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_ 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. _
Read next: BOOK IV: CHAPTER I
Read previous: BOOK III: CHAPTER II
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