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tradition of devotion to anything but gain.
Chicago is one vast gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain,
the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result
is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly,
down at the heels.
And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields that are not disorderly.
There is hope in the corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It
shoots up out of the black land and stands up in orderly rows. The
corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. Fruition comes to the
corn and it is cut down and disappears. Barns are filled to bursting
with the yellow fruit of the corn.
And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have
forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the
corn fields to live in the city.
Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred.
The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men
marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action.
Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages.
The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.
And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and
prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the
sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.
It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses
after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of
the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities
the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one
hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.
A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening
sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths
who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a
factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the
city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet,
efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he
respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He
passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming
light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He
idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon
the walls. A white--clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is
good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind
of universal fairness."
And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man
staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his
hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant
satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner
at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money-
spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work
feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.
My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and
prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is
satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the
age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the
whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life
attending to the business in hand."
The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from
the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They
wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and
with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched
fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the
street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging
black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge
mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and
rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.
The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before
him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky
and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and
ugliness of the face in the lamplight.
Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street
filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In
his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers,
feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he
were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking
under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of
newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with
the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children
over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat
alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over
the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.
The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a
woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She
makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker.
A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue
clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy--he can't be above
six--runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses
of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the
din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.
The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of
a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone.
He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but
the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a
pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he
will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he
turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow
listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar
he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and
as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him
from the factory door.
* * * * *
When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he
began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form.
For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and
shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and
seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of
North State Street in Chicago.
McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he
could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books
without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and
quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the
little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get
himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had
raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt
that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day
McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son
had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he
sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among
rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse
wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.
From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now
worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below
Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room
whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was
free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the
restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.
McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account
belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a
summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in
the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose
and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men
at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood.
He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with
his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and
thinking bitter thoughts.
The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its
possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He
wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning
rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever-
present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the
streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people
before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be
the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with
meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his
blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in
his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.
The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to
tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and
she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could
quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.
McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought
of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the
warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.
"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the
savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful
look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there
doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."
Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she
had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he
will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."
McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new
notion of life and did not know how to begin.
"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked
himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to
the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a
trial. Yes, I'll take the money."
Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was
touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the
undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under
obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take
it from."
In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new
plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he
thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up
into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use
that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up
by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."
It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his
pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the
odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the
intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he
growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would
like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run
about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field."
CHAPTER II
McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked
about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through
the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why
the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To
him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with
its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled
hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.
One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the
classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with
thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the
marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with
blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was
unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed
eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of
amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of
Paper.
At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth
who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign
against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick
building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another
city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he
thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous
and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the
servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from
his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With
delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on
the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red
lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and
was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his
life in the commercial world.
In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young
man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very
serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his
talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor
smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the
professor struck chords.
The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders
and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged
with excitement.
"The world is full of unrest," he said; "men are struggling like
chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy
thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the
Universities of Germany."
The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by
what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain
himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on
the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his
foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large
girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in
McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled
class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like
the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the
girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.
"We go from room to room hearing talk," began McGregor. "On the street
corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk
and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They
wabble about--saying nothing."
McGregor's excitement grew. "If there is all this unrest why does it
not come to something?" he demanded. "Why do not you who have trained
brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this
disorder? Why is something not done?"
The professor ran up and down on the platform. "I do not know what you
mean," he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the
class. He tried to explain. "Why do not men lead their lives like
men?" he asked. "They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands
of men. Do you not think so?"
McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. "The world should
become a great camp," he cried. "The brains of the world should be at
the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men
chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the
organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand
what is meant let them be knocked down."
The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at
McGregor. "I understand your kind," he said, and his voice trembled.
"The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here."
The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the
class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty
class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he
muttered to himself: "What's getting in here? What's getting into our
schools?"
* * * * *
Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of
what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend
any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to
the study of law. Several young men came in.
Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old.
Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk.
Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter
Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk
by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and
enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman--a clean-
looking youth with black curly hair and round pink--and--white cheeks,
the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the
spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand
fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me
tell you."
He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors,
business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he
would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man
who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him
about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for
him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the
saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he
sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother
Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the
streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible
certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up
by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
"It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,"
the curly-haired youth said. "It helps you get on, get in with the
right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get
in with the best fellows." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I
don't mind telling you," he said with an outburst of frankness, "that
one of our stronger men--Whiteside, the mathematician--wanted us to
have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us
and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you."
McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the
utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked
down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in
embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at
his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to
put his thoughts into words.
"I can't do what you ask," he said. "I like you and like your asking
me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University." His
voice softened. "I would like to have you for friends," he added. "You
say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to
know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you
after you become what you will become."
McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk
and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and
he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened.
"I hate hitting boys," he thought as he hurried away to his evening's
work at the restaurant.
CHAPTER III
When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place
among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop
district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his
profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other
lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his
ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.
Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the
matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the
meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was
tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of
adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and
forth along the American railroads.
He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its
patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve
trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless
thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so
absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the
door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and
down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like
cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns
worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with
painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that
housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.
In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State
Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and
made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging
jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building
opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist
Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect
expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did
not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the
socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.
McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in
meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the
street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes
and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched.
Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine
love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by
some great passion into order and meaning was lost.
In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and
bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to
drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman
came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night
have you had?" they asked each other.
The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they
talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from
customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched
them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with
marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter
eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.
A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen
and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried
to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice
he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some
time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he
talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make
himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.
McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to
forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the
great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been
leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark
intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a
disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the
disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men,
half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to
him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the
tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came
to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."
The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor,
each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like
suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he
had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he
looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid
children.
One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red
cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of
white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter
in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and
she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in
the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken
raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece
of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue
flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking
skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.
"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as
he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women
working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I
have only one and she crying and sick half the time."
McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice
spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The
best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against
this evil," it said.
He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist
lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the
waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and
closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf
below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting
his head upon his hands.
McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in
Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at
night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went
to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and
through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that
netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in
Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted
to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw
the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people
tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the
miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to
disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the
swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering
which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's
and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of
humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have
seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the
sea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through the
streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in
sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they
struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth
was drawn.
The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the
mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual
physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power
and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the
great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a
dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes.
At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along
the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood,
become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a
meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the
planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered,
and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and
disorder of the street below.
CHAPTER IV
In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another
desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an
extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his
coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on
his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On
the glass panel of the door was the inscription, "Henry Hunt, Real
Estate Broker." When he had finished with the morning papers he
disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.
The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought
and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a
pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he
specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde
Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at
the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If
any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for
a while."
Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the
first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward
interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he
carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In
the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened
to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his
place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois
Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and
living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the
merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an
Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself
again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening
and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the
deep dust.
It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to
the "boss" of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's
appearance as a public character in Chicago.
One night a young man--son of one of the city's plunging millionaire
wheat speculators--was found dead in a little blind alley back of a
resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a
board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A
policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner
of the alley.
For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light
swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched
him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the
alley the young man ran away up the street.
* * * * *
The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the
identity of the dead man became known. The "boss," a mild-looking
blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache,
stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then
he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police
official.
For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a
campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward.
Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the
front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires
who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown
Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places,
their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage.
A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second
Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the
front page of the morning papers.
Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with
fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation
disclosed.
The powers that ruled the First--quiet shrewd men who knew how to make
and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism--were
frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real
opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had
been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In
their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something
foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who
had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory
for years.
Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the
small soft-speaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively.
Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of
prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries.
Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward.
From house to house he uttered his cry--"Lay low! Pull off nothing."
The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from
Henry Hunt to the police official. "It is no time for hesitation," he
said. "It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest
and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have
action."
Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends
of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of
range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his
daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in
glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of
abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror
his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. "It might
have been Andy Brown," he said, puffing at the stogie.
The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the
papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again
soft and mild. "It was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word about.
Let a _Tribune_ man locate Brown for you. Handle this right and
you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of
the First."
* * * * *
The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the
shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry
for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown.
Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried
sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on
the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the
heads of articles on "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."
An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown
as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by
the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly
industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State
Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men--a
storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused
city.
The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in
the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity
for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The
yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled
mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet
hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and
talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his
eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he
who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange
savage land--"Judge Mac, the Big 'un."
When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him
charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In
a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a
guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said
what he thought should be said. "You are in a hole," he began. "You
don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over
there." He waved his hand in the direction of the First. "They're
going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job
for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and
I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him."
Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he
spoke quickly and determinedly. "You do what I say," he growled. "You
take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it
was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in
the cards. But you get the job just the same."
He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His
voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here,
Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm
going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and
you get it."
CHAPTER V
The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for
McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago.
He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the
endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening
after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at
the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from
life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had
been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his
and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of
the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.
McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep
human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his
Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern
tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of
success that is equally meaningless.
On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook
County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of
McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked
along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into
the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and
the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked
over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be
filled with contempt for them.
He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a
west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing
crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left,
gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set
himself up before the eyes of men.
When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening
and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood
looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his
contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness.
"They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be
Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail
shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over
and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown--
the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on
me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.
At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to
go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red
hair.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of
herself.
* * * * *
America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and
on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined
and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After
each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written
into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried
through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for
the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry
in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through
their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the
market reports.
And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might
have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today
spreads its terrible details over everything.
Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring
the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the
tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and
exhaustively the story of a crime.
And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible
stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled
himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of
Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on
looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no
progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to
the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She
won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find
out."
* * * * *
In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of
womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a
good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for
existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the
man.
Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life.
She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust
with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine
assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the
Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous
and intense.
With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter
security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad,
went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all
women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to
herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive
McGregor to approach with caution.
Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went
in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk
facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First
Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined
that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her
across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse
sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.
"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me
what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've
come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that
want to be useful."
The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern
daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had
she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and
sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business-
like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.
"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your
beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing
the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.
"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy
in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a
fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to
look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the
parlour of their houses.
"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them
tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that
killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to
tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they
half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.
"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here.
They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of
these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching
you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You
can do the job if you're any good."
After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him.
For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no
way diverted by her beauty nor her self--possession. A hot wave, half
anger, half admiration, swept over her.
McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he
said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and
I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a
Chicago is one vast gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain,
the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result
is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly,
down at the heels.
And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields that are not disorderly.
There is hope in the corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It
shoots up out of the black land and stands up in orderly rows. The
corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. Fruition comes to the
corn and it is cut down and disappears. Barns are filled to bursting
with the yellow fruit of the corn.
And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have
forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the
corn fields to live in the city.
Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred.
The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men
marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action.
Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages.
The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.
And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and
prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the
sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.
It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses
after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of
the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities
the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one
hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.
A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening
sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths
who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a
factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the
city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet,
efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he
respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He
passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming
light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He
idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon
the walls. A white--clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is
good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind
of universal fairness."
And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man
staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his
hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant
satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner
at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money-
spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work
feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.
My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and
prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is
satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the
age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the
whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life
attending to the business in hand."
The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from
the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They
wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and
with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched
fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the
street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging
black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge
mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and
rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.
The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before
him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky
and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and
ugliness of the face in the lamplight.
Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street
filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In
his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers,
feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he
were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking
under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of
newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with
the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children
over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat
alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over
the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.
The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a
woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She
makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker.
A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue
clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy--he can't be above
six--runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses
of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the
din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.
The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of
a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone.
He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but
the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a
pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he
will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he
turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow
listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar
he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and
as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him
from the factory door.
* * * * *
When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he
began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form.
For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and
shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and
seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of
North State Street in Chicago.
McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he
could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books
without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and
quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the
little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get
himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had
raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt
that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day
McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son
had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he
sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among
rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse
wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.
From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now
worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below
Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room
whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was
free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the
restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.
McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account
belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a
summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in
the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose
and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men
at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood.
He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with
his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and
thinking bitter thoughts.
The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its
possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He
wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning
rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever-
present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the
streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people
before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be
the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with
meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his
blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in
his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.
The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to
tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and
she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could
quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.
McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought
of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the
warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.
"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the
savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful
look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there
doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."
Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she
had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he
will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."
McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new
notion of life and did not know how to begin.
"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked
himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to
the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a
trial. Yes, I'll take the money."
Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was
touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the
undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under
obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take
it from."
In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new
plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he
thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up
into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use
that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up
by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."
It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his
pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the
odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the
intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he
growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would
like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run
about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field."
CHAPTER II
McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked
about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through
the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why
the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To
him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with
its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled
hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.
One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the
classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with
thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the
marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with
blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was
unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed
eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of
amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of
Paper.
At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth
who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign
against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick
building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another
city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he
thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous
and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the
servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from
his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With
delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on
the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red
lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and
was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his
life in the commercial world.
In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young
man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very
serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his
talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor
smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the
professor struck chords.
The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders
and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged
with excitement.
"The world is full of unrest," he said; "men are struggling like
chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy
thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the
Universities of Germany."
The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by
what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain
himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on
the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his
foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large
girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in
McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled
class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like
the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the
girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.
"We go from room to room hearing talk," began McGregor. "On the street
corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk
and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They
wabble about--saying nothing."
McGregor's excitement grew. "If there is all this unrest why does it
not come to something?" he demanded. "Why do not you who have trained
brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this
disorder? Why is something not done?"
The professor ran up and down on the platform. "I do not know what you
mean," he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the
class. He tried to explain. "Why do not men lead their lives like
men?" he asked. "They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands
of men. Do you not think so?"
McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. "The world should
become a great camp," he cried. "The brains of the world should be at
the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men
chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the
organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand
what is meant let them be knocked down."
The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at
McGregor. "I understand your kind," he said, and his voice trembled.
"The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here."
The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the
class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty
class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he
muttered to himself: "What's getting in here? What's getting into our
schools?"
* * * * *
Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of
what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend
any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to
the study of law. Several young men came in.
Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old.
Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk.
Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter
Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk
by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and
enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman--a clean-
looking youth with black curly hair and round pink--and--white cheeks,
the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
"You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us," said the
spokesman. "We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand
fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me
tell you."
He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors,
business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he
would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man
who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him
about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for
him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the
saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he
sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother
Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the
streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible
certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up
by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
"It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,"
the curly-haired youth said. "It helps you get on, get in with the
right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get
in with the best fellows." He hesitated and looked at the floor. "I
don't mind telling you," he said with an outburst of frankness, "that
one of our stronger men--Whiteside, the mathematician--wanted us to
have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us
and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you."
McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the
utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked
down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in
embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at
his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to
put his thoughts into words.
"I can't do what you ask," he said. "I like you and like your asking
me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University." His
voice softened. "I would like to have you for friends," he added. "You
say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to
know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you
after you become what you will become."
McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk
and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and
he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened.
"I hate hitting boys," he thought as he hurried away to his evening's
work at the restaurant.
CHAPTER III
When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place
among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop
district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his
profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other
lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his
ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.
Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the
matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the
meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was
tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of
adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and
forth along the American railroads.
He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its
patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve
trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless
thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so
absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the
door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and
down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like
cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns
worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with
painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that
housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.
In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State
Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and
made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging
jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building
opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist
Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect
expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did
not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the
socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.
McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in
meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the
street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes
and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched.
Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine
love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by
some great passion into order and meaning was lost.
In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and
bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to
drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman
came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night
have you had?" they asked each other.
The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they
talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from
customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched
them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with
marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter
eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.
A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen
and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried
to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice
he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some
time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he
talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make
himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.
McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to
forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the
great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been
leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark
intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a
disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the
disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men,
half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to
him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the
tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came
to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."
The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor,
each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like
suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he
had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he
looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid
children.
One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red
cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of
white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter
in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and
she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in
the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken
raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece
of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue
flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking
skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.
"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as
he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women
working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I
have only one and she crying and sick half the time."
McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice
spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The
best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against
this evil," it said.
He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist
lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the
waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and
closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf
below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting
his head upon his hands.
McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in
Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at
night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went
to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and
through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that
netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in
Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted
to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw
the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people
tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the
miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to
disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the
swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering
which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's
and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of
humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have
seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the
sea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through the
streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in
sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they
struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth
was drawn.
The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the
mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual
physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power
and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the
great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a
dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes.
At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along
the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood,
become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a
meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the
planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered,
and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and
disorder of the street below.
CHAPTER IV
In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another
desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an
extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his
coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on
his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On
the glass panel of the door was the inscription, "Henry Hunt, Real
Estate Broker." When he had finished with the morning papers he
disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.
The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought
and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a
pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he
specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde
Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at
the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If
any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for
a while."
Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the
first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward
interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he
carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In
the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened
to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his
place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois
Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and
living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the
merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an
Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself
again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening
and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the
deep dust.
It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to
the "boss" of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's
appearance as a public character in Chicago.
One night a young man--son of one of the city's plunging millionaire
wheat speculators--was found dead in a little blind alley back of a
resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a
board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A
policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner
of the alley.
For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light
swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched
him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the
alley the young man ran away up the street.
* * * * *
The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the
identity of the dead man became known. The "boss," a mild-looking
blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache,
stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then
he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police
official.
For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a
campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward.
Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the
front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires
who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown
Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places,
their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage.
A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second
Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the
front page of the morning papers.
Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with
fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation
disclosed.
The powers that ruled the First--quiet shrewd men who knew how to make
and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism--were
frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real
opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had
been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In
their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something
foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who
had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory
for years.
Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the
small soft-speaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively.
Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of
prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries.
Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward.
From house to house he uttered his cry--"Lay low! Pull off nothing."
The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from
Henry Hunt to the police official. "It is no time for hesitation," he
said. "It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest
and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have
action."
Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends
of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of
range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his
daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in
glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of
abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror
his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. "It might
have been Andy Brown," he said, puffing at the stogie.
The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the
papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again
soft and mild. "It was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word about.
Let a _Tribune_ man locate Brown for you. Handle this right and
you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of
the First."
* * * * *
The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the
shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry
for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown.
Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried
sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on
the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the
heads of articles on "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."
An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown
as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by
the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly
industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State
Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men--a
storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused
city.
The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in
the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity
for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The
yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled
mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet
hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and
talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his
eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he
who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange
savage land--"Judge Mac, the Big 'un."
When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him
charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In
a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a
guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said
what he thought should be said. "You are in a hole," he began. "You
don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over
there." He waved his hand in the direction of the First. "They're
going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job
for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and
I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him."
Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he
spoke quickly and determinedly. "You do what I say," he growled. "You
take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it
was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in
the cards. But you get the job just the same."
He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His
voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here,
Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm
going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and
you get it."
CHAPTER V
The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for
McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago.
He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the
endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening
after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at
the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from
life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had
been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his
and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of
the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.
McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep
human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his
Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern
tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of
success that is equally meaningless.
On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook
County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of
McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked
along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into
the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and
the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked
over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be
filled with contempt for them.
He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a
west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing
crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left,
gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set
himself up before the eyes of men.
When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening
and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood
looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his
contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness.
"They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be
Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail
shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over
and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown--
the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on
me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.
At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to
go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red
hair.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of
herself.
* * * * *
America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and
on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined
and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After
each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written
into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried
through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for
the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry
in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through
their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the
market reports.
And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might
have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today
spreads its terrible details over everything.
Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring
the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the
tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and
exhaustively the story of a crime.
And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible
stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled
himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of
Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on
looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no
progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to
the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She
won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find
out."
* * * * *
In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of
womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a
good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for
existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the
man.
Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life.
She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust
with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine
assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the
Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous
and intense.
With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter
security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad,
went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all
women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to
herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive
McGregor to approach with caution.
Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went
in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk
facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First
Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined
that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her
across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse
sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.
"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me
what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've
come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that
want to be useful."
The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern
daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had
she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and
sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business-
like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.
"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your
beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing
the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.
"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy
in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a
fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to
look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the
parlour of their houses.
"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them
tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that
killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to
tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they
half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.
"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here.
They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of
these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching
you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You
can do the job if you're any good."
After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him.
For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no
way diverted by her beauty nor her self--possession. A hot wave, half
anger, half admiration, swept over her.
McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he
said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and
I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a