreading his wrath.
Walking among the hills he thought much of himself. "I am capable of
anything," he thought, lifting his head and looking at the towering
hills, "I wonder why I stay on here."
When he was eighteen Beaut's mother fell ill. All day she lay on her
back in bed in the room above the empty bakery. Beaut shook himself
out of his waking stupor and went about seeking work. He had not felt
that he was indolent. He had been waiting. Now he bestirred himself.
"I'll not go into the mines," he said, "nothing shall get me down
there."
He got work in a livery stable cleaning and feeding the horses. His
mother got out of bed and began going again to the mine offices.
Having started to work Beaut stayed on, thinking it but a way station
to the position he would one day achieve in the city.
In the stable worked two young boys, sons of coal miners. They drove
travelling men from the trains to farming towns in valleys back among
the hills and in the evening with Beaut McGregor they sat on a bench
before the barn and shouted at people going past the stable up the
hill.
The livery stable in Coal Creek was owned by a hunchback named Weller
who lived in the city and went home at night. During the day he sat
about the stable talking to red-haired McGregor. "You're a big beast,"
he said laughing. "You talk about going away to the city and making
something of yourself and still you stay on here doing nothing. You
want to quit this talking about being a lawyer and become a prize
fighter. Law is a place for brains not muscles." He walked through the
stables leaning his head to one side and looking up at the big fellow
who brushed the horses. McGregor watched him and grinned. "I'll show
you," he said.
The hunchback was pleased when he strutted before McGregor. He had
heard men talk of the strength and the evil temper of his stableman
and it pleased him to have so fierce a fellow cleaning the horses. At
night in the city he sat under the lamp with his wife and boasted. "I
make him step about," he said.
In the stable the hunchback kept at the heels of McGregor. "And
there's something else," he said, putting his hand in his pockets and
raising himself on his toes. "You look out for that undertaker's
daughter. She wants you. If she gets you there will be no law study
but a place in the mines for you. You let her alone and begin taking
care of your mother."
Beaut went on cleaning the horses and thinking of what the hunchback
had said. He thought there was sense to it. He also was afraid of the
tall pale girl. Sometimes when he looked at her a pain shot through
him and a combination of fear and desire gripped him. He walked away
from it and went free as he went free from the life in the darkness
down in the mine. "He has a kind of genius for keeping away from the
things he don't like," said the liveryman, talking to Uncle Charlie
Wheeler in the sun before the door of the post office.
One afternoon the two boys who worked in the livery stable with
McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a rude joke, elaborately
planned. The hunchback had stayed in the city for the day and no
travelling men got off the trains to be driven over the hills. In the
afternoon hay brought over the hill from the fruitful valley was being
put into the loft of the barn and between loads McGregor and the two
boys sat on the bench by the stable door. The two boys went to the
saloon and brought back beer, paying for it from a fund kept for that
purpose. The fund was the result of a system worked out by the two
drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day
of driving he put it into the common fund. When the fund had grown to
some size the two went to the saloon and stood before the bar drinking
until it was spent and then came back to sleep off their stupor on the
hay in the barn. After a prosperous week the hunchback occasionally
gave them a dollar for the fund.
Of the beer McGregor drank but one foaming glass. For all his idling
about Coal Creek he had never before tasted beer and it was strong and
bitter in his mouth. He threw up his head and gulped it then turned
and walked toward the rear of the stable to conceal the tears that the
taste of the stuff had forced into his eyes.
The two drivers sat on the bench and laughed. The drink they had given
Beaut was a horrible mess concocted by the laughing bartender at their
suggestion. "We will get the big fellow drunk and hear him roar," the
bartender had said.
As he walked toward the back of the stable a convulsive nausea seized
Beaut. He stumbled and pitched forward, cutting his face on the floor.
Then he rolled over on his back and groaned and a little stream of
blood ran down his cheek.
The two boys jumped up from the bench and ran toward him. They stood
looking at his pale lips. Fear seized them. They tried to lift him but
he fell from their arms and lay again on the stable floor, white and
motionless. Filled with fright they ran from the stable and through
Main Street. "We must get a doctor," they said as they hurried along,
"He is mighty sick--that fellow."
In the doorway leading to the rooms over the undertaker's shop stood
the tall pale girl. One of the running boys stopped and addressed her,
"Your red-head," he shouted, "is blind drunk lying on the stable
floor. He has cut his head and is bleeding."
The tall girl ran down the street to the offices of the mine. With
Nance McGregor she hurried to the stable. The store keepers along Main
Street looked out of their doors and saw the two women pale and with
set faces half-carrying the huge form of Beaut McGregor along the
street and in at the door of the bakery.
* * * * *
At eight o'clock that evening Beaut McGregor, his legs still unsteady,
his face white, climbed aboard a passenger train and passed out of the
life of Coal Creek. On the seat beside him a bag contained all his
clothes. In his pocket lay a ticket to Chicago and eighty-five
dollars, the last of Cracked McGregor's savings. He looked out of the
car window at the little woman thin and worn standing alone on the
station platform and a great wave of anger passed through him. "I'll
show them," he muttered. The woman looked at him and forced a smile to
her lips. The train began to move into the west. Beaut looked at his
mother and at the deserted streets of Coal Creek and put his head down
upon his hands and in the crowded car before the gaping people wept
with joy that he had seen the last of youth. He looked back at Coal
Creek, full of hate. Like Nero he might have wished that all of the
people of the town had but one head so that he might have cut it off
with a sweep of a sword or knocked it into the gutter with one
swinging blow.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
It was late in the summer of 1893 when McGregor came to Chicago, an
ill time for boy or man in that city. The big exposition of the year
before had brought multiplied thousands of restless labourers into the
city and its leading citizens, who had clamoured for the exposition
and had loudly talked of the great growth that was to come, did not
know what to do with the growth now that it had come. The depression
that followed on the heels of the great show and the financial panic
that ran over the country in that year had set thousands of hungry men
to wait dumbly on park benches poring over want advertisements in the
daily papers and looking vacantly at the lake or had driven them to
tramp aimlessly through the streets, filled with forebodings.
In time of plenty a great American city like Chicago goes on showing a
more or less cheerful face to the world while in nooks and crannies
down side-streets and alleys poverty and misery sit hunched up in
little ill-smelling rooms breeding vice. In times of depression these
creatures crawl forth and joined by thousands of the unemployed tramp
the streets through the long nights or sleep upon benches in the
parks. In the alleyways off Madison Street on the West Side and off
State Street, on the South Side, eager women driven by want sold their
bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the
newspapers of one unfilled job brought a thousand men to block the
streets at daylight before a factory door. In the crowds men swore and
knocked each other about. Working-men driven to desperation went forth
into quiet streets and knocking over citizens took their money and
watches and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth
Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by
thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the
University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked
into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a
position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to
pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the
brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street
threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
said.
"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
Lincoln suffering for mankind.
Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.
In a way McGregor had already sensed something the realisation of
which will go far toward making any man a strong figure in the world.
He was not to be bullied with words. Orators might have preached to
him all day about the progress of mankind in America, flags might have
been flapped and newspapers might have dinned the wonders of his
country into his brain. He would only have shaken his big head. He did
not yet know the whole story of how men, coming out of Europe and
given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and
forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have
produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder
of man. McGregor did not know the fullness of the tragic story of his
race. He only knew that the men he had seen were for the most part
pigmies. On the train coming to Chicago a change had come over him.
The hatred of Coal Creek that burned in him had set fire to something
else. He sat looking out of the car window at the stations running
past during the night and the following day at the cornfields of
Indiana, making his plans. In Chicago he meant to do something. Coming
from a community where no man arose above a condition of silent brute
labour he meant to step up into the light of power. Filled with hatred
and contempt of mankind he meant that mankind should serve him. Raised
among men who were but men he meant to be a master.
And his equipment was better than he knew. In a disorderly haphazard
world hatred is as effective an impulse to drive men forward to
success as love and high hope. It is a world-old impulse sleeping in
the heart of man since the day of Cain. In a way it rings true and
strong above the hideous jangle of modern life. Inspiring fear it
usurps power.
McGregor was without fear. He had not yet met his master and looked
with contempt upon the men and women he had known. Without knowing it
he had, besides a huge body hard as adamant, a clear and lucid brain.
The fact that he hated Coal Creek and thought it horrible proved his
keenness. It was horrible. Well might Chicago have trembled and rich
men strolling in the evening along Michigan Boulevard have looked
fearfully about as this huge red fellow, carrying the cheap handbag
and staring with his blue eyes at the restless moving mobs of people,
walked for the first time through its streets. In his very frame there
was the possibility of something, a blow, a shock, a thrust out of the
lean soul of strength into the jelly-like fleshiness of weakness.
In the world of men nothing is so rare as a knowledge of men. Christ
himself found the merchants hawking their wares even on the floor of
the temple and in his naive youth was stirred to wrath and drove them
through the door like flies. And history has represented him in turn
as a man of peace so that after these centuries the temples are again
supported by the hawking of wares and his fine boyish wrath is
forgotten. In France after the great revolution and the babbling of
many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short
and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of
cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming
across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong
into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all
in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word
brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to
achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies
and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe
and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and
for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By
grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have
made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the
thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of
his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his
soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of
brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat
and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder
against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned,
instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the
forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles
or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for
accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land,
by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.
In Chicago in 1893 and in the men who went aimlessly seeking work in
the streets of Chicago in that year there were none of these signs.
Like the coal mining town from which Beaut McGregor had come, the city
lay sprawling and ineffective before him, a tawdry disorderly dwelling
for millions of men, built not for the making of men but for the
making of millions by a few odd meat-packers and drygoods merchants.
With a slight lifting of his great shoulders McGregor sensed these
things although he could not have expressed his sense of them and the
hatred and contempt of men, born of his youth in the mining town, was
rekindled by the sight of city men wandering afraid and bewildered
through the streets of their own city.
Knowing nothing of the customs of the unemployed McGregor did not walk
the streets looking for signs marked "Men Wanted." He did not sit on
park benches studying want advertisements, the want advertisements
that so often proved but bait put out by suave men up dirty stairways
to glean the last few pennies from pockets of the needy. Going along
the street he swung his great body through the doorways leading to the
offices of factories. When some pert young man tried to stop him he
did not say words but drew back his fist threateningly and, glowering,
walked in. The young men at the doors of factories looked at his blue
eyes and let him pass unchallenged.
In the afternoon of his first day of seeking Beaut got a place in an
apple warehouse on the North Side, the third place offered him during
the day and the one that he accepted. The chance came to him through
an exhibition of strength. Two men, old and bent, struggled to get a
barrel of apples from the sidewalk up to a platform that ran waist
high along the front of the warehouse. The barrel had rolled to the
sidewalk from a truck standing in the gutter. The driver of the truck
stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A German with blond hair
stood upon the platform swearing in broken English. McGregor stood
upon the sidewalk and looked at the two men who were struggling with
the barrel. A feeling of immense contempt for their feebleness shone
in his eyes. Pushing them aside he grasped the barrel and with a great
heave sent it up onto the platform and spinning through an open
doorway into the receiving room of the warehouse. The two workmen
stood on the sidewalk smiling sheepishly. Across the street a group of
city firemen who lounged in the sun before an engine house clapped
their hands. The truck driver turned and prepared to send another
barrel along the plank extending from the truck across the sidewalk to
the warehouse platform. At a window in the upper part of the warehouse
a grey head protruded and a sharp voice called down to the tall
German. "Hey Frank, hire that 'husky' and let about six of the dead
ones you've got around here go home."
McGregor jumped upon the platform and walked in at the warehouse door.
The German followed, inventorying the size of the red-haired giant
with something like disapproval. His look seemed to say, "I like
strong fellows but you're too strong." He took the discomfiture of the
two feeble workmen on the sidewalk as in some way reflecting upon
himself. The two men stood in the receiving room and looked at each
other. A bystander might have thought them preparing to fight.
And then a freight elevator came slowly down from the upper part of
the warehouse and from it jumped a small grey-haired man with a yard
stick in his hand. He had a sharp restless eye and a short stubby grey
beard. Striking the floor with a bound he began to talk. "We pay two
dollars for nine hours' work here--begin at seven, quit at five. Will
you come?" Without waiting for an answer he turned to the German.
"Tell those two old 'rummies' to get their time and get out of here,"
he said, turning again and looking expectantly at McGregor.
McGregor liked the quick little man and grinned with approval of his
decisiveness. He nodded his assent to the proposal and, looking at the
German, laughed. The little man disappeared through a door leading to
an office and McGregor walked out into the street. At a corner he
turned and saw the German standing on the platform before the
warehouse looking after him. "He is wondering whether or not he can
whip me," thought McGregor.
* * * * *
In the apple warehouse McGregor worked for three years, rising during
his second year to be foreman and replacing the tall German. The
German expected trouble with McGregor and was determined to make short
work of him. He had been offended by the action of the gray-haired
superintendent in hiring the man and felt that a prerogative belonging
to himself had been ignored. All day he followed McGregor with his
eyes, trying to calculate the strength and courage in the huge body.
He knew that hundreds of hungry men walked the streets and in the end
decided that the need of work if not the spirit of the man would make
him submissive. During the second week he put the question that burned
in his brain to the test. He followed McGregor into a dimly-lighted
upper room where barrels of apples, piled to the ceiling, left only
narrow ways for passage. Standing in the semi-darkness he shouted,
calling the man who worked among the apple barrels a foul name, "I
won't have you loafing in there, you red-haired bastard," he shouted.
McGregor said nothing. He was not offended by the vileness of the name
the German had called him and took it merely as a challenge that he
had been expecting and that he meant to accept. With a grim smile on
his lips he walked toward the German and when but one apple barrel lay
between them reached across and dragged the foreman sputtering and
swearing down the passageway to a window at the end of the room. By
the window he stopped and putting his hand to the throat of the
struggling man began to choke him into submission. Blows fell on his
face and body. Struggling terribly the German kicked McGregor's legs
with desperate energy. Although his ears rang with the hammer-like
blows that fell about his neck and cheeks McGregor stool silent under
the storm. His blue eyes gleamed with hatred and the muscles of his
great arms danced in the light from the window. As he looked into the
protruding eyes of the writhing German he thought of fat Reverend
Minot Weeks of Coal Creek and added an extra twitch to the flesh
between his fingers. When a gesture of submission came from the man
against the wall he stepped back and let go his grip. The German
dropped to the floor. Standing over him McGregor delivered his
ultimatum. "You report this or try to get me fired and I'll kill you
outright," he said. "I'm going to stay here on this job until I get
ready to leave it. You can tell me what to do and how to do it but
when you speak to me again say 'McGregor'--Mr. McGregor, that's my
name."
The German got to his feet and began walking down the passageway
between the rows of piled barrels. As he went he helped himself along
with his hands. McGregor went back to work. After the retreating form
of the German he shouted, "Get a new place when you can Dutch, I'll be
taking this job away from you when I'm ready for it."
That evening as McGregor walked to the car he saw the little grey-
haired superintendent standing waiting for him before a saloon. The
man made a sign and McGregor walked across and stood beside him. They
went together into the saloon and stood leaning against the bar and
looked at each other. A smile played about the lips of the little man.
"What have you been doing to Frank?" he asked.
McGregor turned to the bartender who stood waiting before him. He
thought that the superintendent intended to try to patronise him by
buying him a drink and he did not like the thought. "What will you
have? I'll take a cigar for mine," he said quickly, defeating the
superintendent's plan by being the first to speak. When the bartender
brought the cigars McGregor paid for them and walked out at the door.
He felt like one playing a game. "If Frank meant to bully me into
submission this man also means something."
On the sidewalk before the saloon McGregor stopped. "Look here," he
said, turning and facing the superintendent, "I'm after Frank's place.
I'm going to learn the business as fast as I can. I won't put it up to
you to fire him. When I get ready for the place he won't be there."
A light flashed into the eyes of the little man. He held the cigar
McGregor had paid for as though about to throw it into the street.
"How far do you think you can go with your big fists?" he asked, his
voice rising.
McGregor smiled. He thought he had earned another victory and lighting
his cigar held the burning match before the little man. "Brains are
intended to help fists," he said, "I've got both."
The superintendent looked at the burning match and at the cigar
between his fingers. "If I don't which will you use on me?" he asked.
McGregor threw the match into the street. "Aw! don't bother asking,"
he said, holding out another match.
McGregor and the superintendent walked along the street. "I would like
to fire you but I won't. Some day you'll run that warehouse like a
clock," said the superintendent.
McGregor sat in the street-car and thought of his day. It had been he
felt a day of two battles. First the direct brutal battle of fists in
the passageway and then this other battle with the superintendent. He
thought he had won both fights. Of the fight with the tall German he
thought little. He had expected to win that. The other was different.
The superintendent he felt had wanted to patronise him, patting him on
the back and buying him drinks. Instead he had patronised the
superintendent. A battle had gone on in the brains of the two men and
he had won. He had met a new kind of man, one who did not live by the
raw strength of his muscles and he had given a good account of
himself. The conviction that he had, besides a good pair of fists, a
good brain swept in on him glorifying him. He thought of the sentence,
"Brains are intended to help fists," and wondered how he had happened
to think of it.
CHAPTER II
The street in which McGregor lived in Chicago was called Wycliff
Place, after a family of that name that had once owned the land
thereabout. The street was complete in its hideousness. Nothing more
unlovely could be imagined. Given a free hand an indiscriminate lot of
badly trained carpenters and bricklayers had builded houses beside the
cobblestone road that touched the fantastic in their unsightliness and
inconvenience.
The great west side of Chicago has hundreds of such streets and the
coal mining town out of which McGregor had come was more inspiring as
a place in which to live. As an unemployed young man, not much given
to chance companionships, Beaut had spent many long evenings wandering
alone on the hillsides above his home town. There was a kind of
dreadful loveliness about the place at night. The long black valley
with its dense shroud of smoke that rose and fell and formed itself
into fantastic shapes in the moonlight, the poor little houses
clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry of a woman being beaten
by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble of
coal cars being pushed along the railroad tracks, all of these made a
grim and rather inspiring impression on the young man's mind so that
although he hated the mines and the miners he sometimes paused in his
night wanderings and stood with his great shoulders lifted, breathing
deeply and feeling things he had no words in him to express.
In Wycliff Place McGregor got no such reactions. Foul dust filled the
air. All day the street rumbled and roared under the wheels of trucks
and light hurrying delivery wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys was
caught up by the wind and having been mixed with powdered horse manure
from the roadway flew into the eyes and the nostrils of pedestrians.
Always a babble of voices went on. At a corner saloon teamsters
stopped to have their drinking cans filled with beer and stood about
swearing and shouting. In the evening women and children went back and
forth from their houses carrying beer in pitchers from the same
saloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men reeled along the sidewalk
and the women of the town appeared in their cheap finery and paraded
before the idlers about the saloon door.
The woman who rented the room to McGregor boasted to him of Wycliff
blood. It was that she told him that had brought her to Chicago from
her home at Cairo, Illinois. "The place was left to me and not knowing
what else to do with it I came here to live," she said. She explained
to him that the Wycliffs had been people of note in the early history
of Chicago. The huge old house with the cracked stone steps and the
ROOMS TO RENT sign in the window had once been their family seat.
The history of this woman was characteristic of the miss-fire quality
of much of American life. She was at bottom a wholesome creature who
should have lived in a neat frame house in a village and tended a
garden. On Sunday she should have dressed herself with care and gone
off to sit in a country church with her hands crossed and her soul at
rest.
The thought of owning a house in the city had however paralysed her
brain. The house itself was worth a certain number of thousands of
dollars and her mind could not rise above that fact, so her good broad
face had become grimy with city dirt and her body weary from the
endless toil of caring for roomers. On summer evenings she sat on the
steps before her house clad in some bit of Wycliff finery taken from a
trunk in the attic and when a lodger came out at the door she looked
at him wistfully and said, "On such a night as this you could hear the
whistles on the river steamers in Cairo."
McGregor lived in a small room at the end of a tall on the second
floor of the Wycliff house. The windows of the room looked down into a
dirty little court almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room was
furnished with a bed, a chair that vas always threatening to come to
pieces and a desk with weak carved legs.
In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise his
Coal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of some
account in the world. From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at a
desk in a night school. From ten until midnight he read in his room.
He did not think of his surroundings, of the vast disorder of life
about him, but tried with all his strength to bring something like
order and purpose into his own mind and his own life.
In the little court under the window lay heaps of discarded newspaper
tossed about by the wind. There in the heart of the city, walled in by
the brick warehouse and half concealed under piles of chair legs cans
and broken bottles, lay two logs in their time no doubt, a part of the
grove that once lay about the house. The neighbourhood had passed so
rapidly from country estate to homes and from homes to rented lodgings
and huge brick warehouses that the marks of the lumberman's axe still
showed in the butts of the logs.
McGregor seldom saw the little court except when its ugliness was
refined and glossed over by darkness or by the moonlight. On hot
evenings he laid down his book and leaning far out of the window
rubbed his eyes and watched the discarded newspapers, worried by the
whirlpools of wind in the court, run here and there, dashing against
the warehouse walls and vainly trying to escape over the roof. The
sight fascinated him and brought a thought into his mind. He began to
think that the lives of most of the people about him were much like
the dirty newspaper harried by adverse winds and surrounded by ugly
walls of facts. The thought drove him from the window to renewed
effort among his books. "I'll do something here anyway. I'll show
them," he growled.
One living in the house with McGregor during those first years in the
city might have thought his life stupid and commonplace but to him it
did not seem so. It was for the miner's son a time of sudden and
tremendous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength and
quickness of his body he was beginning to have also confidence in the
vigour and clearness of his brain. In the warehouse he went about with
eyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods,
watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounce
upon the tall German's place as foreman.
The superintendent of the warehouse, not understanding the turn of the
talk with McGregor on the sidewalk before the saloon, decided to like
him and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall German
maintained a policy of sullen silence and went to laborious lengths to
avoid addressing him.
In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading each page
over and over and thinking of what he had read through the next day as
he rolled and piled apple barrels in the passages in the warehouse.
McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts. He read law as
another and gentler nature might have read poetry or old legends. What
he read at night he remembered and thought about during the day. He
had no dream of the glories of the law. The fact that these rules laid
down by men to govern their social organisation were the result of
ages of striving toward perfection did not greatly interest him and he
only thought of them as weapons with which to attack and defend in the
battle of brains he meant presently to fight. His mind gloated in
anticipation of the battle.
CHAPTER III
And then a new element asserted itself in the life of McGregor. One of
the hundreds of disintegrating forces that attack strong natures,
striving to scatter their force in the back currents of life, attacked
him. His big body began to feel with enervating persistency the call
of sex.
In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a mystery. By keeping
silence he won a reputation for wisdom. The clerks in the hall
in that I have utter contempt for men."
* * * * *
Again and again the words of the drunkard came back into the mind of
the McGregor boy influencing his thoughts. Grasping nothing of the
philosophy back of the man's words his imagination was yet touched by
the drunkard's tale of the great Frenchman, babbled into his ears, and
it in some way seemed to give point to his hatred of the disorganised
ineffectiveness of the life about him.
* * * * *
After Nance McGregor opened the bakery another strike came to disturb
the prosperity of the business. Again the miners walked idly through
the streets. Into the bakery they came to get bread and told Nance to
write the debt down against them. Beaut McGregor was disturbed. He saw
his father's money being spent for flour which when baked into loaves
went out of the shop under the arms of the miners who shuffled as they
walked. One night a man whose name appeared on their books followed by
a long record of charged loaves came reeling past the bakery. McGregor
went to his mother and protested. "They have money to get drunk," he
said, "let them pay for their loaves."
Nance McGregor went on trusting the miners. She thought of the women
and children in the houses on the hill and when she heard of the plans
of the mining company to evict the miners from their houses she
shuddered. "I was the wife of a miner and I will stick to them," she
thought.
One day the mine manager came into the bakery. He leaned over the
showcase and talked to Nance. The son went and stood by his mother's
side to listen. "It has got to be stopped," the manager was saying. "I
will not see you ruin yourself for these cattle. I want you to close
this place till the strike is over. If you won't close it I will. The
building belongs to us. They did not appreciate what your husband did
and why should you ruin yourself for them?"
The woman looked at him and answered in a low tone full of resolution.
"They thought he was crazy and he was," she said; "but what made him
so--the rotten timbers in the mine that broke and crushed him. You and
not they are responsible for my man and what he was."
Beaut McGregor interrupted. "Well I think he is right," he declared,
leaning over the counter beside his mother and looking into her face.
"The miners don't want better things for their families, they want
more money to get drunk. We will close the doors here. We will put no
more money into bread to go into their gullets. They hated father and
he hated them and now I hate them also."
Beaut walked around the end of the counter and went with the mine
manager to the door. He locked it and put the key into his pocket.
Then he walked to the rear of the bake shop where his mother sat on a
box weeping. "It is time a man took charge here," he said.
Nance McGregor and her son sat in the bakery and looked at each other.
Miners came along the street, tried the door and went away grumbling.
Word ran from lip to lip up the hillside. "The mine manager has closed
Nance McGregor's shop," said the women leaning over back fences.
Children sprawling on the floors of the houses put up their heads and
howled. Their lives were a succession of new terrors. When a day
passed that a new terror did not shake them they went to bed happy.
When the miner and his woman stood by the door talking in low tones
they cried, expecting to be put to bed hungry. When guarded talk did
not go on by the door the miner came home drunk and beat the mother
and the children lay in beds along the wall trembling with fright.
Late that night a party of miners came to the door of the bakery and
beat upon it with their fists. "Open up here!" they shouted. Beaut
came out of the rooms above the bakery and stood in the empty shop.
His mother sat in a chair in her room and trembled. He went to the
door and unlocking it stepped out. The miners stood in groups on the
wooden sidewalk and in the mud of the road. Among them stood the old
crone who had walked beside the horses and shouted at the soldiers. A
miner with a black beard came and stood before the boy. Waving his
hand at the crowd he said, "We have come to open the bakery. Some of
us have no ovens in our stoves. You give us the key and we will open
the place. We will break in the door if you don't want to do that. The
company can't blame you if we do it by force. You can keep account of
what we take. Then when the strike is settled we will pay you."
A flame shot into the eyes of the boy. He walked down the steps and
stood among the miners. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he peered
into their faces. When he spoke his voice resounded through the
street, "You jeered at my father, Cracked McGregor, when he went into
the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and
did not spend it buying you drinks. Now you come here to get bread his
money bought and you do not pay. Then you get drunk and go reeling
past this very door. Now let me tell you something." He thrust his
hands into the air and shouted. "The mine manager did not close this
place. I closed it. You jeered at Cracked McGregor, a better man than
any of you. You have had fun with me--laughing at me. Now I jeer at
you." He ran up the steps and unlocking the door stood in the doorway.
"Pay the money you owe this bakery and there will be bread for sale
here," he called, and went in and locked the door.
The miners walked off up the street. The boy stood within the bakery,
his hands trembling. "I've told them something," he thought, "I've
shown them they can't make a fool of me." He went up the stairway to
the rooms above. By the window his mother sat, her head in her hands,
looking down into the street. He sat in a chair and thought of the
situation. "They will be back here and smash the place like they tore
up that garden," he said.
The next evening Beaut sat in the darkness on the steps before the
bakery. In his hands he held a hammer. A dull hatred of the town and
of the miners burned in his brain. "I will make it hot for some of
them if they come here," he thought. He hoped they would come. As he
looked at the hammer in his hand a phrase from the lips of the drunken
old oculist babbling of Napoleon came into his mind. He began to think
that he also must be like the figure of which the drunkard had talked.
He remembered a story the oculist had told of a fight in the streets
of a European city and muttered and waved the hammer about. Upstairs
his mother sat by the window with her head in her hands. From the
saloon down the street a light gleamed out on the wet sidewalk. The
tall pale woman who had gone with him to the eminence overlooking the
valley came down the stairway from above the undertaker's shop. She
ran along the sidewalk. On her head she wore a shawl and as she ran
she clutched it with her hand. The other hand she held against her
side.
When the women reached the boy who sat in silence before the bakery
she put her hands on his shoulders and plead with him. "Come away,"
she said. "Get your mother and come to our place. They're going to
smash you up here. You'll get hurt."
Beaut arose and pushed her away. Her coming had given him new courage.
His heart jumped at the thought of her interest in him and he wished
that the miners might come so that he could fight them before her. "I
wish I could live among people as decent as she," he thought.
A train stopped at the station down the street. There came the sound
of tramping of men and quick sharp commands. A stream of men poured
out of the saloon onto the sidewalk. Down the street came a file of
soldiers with guns swung across their shoulders. Again Beaut was
thrilled by the sight of trained orderly men moving along shoulder to
shoulder. In the presence of these men the disorganized miners seemed
pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl pulled the shawl about her
head and ran up the street to disappear into the stairway. The boy
unlocked the door and went upstairs and to bed.
After the strike Nance McGregor who owned nothing but unpaid accounts
was unable to open the bakery. A small man with a white moustache, who
chewed tobacco, came from the mill and took the unused flour and
shipped it away. The boy and his mother continued living above the
bakery store room. Again she went in the morning to wash the windows
and scrub the floors in the offices of the mine and her red-haired son
stood upon the street or sat in the pool room and talked to the black-
haired boy. "Next week I'll be going to the city and will begin making
something of myself," he said. When the time came to go he waited and
idled in the streets. Once when a miner jeered at him for his idleness
he knocked him into the gutter. The miners who hated him for his
speech on the steps, admired him for his strength and brute courage.
CHAPTER IV
In a cellar-like house driven like a stake into the hillside above
Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with
the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor
did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half
running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along
with white intense face shook their heads. "He's cracked," they said.
"He'll hurt some one yet."
Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in
the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him
to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps
in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together
collections of birds' eggs which he sold to women in the trains that
stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put
beads in their eyesockets and sold them also. He proclaimed himself an
anarchist and like Cracked McGregor muttered to himself as he hurried
along.
One day Beaut came upon Mike Hartnet reading a book as he sat on a log
overlooking the town. A shock ran through McGregor when he looked over
the shoulder of the man and saw what book he read. "It is strange," he
thought, "that this fellow should stick to the same book that fat old
Weeks makes his living by."
Beaut sat on the log beside Hartnet and watched him. The reading man
looked up and nodded nervously then slid along the log to the farther
end. Beaut laughed. He looked down at the town and then at the
frightened nervous book-reading man on the log. An inspiration came to
him.
"If you had the power, Mike, what would you do to Coal Creek?" he
asked.
The nervous man jumped and tears came into his eyes. He stood before
the log and spread out his hands. "I would go among men like Christ,"
he cried, pitching his voice forward like one addressing an audience.
"Poor and humble, I would go teaching them of love." Spreading out his
hands like one pronouncing a benediction he shouted, "Oh men of Coal
Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil."
Beaut jumped up from the log and strode before the trembling figure.
He was strangely moved. Grasping the man he thrust him back upon the
log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a great roaring laugh.
"Men of Coal Creek," he shouted, mimicking the earnestness of Hartnet,
"listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you
jeered at my father and at me and because you cheated my mother, Nance
McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganised like
cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power of force. I
would like to slay you one by one, not with weapons but with my naked
fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole they are
right. It is man's right to do what he can. Get up and fight. Fight
and I'll get on the other side and you can fight me. I'll help drive
you back into your holes."
Beaut ceased speaking and jumping over the logs ran down the road.
Among the first of the miner's houses he stopped and laughed
awkwardly. "I am cracked also," he thought, "shouting at emptiness on
a hillside." He went on in a reflective mood, wondering what power had
taken hold of him. "I would like a fight--a fight against odds," he
thought. "I will stir things up when I am a lawyer in the city."
Mike Hartnet came running down the road at the heels of McGregor.
"Don't tell," he plead trembling. "Don't tell about me in the town.
They will laugh and call names after me. I want to be let alone."
Beaut shook himself loose from the detaining hand and went on down the
hill. When he had passed out of sight of Hartnet he sat down on the
ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought of
himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of the thing that had
happened.
* * * * *
In the blue eyes of McGregor anger flashed quick and sudden. Upon the
streets of Coal Creek he walked, swinging along, his great body
inspiring fear. His mother grown grave and silent worked in the
offices of the mines. Again she had a habit of silence in her own home
and looked at her son, half fearing him. All day she worked in the
mine offices and in the evening sat silently in a chair on the porch
before her house and looked down into Main Street.
Beaut McGregor did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and
talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a
stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently
go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to
look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing body.
The miners passed him in silence hating him and dreading his wrath.
Walking among the hills he thought much of himself. "I am capable of
anything," he thought, lifting his head and looking at the towering
hills, "I wonder why I stay on here."
When he was eighteen Beaut's mother fell ill. All day she lay on her
back in bed in the room above the empty bakery. Beaut shook himself
out of his waking stupor and went about seeking work. He had not felt
that he was indolent. He had been waiting. Now he bestirred himself.
"I'll not go into the mines," he said, "nothing shall get me down
there."
He got work in a livery stable cleaning and feeding the horses. His
mother got out of bed and began going again to the mine offices.
Having started to work Beaut stayed on, thinking it but a way station
to the position he would one day achieve in the city.
In the stable worked two young boys, sons of coal miners. They drove
travelling men from the trains to farming towns in valleys back among
the hills and in the evening with Beaut McGregor they sat on a bench
before the barn and shouted at people going past the stable up the
hill.
The livery stable in Coal Creek was owned by a hunchback named Weller
who lived in the city and went home at night. During the day he sat
about the stable talking to red-haired McGregor. "You're a big beast,"
he said laughing. "You talk about going away to the city and making
something of yourself and still you stay on here doing nothing. You
want to quit this talking about being a lawyer and become a prize
fighter. Law is a place for brains not muscles." He walked through the
stables leaning his head to one side and looking up at the big fellow
who brushed the horses. McGregor watched him and grinned. "I'll show
you," he said.
The hunchback was pleased when he strutted before McGregor. He had
heard men talk of the strength and the evil temper of his stableman
and it pleased him to have so fierce a fellow cleaning the horses. At
night in the city he sat under the lamp with his wife and boasted. "I
make him step about," he said.
In the stable the hunchback kept at the heels of McGregor. "And
there's something else," he said, putting his hand in his pockets and
raising himself on his toes. "You look out for that undertaker's
daughter. She wants you. If she gets you there will be no law study
but a place in the mines for you. You let her alone and begin taking
care of your mother."
Beaut went on cleaning the horses and thinking of what the hunchback
had said. He thought there was sense to it. He also was afraid of the
tall pale girl. Sometimes when he looked at her a pain shot through
him and a combination of fear and desire gripped him. He walked away
from it and went free as he went free from the life in the darkness
down in the mine. "He has a kind of genius for keeping away from the
things he don't like," said the liveryman, talking to Uncle Charlie
Wheeler in the sun before the door of the post office.
One afternoon the two boys who worked in the livery stable with
McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a rude joke, elaborately
planned. The hunchback had stayed in the city for the day and no
travelling men got off the trains to be driven over the hills. In the
afternoon hay brought over the hill from the fruitful valley was being
put into the loft of the barn and between loads McGregor and the two
boys sat on the bench by the stable door. The two boys went to the
saloon and brought back beer, paying for it from a fund kept for that
purpose. The fund was the result of a system worked out by the two
drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day
of driving he put it into the common fund. When the fund had grown to
some size the two went to the saloon and stood before the bar drinking
until it was spent and then came back to sleep off their stupor on the
hay in the barn. After a prosperous week the hunchback occasionally
gave them a dollar for the fund.
Of the beer McGregor drank but one foaming glass. For all his idling
about Coal Creek he had never before tasted beer and it was strong and
bitter in his mouth. He threw up his head and gulped it then turned
and walked toward the rear of the stable to conceal the tears that the
taste of the stuff had forced into his eyes.
The two drivers sat on the bench and laughed. The drink they had given
Beaut was a horrible mess concocted by the laughing bartender at their
suggestion. "We will get the big fellow drunk and hear him roar," the
bartender had said.
As he walked toward the back of the stable a convulsive nausea seized
Beaut. He stumbled and pitched forward, cutting his face on the floor.
Then he rolled over on his back and groaned and a little stream of
blood ran down his cheek.
The two boys jumped up from the bench and ran toward him. They stood
looking at his pale lips. Fear seized them. They tried to lift him but
he fell from their arms and lay again on the stable floor, white and
motionless. Filled with fright they ran from the stable and through
Main Street. "We must get a doctor," they said as they hurried along,
"He is mighty sick--that fellow."
In the doorway leading to the rooms over the undertaker's shop stood
the tall pale girl. One of the running boys stopped and addressed her,
"Your red-head," he shouted, "is blind drunk lying on the stable
floor. He has cut his head and is bleeding."
The tall girl ran down the street to the offices of the mine. With
Nance McGregor she hurried to the stable. The store keepers along Main
Street looked out of their doors and saw the two women pale and with
set faces half-carrying the huge form of Beaut McGregor along the
street and in at the door of the bakery.
* * * * *
At eight o'clock that evening Beaut McGregor, his legs still unsteady,
his face white, climbed aboard a passenger train and passed out of the
life of Coal Creek. On the seat beside him a bag contained all his
clothes. In his pocket lay a ticket to Chicago and eighty-five
dollars, the last of Cracked McGregor's savings. He looked out of the
car window at the little woman thin and worn standing alone on the
station platform and a great wave of anger passed through him. "I'll
show them," he muttered. The woman looked at him and forced a smile to
her lips. The train began to move into the west. Beaut looked at his
mother and at the deserted streets of Coal Creek and put his head down
upon his hands and in the crowded car before the gaping people wept
with joy that he had seen the last of youth. He looked back at Coal
Creek, full of hate. Like Nero he might have wished that all of the
people of the town had but one head so that he might have cut it off
with a sweep of a sword or knocked it into the gutter with one
swinging blow.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
It was late in the summer of 1893 when McGregor came to Chicago, an
ill time for boy or man in that city. The big exposition of the year
before had brought multiplied thousands of restless labourers into the
city and its leading citizens, who had clamoured for the exposition
and had loudly talked of the great growth that was to come, did not
know what to do with the growth now that it had come. The depression
that followed on the heels of the great show and the financial panic
that ran over the country in that year had set thousands of hungry men
to wait dumbly on park benches poring over want advertisements in the
daily papers and looking vacantly at the lake or had driven them to
tramp aimlessly through the streets, filled with forebodings.
In time of plenty a great American city like Chicago goes on showing a
more or less cheerful face to the world while in nooks and crannies
down side-streets and alleys poverty and misery sit hunched up in
little ill-smelling rooms breeding vice. In times of depression these
creatures crawl forth and joined by thousands of the unemployed tramp
the streets through the long nights or sleep upon benches in the
parks. In the alleyways off Madison Street on the West Side and off
State Street, on the South Side, eager women driven by want sold their
bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the
newspapers of one unfilled job brought a thousand men to block the
streets at daylight before a factory door. In the crowds men swore and
knocked each other about. Working-men driven to desperation went forth
into quiet streets and knocking over citizens took their money and
watches and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth
Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by
thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the
University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked
into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a
position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to
pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the
brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street
threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
said.
"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
Lincoln suffering for mankind.
Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.
In a way McGregor had already sensed something the realisation of
which will go far toward making any man a strong figure in the world.
He was not to be bullied with words. Orators might have preached to
him all day about the progress of mankind in America, flags might have
been flapped and newspapers might have dinned the wonders of his
country into his brain. He would only have shaken his big head. He did
not yet know the whole story of how men, coming out of Europe and
given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and
forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have
produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder
of man. McGregor did not know the fullness of the tragic story of his
race. He only knew that the men he had seen were for the most part
pigmies. On the train coming to Chicago a change had come over him.
The hatred of Coal Creek that burned in him had set fire to something
else. He sat looking out of the car window at the stations running
past during the night and the following day at the cornfields of
Indiana, making his plans. In Chicago he meant to do something. Coming
from a community where no man arose above a condition of silent brute
labour he meant to step up into the light of power. Filled with hatred
and contempt of mankind he meant that mankind should serve him. Raised
among men who were but men he meant to be a master.
And his equipment was better than he knew. In a disorderly haphazard
world hatred is as effective an impulse to drive men forward to
success as love and high hope. It is a world-old impulse sleeping in
the heart of man since the day of Cain. In a way it rings true and
strong above the hideous jangle of modern life. Inspiring fear it
usurps power.
McGregor was without fear. He had not yet met his master and looked
with contempt upon the men and women he had known. Without knowing it
he had, besides a huge body hard as adamant, a clear and lucid brain.
The fact that he hated Coal Creek and thought it horrible proved his
keenness. It was horrible. Well might Chicago have trembled and rich
men strolling in the evening along Michigan Boulevard have looked
fearfully about as this huge red fellow, carrying the cheap handbag
and staring with his blue eyes at the restless moving mobs of people,
walked for the first time through its streets. In his very frame there
was the possibility of something, a blow, a shock, a thrust out of the
lean soul of strength into the jelly-like fleshiness of weakness.
In the world of men nothing is so rare as a knowledge of men. Christ
himself found the merchants hawking their wares even on the floor of
the temple and in his naive youth was stirred to wrath and drove them
through the door like flies. And history has represented him in turn
as a man of peace so that after these centuries the temples are again
supported by the hawking of wares and his fine boyish wrath is
forgotten. In France after the great revolution and the babbling of
many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short
and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of
cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming
across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong
into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all
in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word
brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to
achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies
and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe
and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and
for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By
grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have
made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the
thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of
his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his
soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of
brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat
and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder
against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned,
instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the
forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles
or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for
accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land,
by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.
In Chicago in 1893 and in the men who went aimlessly seeking work in
the streets of Chicago in that year there were none of these signs.
Like the coal mining town from which Beaut McGregor had come, the city
lay sprawling and ineffective before him, a tawdry disorderly dwelling
for millions of men, built not for the making of men but for the
making of millions by a few odd meat-packers and drygoods merchants.
With a slight lifting of his great shoulders McGregor sensed these
things although he could not have expressed his sense of them and the
hatred and contempt of men, born of his youth in the mining town, was
rekindled by the sight of city men wandering afraid and bewildered
through the streets of their own city.
Knowing nothing of the customs of the unemployed McGregor did not walk
the streets looking for signs marked "Men Wanted." He did not sit on
park benches studying want advertisements, the want advertisements
that so often proved but bait put out by suave men up dirty stairways
to glean the last few pennies from pockets of the needy. Going along
the street he swung his great body through the doorways leading to the
offices of factories. When some pert young man tried to stop him he
did not say words but drew back his fist threateningly and, glowering,
walked in. The young men at the doors of factories looked at his blue
eyes and let him pass unchallenged.
In the afternoon of his first day of seeking Beaut got a place in an
apple warehouse on the North Side, the third place offered him during
the day and the one that he accepted. The chance came to him through
an exhibition of strength. Two men, old and bent, struggled to get a
barrel of apples from the sidewalk up to a platform that ran waist
high along the front of the warehouse. The barrel had rolled to the
sidewalk from a truck standing in the gutter. The driver of the truck
stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A German with blond hair
stood upon the platform swearing in broken English. McGregor stood
upon the sidewalk and looked at the two men who were struggling with
the barrel. A feeling of immense contempt for their feebleness shone
in his eyes. Pushing them aside he grasped the barrel and with a great
heave sent it up onto the platform and spinning through an open
doorway into the receiving room of the warehouse. The two workmen
stood on the sidewalk smiling sheepishly. Across the street a group of
city firemen who lounged in the sun before an engine house clapped
their hands. The truck driver turned and prepared to send another
barrel along the plank extending from the truck across the sidewalk to
the warehouse platform. At a window in the upper part of the warehouse
a grey head protruded and a sharp voice called down to the tall
German. "Hey Frank, hire that 'husky' and let about six of the dead
ones you've got around here go home."
McGregor jumped upon the platform and walked in at the warehouse door.
The German followed, inventorying the size of the red-haired giant
with something like disapproval. His look seemed to say, "I like
strong fellows but you're too strong." He took the discomfiture of the
two feeble workmen on the sidewalk as in some way reflecting upon
himself. The two men stood in the receiving room and looked at each
other. A bystander might have thought them preparing to fight.
And then a freight elevator came slowly down from the upper part of
the warehouse and from it jumped a small grey-haired man with a yard
stick in his hand. He had a sharp restless eye and a short stubby grey
beard. Striking the floor with a bound he began to talk. "We pay two
dollars for nine hours' work here--begin at seven, quit at five. Will
you come?" Without waiting for an answer he turned to the German.
"Tell those two old 'rummies' to get their time and get out of here,"
he said, turning again and looking expectantly at McGregor.
McGregor liked the quick little man and grinned with approval of his
decisiveness. He nodded his assent to the proposal and, looking at the
German, laughed. The little man disappeared through a door leading to
an office and McGregor walked out into the street. At a corner he
turned and saw the German standing on the platform before the
warehouse looking after him. "He is wondering whether or not he can
whip me," thought McGregor.
* * * * *
In the apple warehouse McGregor worked for three years, rising during
his second year to be foreman and replacing the tall German. The
German expected trouble with McGregor and was determined to make short
work of him. He had been offended by the action of the gray-haired
superintendent in hiring the man and felt that a prerogative belonging
to himself had been ignored. All day he followed McGregor with his
eyes, trying to calculate the strength and courage in the huge body.
He knew that hundreds of hungry men walked the streets and in the end
decided that the need of work if not the spirit of the man would make
him submissive. During the second week he put the question that burned
in his brain to the test. He followed McGregor into a dimly-lighted
upper room where barrels of apples, piled to the ceiling, left only
narrow ways for passage. Standing in the semi-darkness he shouted,
calling the man who worked among the apple barrels a foul name, "I
won't have you loafing in there, you red-haired bastard," he shouted.
McGregor said nothing. He was not offended by the vileness of the name
the German had called him and took it merely as a challenge that he
had been expecting and that he meant to accept. With a grim smile on
his lips he walked toward the German and when but one apple barrel lay
between them reached across and dragged the foreman sputtering and
swearing down the passageway to a window at the end of the room. By
the window he stopped and putting his hand to the throat of the
struggling man began to choke him into submission. Blows fell on his
face and body. Struggling terribly the German kicked McGregor's legs
with desperate energy. Although his ears rang with the hammer-like
blows that fell about his neck and cheeks McGregor stool silent under
the storm. His blue eyes gleamed with hatred and the muscles of his
great arms danced in the light from the window. As he looked into the
protruding eyes of the writhing German he thought of fat Reverend
Minot Weeks of Coal Creek and added an extra twitch to the flesh
between his fingers. When a gesture of submission came from the man
against the wall he stepped back and let go his grip. The German
dropped to the floor. Standing over him McGregor delivered his
ultimatum. "You report this or try to get me fired and I'll kill you
outright," he said. "I'm going to stay here on this job until I get
ready to leave it. You can tell me what to do and how to do it but
when you speak to me again say 'McGregor'--Mr. McGregor, that's my
name."
The German got to his feet and began walking down the passageway
between the rows of piled barrels. As he went he helped himself along
with his hands. McGregor went back to work. After the retreating form
of the German he shouted, "Get a new place when you can Dutch, I'll be
taking this job away from you when I'm ready for it."
That evening as McGregor walked to the car he saw the little grey-
haired superintendent standing waiting for him before a saloon. The
man made a sign and McGregor walked across and stood beside him. They
went together into the saloon and stood leaning against the bar and
looked at each other. A smile played about the lips of the little man.
"What have you been doing to Frank?" he asked.
McGregor turned to the bartender who stood waiting before him. He
thought that the superintendent intended to try to patronise him by
buying him a drink and he did not like the thought. "What will you
have? I'll take a cigar for mine," he said quickly, defeating the
superintendent's plan by being the first to speak. When the bartender
brought the cigars McGregor paid for them and walked out at the door.
He felt like one playing a game. "If Frank meant to bully me into
submission this man also means something."
On the sidewalk before the saloon McGregor stopped. "Look here," he
said, turning and facing the superintendent, "I'm after Frank's place.
I'm going to learn the business as fast as I can. I won't put it up to
you to fire him. When I get ready for the place he won't be there."
A light flashed into the eyes of the little man. He held the cigar
McGregor had paid for as though about to throw it into the street.
"How far do you think you can go with your big fists?" he asked, his
voice rising.
McGregor smiled. He thought he had earned another victory and lighting
his cigar held the burning match before the little man. "Brains are
intended to help fists," he said, "I've got both."
The superintendent looked at the burning match and at the cigar
between his fingers. "If I don't which will you use on me?" he asked.
McGregor threw the match into the street. "Aw! don't bother asking,"
he said, holding out another match.
McGregor and the superintendent walked along the street. "I would like
to fire you but I won't. Some day you'll run that warehouse like a
clock," said the superintendent.
McGregor sat in the street-car and thought of his day. It had been he
felt a day of two battles. First the direct brutal battle of fists in
the passageway and then this other battle with the superintendent. He
thought he had won both fights. Of the fight with the tall German he
thought little. He had expected to win that. The other was different.
The superintendent he felt had wanted to patronise him, patting him on
the back and buying him drinks. Instead he had patronised the
superintendent. A battle had gone on in the brains of the two men and
he had won. He had met a new kind of man, one who did not live by the
raw strength of his muscles and he had given a good account of
himself. The conviction that he had, besides a good pair of fists, a
good brain swept in on him glorifying him. He thought of the sentence,
"Brains are intended to help fists," and wondered how he had happened
to think of it.
CHAPTER II
The street in which McGregor lived in Chicago was called Wycliff
Place, after a family of that name that had once owned the land
thereabout. The street was complete in its hideousness. Nothing more
unlovely could be imagined. Given a free hand an indiscriminate lot of
badly trained carpenters and bricklayers had builded houses beside the
cobblestone road that touched the fantastic in their unsightliness and
inconvenience.
The great west side of Chicago has hundreds of such streets and the
coal mining town out of which McGregor had come was more inspiring as
a place in which to live. As an unemployed young man, not much given
to chance companionships, Beaut had spent many long evenings wandering
alone on the hillsides above his home town. There was a kind of
dreadful loveliness about the place at night. The long black valley
with its dense shroud of smoke that rose and fell and formed itself
into fantastic shapes in the moonlight, the poor little houses
clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry of a woman being beaten
by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble of
coal cars being pushed along the railroad tracks, all of these made a
grim and rather inspiring impression on the young man's mind so that
although he hated the mines and the miners he sometimes paused in his
night wanderings and stood with his great shoulders lifted, breathing
deeply and feeling things he had no words in him to express.
In Wycliff Place McGregor got no such reactions. Foul dust filled the
air. All day the street rumbled and roared under the wheels of trucks
and light hurrying delivery wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys was
caught up by the wind and having been mixed with powdered horse manure
from the roadway flew into the eyes and the nostrils of pedestrians.
Always a babble of voices went on. At a corner saloon teamsters
stopped to have their drinking cans filled with beer and stood about
swearing and shouting. In the evening women and children went back and
forth from their houses carrying beer in pitchers from the same
saloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men reeled along the sidewalk
and the women of the town appeared in their cheap finery and paraded
before the idlers about the saloon door.
The woman who rented the room to McGregor boasted to him of Wycliff
blood. It was that she told him that had brought her to Chicago from
her home at Cairo, Illinois. "The place was left to me and not knowing
what else to do with it I came here to live," she said. She explained
to him that the Wycliffs had been people of note in the early history
of Chicago. The huge old house with the cracked stone steps and the
ROOMS TO RENT sign in the window had once been their family seat.
The history of this woman was characteristic of the miss-fire quality
of much of American life. She was at bottom a wholesome creature who
should have lived in a neat frame house in a village and tended a
garden. On Sunday she should have dressed herself with care and gone
off to sit in a country church with her hands crossed and her soul at
rest.
The thought of owning a house in the city had however paralysed her
brain. The house itself was worth a certain number of thousands of
dollars and her mind could not rise above that fact, so her good broad
face had become grimy with city dirt and her body weary from the
endless toil of caring for roomers. On summer evenings she sat on the
steps before her house clad in some bit of Wycliff finery taken from a
trunk in the attic and when a lodger came out at the door she looked
at him wistfully and said, "On such a night as this you could hear the
whistles on the river steamers in Cairo."
McGregor lived in a small room at the end of a tall on the second
floor of the Wycliff house. The windows of the room looked down into a
dirty little court almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room was
furnished with a bed, a chair that vas always threatening to come to
pieces and a desk with weak carved legs.
In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise his
Coal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of some
account in the world. From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at a
desk in a night school. From ten until midnight he read in his room.
He did not think of his surroundings, of the vast disorder of life
about him, but tried with all his strength to bring something like
order and purpose into his own mind and his own life.
In the little court under the window lay heaps of discarded newspaper
tossed about by the wind. There in the heart of the city, walled in by
the brick warehouse and half concealed under piles of chair legs cans
and broken bottles, lay two logs in their time no doubt, a part of the
grove that once lay about the house. The neighbourhood had passed so
rapidly from country estate to homes and from homes to rented lodgings
and huge brick warehouses that the marks of the lumberman's axe still
showed in the butts of the logs.
McGregor seldom saw the little court except when its ugliness was
refined and glossed over by darkness or by the moonlight. On hot
evenings he laid down his book and leaning far out of the window
rubbed his eyes and watched the discarded newspapers, worried by the
whirlpools of wind in the court, run here and there, dashing against
the warehouse walls and vainly trying to escape over the roof. The
sight fascinated him and brought a thought into his mind. He began to
think that the lives of most of the people about him were much like
the dirty newspaper harried by adverse winds and surrounded by ugly
walls of facts. The thought drove him from the window to renewed
effort among his books. "I'll do something here anyway. I'll show
them," he growled.
One living in the house with McGregor during those first years in the
city might have thought his life stupid and commonplace but to him it
did not seem so. It was for the miner's son a time of sudden and
tremendous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength and
quickness of his body he was beginning to have also confidence in the
vigour and clearness of his brain. In the warehouse he went about with
eyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods,
watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounce
upon the tall German's place as foreman.
The superintendent of the warehouse, not understanding the turn of the
talk with McGregor on the sidewalk before the saloon, decided to like
him and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall German
maintained a policy of sullen silence and went to laborious lengths to
avoid addressing him.
In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading each page
over and over and thinking of what he had read through the next day as
he rolled and piled apple barrels in the passages in the warehouse.
McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts. He read law as
another and gentler nature might have read poetry or old legends. What
he read at night he remembered and thought about during the day. He
had no dream of the glories of the law. The fact that these rules laid
down by men to govern their social organisation were the result of
ages of striving toward perfection did not greatly interest him and he
only thought of them as weapons with which to attack and defend in the
battle of brains he meant presently to fight. His mind gloated in
anticipation of the battle.
CHAPTER III
And then a new element asserted itself in the life of McGregor. One of
the hundreds of disintegrating forces that attack strong natures,
striving to scatter their force in the back currents of life, attacked
him. His big body began to feel with enervating persistency the call
of sex.
In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a mystery. By keeping
silence he won a reputation for wisdom. The clerks in the hall