CHAPTER III

And then a new element asserted itself in the life of McGregor. One of the hundreds of disintegrating forces that attack strong natures, striving to scatter their force in the back currents of life, attacked him. His big body began to feel with enervating persistency the call of sex.

In the house in Wycliff Place McGregor passed as a mystery. By keeping silence he won a reputation for wisdom. The clerks in the hall bedrooms thought him a scientist. The woman from Cairo thought him a theological student. Down the hall a pretty girl with large black eyes who worked in a department store down town dreamed of him at night. When in the evening he banged the door to his room and strode down the hallway going to the night school she sat in a chair by the open door of her room. As he passed she raised her eyes and looked at him boldly. When he returned she was again by the door and again she looked boldly at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red- haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on the floor with Edith's two companions. A dance struck up and taking one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes. Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.

At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red- haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall beside McGregor.

"This place doesn't interest me," said McGregor quickly. "I don't like to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk and get acquainted."

* * * * *

The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor, her heart jumping with excitement. "I've got a man," she thought, exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.

Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness. Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him. A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his eyes came over her. "This one could knock him over a six-rail fence," she thought.

"Where are we going now?" she asked.

McGregor looked down at her. "To some place where we can talk," he said. "I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going. I'm going with you. You aren't going with me."

McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.

As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through her.

At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.

In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.

For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely, letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite different.

Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her. She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a faint grey streak of fear. "Of course he won't come back again," she thought.



CHAPTER VII

In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back room.

About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.

McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life. The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers of laws.

There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three sentences to passers by.

It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go, socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words, crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.

The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us have marked them for their barrenness.

And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word. He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the gods.

For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as he stood staring at them.

McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped, that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end mere slaves to words and formulas.

The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk concerning the matter with a at the warehouse. The talk came about in this way.

In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime. Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to compel attention. "They are no good," he said to himself, when in response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. "Although they get but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!" Like McGregor he had nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book. Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. "We are the kind who get things done," he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have contempt for himself.

One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage. "The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves," said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he added heartily. "Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the evening."

McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon him. "Well how are you any better?" he asked bluntly. "Do you think your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very striking figure as far as I can see."

Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had employed him rubbed his hands with delight.

In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly. In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express what was in his brain. "Ugly crawling things that look at the floor," he muttered. "If they have children it is without order or orderly purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the courage to try to do."

With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat thing wandering aimlessly across the light. "I must not be confused by little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and work just as there is in the mining town from which I came."

* * * * *

Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time shared his thoughts with her. "I am trying to discover why men are of so little importance," he said suddenly. "Are they mere tools for women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?"

Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the book. "Oh well," he added "it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her."

Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble. Then a new thought came to her. "He needs money to get on in the world," she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.

"You're all right," said McGregor, preparing to depart. "You do not interfere with a man's thoughts."

Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would have given all to McGregor.

And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water below. "Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?" he asked himself. "Why are the men who write books in some way less full of meaning than the men who do things?"

McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each part without regard to the purpose of the whole. "There is danger in thinking too," he muttered vaguely. "Everywhere there is danger, in labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?"

McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they not pointed the way?

Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the uncertain light. "They marched," whispered McGregor. "That's what made them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them. That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking. Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and tried to do each his own part.

"I will do my part here," shouted McGregor. "I will find the way." His body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad he was not a part of it. "I will keep myself to myself and be ready for what happens," he said, burning with new courage.



BOOK III



CHAPTER I

When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor, working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. "I will begin to take care of her now," he thought and with the rough sense of equity in such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving himself airs. "She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her," he told himself.

The five dollars came back. "Keep it. I don't want your money," the mother wrote. "If you have money left after your expenses are paid begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat. Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son."

Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men. She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the distant city.

Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called "trouble with the heart." Now and then she had "bad spells." On this spring evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole in the woods.

In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. "I've been everywhere," said one of the men. "I've been in towns and cities I don't even remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there."

The other man laughed. "You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer," he jeered.

Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque, staring silently past her into the sky.

Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to dream dreams.

Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.

Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy feet on the stairs. "That will be Beaut coming up from the shop," she muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.



CHAPTER II

Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood. Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when he came into the presence of the dead.

Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. "I will her among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful valley," he told himself. The details of a religious discussion between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. "Anyway if Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting on the log on the hillside," he thought.

With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life. On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their heads and bawled lustily. "It is the place for the dead to lie," whispered McGregor. "When my own time comes I shall be brought up here." An idea came to him. "I will have father's body moved," he told himself. "When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors."

The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him throw back his shoulders. "We are two of a feather, father and me," he muttered, "two of a feather and mother has not understood either of us. Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us."

Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had gone down behind clouds. "I wonder if I understand myself, if any one understands," he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools clanking on his shoulder.

McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.

And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. "I wanted to talk with you," she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.

For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. "She is already becoming stooped," he thought. "I would not want to make love to her now."

Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. "We have been friends since you went away," she explained. "She liked to talk of you and I liked that too."

Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. "I do not want you to misunderstand me," she said. "I know I can't get you. I'm not thinking of that."

She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of tenderness. "I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the consumption," she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.

* * * * *

In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind him. All were silent and embarrassed.

McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him. "It is not because she is a woman, I know that," he told himself and tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in the street below.

In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who, when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.

McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die. "It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to achieve that," he whispered to himself.

In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.

"Vote with us and the thing is done," he shouted. "Are you going to let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle. You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so."

"You will have to do something more than think," roared McGregor, as he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and loose badly knit bodies.

"Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It should be ready to knock down what stands in its way," he cried, astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in the darkened room.



CHAPTER III

The funeral of Nance McGregor was an event in Coal Creek. In the minds of the miners she stood for something. Fearing and hating the husband and the tall big-fisted son they had yet a tenderness for the mother and wife. "She lost her money handing us out bread," they said as they pounded on the bar in the saloon. Word ran about among them and they returned again and again to the subject. The fact that she had lost her man twice—once in the mine when the timber fell and clouded his brain, and then later when his body lay black and distorted near the door to the McCrary cut after the dreadful time of the fire in the mine—was perhaps forgotten but the fact that she had once kept a store and that she had lost her money serving them was not forgotten.

On the day of the funeral the miners came up out of the mine and stood in groups in the open street and in the vacant bake shop. The men of the night shift had their faces washed and had put white paper collars about their necks. The man who owned the saloon locked the front door and putting the keys into his pocket stood on the side-walk looking silently at the windows of Nance McGregor's rooms. Out along the runway from the mines came other miners—men of the day shift. Setting their dinner pails on the stone along the front of the saloon and crossing the railroad they kneeled and washed their blackened faces in the red stream that flowed at the foot of the embankment The voice of the preacher, a slender wasp-like young man with black hair and dark shadows under his eyes, floated out to the listening men. A train of loaded coke cars rumbled past along the back of the stores.

McGregor sat at the head of the coffin dressed in a new black suit. He stared at the wall back of the head of the preacher, not hearing, thinking his own thoughts.

Back of McGregor sat the undertaker's pale daughter. She leaned forward until she touched the back of the chair in front and sat with her face buried in a white handkerchief. Her weeping cut across the voice of the preacher in the closely crowded little room filled with miners' wives and in the midst of his prayer for the dead she was taken with a violent fit of coughing and had to get up and hurry out of the room.

After the services in the rooms above the bake shop a procession formed on Main Street. Like awkward boys the miners fell into groups and walked along behind the black hearse and the carriage in which sat the dead woman's son with the minister. The men kept looking at each other and smiling sheepishly. There had been no arrangement to follow the body to its grave and when they thought of the son and the attitude he had always maintained toward them they wondered whether or not he wanted them to follow.

And McGregor was unconscious of all this. He sat in the carriage beside the minister and with unseeing eyes stared over the heads of the horses. He was thinking of his life in the city and of what he should do there in the future, of Edith Carson, sitting in the cheap dance hall and of the evenings he had spent with her, of the barber on the park bench talking of women and of his life with his mother when he was a boy in the mining town.

As the carriage climbed slowly up the hill followed by the miners McGregor began to love his mother. For the first time he realised that her life was full of meaning and that in her woman's way she had been quite as heroic in her years of patient toil as had been her man Cracked McGregor when he ran to his death in the burning mine. McGregor's hands began to tremble and his shoulders straightened. He became conscious of the men, the dumb blackened children of toil dragging their weary legs up the hill.

For what? McGregor stood up in the carriage and turning about looked at the men. Then he fell upon his knees on the carriage seat and watched them eagerly, his soul crying out to something he thought must be hidden away among the black mass of them, something that was the keynote of their lives, something for which he had not looked and in which he had not believed.

McGregor, kneeling in the open carriage at the top of the hill and watching the marching men slowly toiling upward, had of a sudden one of those strange awakenings that are the reward of stoutness in stout souls. A strong wind lifted the smoke from the coke ovens and blew it up the face of the hill on the farther side of the valley and the wind seemed to have lifted also some of the haze that had covered his eyes. At the foot of the hill along the railroad he could see the little stream, one of the blood red streams of the mine country, and the dull red houses of the miners. The red of the coke ovens, the red sun setting behind the hills to the west and last of all the red stream flowing like a river of blood down through the valley made a scene that burned itself into the brain of the miner's son. A lump came into his throat and for a moment he tried vainly to get back his old satisfying hate of the town and the miners but it would not come. Long he looked down the hill to where the miners of the night shift marched up the hill after the carriage and the slowly moving hearse. It seemed to him that they like himself were marching up out of the smoke and the little squalid houses away from the shores of the blood red river into something new. What? McGregor shook his head slowly like an animal in pain. He wanted something for himself, for all these men. It seemed to him that he would gladly lie dead like Nance McGregor to know the secret of that want.

And then as though in answer to the cry out of his heart the file of marching men fell into step. An instantaneous impulse seemed to run through the ranks of stooped toiling figures. Perhaps they also looking backward had caught the magnificence of the picture scrawled across the landscape in black and red and had been moved by it so that their shoulders straightened and the long subdued song of life began to sing in their bodies. With a swing the marching men fell into step. Into the mind of McGregor flashed a thought of another day when he had stood upon this same hill with the half crazed man who stuffed birds and sat upon a log by the roadside reading the Bible and how he had hated these men because they did not march with orderly precision like the soldiers who came to subdue them. In a flash he knew that he who had hated the miners hated them no more. With Napoleonic insight he read a lesson into the accident of the men's falling into step behind his carriage. A big grim thought flashed into his brain. "Some day a man will come who will swing all of the workers of the world into step like that," he thought. "He will make them conquer, not one another but the terrifying disorder of life. If their lives have been wrecked by disorder it is not their fault. They have been betrayed by the ambitions of their leaders, all men have betrayed them." McGregor thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities, everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful scheme of things alive. "There is a curse on my country," he cried. "Everyone has come here for gain, to grow rich, to achieve. Suppose they should begin to want to live here. Suppose they should quit thinking of gain, leaders and followers of leaders. They are children. Suppose like children they should begin to play a bigger game. Suppose they could just learn to march, nothing else. Suppose they should begin to do with their bodies what their minds are not strong enough to do—to just learn the one simple thing, to march, whenever two or four or a thousand of them get together, to march."

McGregor's thoughts moved him so that he wanted to yell. Instead his face grew stern and he tried to command himself. "No, wait," he whispered. "Train yourself. Here is something to give point to your life. Be patient and wait." Again his thoughts swept away, running down to the advancing men. Tears came into his eyes. "Men have taught them that big lesson only when they wanted to kill. This must be different. Some one must teach them the big lesson just for their own sakes, that they also may know. They must march fear and disorder and purposelessness away. That must come first."

McGregor turned and compelled himself to sit quietly beside the minister in the carriage. He became bitter against the leaders of men, the figures in old history that had once loomed so big in his mind.

"They have half taught them the secret only to betray them," he muttered. "The men of books and of brains have done the same. That loose-jawed fellow in the street last night—there must be thousands of such, talking until their jaws hang loose like worn-out gates. Words mean nothing but when a man marches with a thousand other men and is not doing it for the glory of some king, then it will mean something. He will know then that he is a part of something real and he will catch the rhythm of the mass and glory in the fact that he is a part of the mass and that the mass has meaning. He will begin to feel great and powerful." McGregor smiled grimly. "That is what the great leaders of armies have known," he whispered. "And they have sold men out. They have used that knowledge to subdue men, to make them serve their own little ends."

McGregor continued to look back at the men and in an odd sort of way to wonder at himself and the thought that had come to him. "It can be done," he presently said aloud. "It will be done by some one, sometime. Why not by me?"

They buried Nance McGregor in the deep hole dug by her son before the log on the hillside. On the morning of his arrival he had secured permission of the mining company who owned the land to make this the burial place of the McGregors.

When the service over the grave was finished he looked about him at the miners, standing uncovered along the hill and in the road leading down into the valley, and felt that he should like to tell them what was in his mind. He had an impulse to jump upon the log beside the grave and in the presence of the green fields his father loved and across the grave of Nance McGregor shout to them saying, "Your cause shall be my cause. My brain and strength shall be yours. Your enemies I shall smite with my naked fist." Instead he walked rapidly past them and topping the hill went down toward the town into the gathering night.

McGregor could not sleep on that last night he was ever to spend in Coal Creek. When darkness came he went along the street and stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the home of the undertaker's daughter. The emotions that had swept over him during the afternoon had subdued his spirit and he wanted to be with some one who would also be subdued and quiet. When the woman did not come down the stairs to stand in the hallway as she had done in his boyhood he went up and knocked at her door. Together they went along Main Street and climbed the hill.

The undertaker's daughter walked with difficulty and was compelled to stop and sit upon a stone by the roadside. When she attempted to rise McGregor gathered her into his arms and when she protested patted her thin shoulder with his big hand and whispered to her. "Be quiet," he said. "Do not talk about anything. Just be quiet."

The nights in the hills above mining towns are magnificent. The long valleys, cut and slashed by the railroads and made ugly by the squalid little houses of the miners are half lost in the soft blackness. Out of the darkness sounds emerge. Coal cars creak and protest as they are pushed along rails. Voices cry out. With a long reverberating rattle one of the mine cars dumps its load down a metal chute into a car standing on the railroad tracks. In the winter little fires are started along the tracks by the workmen who are employed about the tipple and on summer nights the moon comes out and touches with wild beauty the banks of black smoke that drift upward from the long rows of coke ovens.

With the sick woman in his arms McGregor sat in silence on the hillside above Coal Creek and let new thoughts and new impulses play with his spirit. The love for the figure of his mother that had come to him during the afternoon returned and he took the woman of the mine country into his arms and held her closely against his breast.

The struggling man in the hills of his own country, who was trying to clear his soul of the hatred of men bred in him by the disorder of life, lifted his head and pressed the body of the undertaker's daughter hard against his own body. The woman, understanding his mood, picked with her thin fingers at his coat and wished she might die there in the darkness in the arms of the man she loved. When he became conscious of her presence and relaxed the grip of his arms about her shoulders she lay still and waited for him to forget again and again to press her tightly and let her feel in her worn-out body his massive strength and virility.

"It is a job. It is something big I can try to do," he whispered to himself and in fancy saw the great disorderly city on the western plains rocked by the swing and rhythm of men, aroused and awakening with their bodies a song of new life.



BOOK IV



CHAPTER I

Chicago is a vast city and millions of people live within the limits of its influence. It stands at the heart of America almost within sound of the creaking green leaves of the corn in the vast corn fields of the Mississippi Valley. It is inhabited by hordes of men of all nations who have come across the seas or out of western corn—shipping towns to make their fortunes. On all sides men are busy making fortunes.

In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, "In America one gets much money," and adventurous souls have set forth only to land at last, a little perplexed and disconcerted, in narrow ill—smelling rooms in Halstead Street in Chicago.

In American villages the tale has been told. Here it has not been whispered but shouted. Magazines and newspapers have done the job. The word regarding the making of money runs over the land like a wind among the corn. The young men listen and run away to Chicago. They have vigour and youth but in them has been builded no dream no tradition of devotion to anything but gain.

Chicago is one vast gulf of disorder. Here is the passion for gain, the very spirit of the bourgeoise gone drunk with desire. The result is something terrible. Chicago is leaderless, purposeless, slovenly, down at the heels.

And back of Chicago lie the long corn fields that are not disorderly. There is hope in the corn. Spring comes and the corn is green. It shoots up out of the black land and stands up in orderly rows. The corn grows and thinks of nothing but growth. Fruition comes to the corn and it is cut down and disappears. Barns are filled to bursting with the yellow fruit of the corn.