Андерсен Ш. Марширующие люди (engl)

bedrooms thought him a scientist. The woman from Cairo thought him a
theological student. Down the hall a pretty girl with large black eyes
who worked in a department store down town dreamed of him at night.
When in the evening he banged the door to his room and strode down the
hallway going to the night school she sat in a chair by the open door
of her room. As he passed she raised her eyes and looked at him
boldly. When he returned she was again by the door and again she
looked boldly at him.

In his room, after the meetings with the black-eyed girl McGregor
found difficulty in keeping his mind on the reading. He felt as he had
felt with the pale girl on the hillside beyond Coal Creek. With her as
with the pale girl he felt the need of defending himself. He began to
make it a practice to hurry along past her door.

The girl in the hall bedroom thought constantly of McGregor. When he
had gone to night school another young man of the house who wore a
Panama hat came from the floor above and, putting his hands on the
door frames of her room, stood looking at her and talking. In his lips
he held a cigarette, which when he talked hung limply from the corner
of his mouth.

This young man and the black-eyed girl kept up a continuous stream of
comments on the doings of red-haired McGregor. Begun by the young man,
who hated him because of his silence, the subject was kept alive by
the girl who wanted to talk of McGregor.

On Saturday nights the young man and the girl sometimes went together
to the theatre. One night in the summer when they had returned to the
front of the house the girl stopped. "Let's see what the big red-head
is doing," she said.

Going around the block they stole in the darkness down an alleyway and
stood in the little dirty court looking up at McGregor who, with his
feet in the window and a lamp burning at his shoulder, sat in his room
reading.

When they returned to the front of the house the black-eyed girl
kissed the young man, closing her eyes and thinking of McGregor. In
her room later she lay abed dreaming. She imagined herself assaulted
by the young man who had crept into her room and that McGregor had
come roaring down the hall to snatch him away and fling him outside
the door.

At the end of the hallway near the stairway leading to the street
lived a barber. He had deserted a wife and four children in a town in
Ohio and to prevent recognition had grown a black beard. Between this
man and McGregor a companionship had sprung up and they went together
on Sunday mornings to walk in the park. The black bearded man called
himself Frank Turner.

Frank Turner had a passion. Through the evenings and on Sunday
afternoons he sat in his room making violins. He worked with a knife,
glue, pieces of glass and sand paper and spent his earnings for
ingredients for the making of varnishes. When he got hold of a piece
of wood that seemed an answer to his prayers he took it to McGregor's
room and holding it up to the light talked of what he would do with
it. Sometimes he brought a violin and sitting in the open window
tested the quality of its tone. One evening he took an hour of
McGregor's time to talk of the varnish of Cremona and to read to him
from a worn little book concerning the old Italian masters of violin
making.

* * * * *

On a bench in the park sat Turner, the maker of violins, the man who
dreamed of the rediscovery of the varnish of Cremona, talking to
McGregor, son of the Pennsylvania miner.

It was a Sunday afternoon and the park was vibrant with life. All day
the street cars had been unloading Chicagoans at the park entrance.
They came in pairs and in parties, young men with their sweethearts
and fathers with families at their heels. Now at the end of the day
they continued to come, a steady stream of humanity flowing along the
gravel walk past the bench where the two men sat in talk. Through the
stream and crossing it went another stream homeward bound. Babies
cried. Fathers called to the children at play on the grass. Cars
coming to the park filled went away filled.

McGregor looked about him and thought of himself and of the restless
moving people. In him there was none of that vague fear of the
multitude common to many solitary souls. His contempt of men and of
the lives lived by men reinforced his native boldness. The odd little
rounding of the shoulders of even the athletic young men made him
straighten with pride his own shoulders and fat and lean, tall and
short, he thought of all men as counters in some vast games at which
he was presently to be a master player.

The passion for form, that strange intuitive power that many men have
felt and none but the masters of human life have understood, had begun
to awaken in him. Already he had begun to sense out the fact that for
him law was but an incident in some vast design and he was altogether
untouched by the desire for getting on in the world, by the greedy
little snatching at trifles that was the whole purpose of the lives of
so many of the people about him. When somewhere in the park a band
began to play he nodded his head up and down and ran his hand
nervously up and down the legs of his trousers. Into his mind came the
desire to boast to the barber, telling of the things he meant to do in
the world, but he put the desire away. Instead he sat silently
blinking his eyes and wondering at the persistent air of
ineffectiveness in the people who passed. When a band went by playing
march music and followed by some fifty men wearing white plumes in
their hats and walking with self-conscious awkwardness, he was
startled. Among the people he thought there was a change. Something
like a running shadow passed over them. The babbling of voices ceased
and like himself the people began to nod their heads. A thought,
gigantic in its simplicity, began to come into his mind but was wiped
out immediately by his impatience with the marchers. A madness to
spring up and run among them knocking them about and making them march
with the power that comes of abandonment almost lifted him from the
bench. His mouth twitched and his fingers ached for action.

* * * * *

In and out among the trees and on the green spaces moved the people.
Along the shores of a pond sat men and women eating the evening meal
from baskets or from white cloths spread on the grass. They laughed
and shouted at each other and at the children, calling them back from
the gravel driveways filled with moving carriages. Beaut saw a girl
throw an egg shell and hit a young fellow between the eyes, and then
run laughing away along the shore of the pond. Under a tree a woman
nursed a babe, covering her breasts with a shawl so that just the
black head of the babe showed. Its tiny hand clutched at the mouth of
the woman. In an open space in the shadow of a building young men
played baseball, the shouts of the spectators rising above the murmur
of the voices of people on the gravel walk.

A thought came into McGregor's mind that he wanted to discuss with the
older man. He was moved by the sight of women about and shook himself
like one awakening from a dream. Then he began looking at the ground
and kicking up the gravel with his foot. "Look here," he said, turning
to the barber, "what is a man to do about women, about getting what he
wants from the women?"

The barber seemed to understand. "It has come to that then?" he asked
and looked quickly up. He lighted a pipe and sat looking at the
people. It was then he told McGregor of the wife and four children in
the Ohio town, describing the little brick house and the garden and
the coop for chickens at the back like one who lingers over a place
dear to his fancy. Something old and weary was in his voice as he
finished.

"It wasn't a matter for me to decide," he said. "I came away because I
couldn't do anything else. I'm not excusing myself, I'm just telling
you. There was something messy and disorderly about it all, about my
life with her and with them. I couldn't stand it. I felt myself being
submerged by something. I wanted to be orderly and to work, you see. I
couldn't let violin making alone. Lord, how I tried--tried bluffing
myself about it--calling it a fad."

The barber looked nervously at McGregor to reassure himself of his
interest. "I owned a shop on the main street of our town. Back of it
was a blacksmith shop. During the day I stood by the chair in my shop
talking to men being shaved about the love of women and a man's duty
to his family. Summer afternoons I went and sat on a keg in the
blacksmith shop and talked of the same thing with the smith but all
that did me no good.

"When I let myself go I dreamed not of my duty to my family but of
working undisturbed as I do now here in the city in my room in the
evenings and on Sundays."

A sharpness came into the voice of the speaker. He turned to McGregor
and talked vigorously like one making a defence. "My woman was a good
enough sort," he said. "I suppose loving is an art like writing a book
or drawing pictures or making violins. People try to do it and don't
succeed. In the end we threw the job up and just lived together like
most people do. Our lives got mussy and meaningless. That's how it
was.

"Before she married me my wife had been a stenographer in a factory
that made tin cans. She liked that work. She could make her fingers
dance along the keys. When she read a book at home she didn't think
the writer amounted to much if he made mistakes about punctuation. Her
boss was so proud of her that he would brag of her work to visitors
and sometimes would go off fishing leaving the running of the business
in her hands.

"I don't know why she married me. She was happier there and she is
happier back there now. We got to walking together on Sunday evenings
and standing under the trees on side streets, kissing and looking at
each other. We talked about a lot of things. We seemed to need each
other. Then we got married and started living together.

"It didn't work out. After we had been married a few years things
changed. I don't know why. I thought I was the same as I had been and
I think she was. We used to sit around quarrelling about it, each
blaming the other. Anyway we didn't get along.

"We would sit on the little front porch of our house in the evening,
she bragging of the work she had done in the can factory and I
dreaming of quietude and a chance to work on the violins. I thought I
knew a way to increase the quality and beauty of tone and I had that
idea about varnish I have talked to you about. I even dreamed of doing
things those old fellows of Cremona didn't do.

"When she had been talking of her work in the office for maybe a half
hour she would look up and find that I hadn't been listening. We would
quarrel. We even quarrelled before the children after they came. Once
she said that she didn't see how it would matter if no violins had
ever been made and that night I dreamed of choking her in bed. I woke
up and lay there beside her thinking of it with something like real
satisfaction in just the thought that one long hard grip of my fingers
would get her out of my way for good.

"We didn't always feel that way. Every little while a change would
come over both of us and we would begin to take an interest in each
other. I would be proud of the work she had done in the factory and
would brag of it to men coming into the shop. In the evening she would
be sympathetic about the violins and put the baby to bed to let me
alone at my work in the kitchen.

"Then we would begin to sit in the darkness in the house and hold each
other's hands. We would forgive things that had been said and play a
sort of game, chasing each other about the room in the darkness and
knocking against the chairs and laughing. Then we would begin to look
at each other and kiss. Presently there would be another baby."

The barber threw up his hands with a gesture of impatience. His voice
lost its softer, reminiscent quality. "Such times didn't last," he
said. "On the whole it was no life to live. I came away. The children
are in a state institution and she has gone back to her work in the
office. The town hates me. They have made a heroine of her. I'm here
talking to you with these whiskers on my face so that people from my
town wouldn't know me if they came along. I'm a barber and I would
shave them off fast enough if it wasn't for that."

A woman walking past looked back at McGregor. In her eyes lurked an
invitation. It reminded him of something in the eyes of the pale
daughter of the undertaker of Coal Creek. An uneasy tremor ran through
him. "What do you do about women now?" he asked.

The voice of the smaller man arose harsh and excited in the evening
air. "I get the feeling taken out of me as a man would have a tooth
fixed," he said. "I pay money for the service and keep my mind on what
I want to do. There are plenty of women for that, women who are good
for that only. When I first came here I used to wander about at night,
wanting to go to my room and work but with my mind and my will
paralysed by that feeling. I don't do that now and I won't again. What
I do many men do--good men--men who do good work. What's the use
thinking about it when you only run against a stone wall and get
hurt?"

The black bearded man arose, thrust his hands into his trousers
pockets and looked about him. Then he sat down again. He seemed to be
filled with suppressed excitement. "There is a big hidden something
going on in modern life," he said, talking rapidly and excitedly. "It
used to touch only the men higher up, now it reaches down to men like
me--barbers and workingmen. Men know about it but don't talk and don't
dare think. Their women have changed. Women used to be willing to do
anything for men, just be slaves to them. The best men don't ask that
now and don't want that."

He jumped to his feet and stood over McGregor. "Men don't understand
what's going on and don't care," he said. "They are too busy getting
things done or going to ball games or quarrelling about politics.

"And what do they know about it if they are fools enough to think?
They get thrown into false notions. They see about them a lot of fine
purposeful women maybe caring for their children and they blame
themselves for their vices and are ashamed. Then they turn to the
other women anyway, shutting their eyes and going ahead. They pay for
what they want as they would pay for a dinner, thinking no more of the
women who serve them than they do of the waitresses who serve them in
the restaurants. They refuse to think of the new kind of woman that is
growing up. They know that if they get sentimental about her they'll
get into trouble or get new tests put to them, be disturbed you see,
and spoil their work or their peace of mind. They don't want to get
into trouble or be disturbed. They want to get a better job or enjoy a
ball game or build a bridge or write a book. They think that a man who
gets sentimental about any woman is a fool and of course he is."

"Do you mean that all of them do that?" asked McGregor. He wasn't
upset by what had been said. It struck him as being true. For himself
he was afraid of women. It seemed to him that a road was being built
by his companion along which he might travel with safety. He wanted
the man to go on talking. Into his brain flashed the thought that if
he had the thing to do over there would have been a different ending
to the afternoon spent with the pale girl on the hillside.

The barber sat down upon the bench. The flush out of his cheeks. "Well
I have done pretty well myself," he said, "but then you know I make
violins and don't think of women. I've been in Chicago two years and
I've spent just eleven dollars. I would like to know what the average
man spends. I wish some fellow would get the facts and publish them.
It would make people sit up. There must be millions spent here every
year."

"You see I'm not very strong and I stand all day on my feet in the
barber shop." He looked at McGregor and laughed. "The black-eyed girl
in the hall is after you," he said. "You'd better look out. You let
her alone. Stick to your law books. You are not like me. You are big
and red and strong. Eleven dollars won't pay your way here in Chicago
for no two years."

McGregor looked again at the people moving toward the park entrance in
the gathering darkness. He thought it wonderful that a brain could
think a thing out so clearly and words express thoughts so lucidly.
His eagerness to follow the passing girls with his eyes was gone. He
was interested in the older man's viewpoint. "And what about
children?" he asked.

The older man sat sideways on the bench. There was a troubled look in
his eyes and a suppressed eager quality in his voice. "I'm going to
tell you about that," he said. "I don't want to keep anything back.

"Look here!" he demanded, sliding along the bench toward McGregor and
emphasising his points by slapping one hand down upon the other.
"Ain't all children my children?" He paused, trying to gather his
scattered thoughts into words. When McGregor started to speak he put
his hand up as though to ward off a new thought or another question.
"I'm not trying to dodge," he said. "I'm trying to get thoughts that
have been in my head day after day in shape to tell. I haven't tried
to express them before. I know men and women cling to their children.
It's the only thing they have left of the dream they had before they
married. I felt that way. It held me for a long time. It would be
holding me now only that the violins pulled so hard at me."

He threw up his hand impatiently. "You see I had to find an answer. I
couldn't think of being a skunk--running away--and I couldn't stay. I
wasn't intended to stay. Some men are intended to work and take care
of children and serve women perhaps but others have to keep trying for
a vague something all their lives--like me trying for a tone on a
violin. If they don't get it it doesn't matter, they have to keep
trying.

"My wife used to say I'd get tired of it. No woman ever really
understands a man caring for anything except herself. I knocked that
out of her."

The little man looked up at McGregor. "Do you think I'm a skunk?" he
asked.

McGregor looked at him gravely. "I don't know," he said. "Go on and
tell me about the children."

"I said they were the last things to cling to. They are. We used to
have religion. But that's pretty well gone now--the old kind. Now men
think about children, I mean a certain kind of men--the ones that have
work they want to get on with. Children and work are the only things
that kind care about. If they have a sentiment about women it's only
about their own--the one they have in the house with them. They want
to keep that one finer than they are themselves. So they work the
other feeling out on the paid women.

"Women fuss about men loving children. Much they care. It's only a
plan for demanding adulation for themselves that they don't earn.
Once, when I first came to the city, I took a place as servant in a
wealthy family. I wanted to stay under cover until my beard grew.
Women used to come there to receptions and to meetings in the
afternoon to talk about reforms they were interested in----Bah! They
work and scheme trying to get at men. They are at it all their lives,
flattering, diverting us, giving us false ideas, pretending to be weak
and uncertain when they are strong and determined. They have no mercy.
They wage war on us trying to make us slaves. They want to take us
captive home to their houses as Caesar took captives home to Rome.

"You look here!" He jumped to his feet again and shook his fingers at
McGregor. "You just try something. You try being open and frank and
square with a woman--any woman--as you would with a man. Let her live
her own life and ask her to let you live yours. You try it. She won't.
She will die first."

He sat down again upon the bench and shook his head back and forth.
"Lord how I wish I could talk!" he said. "I'm making a muddle of this
and I wanted to tell you. Oh, how I wanted to tell you! It's part of
my idea that a man should tell a boy all he knows. We've got to quit
lying to them."

McGregor looked at the ground. He was profoundly and deeply moved and
interested as he had never before been moved by anything but hate.

Two women coming along the gravel walk stopped under a tree and looked
back. The barber smiled and raised his hat. When they smiled back at
him he rose and started toward them. "Come on boy," he whispered
behind his hand to McGregor. "Let's get them."

When McGregor looked up the scene before his eyes infuriated him. The
smiling barber with his hat in his hand, the two women waiting under
the tree, the look of half-guilty innocence on the faces of all of
them, stirred a blind fury in his brain. He sprang forward, clutching
the shoulder of Turner with his hand. Whirling him about he threw him
to his hands and knees. "Get out of here you females!" he roared at
the women who ran off in terror down the walk.

The barber sat again upon the bench beside McGregor. He rubbed his
hands together to brush the bits of gravel out of the flesh. "What's
got wrong with you?" he asked.

McGregor hesitated. He wondered how he should tell what was in his
mind. "Everything in its place," he said finally. "I wanted to go on
with our talk."

Lights flashed out of the darkness of the park. The two men sat on the
bench thinking each his own thoughts.

"I want to take some work out of the clamps to-night," the barber
said, looking at his watch. Together the two men walked along the
street. "Look here," said McGregor. "I didn't mean to hurt you. Those
two women that came up and interfered with what we were working out
made me furious."

"Women always interfere," said the barber. "They raise hell with men."
His mind ran out and began to play with the world-old problem of the
sexes. "If a lot of women fall in the fight with us men and become our
slaves--serving us as the paid women do--need they fuss about it? Let
them be game and try to help work it out as men have been game and
have worked and thought through ages of perplexity and defeat."

The barber stopped on the street corner to fill and light his pipe.
"Women can change everything when they want to," he said, looking at
McGregor and letting the match burn out in his fingers. "They can have
motherhood pensions and room to work out their own problem in the
world or anything else that they really want. They can stand up face
to face with men. They don't want to. They want to enslave us with
their faces and their bodies. They want to carry on the old, old weary
fight." He tapped McGregor on the arm. "If a few of us--wanting with
all our might to get something done--beat them at their own game,
don't we deserve the victory?" he asked.

"But sometimes I think I would like a woman to live with, you know,
just to sit and talk with me," said McGregor.

The barber laughed. Puffing at his pipe he walked down the street. "To
be sure! To be sure!" he said. "I would. Any man would. I like to sit
in the room for a spell in the evening talking to you but I would hate
to give up violin making and be bound all my life to serve you and
your purposes just the same."

In the hallway of their own house the barber spoke to McGregor as he
looked down the hallway to where the door of the black eyed girl's
room had just crept open. "You let women alone," he said; "when you
feel you can't stay away from them any longer you come and talk it
over with me."

McGregor nodded and went along the hallway to his own room. In the
darkness he stood by the window and looked down into the court. The
feeling of hidden power, the ability to rise above the mess into which
modern life had sunk that had come to him in the park, returned and he
walked nervously about. When finally he sat down upon a chair and
leaning forward put his head in his hands he felt like one who has
started on a long journey through a strange and dangerous country and
who has unexpectedly come upon a friend going the same way.




CHAPTER IV


The people of Chicago go home from their work at evening--drifting
they go in droves, hurrying along. It is a startling thing to look
closely at them. The people have bad mouths. Their mouths are slack
and the jaws do not hang right. The mouths are like the shoes they
wear. The shoes have become run down at the corners from too much
pounding on the hard pavements and the mouths have become crooked from
too much weariness of soul.

Something is wrong with modern American life and we Americans do not
want to look at it. We much prefer to call ourselves a great people
and let it go at that.

It is evening and the people of Chicago go home from work. Clatter,
clatter, clatter, go the heels on the hard pavements, jaws wag, the
wind blows and dirt drifts and sifts through the masses of the people.
Every one has dirty ears. The stench in the street cars is horrible.
The antiquated bridges over the rivers are packed with people. The
suburban trains going away south and west are cheaply constructed and
dangerous. A people calling itself great and living in a city also
called great go to their houses a mere disorderly mass of humans
cheaply equipped. Everything is cheap. When the people get home to
their houses they sit on cheap chairs before cheap tables and eat
cheap food. They have given their lives for cheap things. The poorest
peasant of one of the old countries is surrounded by more beauty. His
very equipment for living has more solidity.

The modern man is satisfied with what is cheap and unlovely because he
expects to rise in the world. He has given his life to that dreary
dream and he is teaching his children to follow the same dream.
McGregor was touched by it. Being confused by the matter of sex he had
listened to the advice of the barber and meant to settle things in the
cheap way. One evening a month after the talk in the park he hurried
along Lake Street on the West Side with that end in view. It was near
eight o'clock and growing dark and McGregor should have been at the
night school. Instead he walked along the street looking at the ill-
kept frame houses. A fever burned in his blood. An impulse, for the
moment stronger than the impulse that kept him at work over books
night after night there in the big disorderly city and as yet stronger
than any new impulse toward a vigorous compelling march through life,
had hold of him. His eyes stared into the windows. He hurried along
filled with a lust that stultified his brain and will. A woman sitting
at the window of a little frame house smiled and beckoned to him.

McGregor walked along the path leading to the little frame house. The
path ran through a squalid yard. It was a foul place like the court
under his window behind the house in Wycliff Place. Here also
discoloured papers worried by the wind ran about in crazy circles.
McGregor's heart pounded and his mouth felt dry and unpleasant. He
wondered what he should say and how he should say it when he came into
the presence of the woman. He wished there were some one to be hit
with his fist. He didn't want to make love, he wanted relief. He would
have much preferred a fight.

The veins in McGregor's neck began to swell and as he stood in the
darkness before the door of the house he swore. He stared up and down
the street but the sky, the sight of which might have helped him, was
hidden from view by the structure of an elevated railroad. Pushing
open the door of the house he stepped in. In the dim light he could
see nothing but a form sprang out of the darkness and a pair of
powerful arms pinned his hands to his sides. McGregor looked quickly
about A man huge as himself held him tightly against the door. He had
one glass eye and a stubby black beard and in the half light looked
sinister and dangerous. The hand of the woman who had beckoned to him
from the window fumbled in McGregor's pockets and came out clutching a
little roll of money. Her face, set now and ugly like the man's,
looked up at him from under the arms of her ally.

In a moment McGregor's heart stopped pounding and the dry unpleasant
taste went out of his mouth. He felt relieved and glad at this sudden
turn to the affair.

With a quick upward snap of his knees into the stomach of the man who
had held him McGregor freed himself. A swinging blow to the neck sent
his assailant groaning to the floor. McGregor sprang across the room.
In the corner by the bed he caught the woman. Clutching her by the
hair he whirled her about. "Hand over that money," he said fiercely.

The woman put up her hands and plead with him. The grip of his hands
in her hair brought the tears to her eyes. She thrust the roll of
bills into his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he intended to
kill her.

A new feeling swept over McGregor. The thought of having come into the
house at the invitation of this woman was revolting to him. He
wondered how he could have been such a beast. As he stood in the dim
light thinking of this and looking at the woman he became lost in
thought and wondered why the idea given him by the barber, that had
seemed so clear and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes stared
at the woman as his mind returned to the black-bearded barber talking
on the park bench and he was seized with a blind fury, a fury not
directed at the people in the foul little room but at himself and his
own blindness. Again a great hatred of the disorder of life took hold
of him and as though all of the disorderly people of the world were
personified in her he swore and shook the woman as a dog might have
shaken a foul rag.

"Sneak. Dodger. Mussy fool," he muttered, thinking of himself as a
giant attacked by some nauseous beast. The woman screamed with terror.
Seeing the look on her assailant's face and mistaking the meaning of
his words she trembled and thought again of death. Reaching under the
pillow on the bed she got another roll of bills and thrust that also
into McGregor's hands. "Please go," she plead. "We were mistaken. We
thought you were some one else."

McGregor strode to the door past the man on the floor who groaned and
rolled about. He walked around the corner to Madison Street and
boarded a car for the night school. Sitting in the car he counted the
money in the roll thrust into his hand by the kneeling woman and
laughed so that the people in the car looked at him in amazement.
"Turner has spent eleven dollars among them in two years and I have
got twenty-seven dollars in one night," he thought. He jumped off the
car and walked along under the street lights striving to think things
out. "I can't depend on any one," he muttered. "I have to make my own
way. The barber is as confused as the rest of them and he doesn't know
it. There is a way out of the confusion and I'm going to find it, but
I'll have to do it alone. I can't take any one's word for anything."




CHAPTER V


The matter of McGregor's attitude toward women and the call of sex was
not of course settled by the fight in the house in Lake Street. He was
a man who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed strongly
to the mating instinct in women and more than once his purpose was to
be shaken and his mind disturbed by the forms, the faces and the eyes
of women.

McGregor thought he had settled the matter. He forgot the black-eyed
girl in the hallway and thought only of advancement in the warehouse
and of study in his room at night. Now and then he took an evening off
and went for a walk through the streets or in one of the parks.

In the streets of Chicago, under the night lights, among the restless
moving people he was a figure to be remembered. Sometimes he did not
see the people at all but went swinging along in the same spirit in
which he had walked in the Pennsylvania hills. He was striving to get
a hold of some elusive quality in life that seemed to be forever out
of reach. He did not want to be a lawyer or a warehouseman. What did
he want? Along the street he went trying to make up his mind and
because his was not a gentle nature his perplexity drove him to anger
and he swore.

Up and down Madison Street he went striding along, his lips muttering
words. In a corner saloon some one played a piano. Groups of girls
passed laughing and talking. He came to the bridge that led over the
river into the loop district and then turned restlessly back. On the
sidewalks along Canal Street he saw strong-bodied men loitering before
cheap lodging houses. Their clothing was filthy with long wear and
there was no light of determination in their faces. In the little fine
interstices of the cloth of which their clothes were made was gathered
the filth of the city in which they lived and in the stuff of their
natures the filth and disorder of modern civilisation had also found
lodging.

On walked McGregor looking at man-made things and the flame of anger
within burned stronger and stronger. He saw the drifting clouds of
people of all nations that wander at night in Halstead Street and
turning into a side street saw also the Italians, Poles and Russians
that at evening gather on the sidewalks before tenements in that
district.

The desire in McGregor for some kind of activity became a madness. His
body shook with the strength of his desire to end the vast disorder of
life. With all the ardour of youth he wanted to see if with the
strength of his arm he could shake mankind out of its sloth. A drunken
man passed and following him came a large man with a pipe in his
mouth. The large man did not walk with any suggestion of power in his
legs. He shambled along. He was like a huge child with fat cheeks and
great untrained body, a child without muscles and hardness, clinging
to the skirts of life.

McGregor could not bear the sight of the big ungainly figure. The man
seemed to personify all of the things against which his soul was in
revolt and he stopped and stood crouched, a ferocious light burning in
his eyes.

Into the gutter rolled the man stunned by the force of the blow dealt
him by the miner's son. He crawled on his hands and knees and cried
for help. His pipe had rolled away into the darkness. McGregor stood
on the sidewalk and waited. A crowd of men standing before a tenement
house started to run toward him. Again he crouched. He prayed that
they would come on and let him fight them also. In anticipation of a
great struggle joy shone in his eyes and his muscles twitched.

And then the man in the gutter got to his feet and ran away. The men
who had started to run toward him stopped and turned back. McGregor
walked on, his heart heavy with the sense of defeat. He was a little
sorry for the man he had struck and who had made so ridiculous a
figure crawling about on his hands and knees and he was more perplexed
than ever.

* * * * *

McGregor tried again to solve the problem of women. He had been much
pleased by the outcome of the affair in the little frame house and the
next day bought law books with the twenty-seven dollars thrust into
his hand by the frightened woman. Later he stood in his room
stretching his great body like a lion returned from the kill and
thought of the little black-bearded barber in the room at the end of
the hall stooping over his violin, his mind busy with the attempt to
justify himself because he would not face one of life's problems. The
feeling of resentment against the man had gone. He thought of the
course laid out for himself by that philosopher and laughed. "There is
something about it to avoid, like giving yourself up to digging in the
dirt under the ground," he told himself.

McGregor's second adventure began on a Saturday night and again he let
himself be led into it by the barber. The night was hot and the
younger man sat in his room filled with a desire to go forth and
explore the city. The quiet of the house, the distant rumble of street
cars, the sound of a band playing far down the street disturbed and
diverted his mind. He wished that he might take a stick in his hands
and go forth to prowl among the hills as he had gone on such nights in
his youth in the Pennsylvania town.

The door to his room opened and the barber came in. In his hand he
held two tickets. He sat on the window sill to explain.

"There is a dance in a hall on Monroe Street," said the barber
excitedly. "I have two tickets here. A politician sold them to the
boss in the shop where I work." The barber threw back his head and
laughed. To his mind there was something delicious in the thought of
the boss barber being forced by the politicians to buy dance tickets.
"They cost two dollars each," he cried and shook with laughter "You
should have seen my boss squirm. He didn't want the tickets but was
afraid not to take them. The politician could make trouble for him and
he knew it. You see we make a hand-book on the races in the shop and
that is against the law. The politician could make trouble for us. The
boss paid out the four dollars swearing under his breath and when the
politician had gone out he threw them at me. 'There, take them,' he
shouted, 'I don't want the rotten things. Is a man a horse trough at
which every beast can stop to drink?'"

McGregor and the barber sat in the room laughing at the boss barber
who had smilingly bought the tickets while consumed with inward wrath.
The barber urged McGregor to go with him to the dance. "We will make a
night of it," he said. "We will see women there--two that I know. They
live upstairs over a grocery store. I have been with them. They will
open your eyes. They are a kind of women you haven't known, bold and
clever and good fellows too."

McGregor got up and pulled his shirt over his head. A wave of feverish
excitement ran over his body. "We shall see about this," he said, "we
shall see if this is another wrong trail you are starting me on. You
go to your room and get ready. I am going to fix myself up."

In the dance hall McGregor sat on a seat by the wall with one of the
two women lauded by the barber and a third one who was frail and
bloodless. To him the adventure had been a failure. The swing of the
dance music struck no answering chord in him. He saw the couples on
the floor clasped in each other's arms, writhing and turning, swaying
back and forth, looking into each other's eyes and turned aside
wishing himself back in his room among the law books.

The barber talked to two of the women, bantering them. McGregor
thought the conversation inane and trivial. It skirted the edge of
things and ran off into vague references to other times and adventures
of which he knew nothing.

The barber danced away with one of the women. She was tall and the
head of the barber barely Passed her shoulder. His black beard shone
against her white dress. The two women sat beside him and talked.
McGregor gathered that the frail woman was a maker of hats. Something
about her attracted him and he leaned against the wall and looked at
her, not hearing the talk.

A youth came up and took the other woman away. From across the hall
the barber beckoned to him.

A thought flashed into his mind. This woman beside him was frail and
thin and bloodless like the women of Coal Creek. A feeling of intimacy
with her came over him. He felt as he had felt concerning the tall
pale girl of Coal Creek when they together gether had climbed the hill
to the eminence that looked down into the valley of farms.




CHAPTER VI


Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of
McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two
rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid
of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on
an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the
show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the
same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the
sermon.

On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked
alone under the trees. If it threatened rain she sat in the larger of
the two rooms back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself or
for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the Indiana town and who
had four children.

Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with small brown
spots on the iris. She was so slender that she wore pads about her
body under her dress to fill it out. In her youth she had had a
sweetheart--a fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm. Once
they had gone together to the fair at the county seat and coming home
in the buggy at night he had put his arm about her and kissed her.
"You ain't very big," he had said.

Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought the padding
which she wore under her dress With it came an oil which she rubbed on
herself. The label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great
respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads wore raw places on
her side against which her clothes rubbed but she bore the pain with
grim stoicism, remembering what the fat boy had said.

After Edith came to Chicago and opened a shop of her own she had a
letter from her former admirer. "It pleases me to think that the same
wind that blows over me blows also over you," it said. After that one
letter she did not hear from him again. He had the phrase out of a
book he had read and had written the letter to Edith that he might use
it. After the letter had gone he thought of her frail figure and
repented of the impulse that had tricked him into writing. Half in
alarm he began courting and soon married another girl.

Sometimes on her rare visits home Edith had seen her former lover
driving along the road. The sister who had married the blacksmith said
that he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear but a cheap
calico dress and that on Saturday he drove off to town alone, leaving
her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. Once he encountered
Edith on the road and tried to get her into the wagon to ride with
him. Although she had walked along the road ignoring him she took the
letter about the wind that blew over them both out of a drawer on
spring evenings or after a walk in the park and read it over. After
she had read it she sat in the darkness at the front of the store
looking through the screen door at people in the street and wondered
what life would mean to her if she had a man on whom she could bestow
her love. In her heart she believed that, unlike the wife of the fat
youth, she would have borne children.

In Chicago Edith Carson had made money. She had a genius for economy
in the management of her business. In six years she had cleared a
large debt from the shop and had a comfortable balance in the bank.
Girls who worked in factories or in stores came and left most of their
meagre surplus in her shop and other girls who didn't work came in,
throwing dollars about and talking about "gentlemen friends." Edith
hated the bargaining but attended to it with shrewdness and with a
quiet disarming little smile on her face. What she liked was to sit
quietly in the room and trim hats. When the business grew she had a
woman to tend the shop and a girl to sit beside her and help with the
hats. She had a friend, the wife of a motorman on the street-car line,
who sometimes came to see her in the evening. The friend was a plump
little woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, and she got Edith to
make her several new hats a year for which she paid nothing.

Edith went to the dance at which she met McGregor with the motorman's
wife and a girl who lived upstairs over a bakery next door to the
shop, The dance was held in a hall over a saloon and was given for the
benefit of a political organisation in which the baker was a leader.
The wife of the baker came in and sold Edith two tickets, one for
herself and one for the wife of the motorman who happened to be
sitting with her at the time.

That evening after the motorman's wife had gone home Edith decided to
go to the dance and the decision was something like an adventure in
itself. The night was hot and sultry, lightning flashed in the sky and
clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind
the bolted screen door and looked at the people who hurried homeward
down the street. A wave of revolt at the narrowness and emptiness of
her life ran through her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed the
shop door and going into the room at the back lighted the gas and
stood looking at herself in the mirror. "I'll go to the dance," she
thought. "Perhaps I shall get a man. If he won't marry me he can have
what he wants of me anyway."

In the dance hall Edith sat demurely by the wall near a window and
watched the couples whirl about on the floor. Through an open door she
could see couples sitting in another room around tables and drinking
beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers went about
on the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once he started
across the floor toward Edith and her heart beat rapidly, but just
when she thought he intended to speak to her and to the motorman's
wife he turned and went to another part of the room. Edith followed
him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and his shining white
teeth.

The wife of the motorman went away with a small straight man with a
grey moustache whom Edith thought had unpleasant eyes and two girls
came and sat beside her. They were customers of her store and lived
together in a flat over a grocery on Monroe Street. Edith had heard
the girl who sat in the workroom with her speak slightingly of them.
The three sat together along the wall and talked of hats.

And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red-
haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women
hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the
little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on
the floor with Edith's two companions. A dance struck up and taking
one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the