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girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your
way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women
talk and tell you and then you tell me."
When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the
settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's
office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech
and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise
that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about
her in the First Ward. Her self--possession was shaken. "If they are
children--these women of the town--then I am a child, a child swimming
with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."
A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child--that McGregor.
He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."
She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the
man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of
the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom
we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."
In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she
realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to
pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I
will have to do that," she whispered to herself.
CHAPTER VI
The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial
McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic
climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic
moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and
that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading
of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of
fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had
given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age-
old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor
had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against
all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed
that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and
purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful
weakness of his fellows.
In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State
build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out
from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a
bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case.
Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning,
the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned
Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of
a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before
him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the
court room he sat waiting and watching.
When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the
courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the
silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he
shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting
among the witnesses. "They have tricked you Mary," he roared. "The
tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're
stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell
the naked truth or his blood be on your hands."
A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet,
objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice.
"Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here," he
shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the
stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."
The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the
joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the
words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help
of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her
suggestion.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart."
In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of
O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the
sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a
woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed
little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before
which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick--the story of
a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son
--of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager
lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl--of the blow with
the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man--of
the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily
pitched into the passageway.
"They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over," wailed the
woman.
* * * * *
McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of
victory was on him and he strode along with his heart beating high.
His way led over a bridge into the North Side and in his wanderings he
passed the apple warehouse where he had made his start in the city and
where he had fought with the German. When night came he walked in
North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting of his victory.
Before him danced a new vision, a vision of himself as a big figure in
the city. Within himself he felt the power to stand forth among men,
to outwit them and outfight them, to get for himself power and place
in the world.
The miner's son was half drunk with the new sense of achievement that
swept in on him. Out of Clark Street he went and walked east along a
residence street to the lake. By the lake he saw a street of great
houses surrounded by gardens and the thought came that at some time he
might have such a house of his own. The disorderly clatter of modern
life seemed very far away. When he came to the lake he stood in the
darkness thinking of the useless rowdy of the mining town suddenly
become a great lawyer in the city and the blood ran swiftly through
his body. "I am to be one of the victors, one of the few who emerge,"
he whispered to himself and with a jump of the heart thought also of
Margaret Ormsby looking at him with her fine questioning eyes as he
stood before the men in the court room and by the force of his
personality pushed his way through a fog of lies to victory and truth.
BOOK V
CHAPTER I
Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of American
social life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Although
her father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his position
and his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during his
early life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had made
it his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. The
girl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the fine
distinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensive
and clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a room
and how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and an
active mind. Added to these things she had, without the least
knowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in her
ability to meet life.
During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up her
mind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dull
or uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to the
college to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat down
upon a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools,"
Margaret had declared. "If Father and Mother think that I am going to
come home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I have
learned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine.
That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to much
either but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I think
of how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil things
away from us--Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girls
here feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day some
little whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care of
me. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growing
up and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to taste
life strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make up
their minds to that."
The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mild
looking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above her
head as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fine
young animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflected
the intoxication of her mood. "I want all of life," she cried; "I want
the lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of the
new women, the saviours of our sex."
Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Six
foot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strength
and dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed his
strength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired.
Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the details
of a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command which
inspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled with
excitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to a
workman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmen
going from village to village to sell ploughs became under his
influence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel to
the unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to him
with rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks for
new assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back their
faith in business and their faith in men.
To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his type
he had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thought
of himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his daily
associates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency tried
to keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world by
reading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimes
spent half the night over a book in his room.
As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source of
anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an
awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new
kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One
day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her
homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst
from an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at evening
in his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmaker
should have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind of
living that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.
And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and
commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table
and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On
his desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He
had the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had
been trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women
in the house with him.
Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure.
Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft
brown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge
caught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something
of her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires
of her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival
she announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. "I
am going to know things I can not get from books," she said. "I am
going to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my
mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't
be cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir
or to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see.
I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live."
In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing
were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way
she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused
and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and
made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and
who talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free
men and artists.
Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an
appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer
who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live and
who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and
position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David
Ormsby. "My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man
than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived," she declared. "He
makes ploughs anyway--makes them well--millions of them. He does not
spend his time talking and running his ringers through his hair. He
works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the
talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered."
In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a common
fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to
know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he
was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in
the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life
she would have been splendid.
She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of
something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob
of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the
midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with
impatience.
The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the
keynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but the
father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him
to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half
serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was
happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his
daughter went to college had come back to live with him.
After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her
father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din
that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege.
Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating
place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and
talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other
they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn
treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly.
Secretly neither believed as he talked.
In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating
in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her
father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean and
important work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."
At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his
daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "She
is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Her
whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she
once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."
On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as
usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long
carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at
Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung
over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished
so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating in
Margaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its
stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face--the face of the man
who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby
daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could
serve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mind
haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father.
She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth
and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get
back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself
in at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recalling
certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality
of his face.
Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after
day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence,
Margaret suddenly burst into tears.
"I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to
do," she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him
through the tears that glistened in her eyes.
CHAPTER II
In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel
Boulevard. The house had a history. It was owned by a banker who was a
large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust. Like
all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability
and integrity of David Ormsby. When the ploughmaker came to the city
from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he
offered him the house to use.
The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined
old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by
half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years. In his
old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth
had given him. It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of
expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels. In
the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that
had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars. The stairway leading to
the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been
bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.
The banker who inherited the house did not want to live in it. Even
before the death of his father and after his own unsuccessful marriage
he lived at a down town club. In his old age the merchant, retired
from business, lived in the house with another old man, an inventor.
He could not rest although he had given up business with that end in
view. Digging a trench in the lawn at the back of the house he with
his friend spent his days trying to reduce the refuse of one of his
factories to something having commercial value. Fires burned in the
trench and at night the grim old man, hands covered with tar, sat in
the house under the chandelier. After the death of the merchant the
house stood empty, staring at passers-by in the street, its walks and
paths overgrown with weeds and rank grass.
David Ormsby fitted into his house. Walking through the long halls or
sitting smoking his cigar in an easy chair on the wide lawn he looked
arrayed and environed. The house became a part of him like a well-made
and intelligently worn suit of clothes. Into the drawing room under
the ten thousand dollar chandelier he moved a billiard table and the
click of ivory balls banished the churchliness of the place.
Up and down the stairway moved American girls, friends of Margaret,
their skirts rustling and their voices running through the huge rooms.
In the evening after dinner David played billiards. The careful
calculation of the angles and the English interested him. Playing in
the evening with Margaret or with a man friend the fatigue of the day
passed and his honest voice and reverberating laugh brought a smile to
the lips of people passing in the street. In the evening David brought
his friends to sit in talk with him on the wide verandas. At times he
went alone to his room at the top of the house and buried himself in
books. On Saturday evenings he had a debauch and with a group of
friends from town sat at a card table in the long parlour playing
poker and drinking highballs.
Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, had never seemed a real part of the
life about her. Even as a child the daughter had thought her
hopelessly romantic. Life had treated her too well and from every one
about her she expected qualities and reactions which in her own person
she would not have tried to achieve.
David had already begun to rise when he married her, the slender
brown-haired daughter of a village shoemaker, and even in those days
the little plough company with its ownership scattered among the
merchants and farmers of the vicinity had started under his hand to
make progress in the state. People already spoke of its master as a
coming man and of Laura as the wife of a coming man.
To Laura this was in some way unsatisfactory. Sitting at home and
doing nothing she had still a passionate wish to be known as a
character, an individual, a woman of action. On the street as she
walked beside her husband, she beamed upon people but when the same
people spoke, calling them a handsome couple, a flush rose to her
cheeks and a flash of indignation ran through her brain.
Laura Ormsby lay awake in her bed at night thinking of her life. She
had a world of fancies in which she at such times lived. In her dream
world a thousand stirring adventures came to her. She imagined a
letter received through the mail, telling of an intrigue in which
David's name was coupled with that of another woman and lay abed
quietly hugging the thought. She looked at the face of the sleeping
David tenderly. "Poor hard-pressed boy," she muttered. "I shall be
resigned and cheerful and lead him gently back to his old place in my
heart."
In the morning after a night spent in this dream world Laura looked at
David, so cool and efficient, and was irritated by his efficiency.
When he playfully dropped his hand upon her shoulder she drew away and
sitting opposite him at breakfast watched him reading the morning
paper all unconscious of the rebel thoughts in her mind.
Once after she had moved to Chicago and after Margaret's return from
college Laura had the faint suggestion of an adventure. Although it
turned out tamely it lingered in her mind and in some way sweetened
her thoughts.
She was alone on a sleeping car coming from New York. A young man sat
in a seat opposite her and the two fell into talk. As she talked Laura
imagined herself eloping with the young man and under her lashes
looked sharply at his weak and pleasant face. She kept the talk alive
as others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green
swaying curtains.
With the young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading
Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions
and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that
might arouse her indignation.
The young man did not understand the middle-aged woman who sat beside
him and talked so boldly. He knew of but one prominent man named Shaw
and that man had been governor of Iowa and later a member of the
cabinet of President McKinley. It startled him to think that a
prominent member of the Republican party should have such thoughts or
express such opinions. He talked of fishing in Canada and of a comic
opera he had seen in New York and at eleven o'clock yawned and
disappeared behind the green curtains. As the young man lay in his
berth he muttered to himself, "Now what did that woman want?" A
thought came into his mind and he reached up to where his trousers
swung in a little hammock above the window and looked to see that his
watch and pocket-book were still there.
At home Laura Ormsby nursed the thought of the talk with the strange
man on the train. In her mind he became something romantic and daring,
a streak of light across what she was pleased to think of as her
sombre life.
Sitting at dinner she talked of him describing his charms. "He had a
wonderful mind and we sat late into the night talking," she said,
watching the face of David.
When she had spoken Margaret looked up and said laughingly, "Have a
heart Dad. Here is romance. Do not be blind to it. Mother is trying to
scare you about an alleged love affair."
CHAPTER III
One evening three weeks after the great murder trial McGregor took a
long walk in the streets of Chicago and tried to plan out his life. He
was troubled and disconcerted by the event that had crowded in upon
the heels of his dramatic success in the court room and more than
troubled by the fact that his mind constantly played with the dream of
having Margaret Ormsby as his wife. In the city he had become a power
and instead of the names and the pictures of criminals and keepers of
disorderly houses his name and his picture now appeared on the front
pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the political representative
in Chicago of a rich and successful publisher of sensational
newspapers, had visited him in his office and had proposed to make him
a political figure in the city. Finley a noted criminal lawyer had
offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small smiling man with white
teeth, had not asked McGregor for an immediate decision. In a way he
had taken the decision for granted. Smiling genially and rolling a
cigar across McGregor's desk he had spent an hour telling stories of
famous court room triumphs.
"One such triumph is enough to make a man," he declared. "You have no
idea how far such a success will carry you. The word of it keeps
running through men's minds. A tradition is built up. The remembrance
of it acts upon the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you by the mere
connection of your name with the case."
McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets without seeing
the people. In Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street he stopped in a
saloon and drank beer. The saloon was in a room below the level of the
sidewalk and the floor was covered with sawdust. Two half drunken
labourers stood by the bar quarrelling. One of the labourers who was a
socialist continually cursed the army and his words started McGregor
to thinking of the dream he had so long held and that now seemed
fading. "I was in the army and I know what I am talking about,"
declared the socialist. "There is nothing national about the army. It
is a privately owned thing. Here it is secretly owned by the
capitalists and in Europe by the aristocracy. Don't tell me--I know.
The army is made up of bums. If I'm a bum I became one then. You will
see fast enough what fellows are in the army if the country is ever
caught and drawn into a great war."
Becoming excited the socialist raised his voice and pounded on the
bar. "Hell, we don't know ourselves at all," he cried. "We never have
been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we are rich. We
are like a fat boy who has had too much pie. Yes sir--that's what we
are here in America and as far as our army goes it is a fat boy's
plaything. Keep away from it."
McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon and looked about. Men came in
and went out at the door. A child carried a pail down the short flight
of steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice,
thin and sharp, pierced through the babble of men's voices. "Ten
cents' worth--give me plenty," she pleaded, raising the pail above her
head and putting it on the bar.
The confident smiling face of Finley the lawyer came back into
McGregor's mind. Like David Ormsby the successful maker of ploughs the
lawyer looked upon men as pawns in a great game and like the
ploughmaker his intentions were honourable and his purpose clear. He
was intent upon making much of his life, being successful. If he
played the game on the side of the criminal that was but a chance.
Things had fallen out so. In his mind was something else--the
expression of his own purpose.
McGregor rose and went out of the saloon. In the street men stood
about in groups. At Thirty-ninth Street a crowd of youths scuffling on
the sidewalk pushed against the tall muttering man who passed with his
hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of
something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The
pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long
procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of
the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he
realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages
of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their
deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. Like
the men passing in the street they went across the face of things and
disappeared into the darkness.
"Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right," he whispered. "They get what
they can, they have the good sense to know that life runs quickly like
a flying bird passing an open window. They know that if a man thinks
of anything else he is likely to become another sentimentalist and
spend his life being hypnotised by the wagging of his own jaw."
* * * * *
In his wanderings McGregor came to an out-of-door restaurant and
garden far out on the south side. The garden had been built for the
amusement of the rich and successful. Upon a little platform a band
played. Although the garden was walled about it was open to the sky
and above the laughing people seated at the tables shone the stars.
McGregor sat alone at a little table on a balcony beneath a shaded
light. Below him along a terrace were other tables occupied by men and
women. On a platform in the centre of the garden dancers appeared.
McGregor who had ordered a dinner left it untouched. A tall graceful
girl, strongly suggestive of Margaret Ormsby, danced upon the
platform. With infinite grace her body gave expression to the
movements of the dance and like a thing blown by the wind she moved
here and there in the arms of her partner, a slender youth with long
black hair. In the figure of the dancing woman there was expressed
much of the idealism man has sought to materialise in women and
McGregor was thrilled by it. A sensualism so delicate that it did not
appear to be sensualism began to invade him. With a new hunger he
looked forward to the time when he would again see Margaret.
Upon the platform in the garden appeared other dancers. The lights at
the tables were turned low. From the darkness laughter arose. McGregor
stared about. The people seated at the tables on the terrace caught
and held his attention and he began looking sharply at the faces of
the men. How cunning they were, these men who had been successful in
life. Were they not after all the wise men? Behind the flesh that had
grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes. There was a game of
life and they had played it. The garden was a part of the game. It was
beautiful and did not all that was beautiful in the world end by
serving them? The arts of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses
toward loveliness that came into the minds of men and women, did not
all these things work solely to lighten the hours of the successful?
The eyes of the men at the tables as they looked at the women who
danced were not too greedy. They were filled with assurance. Was it
not for them that the dancers turned here and there revealing their
grace? If life was a struggle had they not been successful in the
struggle?
McGregor arose from the table and left his food untouched. Near the
entrance to the gardens he stopped and leaning against a pillar looked
again at the scene before him. Upon the platform appeared a whole
troupe of women-dancers. They were dressed in many-coloured garments
and danced a folk dance. As McGregor watched a light began to creep
back into his eyes. The women who now danced were unlike her who had
reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short of stature and there
was something rugged in their faces. Back and forth across the
platform they moved in masses. By their dancing they were striving to
convey a message. A thought came to McGregor. "It is the dance of
labour," he muttered. "Here in this garden it is corrupted but the
note of labour is not lost. There is a hint of it left in these
figures who toil even as they dance."
McGregor moved away from the shadows of the pillar and stood, hat in
hand, beneath the garden lights waiting as though for a call out of
the ranks of the dancers. How furiously they worked. How the bodies
twisted and squirmed. Out of sympathy with their efforts sweat
appeared on the face of the man who stood watching. "What a storm must
be going on just below the surface of labour," he muttered.
"Everywhere dumb brutalised men and women must be waiting for
something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my purpose but
I will not give up Margaret," he said aloud, turning and half running
out of the garden and into the street.
In his sleep that night McGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of
soft phrases and gentle hands that stilled the rising brute in man. It
was a world-old dream, the dream out of which such women as Margaret
Ormsby have been created. The long slender hands he had seen lying on
the desk in the settlement house now touched his hands. Uneasily he
rolled about in bed and desire came to him so that he awakened. On the
Boulevard people still passed up and down. McGregor arose and stood in
the darkness by the window of his room watching. A theatre had just
spat forth its portion of richly dressed men and women and when he had
opened the window the voices of the women came clear and sharp to his
ears.
The distracted man stared into the darkness and his blue eyes were
troubled. The vision of the disordered and disorganised band of miners
marching silently in the wake of his mother's funeral into whose lives
he by some supreme effort was to bring order was disturbed and
shattered by the more definite and lovely vision that had come to him.
CHAPTER IV
During the days since she had seen McGregor Margaret had thought of
him almost constantly. She weighed and balanced her own inclinations
and decided that if the opportunity came she would marry the man whose
force and courage had so appealed to her. She was half disappointed
that the opposition she had seen in her father's face when she had
told him of McGregor and had betrayed herself by her tears did not
become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had
secretly chosen. When nothing was said of the matter she went to her
mother and tried to explain. "We will have him here," the mother said
quickly. "I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the chief
figure. Let me have his name and address and I will attend to the
matter."
Laura arose and went into the house. A shrewd gleam came into her
eyes. "He will act like a fool before our people," she told herself.
"He is a brute and will be made to look like a brute." She could not
restrain her impatience and sought out David. "He is a man to fear,"
she said; "he would stop at nothing. You must think of some way to put
an end to Margaret's interest in him. Do you know of a better plan
than to have him here where he will look the fool?"
David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that
an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion.
In his heart he also feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply.
"She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any
other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda
into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They
do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go
forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up
understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up
understanding Margaret."
* * * * *
At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit
he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and
rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides
crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at
ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he
among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and
laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the
midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and
ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They
thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite
the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would
be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and
come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of
the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply
and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.
In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the
person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his
speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled
their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the
Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey
mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed
the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself
dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired
outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust
for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no
fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered
and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the
inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an
unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest.
Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's
restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had
a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.
One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her
world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him
in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and
the people. He stood by the wall bowing and staring boldly about and
thought that the confusion and distraction of mind that had followed
his first visit to Margaret at the settlement house was being
increased immeasurably with every passing moment. He looked at the
glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people moving about--
the men at ease, comfortable--the women with wonderfully delicate
expressive hands and with their round white necks and shoulders
showing above their gowns and a feeling of utter helplessness pervaded
him. Never before had he been in a company so feminine. He thought of
the beautiful women about him, seeing them in his direct crude and
forceful way merely as females at work among males, carrying forward
some purpose. "With all the softly suggestive sensuality of their
dress and their persons they must in some way have sapped the strength
and the purpose of these men who move among them so indifferently," he
thought. Within himself he knew of nothing to set up as a defence
against what he believed such beauty must become to the man who lived
with it. Its power he thought must be something monumental and he
looked with admiration at the quiet face of Margaret's father, moving
among his guests.
McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the
veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older
woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on
him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. "The fine
lady," he thought, "is no better than the women of the First Ward. She
has an idea I will surrender without a fight."
Out of his mind went the fear of the assurance and stability of
Margaret's people that had almost overcome him in the house. The woman
who had all her life thought of herself as one waiting only the
opportunity to appear as a commanding figure in affairs made by her
presence a failure of the effort to submerge McGregor.
* * * * *
On the veranda stood the three people. McGregor the silent became the
talkative. Seized with one of the inspirations that were a part of his
nature he threw talk about, sparring and returning thrust for thrust
with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought that the time had come for him to
get at the thing that was in his mind he went into the house and
presently came out carrying his hat. The quality of harshness that
crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura
Ormsby. Looking down at her, he said, "I am going to take your
daughter for a walk in the street. I want to talk with her."
Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She determined to speak out,
to be like the man crude and direct. When she had her mind fixed and
ready Margaret and McGregor were already half way down the gravel walk
to the gate and the opportunity to distinguish herself had passed.
* * * * *
McGregor walked beside Margaret, absorbed in thoughts of her. "I am
engaged in a work here," he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the
city. "It is a big work and it takes a lot out of me. I have not come
to see you, because I've been uncertain. I've been afraid you would
overcome me and drive thoughts of the work out of my head."
By the iron gate at the end of the gravel walk they turned and faced
each other. McGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her.
"I want you to marry me," he said. "I think of you constantly.
Thinking of you I can only half do my work. I get to thinking that
another man may come and take you and I waste hour after hour being
afraid."
She put a trembling hand upon his arm and he thinking to check an
attempt at an answer before he had finished, hurried on.
"There are things to be said and understood between us before I can
come to you as a suitor. I did not think I should feel toward a woman
as I feel toward you and I have certain adjustments to make. I thought
I could get along without your kind of women. I thought you were not
for me--with the work I have thought out to do in the world. If you
will not marry me I'll be glad to know now so that I can get my mind
straightened out."
Margaret raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder. The act was a
kind of acknowledgment of his right to talk to her so directly. She
said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness
she longed to pour into his ear she stood in silence on the gravel
path with her hand on his shoulder.
And then an absurd thing happened. The fear that Margaret might come
to some quick decision that would affect all of their future together
made McGregor frantic. He did not want her to speak and wished his own
words unsaid. "Wait. Not now," he cried and threw up his hand
intending to take her hand. His fist struck the arm that lay on his
shoulder and it in turn knocked his hat flying into the road. McGregor
started to run after it and then stopped. He put his hand to his head
and appeared lost in thought. When he turned again to pursue the hat
Margaret, unable longer to control herself, shouted with laughter.
Hatless, McGregor walked up Drexel Boulevard in the soft stillness of
the summer night. He was annoyed at the outcome of the evening and in
his heart half wished that Margaret had sent him away defeated. His
arms ached to have her against his breast but his mind kept presenting
one after another the objections to marriage with her. "Men are
submerged by such women and forget their work," he told himself. "They
sit looking into the soft brown eyes of their beloved, thinking of
happiness. A man should go about his work thinking of that. The fire
that runs through the veins of his body should light his mind. One
wants to take the love of woman as an end in life and the woman
accepts that and is made happy by it." He thought with gratitude of
Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. "I do not sit in my room at night
dreaming of taking her in my arms and pouring kisses on her lips," he
whispered.
* * * * *
In the door of her house Mrs. Ormsby had stood watching McGregor and
Margaret. She had seen them stop at the end of the walk. The figure of
the man was lost in shadows and that of Margaret stood alone, outlined
against a distant light. She saw Margaret's hand thrust out--was she
clutching his sleeve--and heard the murmur of voices. And then the man
precipitating himself into the street. His hat catapulted ahead of him
and a quick outburst of half-hysterical laughter broke the stillness.
Laura Ormsby was furious. Although she hated McGregor she could not
bear the thought that laughter should break the spell of romance. "She
is just like her father," she muttered. "At least she might show some
spirit and not be like a wooden thing, ending her first talk with a
lover with a laugh like that."
As for Margaret she stood in the darkness trembling with happiness.
She imagined herself going up the dark stairway to McGregor's office
in Van Buren Street where once she had gone to take him news of the
murder case--laying her hand upon his shoulder and saying, "Take me in
your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am
way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women
talk and tell you and then you tell me."
When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the
settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's
office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech
and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise
that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about
her in the First Ward. Her self--possession was shaken. "If they are
children--these women of the town--then I am a child, a child swimming
with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."
A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child--that McGregor.
He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."
She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the
man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of
the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom
we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."
In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she
realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to
pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I
will have to do that," she whispered to herself.
CHAPTER VI
The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial
McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic
climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic
moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and
that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading
of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of
fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had
given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age-
old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor
had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against
all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed
that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and
purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful
weakness of his fellows.
In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State
build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out
from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a
bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case.
Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning,
the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned
Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of
a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before
him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the
court room he sat waiting and watching.
When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the
courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the
silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he
shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting
among the witnesses. "They have tricked you Mary," he roared. "The
tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're
stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell
the naked truth or his blood be on your hands."
A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet,
objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice.
"Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here," he
shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the
stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."
The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the
joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the
words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help
of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her
suggestion.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart."
In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of
O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the
sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a
woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed
little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before
which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick--the story of
a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son
--of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager
lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl--of the blow with
the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man--of
the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily
pitched into the passageway.
"They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over," wailed the
woman.
* * * * *
McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of
victory was on him and he strode along with his heart beating high.
His way led over a bridge into the North Side and in his wanderings he
passed the apple warehouse where he had made his start in the city and
where he had fought with the German. When night came he walked in
North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting of his victory.
Before him danced a new vision, a vision of himself as a big figure in
the city. Within himself he felt the power to stand forth among men,
to outwit them and outfight them, to get for himself power and place
in the world.
The miner's son was half drunk with the new sense of achievement that
swept in on him. Out of Clark Street he went and walked east along a
residence street to the lake. By the lake he saw a street of great
houses surrounded by gardens and the thought came that at some time he
might have such a house of his own. The disorderly clatter of modern
life seemed very far away. When he came to the lake he stood in the
darkness thinking of the useless rowdy of the mining town suddenly
become a great lawyer in the city and the blood ran swiftly through
his body. "I am to be one of the victors, one of the few who emerge,"
he whispered to himself and with a jump of the heart thought also of
Margaret Ormsby looking at him with her fine questioning eyes as he
stood before the men in the court room and by the force of his
personality pushed his way through a fog of lies to victory and truth.
BOOK V
CHAPTER I
Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of American
social life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Although
her father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his position
and his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during his
early life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had made
it his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. The
girl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the fine
distinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensive
and clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a room
and how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and an
active mind. Added to these things she had, without the least
knowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in her
ability to meet life.
During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up her
mind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dull
or uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to the
college to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat down
upon a hillside to talk things over. "We women have been fools,"
Margaret had declared. "If Father and Mother think that I am going to
come home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I have
learned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine.
That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to much
either but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I think
of how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil things
away from us--Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girls
here feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day some
little whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care of
me. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growing
up and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to taste
life strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make up
their minds to that."
The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mild
looking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above her
head as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fine
young animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflected
the intoxication of her mood. "I want all of life," she cried; "I want
the lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of the
new women, the saviours of our sex."
Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Six
foot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strength
and dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed his
strength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired.
Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the details
of a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command which
inspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled with
excitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to a
workman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmen
going from village to village to sell ploughs became under his
influence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel to
the unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to him
with rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks for
new assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back their
faith in business and their faith in men.
To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his type
he had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thought
of himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his daily
associates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency tried
to keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world by
reading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimes
spent half the night over a book in his room.
As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source of
anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an
awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new
kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One
day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her
homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst
from an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at evening
in his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmaker
should have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind of
living that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.
And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and
commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table
and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On
his desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He
had the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had
been trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women
in the house with him.
Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure.
Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft
brown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge
caught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something
of her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires
of her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival
she announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. "I
am going to know things I can not get from books," she said. "I am
going to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my
mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't
be cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir
or to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see.
I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live."
In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing
were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way
she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused
and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and
made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and
who talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free
men and artists.
Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an
appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer
who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live and
who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and
position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David
Ormsby. "My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man
than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived," she declared. "He
makes ploughs anyway--makes them well--millions of them. He does not
spend his time talking and running his ringers through his hair. He
works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the
talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered."
In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a common
fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to
know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he
was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in
the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life
she would have been splendid.
She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of
something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob
of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the
midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with
impatience.
The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the
keynote of his life; "I want you to tell me things," she said, but the
father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him
to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half
serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was
happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his
daughter went to college had come back to live with him.
After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her
father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din
that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege.
Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating
place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and
talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other
they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn
treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly.
Secretly neither believed as he talked.
In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating
in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her
father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. "It is clean and
important work," she thought. "He is a big and effective man."
At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his
daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. "She
is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness," he thought "Her
whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she
once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life."
On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as
usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long
carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at
Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung
over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished
so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating in
Margaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its
stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face--the face of the man
who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby
daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could
serve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mind
haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father.
She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth
and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get
back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself
in at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recalling
certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality
of his face.
Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after
day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence,
Margaret suddenly burst into tears.
"I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to
do," she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him
through the tears that glistened in her eyes.
CHAPTER II
In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel
Boulevard. The house had a history. It was owned by a banker who was a
large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust. Like
all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability
and integrity of David Ormsby. When the ploughmaker came to the city
from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he
offered him the house to use.
The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined
old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by
half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years. In his
old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth
had given him. It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of
expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels. In
the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that
had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars. The stairway leading to
the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been
bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.
The banker who inherited the house did not want to live in it. Even
before the death of his father and after his own unsuccessful marriage
he lived at a down town club. In his old age the merchant, retired
from business, lived in the house with another old man, an inventor.
He could not rest although he had given up business with that end in
view. Digging a trench in the lawn at the back of the house he with
his friend spent his days trying to reduce the refuse of one of his
factories to something having commercial value. Fires burned in the
trench and at night the grim old man, hands covered with tar, sat in
the house under the chandelier. After the death of the merchant the
house stood empty, staring at passers-by in the street, its walks and
paths overgrown with weeds and rank grass.
David Ormsby fitted into his house. Walking through the long halls or
sitting smoking his cigar in an easy chair on the wide lawn he looked
arrayed and environed. The house became a part of him like a well-made
and intelligently worn suit of clothes. Into the drawing room under
the ten thousand dollar chandelier he moved a billiard table and the
click of ivory balls banished the churchliness of the place.
Up and down the stairway moved American girls, friends of Margaret,
their skirts rustling and their voices running through the huge rooms.
In the evening after dinner David played billiards. The careful
calculation of the angles and the English interested him. Playing in
the evening with Margaret or with a man friend the fatigue of the day
passed and his honest voice and reverberating laugh brought a smile to
the lips of people passing in the street. In the evening David brought
his friends to sit in talk with him on the wide verandas. At times he
went alone to his room at the top of the house and buried himself in
books. On Saturday evenings he had a debauch and with a group of
friends from town sat at a card table in the long parlour playing
poker and drinking highballs.
Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, had never seemed a real part of the
life about her. Even as a child the daughter had thought her
hopelessly romantic. Life had treated her too well and from every one
about her she expected qualities and reactions which in her own person
she would not have tried to achieve.
David had already begun to rise when he married her, the slender
brown-haired daughter of a village shoemaker, and even in those days
the little plough company with its ownership scattered among the
merchants and farmers of the vicinity had started under his hand to
make progress in the state. People already spoke of its master as a
coming man and of Laura as the wife of a coming man.
To Laura this was in some way unsatisfactory. Sitting at home and
doing nothing she had still a passionate wish to be known as a
character, an individual, a woman of action. On the street as she
walked beside her husband, she beamed upon people but when the same
people spoke, calling them a handsome couple, a flush rose to her
cheeks and a flash of indignation ran through her brain.
Laura Ormsby lay awake in her bed at night thinking of her life. She
had a world of fancies in which she at such times lived. In her dream
world a thousand stirring adventures came to her. She imagined a
letter received through the mail, telling of an intrigue in which
David's name was coupled with that of another woman and lay abed
quietly hugging the thought. She looked at the face of the sleeping
David tenderly. "Poor hard-pressed boy," she muttered. "I shall be
resigned and cheerful and lead him gently back to his old place in my
heart."
In the morning after a night spent in this dream world Laura looked at
David, so cool and efficient, and was irritated by his efficiency.
When he playfully dropped his hand upon her shoulder she drew away and
sitting opposite him at breakfast watched him reading the morning
paper all unconscious of the rebel thoughts in her mind.
Once after she had moved to Chicago and after Margaret's return from
college Laura had the faint suggestion of an adventure. Although it
turned out tamely it lingered in her mind and in some way sweetened
her thoughts.
She was alone on a sleeping car coming from New York. A young man sat
in a seat opposite her and the two fell into talk. As she talked Laura
imagined herself eloping with the young man and under her lashes
looked sharply at his weak and pleasant face. She kept the talk alive
as others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green
swaying curtains.
With the young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading
Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions
and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that
might arouse her indignation.
The young man did not understand the middle-aged woman who sat beside
him and talked so boldly. He knew of but one prominent man named Shaw
and that man had been governor of Iowa and later a member of the
cabinet of President McKinley. It startled him to think that a
prominent member of the Republican party should have such thoughts or
express such opinions. He talked of fishing in Canada and of a comic
opera he had seen in New York and at eleven o'clock yawned and
disappeared behind the green curtains. As the young man lay in his
berth he muttered to himself, "Now what did that woman want?" A
thought came into his mind and he reached up to where his trousers
swung in a little hammock above the window and looked to see that his
watch and pocket-book were still there.
At home Laura Ormsby nursed the thought of the talk with the strange
man on the train. In her mind he became something romantic and daring,
a streak of light across what she was pleased to think of as her
sombre life.
Sitting at dinner she talked of him describing his charms. "He had a
wonderful mind and we sat late into the night talking," she said,
watching the face of David.
When she had spoken Margaret looked up and said laughingly, "Have a
heart Dad. Here is romance. Do not be blind to it. Mother is trying to
scare you about an alleged love affair."
CHAPTER III
One evening three weeks after the great murder trial McGregor took a
long walk in the streets of Chicago and tried to plan out his life. He
was troubled and disconcerted by the event that had crowded in upon
the heels of his dramatic success in the court room and more than
troubled by the fact that his mind constantly played with the dream of
having Margaret Ormsby as his wife. In the city he had become a power
and instead of the names and the pictures of criminals and keepers of
disorderly houses his name and his picture now appeared on the front
pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the political representative
in Chicago of a rich and successful publisher of sensational
newspapers, had visited him in his office and had proposed to make him
a political figure in the city. Finley a noted criminal lawyer had
offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small smiling man with white
teeth, had not asked McGregor for an immediate decision. In a way he
had taken the decision for granted. Smiling genially and rolling a
cigar across McGregor's desk he had spent an hour telling stories of
famous court room triumphs.
"One such triumph is enough to make a man," he declared. "You have no
idea how far such a success will carry you. The word of it keeps
running through men's minds. A tradition is built up. The remembrance
of it acts upon the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you by the mere
connection of your name with the case."
McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets without seeing
the people. In Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street he stopped in a
saloon and drank beer. The saloon was in a room below the level of the
sidewalk and the floor was covered with sawdust. Two half drunken
labourers stood by the bar quarrelling. One of the labourers who was a
socialist continually cursed the army and his words started McGregor
to thinking of the dream he had so long held and that now seemed
fading. "I was in the army and I know what I am talking about,"
declared the socialist. "There is nothing national about the army. It
is a privately owned thing. Here it is secretly owned by the
capitalists and in Europe by the aristocracy. Don't tell me--I know.
The army is made up of bums. If I'm a bum I became one then. You will
see fast enough what fellows are in the army if the country is ever
caught and drawn into a great war."
Becoming excited the socialist raised his voice and pounded on the
bar. "Hell, we don't know ourselves at all," he cried. "We never have
been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we are rich. We
are like a fat boy who has had too much pie. Yes sir--that's what we
are here in America and as far as our army goes it is a fat boy's
plaything. Keep away from it."
McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon and looked about. Men came in
and went out at the door. A child carried a pail down the short flight
of steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice,
thin and sharp, pierced through the babble of men's voices. "Ten
cents' worth--give me plenty," she pleaded, raising the pail above her
head and putting it on the bar.
The confident smiling face of Finley the lawyer came back into
McGregor's mind. Like David Ormsby the successful maker of ploughs the
lawyer looked upon men as pawns in a great game and like the
ploughmaker his intentions were honourable and his purpose clear. He
was intent upon making much of his life, being successful. If he
played the game on the side of the criminal that was but a chance.
Things had fallen out so. In his mind was something else--the
expression of his own purpose.
McGregor rose and went out of the saloon. In the street men stood
about in groups. At Thirty-ninth Street a crowd of youths scuffling on
the sidewalk pushed against the tall muttering man who passed with his
hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of
something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The
pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long
procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of
the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he
realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages
of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their
deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. Like
the men passing in the street they went across the face of things and
disappeared into the darkness.
"Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right," he whispered. "They get what
they can, they have the good sense to know that life runs quickly like
a flying bird passing an open window. They know that if a man thinks
of anything else he is likely to become another sentimentalist and
spend his life being hypnotised by the wagging of his own jaw."
* * * * *
In his wanderings McGregor came to an out-of-door restaurant and
garden far out on the south side. The garden had been built for the
amusement of the rich and successful. Upon a little platform a band
played. Although the garden was walled about it was open to the sky
and above the laughing people seated at the tables shone the stars.
McGregor sat alone at a little table on a balcony beneath a shaded
light. Below him along a terrace were other tables occupied by men and
women. On a platform in the centre of the garden dancers appeared.
McGregor who had ordered a dinner left it untouched. A tall graceful
girl, strongly suggestive of Margaret Ormsby, danced upon the
platform. With infinite grace her body gave expression to the
movements of the dance and like a thing blown by the wind she moved
here and there in the arms of her partner, a slender youth with long
black hair. In the figure of the dancing woman there was expressed
much of the idealism man has sought to materialise in women and
McGregor was thrilled by it. A sensualism so delicate that it did not
appear to be sensualism began to invade him. With a new hunger he
looked forward to the time when he would again see Margaret.
Upon the platform in the garden appeared other dancers. The lights at
the tables were turned low. From the darkness laughter arose. McGregor
stared about. The people seated at the tables on the terrace caught
and held his attention and he began looking sharply at the faces of
the men. How cunning they were, these men who had been successful in
life. Were they not after all the wise men? Behind the flesh that had
grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes. There was a game of
life and they had played it. The garden was a part of the game. It was
beautiful and did not all that was beautiful in the world end by
serving them? The arts of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses
toward loveliness that came into the minds of men and women, did not
all these things work solely to lighten the hours of the successful?
The eyes of the men at the tables as they looked at the women who
danced were not too greedy. They were filled with assurance. Was it
not for them that the dancers turned here and there revealing their
grace? If life was a struggle had they not been successful in the
struggle?
McGregor arose from the table and left his food untouched. Near the
entrance to the gardens he stopped and leaning against a pillar looked
again at the scene before him. Upon the platform appeared a whole
troupe of women-dancers. They were dressed in many-coloured garments
and danced a folk dance. As McGregor watched a light began to creep
back into his eyes. The women who now danced were unlike her who had
reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short of stature and there
was something rugged in their faces. Back and forth across the
platform they moved in masses. By their dancing they were striving to
convey a message. A thought came to McGregor. "It is the dance of
labour," he muttered. "Here in this garden it is corrupted but the
note of labour is not lost. There is a hint of it left in these
figures who toil even as they dance."
McGregor moved away from the shadows of the pillar and stood, hat in
hand, beneath the garden lights waiting as though for a call out of
the ranks of the dancers. How furiously they worked. How the bodies
twisted and squirmed. Out of sympathy with their efforts sweat
appeared on the face of the man who stood watching. "What a storm must
be going on just below the surface of labour," he muttered.
"Everywhere dumb brutalised men and women must be waiting for
something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my purpose but
I will not give up Margaret," he said aloud, turning and half running
out of the garden and into the street.
In his sleep that night McGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of
soft phrases and gentle hands that stilled the rising brute in man. It
was a world-old dream, the dream out of which such women as Margaret
Ormsby have been created. The long slender hands he had seen lying on
the desk in the settlement house now touched his hands. Uneasily he
rolled about in bed and desire came to him so that he awakened. On the
Boulevard people still passed up and down. McGregor arose and stood in
the darkness by the window of his room watching. A theatre had just
spat forth its portion of richly dressed men and women and when he had
opened the window the voices of the women came clear and sharp to his
ears.
The distracted man stared into the darkness and his blue eyes were
troubled. The vision of the disordered and disorganised band of miners
marching silently in the wake of his mother's funeral into whose lives
he by some supreme effort was to bring order was disturbed and
shattered by the more definite and lovely vision that had come to him.
CHAPTER IV
During the days since she had seen McGregor Margaret had thought of
him almost constantly. She weighed and balanced her own inclinations
and decided that if the opportunity came she would marry the man whose
force and courage had so appealed to her. She was half disappointed
that the opposition she had seen in her father's face when she had
told him of McGregor and had betrayed herself by her tears did not
become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had
secretly chosen. When nothing was said of the matter she went to her
mother and tried to explain. "We will have him here," the mother said
quickly. "I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the chief
figure. Let me have his name and address and I will attend to the
matter."
Laura arose and went into the house. A shrewd gleam came into her
eyes. "He will act like a fool before our people," she told herself.
"He is a brute and will be made to look like a brute." She could not
restrain her impatience and sought out David. "He is a man to fear,"
she said; "he would stop at nothing. You must think of some way to put
an end to Margaret's interest in him. Do you know of a better plan
than to have him here where he will look the fool?"
David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that
an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion.
In his heart he also feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply.
"She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any
other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda
into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They
do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go
forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up
understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up
understanding Margaret."
* * * * *
At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit
he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and
rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides
crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at
ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he
among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and
laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the
midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and
ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They
thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite
the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would
be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and
come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of
the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply
and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.
In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the
person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his
speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled
their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the
Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey
mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed
the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself
dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired
outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust
for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no
fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered
and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the
inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an
unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest.
Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's
restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had
a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.
One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her
world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him
in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and
the people. He stood by the wall bowing and staring boldly about and
thought that the confusion and distraction of mind that had followed
his first visit to Margaret at the settlement house was being
increased immeasurably with every passing moment. He looked at the
glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people moving about--
the men at ease, comfortable--the women with wonderfully delicate
expressive hands and with their round white necks and shoulders
showing above their gowns and a feeling of utter helplessness pervaded
him. Never before had he been in a company so feminine. He thought of
the beautiful women about him, seeing them in his direct crude and
forceful way merely as females at work among males, carrying forward
some purpose. "With all the softly suggestive sensuality of their
dress and their persons they must in some way have sapped the strength
and the purpose of these men who move among them so indifferently," he
thought. Within himself he knew of nothing to set up as a defence
against what he believed such beauty must become to the man who lived
with it. Its power he thought must be something monumental and he
looked with admiration at the quiet face of Margaret's father, moving
among his guests.
McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the
veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older
woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on
him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. "The fine
lady," he thought, "is no better than the women of the First Ward. She
has an idea I will surrender without a fight."
Out of his mind went the fear of the assurance and stability of
Margaret's people that had almost overcome him in the house. The woman
who had all her life thought of herself as one waiting only the
opportunity to appear as a commanding figure in affairs made by her
presence a failure of the effort to submerge McGregor.
* * * * *
On the veranda stood the three people. McGregor the silent became the
talkative. Seized with one of the inspirations that were a part of his
nature he threw talk about, sparring and returning thrust for thrust
with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought that the time had come for him to
get at the thing that was in his mind he went into the house and
presently came out carrying his hat. The quality of harshness that
crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura
Ormsby. Looking down at her, he said, "I am going to take your
daughter for a walk in the street. I want to talk with her."
Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She determined to speak out,
to be like the man crude and direct. When she had her mind fixed and
ready Margaret and McGregor were already half way down the gravel walk
to the gate and the opportunity to distinguish herself had passed.
* * * * *
McGregor walked beside Margaret, absorbed in thoughts of her. "I am
engaged in a work here," he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the
city. "It is a big work and it takes a lot out of me. I have not come
to see you, because I've been uncertain. I've been afraid you would
overcome me and drive thoughts of the work out of my head."
By the iron gate at the end of the gravel walk they turned and faced
each other. McGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her.
"I want you to marry me," he said. "I think of you constantly.
Thinking of you I can only half do my work. I get to thinking that
another man may come and take you and I waste hour after hour being
afraid."
She put a trembling hand upon his arm and he thinking to check an
attempt at an answer before he had finished, hurried on.
"There are things to be said and understood between us before I can
come to you as a suitor. I did not think I should feel toward a woman
as I feel toward you and I have certain adjustments to make. I thought
I could get along without your kind of women. I thought you were not
for me--with the work I have thought out to do in the world. If you
will not marry me I'll be glad to know now so that I can get my mind
straightened out."
Margaret raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder. The act was a
kind of acknowledgment of his right to talk to her so directly. She
said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness
she longed to pour into his ear she stood in silence on the gravel
path with her hand on his shoulder.
And then an absurd thing happened. The fear that Margaret might come
to some quick decision that would affect all of their future together
made McGregor frantic. He did not want her to speak and wished his own
words unsaid. "Wait. Not now," he cried and threw up his hand
intending to take her hand. His fist struck the arm that lay on his
shoulder and it in turn knocked his hat flying into the road. McGregor
started to run after it and then stopped. He put his hand to his head
and appeared lost in thought. When he turned again to pursue the hat
Margaret, unable longer to control herself, shouted with laughter.
Hatless, McGregor walked up Drexel Boulevard in the soft stillness of
the summer night. He was annoyed at the outcome of the evening and in
his heart half wished that Margaret had sent him away defeated. His
arms ached to have her against his breast but his mind kept presenting
one after another the objections to marriage with her. "Men are
submerged by such women and forget their work," he told himself. "They
sit looking into the soft brown eyes of their beloved, thinking of
happiness. A man should go about his work thinking of that. The fire
that runs through the veins of his body should light his mind. One
wants to take the love of woman as an end in life and the woman
accepts that and is made happy by it." He thought with gratitude of
Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. "I do not sit in my room at night
dreaming of taking her in my arms and pouring kisses on her lips," he
whispered.
* * * * *
In the door of her house Mrs. Ormsby had stood watching McGregor and
Margaret. She had seen them stop at the end of the walk. The figure of
the man was lost in shadows and that of Margaret stood alone, outlined
against a distant light. She saw Margaret's hand thrust out--was she
clutching his sleeve--and heard the murmur of voices. And then the man
precipitating himself into the street. His hat catapulted ahead of him
and a quick outburst of half-hysterical laughter broke the stillness.
Laura Ormsby was furious. Although she hated McGregor she could not
bear the thought that laughter should break the spell of romance. "She
is just like her father," she muttered. "At least she might show some
spirit and not be like a wooden thing, ending her first talk with a
lover with a laugh like that."
As for Margaret she stood in the darkness trembling with happiness.
She imagined herself going up the dark stairway to McGregor's office
in Van Buren Street where once she had gone to take him news of the
murder case--laying her hand upon his shoulder and saying, "Take me in
your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am