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other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said
nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes.
Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.
At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door
into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-
haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away
with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall
beside McGregor.
"This place doesn't interest me," said McGregor quickly. "I don't like
to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come
with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk
and get acquainted."
* * * * *
The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor,
her heart jumping with excitement. "I've got a man," she thought,
exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had
heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded
man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.
Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness.
Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving
down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him.
A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his
eyes came over her. "This one could knock him over a six-rail fence,"
she thought.
"Where are we going now?" she asked.
McGregor looked down at her. "To some place where we can talk," he
said. "I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going.
I'm going with you. You aren't going with me."
McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take
this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.
As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she
had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the
shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She
wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand
trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through
her.
At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as
she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a
bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.
In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and
pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the
room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted
the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he
might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and
the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited
hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.
For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room
and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely,
letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people
after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice
confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite
different.
Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and
prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and
talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her.
She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a
faint grey streak of fear. "Of course he won't come back again," she
thought.
CHAPTER VII
In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith
Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse
and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing
the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When
he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and
sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back
room.
About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly
and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her
cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind
and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle
insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and
almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this
strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs
within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and
wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little
facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of
his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires
but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that
nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.
McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the
figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who
stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life.
The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar,
Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the
other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon
hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in
the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers
of laws.
There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as
virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills
of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into
power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of
isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically
as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and
he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in
the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and
the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots
that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three
sentences to passers by.
It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by
his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such
power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility
of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go,
socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers
in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words,
crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.
The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens
inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never
change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us
have marked them for their barrenness.
And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word.
He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub
of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility
within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that
his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the
words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his
turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the
gods.
For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men
whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He
tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by
himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new
curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling
apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of
the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of
their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered
but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as
he stood staring at them.
McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that
made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped,
that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end
mere slaves to words and formulas.
The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to
think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do
with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened
the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and
only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from
devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk
concerning the matter with a at the warehouse. The talk came about in
this way.
In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting
in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With
downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime.
Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to
their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed
young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little
coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From
time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with
one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to
compel attention. "They are no good," he said to himself, when in
response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. "Although they get
but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!" Like McGregor he had
nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book.
Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. "We are the kind
who get things done," he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear
and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class
man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have
contempt for himself.
One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board
platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage.
"The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves,"
said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he
added heartily. "Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids
around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play
about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the
evening."
McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow
within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the
purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought
against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon
him. "Well how are you any better?" he asked bluntly. "Do you think
your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better
mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very
striking figure as far as I can see."
Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath
McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to
think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a
workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes
and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to
take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had
employed him rubbed his hands with delight.
In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not
want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim
light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly.
In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested
to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely
his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express
what was in his brain. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor,"
he muttered. "If they have children it is without order or orderly
purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls
into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is
like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In
the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the
courage to try to do."
With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat
thing wandering aimlessly across the light. "I must not be confused by
little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into
the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and
work just as there is in the mining town from which I came."
* * * * *
Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He
wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he
sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time
shared his thoughts with her. "I am trying to discover why men are of
so little importance," he said suddenly. "Are they mere tools for
women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?"
Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the
book. "Oh well," he added "it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let
any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her."
Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of
war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble.
Then a new thought came to her. "He needs money to get on in the
world," she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as
she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she
could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.
"You're all right," said McGregor, preparing to depart. "You do not
interfere with a man's thoughts."
Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the
floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she
went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new
pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would
have given all to McGregor.
And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He
dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began
again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so
strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he
stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water
below. "Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?" he asked
himself. "Why are the men who write books in some way less full of
meaning than the men who do things?"
McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and
wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and
trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and
tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into
his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of
disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic
machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each
part without regard to the purpose of the whole. "There is danger in
thinking too," he muttered vaguely. "Everywhere there is danger, in
labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?"
McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like
a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see
that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had
appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had
used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the
courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep
in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken
hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they
not pointed the way?
Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly
he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad
tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before
the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched
past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the
uncertain light. "They marched," whispered McGregor. "That's what made
them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went
swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them.
That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant
and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use
their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all
come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking.
Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and
tried to do each his own part.
"I will do my part here," shouted McGregor. "I will find the way." His
body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men
stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking
past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away
toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be
able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along
through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again
of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad
he was not a part of it. "I will keep myself to myself and be ready
for what happens," he said, burning with new courage.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went
home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve
dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor,
working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a
five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. "I will begin to take
care of her now," he thought and with the rough sense of equity in
such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving
himself airs. "She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he
told himself.
The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the
mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid
begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat.
Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out
for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In
the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more
to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."
Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance
began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a
woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving
along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent
little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling
of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long
letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by
the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably
romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a
crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men.
She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so
unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of
books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not
lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her
own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy
sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her
husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she
thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the
distant city.
Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days
of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and
expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the
women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called "trouble
with the heart." Now and then she had "bad spells." On this spring
evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought
out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole
in the woods.
In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would
die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the
street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with
their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life
seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere,"
said one of the men. "I've been in towns and cities I don't even
remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in
Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there."
The other man laughed. "You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer,"
he jeered.
Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that
life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from
her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her
ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below
the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat
men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a
chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque,
staring silently past her into the sky.
Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not
think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying
hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to
dream dreams.
Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the
old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had
taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they
had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming
country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land
spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more
toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had
made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy
came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they
found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought
life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.
Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy
feet on the stairs. "That will be Beaut coming up from the shop," she
muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.
CHAPTER II
Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a
summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From
the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had
lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood
bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room
above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The
voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood.
Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear
the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon
the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when
he came into the presence of the dead.
Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to
the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began
to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a
lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. "I will her
among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful
valley," he told himself. The details of a religious discussion
between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at
the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he
for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a
life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. "Anyway if
Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting
on the log on the hillside," he thought.
With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside
road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the
burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed
swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but
looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little
wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life.
On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging
into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had
grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man
who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a
farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their
heads and bawled lustily. "It is the place for the dead to lie,"
whispered McGregor. "When my own time comes I shall be brought up
here." An idea came to him. "I will have father's body moved," he told
himself. "When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we
shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors."
The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased
also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him
throw back his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, father and me," he
muttered, "two of a feather and mother has not understood either of
us. Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us."
Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began
the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had
gone down behind clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if any one
understands," he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools
clanking on his shoulder.
McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in
the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the
dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out
of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon
he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and
where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.
And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he
recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his
throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel
on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long
enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. "I wanted to talk
with you," she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.
For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the
town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale
than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look
critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat
talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. "She is
already becoming stooped," he thought. "I would not want to make love
to her now."
Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a
swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began
to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. "We
have been friends since you went away," she explained. "She liked to
talk of you and I liked that too."
Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. "I do not want you
to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not
thinking of that."
She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life
with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her
talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her
in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but
was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that
for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him
and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of
tenderness. "I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the
consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to
the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her
words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on
the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.
* * * * *
In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked
down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his
mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind
him. All were silent and embarrassed.
McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who
gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now
nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him.
"It is not because she is a woman, I know that," he told himself and
tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in
the street below.
In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of
the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once
talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs
and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked
rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who,
when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and
anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.
McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to
sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell
her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective
all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought
of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die.
"It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march
toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to
achieve that," he whispered to himself.
In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling
socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he
talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much
wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without
force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped
about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.
"Vote with us and the thing is done," he shouted. "Are you going to
let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying
tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle.
You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so."
"You will have to do something more than think," roared McGregor, as
he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men
saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks
he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of
disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town
it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and
loose badly knit bodies.
"Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It
should be ready to knock down what stands in its way," he cried,
astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something
like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in
the darkened room.
CHAPTER III
The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the minds
of the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husband
and the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the mother
and wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as they
pounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and they
returned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had lost
her man twice--once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded his
brain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near the
door to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in the
mine--was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept a
store and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.
On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stood
in groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men of
the night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collars
about their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front door
and putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk looking
silently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along the
runway from the mines came other miners--men of the day shift. Setting
their dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon and
crossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces in
the red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice of
the preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and dark
shadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train of
loaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.
McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. He
stared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing,
thinking his own thoughts.
Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned
forward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat with
her face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across the
voice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled with
miners' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she was
taken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry out
of the room.
After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a procession
formed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups
and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat
the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each
other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow
the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the
attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or
not he wanted them to follow.
And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage
beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of
the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he
should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap
dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on
the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when
he was a boy in the mining town.
As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners
McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that
her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been
quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man
Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.
McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He
became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil
dragging their weary legs up the hill.
For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about looked
at the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat and
watched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought must
be hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was the
keynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and in
which he had not believed.
McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill and
watching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden one
of those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stout
souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew it
up the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the wind
seemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes.
At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the little
stream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dull
red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun
setting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red stream
flowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scene
that burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came into
his throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his old
satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Long
he looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marched
up the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed
to him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and
the little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red river
into something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like an
animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. It
seemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor to
know the secret of that want.
And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file of
marching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to run
through the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they also
looking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawled
across the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so that
their shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life began
to sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step.
Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he had
stood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birds
and sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he had
hated these men because they did not march with orderly precision like
the soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he who
had hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight he
read a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behind
his carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day a
man will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into step
like that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one another
but the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wrecked
by disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the
ambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregor
thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of
his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching
them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body
tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the
millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities,
everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets
to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few
paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful
scheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried.
"Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Suppose
they should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quit
thinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children.
Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Suppose
they could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they should
begin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enough
to do--to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two or
four or a thousand of them get together, to march."
McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead his
face grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," he
whispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to your
life. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, running
down to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taught
them that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must be
different. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their own
sakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder and
purposelessness away. That must come first."
McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside the
minister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men,
the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.
"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," he
muttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. That
loose-jawed fellow in the street last night--there must be thousands
of such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates.
Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other men
and is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will mean
something. He will know then that he is a part of something real and
he will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he is
a part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin to
feel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what the
great leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have sold
men out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make them
serve their own little ends."
McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of way
to wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can be
done," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one,
sometime. Why not by me?"
They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before the
log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had secured
permission of the mining company who owned the land to make this the
burial place of the McGregors.
When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him at
the miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leading
down into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them what
was in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside the
grave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved and
across the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your cause
shall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemies
I shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past them
and topping the hill went down toward the town into the gathering
night.
McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend in
Coal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood at
the foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker's
daughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoon
had subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who would
also be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairs
to stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up and
knocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbed
the hill.
The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled to
stop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to rise
McGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted her
thin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," he
said. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."
The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The long
valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid
little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Out
of the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they are
pushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattle
one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car
standing on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires are
started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the
tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild
beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows
of coke ovens.
With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the
hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play
with his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had come
to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine
country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.
The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to
clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of
life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's
daughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood,
picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die
there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he became
conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her
shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again
to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive
strength and virility.
"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered to
himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western
plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening
with their bodies a song of new life.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits
of its influence. It stands at the heart of America almost within
sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields
of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of men of all
nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn--shipping
towns to make their fortunes. On all sides men are busy making
fortunes.
In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, "In
America one gets much money," and adventurous souls have set forth
only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow
ill--smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.
In American villages the tale has been told. Here it has not been
whispered but shouted. Magazines and newspapers have done the job. The
word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind
among the corn. The young men listen and run away to Chicago. They
have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no
nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes.
Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.
At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door
into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-
haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away
with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall
beside McGregor.
"This place doesn't interest me," said McGregor quickly. "I don't like
to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come
with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk
and get acquainted."
* * * * *
The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor,
her heart jumping with excitement. "I've got a man," she thought,
exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had
heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded
man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.
Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness.
Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving
down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him.
A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his
eyes came over her. "This one could knock him over a six-rail fence,"
she thought.
"Where are we going now?" she asked.
McGregor looked down at her. "To some place where we can talk," he
said. "I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going.
I'm going with you. You aren't going with me."
McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take
this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.
As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she
had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the
shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She
wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand
trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through
her.
At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as
she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a
bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.
In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and
pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the
room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted
the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he
might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and
the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited
hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.
For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room
and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely,
letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people
after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice
confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite
different.
Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and
prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and
talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her.
She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a
faint grey streak of fear. "Of course he won't come back again," she
thought.
CHAPTER VII
In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith
Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse
and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing
the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When
he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and
sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back
room.
About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly
and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her
cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind
and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle
insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and
almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this
strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs
within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and
wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little
facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of
his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires
but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that
nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.
McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the
figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who
stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life.
The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar,
Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the
other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon
hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in
the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers
of laws.
There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as
virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills
of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into
power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of
isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically
as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and
he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in
the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and
the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots
that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three
sentences to passers by.
It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by
his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such
power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility
of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go,
socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers
in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words,
crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.
The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens
inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never
change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us
have marked them for their barrenness.
And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word.
He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub
of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility
within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that
his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the
words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his
turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the
gods.
For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men
whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He
tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by
himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new
curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling
apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of
the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of
their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered
but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as
he stood staring at them.
McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that
made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped,
that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end
mere slaves to words and formulas.
The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to
think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do
with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened
the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and
only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from
devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk
concerning the matter with a at the warehouse. The talk came about in
this way.
In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting
in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With
downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime.
Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to
their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed
young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little
coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From
time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with
one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to
compel attention. "They are no good," he said to himself, when in
response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. "Although they get
but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!" Like McGregor he had
nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book.
Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. "We are the kind
who get things done," he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear
and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class
man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have
contempt for himself.
One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board
platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage.
"The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves,"
said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he
added heartily. "Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids
around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play
about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the
evening."
McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow
within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the
purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought
against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon
him. "Well how are you any better?" he asked bluntly. "Do you think
your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better
mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very
striking figure as far as I can see."
Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath
McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to
think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a
workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes
and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to
take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had
employed him rubbed his hands with delight.
In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not
want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim
light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly.
In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested
to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely
his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express
what was in his brain. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor,"
he muttered. "If they have children it is without order or orderly
purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls
into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is
like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In
the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the
courage to try to do."
With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat
thing wandering aimlessly across the light. "I must not be confused by
little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into
the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and
work just as there is in the mining town from which I came."
* * * * *
Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He
wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he
sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time
shared his thoughts with her. "I am trying to discover why men are of
so little importance," he said suddenly. "Are they mere tools for
women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?"
Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the
book. "Oh well," he added "it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let
any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her."
Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of
war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble.
Then a new thought came to her. "He needs money to get on in the
world," she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as
she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she
could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.
"You're all right," said McGregor, preparing to depart. "You do not
interfere with a man's thoughts."
Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the
floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she
went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new
pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would
have given all to McGregor.
And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He
dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began
again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so
strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he
stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water
below. "Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?" he asked
himself. "Why are the men who write books in some way less full of
meaning than the men who do things?"
McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and
wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and
trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and
tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into
his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of
disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic
machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each
part without regard to the purpose of the whole. "There is danger in
thinking too," he muttered vaguely. "Everywhere there is danger, in
labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?"
McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like
a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see
that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had
appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had
used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the
courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep
in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken
hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they
not pointed the way?
Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly
he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad
tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before
the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched
past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the
uncertain light. "They marched," whispered McGregor. "That's what made
them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went
swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them.
That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant
and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use
their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all
come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking.
Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and
tried to do each his own part.
"I will do my part here," shouted McGregor. "I will find the way." His
body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men
stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking
past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away
toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be
able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along
through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again
of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad
he was not a part of it. "I will keep myself to myself and be ready
for what happens," he said, burning with new courage.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went
home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve
dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor,
working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a
five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. "I will begin to take
care of her now," he thought and with the rough sense of equity in
such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving
himself airs. "She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he
told himself.
The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the
mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid
begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat.
Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out
for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In
the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more
to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."
Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance
began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a
woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving
along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent
little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling
of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long
letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by
the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably
romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a
crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men.
She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so
unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of
books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not
lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her
own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy
sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her
husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she
thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the
distant city.
Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days
of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and
expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the
women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called "trouble
with the heart." Now and then she had "bad spells." On this spring
evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought
out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole
in the woods.
In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would
die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the
street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with
their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life
seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere,"
said one of the men. "I've been in towns and cities I don't even
remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in
Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there."
The other man laughed. "You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer,"
he jeered.
Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that
life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from
her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her
ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below
the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat
men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a
chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque,
staring silently past her into the sky.
Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not
think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying
hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to
dream dreams.
Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the
old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had
taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they
had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming
country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land
spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more
toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had
made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy
came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they
found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought
life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.
Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy
feet on the stairs. "That will be Beaut coming up from the shop," she
muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.
CHAPTER II
Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a
summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From
the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had
lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood
bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room
above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The
voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood.
Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear
the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon
the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when
he came into the presence of the dead.
Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to
the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began
to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a
lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. "I will her
among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful
valley," he told himself. The details of a religious discussion
between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at
the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he
for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a
life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. "Anyway if
Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting
on the log on the hillside," he thought.
With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside
road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the
burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed
swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but
looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little
wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life.
On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging
into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had
grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man
who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a
farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their
heads and bawled lustily. "It is the place for the dead to lie,"
whispered McGregor. "When my own time comes I shall be brought up
here." An idea came to him. "I will have father's body moved," he told
himself. "When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we
shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors."
The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased
also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him
throw back his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, father and me," he
muttered, "two of a feather and mother has not understood either of
us. Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us."
Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began
the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had
gone down behind clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if any one
understands," he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools
clanking on his shoulder.
McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in
the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the
dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out
of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon
he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and
where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.
And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he
recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his
throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel
on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long
enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. "I wanted to talk
with you," she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.
For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the
town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale
than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look
critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat
talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. "She is
already becoming stooped," he thought. "I would not want to make love
to her now."
Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a
swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began
to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. "We
have been friends since you went away," she explained. "She liked to
talk of you and I liked that too."
Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. "I do not want you
to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not
thinking of that."
She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life
with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her
talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her
in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but
was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that
for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him
and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of
tenderness. "I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the
consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to
the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her
words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on
the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.
* * * * *
In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked
down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his
mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind
him. All were silent and embarrassed.
McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who
gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now
nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him.
"It is not because she is a woman, I know that," he told himself and
tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in
the street below.
In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of
the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once
talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs
and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked
rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who,
when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and
anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.
McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to
sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell
her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective
all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought
of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die.
"It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march
toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to
achieve that," he whispered to himself.
In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling
socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he
talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much
wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without
force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped
about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.
"Vote with us and the thing is done," he shouted. "Are you going to
let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying
tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle.
You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so."
"You will have to do something more than think," roared McGregor, as
he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men
saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks
he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of
disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town
it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and
loose badly knit bodies.
"Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It
should be ready to knock down what stands in its way," he cried,
astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something
like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in
the darkened room.
CHAPTER III
The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the minds
of the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husband
and the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the mother
and wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as they
pounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and they
returned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had lost
her man twice--once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded his
brain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near the
door to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in the
mine--was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept a
store and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.
On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stood
in groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men of
the night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collars
about their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front door
and putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk looking
silently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along the
runway from the mines came other miners--men of the day shift. Setting
their dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon and
crossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces in
the red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice of
the preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and dark
shadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train of
loaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.
McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. He
stared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing,
thinking his own thoughts.
Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned
forward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat with
her face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across the
voice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled with
miners' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she was
taken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry out
of the room.
After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a procession
formed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups
and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat
the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each
other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow
the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the
attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or
not he wanted them to follow.
And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage
beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of
the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he
should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap
dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on
the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when
he was a boy in the mining town.
As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners
McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that
her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been
quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man
Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine.
McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He
became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil
dragging their weary legs up the hill.
For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about looked
at the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat and
watched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought must
be hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was the
keynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and in
which he had not believed.
McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill and
watching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden one
of those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stout
souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew it
up the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the wind
seemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes.
At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the little
stream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dull
red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun
setting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red stream
flowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scene
that burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came into
his throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his old
satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Long
he looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marched
up the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed
to him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and
the little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red river
into something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like an
animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. It
seemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor to
know the secret of that want.
And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file of
marching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to run
through the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they also
looking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawled
across the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so that
their shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life began
to sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step.
Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he had
stood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birds
and sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he had
hated these men because they did not march with orderly precision like
the soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he who
had hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight he
read a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behind
his carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day a
man will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into step
like that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one another
but the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wrecked
by disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the
ambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregor
thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of
his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching
them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body
tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the
millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities,
everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets
to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few
paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful
scheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried.
"Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Suppose
they should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quit
thinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children.
Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Suppose
they could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they should
begin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enough
to do--to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two or
four or a thousand of them get together, to march."
McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead his
face grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," he
whispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to your
life. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, running
down to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taught
them that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must be
different. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their own
sakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder and
purposelessness away. That must come first."
McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside the
minister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men,
the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.
"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," he
muttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. That
loose-jawed fellow in the street last night--there must be thousands
of such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates.
Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other men
and is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will mean
something. He will know then that he is a part of something real and
he will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he is
a part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin to
feel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what the
great leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have sold
men out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make them
serve their own little ends."
McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of way
to wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can be
done," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one,
sometime. Why not by me?"
They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before the
log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had secured
permission of the mining company who owned the land to make this the
burial place of the McGregors.
When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him at
the miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leading
down into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them what
was in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside the
grave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved and
across the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your cause
shall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemies
I shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past them
and topping the hill went down toward the town into the gathering
night.
McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend in
Coal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood at
the foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker's
daughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoon
had subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who would
also be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairs
to stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up and
knocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbed
the hill.
The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled to
stop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to rise
McGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted her
thin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," he
said. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."
The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The long
valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid
little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Out
of the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they are
pushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattle
one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car
standing on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires are
started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the
tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild
beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows
of coke ovens.
With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the
hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play
with his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had come
to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine
country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.
The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to
clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of
life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's
daughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood,
picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die
there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he became
conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her
shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again
to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive
strength and virility.
"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered to
himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western
plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening
with their bodies a song of new life.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits
of its influence. It stands at the heart of America almost within
sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields
of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of men of all
nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn--shipping
towns to make their fortunes. On all sides men are busy making
fortunes.
In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, "In
America one gets much money," and adventurous souls have set forth
only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow
ill--smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.
In American villages the tale has been told. Here it has not been
whispered but shouted. Magazines and newspapers have done the job. The
word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind
among the corn. The young men listen and run away to Chicago. They
have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no