________________________________________________
_ 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. _
Read next: BOOK III: CHAPTER III
Read previous: BOOK III: CHAPTER I
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