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_ 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." _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER V
Read previous: BOOK II: CHAPTER III
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