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Title: Marching Men
Author: Sherwood Anderson
Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7045]
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[This file was first posted on February 27, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARCHING MEN ***
This eBook was provided by Juliet Sutherland
MARCHING MEN
BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Author of "Windy Mcpherson's Son"
MCMXVII
TO
AMERICAN WORKINGMEN
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
Uncle Charlie Wheeler stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor's
bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania
and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood
before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a
wink at the Reverend Minot Weeks who stood by the door leading to the
street, he tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.
"It has," he said, waving attention to the boy, who was making a mess
of the effort to arrange Uncle Charlie's loaf into a neat package, "a
pretty name. They call it Norman--Norman McGregor." Uncle Charlie
laughed heartily and again stamped upon the floor. Putting his finger
to his forehead to suggest deep thought, he turned to the minister. "I
am going to change all that," he said.
"Norman indeed! I shall give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too
soft, too soft and delicate for Coal Creek, eh? It shall be
rechristened. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden naming
things. We will call it Beaut--Our Beautiful One--Beaut McGregor."
The Reverend Minot Weeks also laughed. He thrust four ringers of each
hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie
along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like
two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and
jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing
as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door
ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go
along the street from store to store telling the tale of the
christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details
of the story.
It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one
of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks
and in the gutters of Main Street--black snow, sordid with the
gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the
bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling
along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they
carried dinner pails.
The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great
hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie,
Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and
looked after him as with the loaf of bread under his arm he hurried
along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still
enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his
nearness to life in the mining town. "Did not Christ himself laugh,
eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, as he waddled
through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the
two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-
shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was
the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole
between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand
forth among his fellows.
In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it
is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast
disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in
route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent
of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of
them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or
Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of
the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of
our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of
our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing
step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own
individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly
mass in at the door of a Chicago factory morning after morning and
year after year with never an epigram from the lips of one of them.
In Coal Creek when men got drunk they staggered in silence through the
street. Did one of them, in a moment of stupid animal sportiveness,
execute a clumsy dance upon the barroom floor, his fellow--labourers
looked at him dumbly, or turning away left him to finish without
witnesses his clumsy hilarity.
Standing in the doorway and looking up and down the bleak village
street, some dim realisation of the disorganised ineffectiveness of
life as he knew it came into the mind of the McGregor boy. It seemed
to him right and natural that he should hate men. With a sneer on his
lips, he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist, who was
forever talking of a day coming when men would march shoulder to
shoulder and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, should cease being
aimless and become definite and full of meaning.
"They will never do that and who wants them to," mused the McGregor
boy. A blast of wind bearing snow beat upon him and he turned into the
shop and slammed the door behind him. Another thought stirred in his
head and brought a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the
silence of the empty shop shaking with emotion. "If I could form the
men of this place into an army I would lead them to the mouth of the
old Shumway cut and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist
toward the door. "I would stand aside and see the whole town struggle
and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."
* * * * *
The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the
street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the
loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being,
the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had
made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance,
galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men
looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and
nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the snow from
before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he
called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beaut is the name
for you! Oh you Beaut!"
The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend Minot
Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his hat
and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about
it. It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been
plain John or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed
through him. "She might have used more sense," he muttered.
And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the
name. That checked his flight toward universal hatred and he began
pushing the cart forward again, a more genial current of thought
running through his mind. The tall boy loved the memory of his father,
"Cracked McGregor." "They called him 'Cracked' until that became his
name," he thought. "Now they are at me." The thought renewed a feeling
of fellowship between himself and his dead father--it softened him.
When he reached the first of the bleak miners' houses a smile played
about the corners of his huge mouth.
In his day Cracked McGregor had not borne a good reputation in Coal
Creek. He was a tall silent man with something morose and dangerous
about him. He inspired fear born of hatred. In the mines he worked
silently and with fiery energy, hating his fellow miners among whom he
was thought to be "a bit off his head." They it was who named him
"Cracked" McGregor and they avoided him while subscribing to the
common opinion that he was the best miner in the district. Like his
fellow workers he occasionally got drunk. When he went into the saloon
where other men stood in groups buying drinks for each other he bought
only for himself. Once a stranger, a fat man who sold liquor for a
wholesale house, approached and slapped him on the back. "Come, cheer
up and have a drink with me," he said. Cracked McGregor turned and
knocked the stranger to the floor. When the fat man was down he kicked
him and glared at the crowd in the room. Then he walked slowly out at
the door staring around and hoping some one would interfere.
In his house also Cracked McGregor was silent. When he spoke at all he
spoke kindly and looked into the eyes of his wife with an eager
expectant air. To his red-haired son he seemed to be forever pouring
forth a kind of dumb affection. Taking the boy in his arms he sat for
hours rocking back and forth and saying nothing. When the boy was ill
or troubled by strange dreams at night the feel of his father's arms
about him quieted him. In his arms the boy went to sleep happily. In
the mind of the father there was a single recurring thought, "We have
but the one bairn, we'll not put him into the hole in the ground," he
said, looking eagerly to the mother for approval.
Twice had Cracked McGregor walked with his son on a Sunday afternoon.
Taking the lad by the hand the miner went up the face of the hill,
past the last of the miners' houses, through the grove of pine trees
at the summit and on over the hill into sight of a wide valley on the
farther side. When he walked he twisted his head far to one side like
one listening. A falling timber in the mines had given him a deformed
shoulder and left a great scar on his face, partly covered by a red
beard filled with coal dust. The blow that had deformed his shoulder
had clouded his mind. He muttered as he walked along the road and
talked to himself like an old man.
The red-haired boy ran beside his father happily. He did not see the
smiles on the faces of the miners, who came down the hill and stopped
to look at the odd pair. The miners went on down the road to sit in
front of the stores on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory
of the hurrying McGregors. They had a remark they tossed about. "Nance
McGregor should not have looked at her man when she conceived," they
said.
Up the face of the hill climbed the McGregors. In the mind of the boy
a thousand questions wanted answering. Looking at the silent gloomy
face of his father, he choked back the questions rising in his throat,
saving them for the quiet hour with his mother when Cracked McGregor
was gone to the mine. He wanted to know of the boyhood of his father,
of the life in the mine, of the birds that flew overhead and why they
wheeled and flew in great ovals in the sky. He looked at the fallen
trees in the woods and wondered what made them fall and whether the
others would presently fall in their turn.
Over the hill went the silent pair and through the pinewood to an
eminence half way down the farther side. When the boy saw the valley
lying so green and broad and fruitful at their feet he thought it the
most wonderful sight in the world. He was not surprised that his
father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground he opened and
closed his eyes, his soul stirred by the beauty of the scene that lay
before them.
On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
droning song.
On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of
Eden, told him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother went
over the hill and down toward the valley but that his father, wearing
a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood
upon the hillside swinging a long sword blazing with fire and drove
them back.
When the boy went again over the hill it was October and a cold wind
blew down the hill into his face. In the woods golden brown leaves ran
about like frightened little animals and golden-brown were the leaves
on the trees about the farmhouses and golden-brown the corn standing
shocked in the fields. The scene saddened the boy. A lump came into
his throat and he wanted back the green shining beauty of the spring.
He wished to hear the birds singing in the air and in the grass on the
hillside.
Cracked McGregor was in another mood. He seemed more satisfied than on
the first visit and ran up and down on the little eminence rubbing his
hands together and on the legs of his trousers. Through the long
afternoon he sat on the log muttering and smiling.
On the road home through the darkened woods the restless hurrying
leaves frightened the boy so that, with his weariness from walking
against the wind, his hunger from being all day without food, and with
the cold nipping at his body, he began to cry. The father took the boy
in his arms and holding him across his breast like a babe went down
the hill to their home.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Cracked McGregor died. His death
fixed itself as something fine in the mind of the boy and the scene
and the circumstance stayed with him through life, filling him with
secret pride like a knowledge of good blood. "It means something that
I am the son of such a man," he thought.
It was past ten in the morning when the cry of "Fire in the mine" ran
up the hill to the houses of the miners. A panic seized the women. In
their minds they saw the men hurrying down old cuts, crouching in
hidden corridors, pursued by death. Cracked McGregor, one of the night
shift, slept in his house. The boy's mother, threw a shawl about her
head, took his hand and ran down the hill to the mouth of the mine.
Cold winds spitting snow blew in their faces. They ran along the
tracks of the railroad, stumbling over the ties, and stood on the
railroad embankment that overlooked the runway to the mine.
About the runway and along the embankment stood the silent miners,
their hands in their trousers pockets, staring stolidly at the closed
door of the mine. Among them was no impulse toward concerted action.
Like animals at the door of a slaughter-house they stood as though
waiting their turn to be driven in at the door. An old crone with bent
back and a huge stick in her hand went from one to another of the
miners gesticulating and talking. "Get my boy--my Steve! Get him out
of there!" she shouted, waving the stick about.
The door of the mine opened and three men came out, staggering as they
pushed before them a small car that ran upon rails. On the car lay
three other men, silent and motionless. A woman thinly clad and with
great cave-like hollows in her face climbed the embankment and sat
upon the ground below the boy and his mother. "The fire is in the old
McCrary cut," she said, her voice quivering, a dumb hopeless look in
her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My man Ike is in
there." She put down her head and sat weeping. The boy knew the woman.
She was a neighbour who lived in an unpainted house on the hillside.
In the yard in front of her house a swarm of children played among the
stones. Her husband, a great hulking fellow, got drunk and when he
came home kicked his wife. The boy had heard her screaming at night.
Suddenly in the growing crowd of miners below the embankment Beaut
McGregor saw his father moving restlessly about. On his head he had
his cap with the miner's lamp lighted. He went from group to group
among the people, his head hanging to one side. The boy looked at him
intently. He was reminded of the October day on the eminence
overlooking the fruitful valley and again he thought of his father as
a man inspired, going through a kind of ceremony. The tall miner
rubbed his hands up and down his legs, he peered into the faces of the
silent men standing about, his lips moved and his red beard danced up
and down.
As the boy looked a change came over the face of Cracked McGregor. He
ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. In his eyes was the
look of a perplexed animal. The wife bent down and began to talk to
the weeping woman on the ground, trying to comfort her. She did not
see her husband and the boy and man stood in silence looking into each
other's eyes.
Then the puzzled look went out of the father's face. He turned and
running along with his head rolling about reached the closed door of
the mine. A man, who wore a white collar and had a cigar stuck in the
corner of his mouth, put out his hand.
"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful arm
the runner pulled open the door of the mine and disappeared down the
runway.
A hubbub arose. The man in the white collar took the cigar from his
mouth and began to swear violently. The boy stood on the embankment
and saw his mother running toward the runway of the mine. A miner
gripped her by the arm and led her back up the face of the embankment.
In the crowd a woman's voice shouted, "It's Cracked McGregor gone to
close the door to the McCrary cut."
The man with the white collar glared about as he chewed the end of his
cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, again closing the door to the
mine.
Cracked McGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to
the old cut where the fire burned. With him died all but five of the
imprisoned miners. All day parties of men tried to get down into the
mine. Below in the hidden passages under their own homes the scurrying
miners died like rats in a burning barn while their wives, with shawls
over their heads, sat silently weeping on the railroad embankment. In
the evening the boy and his mother went up the hill alone. From the
houses scattered over the hill came the sound of women weeping.
* * * * *
For several years after the mine disaster the McGregors, mother and
son, lived in the house on the hillside. The woman went each morning
to the offices of the mine where she washed windows and scrubbed
floors. The position was a sort of recognition on the part of the mine
officials of the heroism of Cracked McGregor.
Nance McGregor was a small blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She wore
glasses and had the name in Coal Creek of being quick and sharp. She
did not stand by the fence to talk with the wives of other miners but
sat in her house and sewed or read aloud to her son. She subscribed
for a magazine and had bound copies of it standing upon shelves in the
room where she and the boy ate breakfast in the early morning. Before
the death of her husband she had maintained a habit of silence in her
house but after his death she expanded, and, with her red-haired son,
discussed freely every phase of their narrow lives. As he grew older
the boy began to believe that she like the miners had kept hidden
under her silence a secret fear of his father. Certain things she said
of her life encouraged the thought.
Norman McGregor grew into a tall broad-shouldered boy with strong
arms, flaming red hair and a habit of sudden and violent fits of
temper. There was something about him that held the attention. As he
grew older and was renamed by Uncle Charlie Wheeler he began going
about looking for trouble. When the boys called him "Beaut" he knocked
them down. When men shouted the name after him on the street he
followed them with black looks. It became a point of honour with him
to resent the name. He connected it with the town's unfairness to
Cracked McGregor.
In the house on the hillside the boy and his mother lived together
happily. In the early morning they went down the hill and across the
tracks to the offices of the mine. From the offices the boy went up
the hill on the farther side of the valley and sat upon the
schoolhouse steps or wandered in the streets waiting for the day in
school to begin. In the evening mother and son sat upon the steps at
the front of their home and watched the glare of the coke ovens on the
sky and the lights of the swiftly-running passenger trains, roaring
whistling and disappearing into the night.
Nance McGregor talked to her son of the big world outside the valley
and told him of the cities, the seas and the strange lands and peoples
beyond the seas. "We have dug in the ground like rats," she said, "I
and my people and your father and his people. With you it will be
different. You will get out of here to other places and other work."
She grew indignant thinking of the life in the town. "We are stuck
down here amid dirt, living in it, breathing it," she complained.
"Sixty men died in that hole in the ground and then the mine started
again with new men. We stay here year after year digging coal to burn
in engines that take other people across the seas and into the West."
When the son was a tall strong boy of fourteen Nance McGregor bought
the bakery and to buy it took the money saved by Cracked McGregor.
With it he had planned to buy a farm in the valley beyond the hill.
Dollar by dollar it had been put away by the miner who dreamed of life
in his own fields.
In the bakery the boy worked and learned to make bread. Kneading the
dough his arms and hands grew as strong as a bear's. He hated the
work, he hated Coal Creek and dreamed of life in the city and of the
part he should play there. Among the young men he began to make here
and there a friend. Like his father he attracted attention. Women
looked at him, laughed at his big frame and strong homely features and
looked again. When they spoke to him in the bakery or on the street he
spoke back fearlessly and looked them in the eyes. Young girls in the
school walked home down the hill with other boys and at night dreamed
of Beaut McGregor. When some one spoke ill of him they answered
defending and praising him. Like his father he was a marked man in the
town of Coal Creek.
CHAPTER II
One Sunday afternoon three boys sat on a log on the side of the hill
that looked down into Coal Creek. From where they sat they could see
the workers of the night shift idling in the sun on Main Street. From
the coke ovens a thin line of smoke rose into the sky. A freight train
heavily loaded crept round the hill at the end of the valley. It was
spring and over even that hive of black industry hung a faint promise
of beauty. The boys talked of the life of people in their town and as
they talked thought each of himself.
Although he had not been out of the valley and had grown strong and
big there, Beaut McGregor knew something of the outside world. It
isn't a time when men are shut off from their fellows. Newspapers and
magazines have done their work too well. They reached even into the
miner's cabin and the merchants along Main Street of Coal Creek stood
before their stores in the afternoon and talked of the doings of the
world. Beaut McGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that
not everywhere did men toil all day black and grimy underground, that
not all women were pale bloodless and bent. As he went about
delivering bread he whistled a song. "Take me back to Broadway," he
sang after the soubrette in a show that had once come to Coal Creek.
Now as he sat on the hillside he talked earnestly while he
gesticulated with his hands. "I hate this town," he said. "The men
here think they are confoundedly funny. They don't care for anything
but making foolish jokes and getting drunk. I want to go away." His
voice rose and hatred flamed up in him. "You wait," he boasted. "I'll
make men stop being fools. I'll make children of them. I'll----"
Pausing he looked at his two companions.
Beaut poked the ground with a stick. The boy sitting beside him
laughed. He was a short well--dressed black--haired boy with rings on
his fingers who worked in the town poolroom, racking the pool balls.
"I'd like to go where there are women with blood in them," he said.
Three women came up the hill toward them, a tall pale brown-haired
woman of twenty-seven and two fairer young girls. The black-haired boy
straightened his tie and began thinking of a conversation he would
start when the women reached him. Beaut and the other boy, a fat
fellow, the son of a grocer, looked down the hill to the town over the
heads of the newcomers and continued in their minds the thoughts that
had made the conversation.
"Hello girls, come and sit here," shouted the black-haired boy,
laughing and looking boldly into the eyes of the tall pale woman. They
stopped and the tall woman began stepping over the fallen logs, coming
to them. The two young girls followed, laughing. They sat down on the
log beside the boys, the tall pale woman at the end beside red-haired
McGregor. An embarrassed silence fell over the party. Both Beaut and
the fat boy were disconcerted by this turn to their afternoon's outing
and wondered how it would turn out.
The pale woman began to talk in a low tone. "I want to get away from
here," she said, "I wish I could hear birds sing and see green things
grow."
Beaut McGregor had an idea. "You come with me," he said. He got up and
climbed over the logs and the pale woman followed. The fat boy shouted
at them, relieving his own embarrassment by trying to embarrass them.
"Where're you going--you two?" he shouted.
Beaut said nothing. He stepped over the logs to the road and began
climbing the hill. The tall woman walked beside him and held her
skirts out of the deep dust of the road. Even on this her Sunday gown
there was a faint black mark along the seams--the mark of Coal Creek.
As McGregor walked his embarrassment left him. He thought it fine that
he should be thus alone with a woman. When she had tired from the
climb he sat with her on a log beside the road and talked of the
black-haired boy. "He has your ring on his finger," he said, looking
at her and laughing.
She held her hand pressed tightly against her side and closed her
eyes. "The climbing hurts me," she said.
Tenderness took hold of Beaut. When they went on again he walked
behind her, his hand upon her back pushing her up the hill. The desire
to tease her about the black-haired boy had passed and he wished he
had said nothing about the ring. He remembered the story the black-
haired boy had told him of his conquest of the woman. "More than
likely a mess of lies," he thought.
Over the crest of the hill they stopped and rested, leaning against a
worn rail fence by the woods. Below them in a wagon a party of men
went down the hill. The men sat upon boards laid across the box of a
wagon and sang a song. One of them stood in the seat beside the driver
and waved a bottle. He seemed to be making a speech. The others
shouted and clapped their hands. The sounds came faint and sharp up
the hill.
In the woods beside the fence rank grass grew. Hawks floated in the
sky over the valley below. A squirrel running along the fence stopped
and chattered at them. McGregor thought he had never had so delightful
a companion. He got a feeling of complete, good fellowship and
friendliness with this woman. Without knowing how the thing had been
done he felt a certain pride in it. "Don't mind what I said about the
ring," he urged, "I was only trying to tease you."
The woman beside McGregor was the daughter of an undertaker who lived
upstairs over his shop near the bakery. He had seen her in the evening
standing in the stairway by the shop door. After the story told him by
the black-haired boy he had been embarrassed about her. When he passed
her standing in the stairway he went hurriedly along and looked into
the gutter.
They went down the hill and sat on the log upon the hillside. A clump
of elders had grown about the log since his visits there with Cracked
McGregor so that the place was closed and shaded like a room. The
woman took off her hat and laid it beside her on the log. A faint
colour mounted to her pale cheeks and a flash of anger gleamed in her
eyes. "He probably lied to you about me," she said, "I didn't give him
that ring to wear. I don't know why I gave it to him. He wanted it. He
asked me for it time and again. He said he wanted to show it to his
mother. And now he has shown it to you and I suppose told lies about
me."
Beaut was annoyed and wished he had not mentioned the ring. He felt
that an unnecessary fuss was being made about it. He did not believe
that the black-haired boy had lied but he did not think it mattered.
He began talking of his father, boasting of him. His hatred of the
town blazed up. "They thought they knew him down there," he said,
"they laughed at him and called him 'Cracked.' They thought his
running into the mine just a crazy notion like a horse that runs into
a burning stable. He was the best man in town. He was braver than any
of them. He went in there and died when he had almost enough money
saved to buy a farm over here." He pointed down the valley.
Beaut began to tell her of the visits to the hillside with his father
and described the effect of the scene on himself when he was a child.
"I thought it was paradise," he said.
She put her hand on his arm and seemed to be soothing him like a
careful groom quieting an excitable horse. "Don't mind them," she
said, "you will go away after a time and make a place for yourself out
in the world."
He wondered how she knew. A profound respect for her came over him.
"She is keen to guess that," he thought.
He began to talk of himself, boasting and throwing out his chest. "I'd
like to have the chance to show what I can do," he declared. A thought
that had been in his mind on the winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler
put the name of Beaut upon him came back and he walked up and down
before the woman making grotesque motions with his hands as Cracked
McGregor had walked up and down before him.
"I'll tell you what," he began and his voice was harsh. He had
forgotten the presence of the woman and half forgotten what had been
in his mind. He sputtered and glared over his shoulder up the hillside
as he struggled for words. "Oh to Hell with men!" he burst forth.
"They are cattle, stupid cattle." A fire blazed up in his eyes and a
confident ring came into his voice. "I'd like to get them together,
all of them," he said, "I'd like to make them----" Words failed him
and again he sat down on the log beside the woman. "Well I'd like to
lead them to an old mine shaft and push them in," he concluded
resentfully.
* * * * *
On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into the
valley. "I wonder why we don't go there, mother and I," he said. "When
I see it I'm filled with the notion. I think I want to be a farmer and
work in the fields. Instead of that mother and I sit and plan of the
city. I'm going to be a lawyer. That's all we talk about. Then I come
up here and it seems as though this is the place for me."
The tall woman laughed. "I can see you coming home at night from the
fields," she said. "It might be to that white house there with the
windmill, You would be a big man and would have dust in your red hair
and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman with a baby
in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand leaning on the
fence waiting for you. When you came up she would put her arm around
your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard would tickle her cheek.
You should have a beard when you grow older. Your mouth is so big."
A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had said
that and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then and there.
He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the hill far away at
the other end of the valley. "We'd better be getting along back," he
said.
The woman remained seated on the log. "Sit down," she said, "I'll tell
you something--something it's good for you to hear. You're so big and
red you tempt a girl to bother you. First though you tell me why you
go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the
stairway in the evening."
Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-
haired boy had told him of her. "Then it was true--what he said about
you?" he asked.
"No! No!" she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on
her hat. "Let's be going."
Beaut sat stolidly on the log. "What's the use bothering each other,"
he said. "Let's sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home
before dark."
They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
boasted of his father.
"I'm too old for that boy," she said; "I'm older than you by a good
many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women.
I do pretty well. I don't have any one to talk to except father and he
sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I
let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me
in the stairway it is because I'm lonesome. There isn't a man in town
I'd marry--not one."
The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his father
were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than this
pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women
at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had thought
before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent to
their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it
crudely so that it hurt.
Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again
he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill.
Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.
Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky.
"One living up here and never going down there might think it rather
grand and big," he said. Again the hatred came. "They might think the
men who live down there knew something instead of being just a lot of
cattle."
A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole
into her eyes. "We get at one another," she said, "we can't let one
another alone. I wish we hadn't quarrelled. We might be friends if we
tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I've heard
others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here
would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was
than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say
that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay
listening."
The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. "I don't like
the women," he said, "but I liked you, seeing you standing in the
stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought
maybe you amounted to something. I don't know why you should be
bothered by what I think. I don't know why any woman should be
bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on
doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a lawyer."
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood
crept over him.
CHAPTER III
The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and
cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east
to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books
they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men
and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all
they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern
life.
The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged
to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the
officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who
was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by
the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived
in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the
train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the
offices of the mine. After five o'clock in the afternoon no white
collars were to be seen upon the streets of Coal Creek.
In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with toil they drank greedily
in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. Among
them a constant low muttering went on. They felt the injustice of
their lot but could not voice it logically and when they thought of
the men who owned the mine they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in
their thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and Barney Butterlips,
a thin little man with a cork leg, stood on a box and made speeches
regarding the coming brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was
unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the main street. The
battery was made up of several men in brown uniforms. They set up a
Gatling gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.
An Italian who lived in a house on the hillside cultivated a garden.
His place was the one beauty spot in the valley. With a wheelbarrow he
brought earth from the woods at the top of the hill and on Sunday he
could be seen going back and forth and whistling merrily. In the
winter he sat in his house making a drawing on a bit of paper. In the
spring he took the drawing, and by it planted his garden, utilising
every inch of his ground. When a strike came on he was told by the
mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He
thought of the garden and the work he had done and went back to his
routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the
hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined
the striking miners.
In a little one-room shack on the hill lived an old woman. She lived
alone and was vilely dirty. In her house she had old broken chairs and
tables picked up about town and piled in such profusion that she could
scarcely move about. On warm days she sat in the sun before the shack
chewing on a stick that had been dipped in tobacco. Miners coming up
the hill dumped bits of bread and meat-ends out of their dinner-pails
into a box nailed to a tree by the road. These the old woman collected
and ate. When the soldiers came to town she walked along the street
jeering at them. "Pretty boys! Scabs! Dudes! Dry-goods clerks!" she
called after them as she walked by the tails of their horses. A young
man with glasses on his nose, who was mounted on a grey horse turned
and called to his comrades, "Let her alone--it's old Mother Misery
herself."
When the tall red-haired boy looked at the workers and at the old
woman who followed the soldiers he did not sympathise with them. He
hated them. In a way he sympathised with the soldiers. His blood was
stirred by the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought
there was order and decency in the rank of uniformed men moving
silently and quickly along and he half wished they would destroy the
town. When the strikers made a wreck of the garden of the Italian he
was deeply touched and walked up and down in the room before his
mother, proclaiming himself. "I would have killed them had it been my
garden," he said. "I would not have left one of them alive." In his
heart he like Cracked McGregor nursed his hatred of the miners and of
the town. "The place is one to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't
like it here let him get up and leave." He remembered his father
working and saving for the farm in the valley. "They thought him
cracked but he knew more than they. They would not have dared touch a
garden he had planted."
In the heart of the miner's son strange half-formed thoughts began to
find lodgings. Remembering in his dreams at night the moving columns
of men in their uniforms he read new meaning into the scraps of
history picked up in the school and the movements of men in old
history began to have significance for him. On a summer afternoon as
he loitered before the town's hotel, beneath which was the saloon and
billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men
talking of the significance of men.
One of the men was an itinerant oculist who came to the mining town
once a month to fit and sell spectacles. When the oculist had sold
several pairs of spectacles he got drunk, sometimes staying drunk for
a week. When he was drunk he spoke French and Italian and sometimes
stood in the barroom before the miners, quoting the poems of Dante.
His clothes were greasy from long wear and he had a huge nose streaked
with red and purple veins. Because of his learning in the languages
and his quoting of poems the miners thought the oculist infinitely
wise. To them it seemed that one with such a mind must have almost
unearthly knowledge concerning the eyes and the fitting of glasses and
they wore with pride the cheap ill-fitting things he thrust upon them.
Occasionally, as though making a concession to his patrons, the
oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the
sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently
back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning "The
harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed." After the
song he put his head down upon the bar and wept while the miners
looked on touched with sympathy.
On the summer afternoon when Beaut McGregor listened, the oculist was
engaged in a violent quarrel with another man, drunk like himself. The
second man was a slender dandified fellow of middle age who sold shoes
for a Philadelphia jobbing-house. He sat in a chair tilted against the
hotel and tried to read aloud from a book. When he was fairly launched
in a long paragraph the oculist interrupted. Staggering up and down
the narrow board walk before the hotel the old drunkard raved and
swore. He seemed beside himself with wrath.
"I am sick of such slobbering philosophy," he declared. "Even the
reading of it makes you drool at the mouth. You do not say the words
sharply, and they can't be said sharply. I'm a strong man myself."
Spreading his legs wide apart and blowing up his cheeks, the oculist
beat upon his breast. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the man in
the chair.
"You but slobber and make a foul noise," he declared. "I know your
kind. I spit upon you. The Congress at Washington is full of such
fellows as is also the House of Commons in England. In France they
were once in charge. They ran things in France until the coming of a
man such as myself. They were lost in the shadow of the great
Napoleon."
The oculist as though dismissing the dandified man from his mind
turned to address Beaut. He talked in French and the man in the chair
fell into a troubled sleep. "I am like Napoleon," the drunkard
declared, breaking again into English. Tears began to show in his
eyes. "I take the money of these miners and I give them nothing. The
spectacles I sell to their wives for five dollars cost me but fifteen
cents. I ride over these brutes as Napoleon rode over Europe. There
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Title: Marching Men
Author: Sherwood Anderson
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MARCHING MEN
BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Author of "Windy Mcpherson's Son"
MCMXVII
TO
AMERICAN WORKINGMEN
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
Uncle Charlie Wheeler stamped on the steps before Nance McGregor's
bake-shop on the Main Street of the town of Coal Creek Pennsylvania
and then went quickly inside. Something pleased him and as he stood
before the counter in the shop he laughed and whistled softly. With a
wink at the Reverend Minot Weeks who stood by the door leading to the
street, he tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.
"It has," he said, waving attention to the boy, who was making a mess
of the effort to arrange Uncle Charlie's loaf into a neat package, "a
pretty name. They call it Norman--Norman McGregor." Uncle Charlie
laughed heartily and again stamped upon the floor. Putting his finger
to his forehead to suggest deep thought, he turned to the minister. "I
am going to change all that," he said.
"Norman indeed! I shall give him a name that will stick! Norman! Too
soft, too soft and delicate for Coal Creek, eh? It shall be
rechristened. You and I will be Adam and Eve in the garden naming
things. We will call it Beaut--Our Beautiful One--Beaut McGregor."
The Reverend Minot Weeks also laughed. He thrust four ringers of each
hand into the pockets of his trousers, letting the extended thumbs lie
along the swelling waist line. From the front the thumbs looked like
two tiny boats on the horizon of a troubled sea. They bobbed and
jumped about on the rolling shaking paunch, appearing and disappearing
as laughter shook him. The Reverend Minot Weeks went out at the door
ahead of Uncle Charlie, still laughing. One fancied that he would go
along the street from store to store telling the tale of the
christening and laughing again. The tall boy could imagine the details
of the story.
It was an ill day for births in Coal Creek, even for the birth of one
of Uncle Charlie's inspirations. Snow lay piled along the sidewalks
and in the gutters of Main Street--black snow, sordid with the
gathered grime of human endeavour that went on day and night in the
bowels of the hills. Through the soiled snow walked miners, stumbling
along silently and with blackened faces. In their bare hands they
carried dinner pails.
The McGregor boy, tall and awkward, and with a towering nose, great
hippopotamus-like mouth and fiery red hair, followed Uncle Charlie,
Republican politician, postmaster and village wit to the door and
looked after him as with the loaf of bread under his arm he hurried
along the street. Behind the politician went the minister still
enjoying the scene in the bakery. He was preening himself on his
nearness to life in the mining town. "Did not Christ himself laugh,
eat and drink with publicans and sinners?" he thought, as he waddled
through the snow. The eyes of the McGregor boy, as they followed the
two departing figures, and later, as he stood in the door of the bake-
shop watching the struggling miners, glistened, with hatred. It was
the quality of intense hatred for his fellows in the black hole
between the Pennsylvania hills that marked the boy and made him stand
forth among his fellows.
In a country of so many varied climates and occupations as America it
is absurd to talk of an American type. The country is like a vast
disorganised undisciplined army, leaderless, uninspired, going in
route-step along the road to they know not what end. In the prairie
towns of the West and the river towns of the South from which have
come so many of our writing men, the citizens swagger through life.
Drunken old reprobates lie in the shade by the river's edge or wander
through the streets of a corn shipping village of a Saturday evening
with grins on their faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent
of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of
them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or
Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of
the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of
our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of
our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing
step with one another, men lose also a sense of their own
individuality so that a thousand of them may be driven in a disorderly
mass in at the door of a Chicago factory morning after morning and
year after year with never an epigram from the lips of one of them.
In Coal Creek when men got drunk they staggered in silence through the
street. Did one of them, in a moment of stupid animal sportiveness,
execute a clumsy dance upon the barroom floor, his fellow--labourers
looked at him dumbly, or turning away left him to finish without
witnesses his clumsy hilarity.
Standing in the doorway and looking up and down the bleak village
street, some dim realisation of the disorganised ineffectiveness of
life as he knew it came into the mind of the McGregor boy. It seemed
to him right and natural that he should hate men. With a sneer on his
lips, he thought of Barney Butterlips, the town socialist, who was
forever talking of a day coming when men would march shoulder to
shoulder and life in Coal Creek, life everywhere, should cease being
aimless and become definite and full of meaning.
"They will never do that and who wants them to," mused the McGregor
boy. A blast of wind bearing snow beat upon him and he turned into the
shop and slammed the door behind him. Another thought stirred in his
head and brought a flush to his cheeks. He turned and stood in the
silence of the empty shop shaking with emotion. "If I could form the
men of this place into an army I would lead them to the mouth of the
old Shumway cut and push them in," he threatened, shaking his fist
toward the door. "I would stand aside and see the whole town struggle
and drown in the black water as untouched as though I watched the
drowning of a litter of dirty little kittens."
* * * * *
The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the
street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he
went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the
loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being,
the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had
made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance,
galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men
looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and
nose and the flaming hair. The bartender, sweeping the snow from
before the door of the saloon, shouted at him. "Hey, Norman!" he
called. "Sweet Norman! Norman is too pretty a name. Beaut is the name
for you! Oh you Beaut!"
The tall boy pushed the cart silently along the street. Again he hated
Coal Creek. He hated the bakery and the bakery cart. With a burning
satisfying hate he hated Uncle Charlie Wheeler and the Reverend Minot
Weeks. "Fat old fools," he muttered as he shook the snow off his hat
and paused to breathe in the struggle up the hill. He had something
new to hate. He hated his own name. It did sound ridiculous. He had
thought before that there was something fancy and pretentious about
it. It did not fit a bakery cart boy. He wished it might have been
plain John or Jim or Fred. A quiver of irritation at his mother passed
through him. "She might have used more sense," he muttered.
And then the thought came to him that his father might have chosen the
name. That checked his flight toward universal hatred and he began
pushing the cart forward again, a more genial current of thought
running through his mind. The tall boy loved the memory of his father,
"Cracked McGregor." "They called him 'Cracked' until that became his
name," he thought. "Now they are at me." The thought renewed a feeling
of fellowship between himself and his dead father--it softened him.
When he reached the first of the bleak miners' houses a smile played
about the corners of his huge mouth.
In his day Cracked McGregor had not borne a good reputation in Coal
Creek. He was a tall silent man with something morose and dangerous
about him. He inspired fear born of hatred. In the mines he worked
silently and with fiery energy, hating his fellow miners among whom he
was thought to be "a bit off his head." They it was who named him
"Cracked" McGregor and they avoided him while subscribing to the
common opinion that he was the best miner in the district. Like his
fellow workers he occasionally got drunk. When he went into the saloon
where other men stood in groups buying drinks for each other he bought
only for himself. Once a stranger, a fat man who sold liquor for a
wholesale house, approached and slapped him on the back. "Come, cheer
up and have a drink with me," he said. Cracked McGregor turned and
knocked the stranger to the floor. When the fat man was down he kicked
him and glared at the crowd in the room. Then he walked slowly out at
the door staring around and hoping some one would interfere.
In his house also Cracked McGregor was silent. When he spoke at all he
spoke kindly and looked into the eyes of his wife with an eager
expectant air. To his red-haired son he seemed to be forever pouring
forth a kind of dumb affection. Taking the boy in his arms he sat for
hours rocking back and forth and saying nothing. When the boy was ill
or troubled by strange dreams at night the feel of his father's arms
about him quieted him. In his arms the boy went to sleep happily. In
the mind of the father there was a single recurring thought, "We have
but the one bairn, we'll not put him into the hole in the ground," he
said, looking eagerly to the mother for approval.
Twice had Cracked McGregor walked with his son on a Sunday afternoon.
Taking the lad by the hand the miner went up the face of the hill,
past the last of the miners' houses, through the grove of pine trees
at the summit and on over the hill into sight of a wide valley on the
farther side. When he walked he twisted his head far to one side like
one listening. A falling timber in the mines had given him a deformed
shoulder and left a great scar on his face, partly covered by a red
beard filled with coal dust. The blow that had deformed his shoulder
had clouded his mind. He muttered as he walked along the road and
talked to himself like an old man.
The red-haired boy ran beside his father happily. He did not see the
smiles on the faces of the miners, who came down the hill and stopped
to look at the odd pair. The miners went on down the road to sit in
front of the stores on Main Street, their day brightened by the memory
of the hurrying McGregors. They had a remark they tossed about. "Nance
McGregor should not have looked at her man when she conceived," they
said.
Up the face of the hill climbed the McGregors. In the mind of the boy
a thousand questions wanted answering. Looking at the silent gloomy
face of his father, he choked back the questions rising in his throat,
saving them for the quiet hour with his mother when Cracked McGregor
was gone to the mine. He wanted to know of the boyhood of his father,
of the life in the mine, of the birds that flew overhead and why they
wheeled and flew in great ovals in the sky. He looked at the fallen
trees in the woods and wondered what made them fall and whether the
others would presently fall in their turn.
Over the hill went the silent pair and through the pinewood to an
eminence half way down the farther side. When the boy saw the valley
lying so green and broad and fruitful at their feet he thought it the
most wonderful sight in the world. He was not surprised that his
father had brought him there. Sitting on the ground he opened and
closed his eyes, his soul stirred by the beauty of the scene that lay
before them.
On the hillside Cracked McGregor went through a kind of ceremony.
Sitting upon a log he made a telescope of his hands and looked over
the valley inch by inch like one seeking something lost. For ten
minutes he would look intently at a clump of trees or a spot in the
river running through the valley where it broadened and where the
water roughened by the wind glistened in the sun. A smile lurked in
the corners of his mouth, he rubbed his hands together, he muttered
incoherent words and bits of sentences, once he broke forth into a low
droning song.
On the first morning, when the boy sat on the hillside with his
father, it was spring and the land was vividly green. Lambs played in
the fields; birds sang their mating songs; in the air, on the earth
and in the water of the flowing river it was a time of new life.
Below, the flat valley of green fields was patched and spotted with
brown new-turned earth. The cattle walking with bowed heads, eating
the sweet grass, the farmhouses with red barns, the pungent smell of
the new ground, fired his mind and awoke the sleeping sense of beauty
in the boy. He sat upon the log drunk with happiness that the world in
which he lived could be so beautiful. In his bed at night he dreamed
of the valley, confounding it with the old Bible tale of the Garden of
Eden, told him by his mother. He dreamed that he and his mother went
over the hill and down toward the valley but that his father, wearing
a long white robe and with his red hair blowing in the wind, stood
upon the hillside swinging a long sword blazing with fire and drove
them back.
When the boy went again over the hill it was October and a cold wind
blew down the hill into his face. In the woods golden brown leaves ran
about like frightened little animals and golden-brown were the leaves
on the trees about the farmhouses and golden-brown the corn standing
shocked in the fields. The scene saddened the boy. A lump came into
his throat and he wanted back the green shining beauty of the spring.
He wished to hear the birds singing in the air and in the grass on the
hillside.
Cracked McGregor was in another mood. He seemed more satisfied than on
the first visit and ran up and down on the little eminence rubbing his
hands together and on the legs of his trousers. Through the long
afternoon he sat on the log muttering and smiling.
On the road home through the darkened woods the restless hurrying
leaves frightened the boy so that, with his weariness from walking
against the wind, his hunger from being all day without food, and with
the cold nipping at his body, he began to cry. The father took the boy
in his arms and holding him across his breast like a babe went down
the hill to their home.
It was on a Tuesday morning that Cracked McGregor died. His death
fixed itself as something fine in the mind of the boy and the scene
and the circumstance stayed with him through life, filling him with
secret pride like a knowledge of good blood. "It means something that
I am the son of such a man," he thought.
It was past ten in the morning when the cry of "Fire in the mine" ran
up the hill to the houses of the miners. A panic seized the women. In
their minds they saw the men hurrying down old cuts, crouching in
hidden corridors, pursued by death. Cracked McGregor, one of the night
shift, slept in his house. The boy's mother, threw a shawl about her
head, took his hand and ran down the hill to the mouth of the mine.
Cold winds spitting snow blew in their faces. They ran along the
tracks of the railroad, stumbling over the ties, and stood on the
railroad embankment that overlooked the runway to the mine.
About the runway and along the embankment stood the silent miners,
their hands in their trousers pockets, staring stolidly at the closed
door of the mine. Among them was no impulse toward concerted action.
Like animals at the door of a slaughter-house they stood as though
waiting their turn to be driven in at the door. An old crone with bent
back and a huge stick in her hand went from one to another of the
miners gesticulating and talking. "Get my boy--my Steve! Get him out
of there!" she shouted, waving the stick about.
The door of the mine opened and three men came out, staggering as they
pushed before them a small car that ran upon rails. On the car lay
three other men, silent and motionless. A woman thinly clad and with
great cave-like hollows in her face climbed the embankment and sat
upon the ground below the boy and his mother. "The fire is in the old
McCrary cut," she said, her voice quivering, a dumb hopeless look in
her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My man Ike is in
there." She put down her head and sat weeping. The boy knew the woman.
She was a neighbour who lived in an unpainted house on the hillside.
In the yard in front of her house a swarm of children played among the
stones. Her husband, a great hulking fellow, got drunk and when he
came home kicked his wife. The boy had heard her screaming at night.
Suddenly in the growing crowd of miners below the embankment Beaut
McGregor saw his father moving restlessly about. On his head he had
his cap with the miner's lamp lighted. He went from group to group
among the people, his head hanging to one side. The boy looked at him
intently. He was reminded of the October day on the eminence
overlooking the fruitful valley and again he thought of his father as
a man inspired, going through a kind of ceremony. The tall miner
rubbed his hands up and down his legs, he peered into the faces of the
silent men standing about, his lips moved and his red beard danced up
and down.
As the boy looked a change came over the face of Cracked McGregor. He
ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. In his eyes was the
look of a perplexed animal. The wife bent down and began to talk to
the weeping woman on the ground, trying to comfort her. She did not
see her husband and the boy and man stood in silence looking into each
other's eyes.
Then the puzzled look went out of the father's face. He turned and
running along with his head rolling about reached the closed door of
the mine. A man, who wore a white collar and had a cigar stuck in the
corner of his mouth, put out his hand.
"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful arm
the runner pulled open the door of the mine and disappeared down the
runway.
A hubbub arose. The man in the white collar took the cigar from his
mouth and began to swear violently. The boy stood on the embankment
and saw his mother running toward the runway of the mine. A miner
gripped her by the arm and led her back up the face of the embankment.
In the crowd a woman's voice shouted, "It's Cracked McGregor gone to
close the door to the McCrary cut."
The man with the white collar glared about as he chewed the end of his
cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, again closing the door to the
mine.
Cracked McGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to
the old cut where the fire burned. With him died all but five of the
imprisoned miners. All day parties of men tried to get down into the
mine. Below in the hidden passages under their own homes the scurrying
miners died like rats in a burning barn while their wives, with shawls
over their heads, sat silently weeping on the railroad embankment. In
the evening the boy and his mother went up the hill alone. From the
houses scattered over the hill came the sound of women weeping.
* * * * *
For several years after the mine disaster the McGregors, mother and
son, lived in the house on the hillside. The woman went each morning
to the offices of the mine where she washed windows and scrubbed
floors. The position was a sort of recognition on the part of the mine
officials of the heroism of Cracked McGregor.
Nance McGregor was a small blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She wore
glasses and had the name in Coal Creek of being quick and sharp. She
did not stand by the fence to talk with the wives of other miners but
sat in her house and sewed or read aloud to her son. She subscribed
for a magazine and had bound copies of it standing upon shelves in the
room where she and the boy ate breakfast in the early morning. Before
the death of her husband she had maintained a habit of silence in her
house but after his death she expanded, and, with her red-haired son,
discussed freely every phase of their narrow lives. As he grew older
the boy began to believe that she like the miners had kept hidden
under her silence a secret fear of his father. Certain things she said
of her life encouraged the thought.
Norman McGregor grew into a tall broad-shouldered boy with strong
arms, flaming red hair and a habit of sudden and violent fits of
temper. There was something about him that held the attention. As he
grew older and was renamed by Uncle Charlie Wheeler he began going
about looking for trouble. When the boys called him "Beaut" he knocked
them down. When men shouted the name after him on the street he
followed them with black looks. It became a point of honour with him
to resent the name. He connected it with the town's unfairness to
Cracked McGregor.
In the house on the hillside the boy and his mother lived together
happily. In the early morning they went down the hill and across the
tracks to the offices of the mine. From the offices the boy went up
the hill on the farther side of the valley and sat upon the
schoolhouse steps or wandered in the streets waiting for the day in
school to begin. In the evening mother and son sat upon the steps at
the front of their home and watched the glare of the coke ovens on the
sky and the lights of the swiftly-running passenger trains, roaring
whistling and disappearing into the night.
Nance McGregor talked to her son of the big world outside the valley
and told him of the cities, the seas and the strange lands and peoples
beyond the seas. "We have dug in the ground like rats," she said, "I
and my people and your father and his people. With you it will be
different. You will get out of here to other places and other work."
She grew indignant thinking of the life in the town. "We are stuck
down here amid dirt, living in it, breathing it," she complained.
"Sixty men died in that hole in the ground and then the mine started
again with new men. We stay here year after year digging coal to burn
in engines that take other people across the seas and into the West."
When the son was a tall strong boy of fourteen Nance McGregor bought
the bakery and to buy it took the money saved by Cracked McGregor.
With it he had planned to buy a farm in the valley beyond the hill.
Dollar by dollar it had been put away by the miner who dreamed of life
in his own fields.
In the bakery the boy worked and learned to make bread. Kneading the
dough his arms and hands grew as strong as a bear's. He hated the
work, he hated Coal Creek and dreamed of life in the city and of the
part he should play there. Among the young men he began to make here
and there a friend. Like his father he attracted attention. Women
looked at him, laughed at his big frame and strong homely features and
looked again. When they spoke to him in the bakery or on the street he
spoke back fearlessly and looked them in the eyes. Young girls in the
school walked home down the hill with other boys and at night dreamed
of Beaut McGregor. When some one spoke ill of him they answered
defending and praising him. Like his father he was a marked man in the
town of Coal Creek.
CHAPTER II
One Sunday afternoon three boys sat on a log on the side of the hill
that looked down into Coal Creek. From where they sat they could see
the workers of the night shift idling in the sun on Main Street. From
the coke ovens a thin line of smoke rose into the sky. A freight train
heavily loaded crept round the hill at the end of the valley. It was
spring and over even that hive of black industry hung a faint promise
of beauty. The boys talked of the life of people in their town and as
they talked thought each of himself.
Although he had not been out of the valley and had grown strong and
big there, Beaut McGregor knew something of the outside world. It
isn't a time when men are shut off from their fellows. Newspapers and
magazines have done their work too well. They reached even into the
miner's cabin and the merchants along Main Street of Coal Creek stood
before their stores in the afternoon and talked of the doings of the
world. Beaut McGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that
not everywhere did men toil all day black and grimy underground, that
not all women were pale bloodless and bent. As he went about
delivering bread he whistled a song. "Take me back to Broadway," he
sang after the soubrette in a show that had once come to Coal Creek.
Now as he sat on the hillside he talked earnestly while he
gesticulated with his hands. "I hate this town," he said. "The men
here think they are confoundedly funny. They don't care for anything
but making foolish jokes and getting drunk. I want to go away." His
voice rose and hatred flamed up in him. "You wait," he boasted. "I'll
make men stop being fools. I'll make children of them. I'll----"
Pausing he looked at his two companions.
Beaut poked the ground with a stick. The boy sitting beside him
laughed. He was a short well--dressed black--haired boy with rings on
his fingers who worked in the town poolroom, racking the pool balls.
"I'd like to go where there are women with blood in them," he said.
Three women came up the hill toward them, a tall pale brown-haired
woman of twenty-seven and two fairer young girls. The black-haired boy
straightened his tie and began thinking of a conversation he would
start when the women reached him. Beaut and the other boy, a fat
fellow, the son of a grocer, looked down the hill to the town over the
heads of the newcomers and continued in their minds the thoughts that
had made the conversation.
"Hello girls, come and sit here," shouted the black-haired boy,
laughing and looking boldly into the eyes of the tall pale woman. They
stopped and the tall woman began stepping over the fallen logs, coming
to them. The two young girls followed, laughing. They sat down on the
log beside the boys, the tall pale woman at the end beside red-haired
McGregor. An embarrassed silence fell over the party. Both Beaut and
the fat boy were disconcerted by this turn to their afternoon's outing
and wondered how it would turn out.
The pale woman began to talk in a low tone. "I want to get away from
here," she said, "I wish I could hear birds sing and see green things
grow."
Beaut McGregor had an idea. "You come with me," he said. He got up and
climbed over the logs and the pale woman followed. The fat boy shouted
at them, relieving his own embarrassment by trying to embarrass them.
"Where're you going--you two?" he shouted.
Beaut said nothing. He stepped over the logs to the road and began
climbing the hill. The tall woman walked beside him and held her
skirts out of the deep dust of the road. Even on this her Sunday gown
there was a faint black mark along the seams--the mark of Coal Creek.
As McGregor walked his embarrassment left him. He thought it fine that
he should be thus alone with a woman. When she had tired from the
climb he sat with her on a log beside the road and talked of the
black-haired boy. "He has your ring on his finger," he said, looking
at her and laughing.
She held her hand pressed tightly against her side and closed her
eyes. "The climbing hurts me," she said.
Tenderness took hold of Beaut. When they went on again he walked
behind her, his hand upon her back pushing her up the hill. The desire
to tease her about the black-haired boy had passed and he wished he
had said nothing about the ring. He remembered the story the black-
haired boy had told him of his conquest of the woman. "More than
likely a mess of lies," he thought.
Over the crest of the hill they stopped and rested, leaning against a
worn rail fence by the woods. Below them in a wagon a party of men
went down the hill. The men sat upon boards laid across the box of a
wagon and sang a song. One of them stood in the seat beside the driver
and waved a bottle. He seemed to be making a speech. The others
shouted and clapped their hands. The sounds came faint and sharp up
the hill.
In the woods beside the fence rank grass grew. Hawks floated in the
sky over the valley below. A squirrel running along the fence stopped
and chattered at them. McGregor thought he had never had so delightful
a companion. He got a feeling of complete, good fellowship and
friendliness with this woman. Without knowing how the thing had been
done he felt a certain pride in it. "Don't mind what I said about the
ring," he urged, "I was only trying to tease you."
The woman beside McGregor was the daughter of an undertaker who lived
upstairs over his shop near the bakery. He had seen her in the evening
standing in the stairway by the shop door. After the story told him by
the black-haired boy he had been embarrassed about her. When he passed
her standing in the stairway he went hurriedly along and looked into
the gutter.
They went down the hill and sat on the log upon the hillside. A clump
of elders had grown about the log since his visits there with Cracked
McGregor so that the place was closed and shaded like a room. The
woman took off her hat and laid it beside her on the log. A faint
colour mounted to her pale cheeks and a flash of anger gleamed in her
eyes. "He probably lied to you about me," she said, "I didn't give him
that ring to wear. I don't know why I gave it to him. He wanted it. He
asked me for it time and again. He said he wanted to show it to his
mother. And now he has shown it to you and I suppose told lies about
me."
Beaut was annoyed and wished he had not mentioned the ring. He felt
that an unnecessary fuss was being made about it. He did not believe
that the black-haired boy had lied but he did not think it mattered.
He began talking of his father, boasting of him. His hatred of the
town blazed up. "They thought they knew him down there," he said,
"they laughed at him and called him 'Cracked.' They thought his
running into the mine just a crazy notion like a horse that runs into
a burning stable. He was the best man in town. He was braver than any
of them. He went in there and died when he had almost enough money
saved to buy a farm over here." He pointed down the valley.
Beaut began to tell her of the visits to the hillside with his father
and described the effect of the scene on himself when he was a child.
"I thought it was paradise," he said.
She put her hand on his arm and seemed to be soothing him like a
careful groom quieting an excitable horse. "Don't mind them," she
said, "you will go away after a time and make a place for yourself out
in the world."
He wondered how she knew. A profound respect for her came over him.
"She is keen to guess that," he thought.
He began to talk of himself, boasting and throwing out his chest. "I'd
like to have the chance to show what I can do," he declared. A thought
that had been in his mind on the winter day when Uncle Charlie Wheeler
put the name of Beaut upon him came back and he walked up and down
before the woman making grotesque motions with his hands as Cracked
McGregor had walked up and down before him.
"I'll tell you what," he began and his voice was harsh. He had
forgotten the presence of the woman and half forgotten what had been
in his mind. He sputtered and glared over his shoulder up the hillside
as he struggled for words. "Oh to Hell with men!" he burst forth.
"They are cattle, stupid cattle." A fire blazed up in his eyes and a
confident ring came into his voice. "I'd like to get them together,
all of them," he said, "I'd like to make them----" Words failed him
and again he sat down on the log beside the woman. "Well I'd like to
lead them to an old mine shaft and push them in," he concluded
resentfully.
* * * * *
On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into the
valley. "I wonder why we don't go there, mother and I," he said. "When
I see it I'm filled with the notion. I think I want to be a farmer and
work in the fields. Instead of that mother and I sit and plan of the
city. I'm going to be a lawyer. That's all we talk about. Then I come
up here and it seems as though this is the place for me."
The tall woman laughed. "I can see you coming home at night from the
fields," she said. "It might be to that white house there with the
windmill, You would be a big man and would have dust in your red hair
and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman with a baby
in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand leaning on the
fence waiting for you. When you came up she would put her arm around
your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard would tickle her cheek.
You should have a beard when you grow older. Your mouth is so big."
A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had said
that and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then and there.
He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the hill far away at
the other end of the valley. "We'd better be getting along back," he
said.
The woman remained seated on the log. "Sit down," she said, "I'll tell
you something--something it's good for you to hear. You're so big and
red you tempt a girl to bother you. First though you tell me why you
go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the
stairway in the evening."
Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-
haired boy had told him of her. "Then it was true--what he said about
you?" he asked.
"No! No!" she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on
her hat. "Let's be going."
Beaut sat stolidly on the log. "What's the use bothering each other,"
he said. "Let's sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home
before dark."
They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
boasted of his father.
"I'm too old for that boy," she said; "I'm older than you by a good
many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women.
I do pretty well. I don't have any one to talk to except father and he
sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I
let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me
in the stairway it is because I'm lonesome. There isn't a man in town
I'd marry--not one."
The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his father
were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than this
pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women
at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had thought
before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent to
their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it
crudely so that it hurt.
Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again
he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill.
Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.
Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky.
"One living up here and never going down there might think it rather
grand and big," he said. Again the hatred came. "They might think the
men who live down there knew something instead of being just a lot of
cattle."
A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole
into her eyes. "We get at one another," she said, "we can't let one
another alone. I wish we hadn't quarrelled. We might be friends if we
tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I've heard
others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here
would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was
than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say
that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay
listening."
The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. "I don't like
the women," he said, "but I liked you, seeing you standing in the
stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought
maybe you amounted to something. I don't know why you should be
bothered by what I think. I don't know why any woman should be
bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on
doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a lawyer."
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood
crept over him.
CHAPTER III
The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and
cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east
to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books
they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men
and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all
they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern
life.
The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged
to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the
officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who
was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by
the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived
in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the
train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the
offices of the mine. After five o'clock in the afternoon no white
collars were to be seen upon the streets of Coal Creek.
In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with toil they drank greedily
in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. Among
them a constant low muttering went on. They felt the injustice of
their lot but could not voice it logically and when they thought of
the men who owned the mine they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in
their thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and Barney Butterlips,
a thin little man with a cork leg, stood on a box and made speeches
regarding the coming brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was
unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the main street. The
battery was made up of several men in brown uniforms. They set up a
Gatling gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.
An Italian who lived in a house on the hillside cultivated a garden.
His place was the one beauty spot in the valley. With a wheelbarrow he
brought earth from the woods at the top of the hill and on Sunday he
could be seen going back and forth and whistling merrily. In the
winter he sat in his house making a drawing on a bit of paper. In the
spring he took the drawing, and by it planted his garden, utilising
every inch of his ground. When a strike came on he was told by the
mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He
thought of the garden and the work he had done and went back to his
routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the
hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined
the striking miners.
In a little one-room shack on the hill lived an old woman. She lived
alone and was vilely dirty. In her house she had old broken chairs and
tables picked up about town and piled in such profusion that she could
scarcely move about. On warm days she sat in the sun before the shack
chewing on a stick that had been dipped in tobacco. Miners coming up
the hill dumped bits of bread and meat-ends out of their dinner-pails
into a box nailed to a tree by the road. These the old woman collected
and ate. When the soldiers came to town she walked along the street
jeering at them. "Pretty boys! Scabs! Dudes! Dry-goods clerks!" she
called after them as she walked by the tails of their horses. A young
man with glasses on his nose, who was mounted on a grey horse turned
and called to his comrades, "Let her alone--it's old Mother Misery
herself."
When the tall red-haired boy looked at the workers and at the old
woman who followed the soldiers he did not sympathise with them. He
hated them. In a way he sympathised with the soldiers. His blood was
stirred by the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought
there was order and decency in the rank of uniformed men moving
silently and quickly along and he half wished they would destroy the
town. When the strikers made a wreck of the garden of the Italian he
was deeply touched and walked up and down in the room before his
mother, proclaiming himself. "I would have killed them had it been my
garden," he said. "I would not have left one of them alive." In his
heart he like Cracked McGregor nursed his hatred of the miners and of
the town. "The place is one to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't
like it here let him get up and leave." He remembered his father
working and saving for the farm in the valley. "They thought him
cracked but he knew more than they. They would not have dared touch a
garden he had planted."
In the heart of the miner's son strange half-formed thoughts began to
find lodgings. Remembering in his dreams at night the moving columns
of men in their uniforms he read new meaning into the scraps of
history picked up in the school and the movements of men in old
history began to have significance for him. On a summer afternoon as
he loitered before the town's hotel, beneath which was the saloon and
billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men
talking of the significance of men.
One of the men was an itinerant oculist who came to the mining town
once a month to fit and sell spectacles. When the oculist had sold
several pairs of spectacles he got drunk, sometimes staying drunk for
a week. When he was drunk he spoke French and Italian and sometimes
stood in the barroom before the miners, quoting the poems of Dante.
His clothes were greasy from long wear and he had a huge nose streaked
with red and purple veins. Because of his learning in the languages
and his quoting of poems the miners thought the oculist infinitely
wise. To them it seemed that one with such a mind must have almost
unearthly knowledge concerning the eyes and the fitting of glasses and
they wore with pride the cheap ill-fitting things he thrust upon them.
Occasionally, as though making a concession to his patrons, the
oculist spent an evening among them. Once after reciting one of the
sonnets of Shakespeare he put a hand on the bar and rocking gently
back and forth sang in a drink-broken voice a ballad beginning "The
harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed." After the
song he put his head down upon the bar and wept while the miners
looked on touched with sympathy.
On the summer afternoon when Beaut McGregor listened, the oculist was
engaged in a violent quarrel with another man, drunk like himself. The
second man was a slender dandified fellow of middle age who sold shoes
for a Philadelphia jobbing-house. He sat in a chair tilted against the
hotel and tried to read aloud from a book. When he was fairly launched
in a long paragraph the oculist interrupted. Staggering up and down
the narrow board walk before the hotel the old drunkard raved and
swore. He seemed beside himself with wrath.
"I am sick of such slobbering philosophy," he declared. "Even the
reading of it makes you drool at the mouth. You do not say the words
sharply, and they can't be said sharply. I'm a strong man myself."
Spreading his legs wide apart and blowing up his cheeks, the oculist
beat upon his breast. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the man in
the chair.
"You but slobber and make a foul noise," he declared. "I know your
kind. I spit upon you. The Congress at Washington is full of such
fellows as is also the House of Commons in England. In France they
were once in charge. They ran things in France until the coming of a
man such as myself. They were lost in the shadow of the great
Napoleon."
The oculist as though dismissing the dandified man from his mind
turned to address Beaut. He talked in French and the man in the chair
fell into a troubled sleep. "I am like Napoleon," the drunkard
declared, breaking again into English. Tears began to show in his
eyes. "I take the money of these miners and I give them nothing. The
spectacles I sell to their wives for five dollars cost me but fifteen
cents. I ride over these brutes as Napoleon rode over Europe. There