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_ 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.
And Chicago has forgotten the lesson of the corn. All men have
forgotten. It has never been told to the young men who come out of the
corn fields to live in the city.
Once and once only in modern times the soul of America was stirred.
The Civil War swept like a purifying fire through the land. Men
marched together and knew the feel of shoulder to shoulder action.
Brown stout bearded figures returned after the war to the villages.
The beginning of a literature of strength and virility arose.
And then the time of sorrow and of stirring effort passed and
prosperity returned. Only the aged are now cemented together by the
sorrow of that time and there has been no new national sorrow.
It is a summer evening in America and the citizens sit in their houses
after the effort of the day. They talk of the children in school or of
the new difficulty of meeting the high prices of food stuff. In cities
the bands play in the parks. In villages the lights go out and one
hears the sound of hurrying horses on distant roads.
A thoughtful man walking in the streets of Chicago on such an evening
sees women in white shirt waists and men with cigars in their mouths
who sit on the porches of the houses. The man is from Ohio. He owns a
factory in one of the large industrial towns there and has come to the
city to sell his product. He is a man of the better sort, quiet,
efficient, kindly. In his own community every one respects him and he
respects himself. Now he walks and gives himself over to thoughts. He
passes a house set among trees where a man cuts grass by the streaming
light from a window. The song of the lawn mower stirs the walker. He
idles along the street and looks in through the windows at Prints upon
the walls. A white--clad woman sits playing on a piano. "Life is
good," he says, lighting a cigar; "it climbs on and up toward a kind
of universal fairness."
And then in the light from a street lamp the walker sees a man
staggering along the sidewalk, muttering and helping himself with his
hands upon a wall. The sight does not greatly disturb the pleasant
satisfying thoughts that stir in his mind. He has eaten a good dinner
at the hotel, he knows that drunken men are often but gay money-
spending dogs who to-morrow morning will settle down to their work
feeling secretly better for the night of wine and song.
My thoughtful man is an American with the disease of comfort and
prosperity in his blood. He strolls along and turns a corner. He is
satisfied with the cigar he smokes and, he decides, satisfied with the
age in which he lives. "Agitators may howl," he says, "but on the
whole life is good, and as for me I am going to spend my life
attending to the business in hand."
The walker has turned a corner into a side street. Two men emerge from
the door of a saloon and stand upon the sidewalk under a light. They
wave their arms up and down. Suddenly one of them springs forward and
with a quick forward thrust of his body and the flash of a clenched
fist in the lamp light knocks his companion into the gutter. Down the
street he sees rows of tall smoke-begrimed brick buildings hanging
black and ominous against the sky. At the end of a street a huge
mechanical apparatus lifts cars of coal and dumps them roaring and
rattling into the bowels of a ship that lies tied in the river.
The walker throws his cigar away and looks about. A man walks before
him in the silent street. He sees the man raise his fist to the sky
and notes with a shock the movement of the lips and the hugeness and
ugliness of the face in the lamplight.
Again he goes on, hurrying now, around another corner into a street
filled with pawn shops, clothing stores and the clamour of voices. In
his mind floats a picture. He sees two boys, clad in white rompers,
feeding clover to a tame rabbit in a suburban back lawn and wishes he
were at home in his own place. In his fancy the two sons are walking
under apple trees and laughing and tusseling for a great bundle of
newly pulled sweet smelling clover. The strange looking red man with
the huge face he has seen in the street is looking at the two children
over a garden wall. There is a threat in the look and the threat
alarms him. Into his mind comes the notion that the man who looks over
the wall wants to destroy the future of his children.
The night advances. Down a stairway beside a clothing store comes a
woman with gleaming white teeth who is clad in a black dress. She
makes a Peculiar little jerking movement with her head to the walker.
A patrol wagon with clanging bells rushes through the street, two blue
clad policemen sitting stiffly in the seat. A boy--he can't be above
six--runs along the street pushing soiled newspapers under the noses
of idlers on the corners, his shrill childish voice rises above the
din of the trolley cars and the clanging notes of the patrol wagon.
The walker throws his cigar into the gutter and climbing the steps of
a street car goes back to his hotel. His fine reflective mood is gone.
He half wishes that something lovely might come into American life but
the wish does not persist. He is only irritated and feels that a
pleasant evening has been in some way spoiled. He is wondering if he
will be successful in the business that brought him to the city. As he
turns out the light in his room and putting his head upon the pillow
listens to the noises of the city merged now into a quiet droning roar
he thinks of the brick factory on the banks of the river in Ohio and
as he falls into sleep the face of the red-haired man lowers at him
from the factory door.
* * * * *
When McGregor returned to the city after the burial of his mother he
began at once to try to put his idea of the marching men into form.
For a long time he did not know how to begin. The idea was vague and
shadowy. It belonged to the nights in the hills of his own country and
seemed a little absurd when he tried to think of it in the daylight of
North State Street in Chicago.
McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he
could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books
without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and
quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the
little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get
himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had
raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt
that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day
McGregor began to work for him something had happened. The miner's son
had unmanned him. "A man ought to be boss in his own place," he
sometimes muttered to himself, as he walked in the passageways among
rows of piled apple barrels in the upper part of the warehouse
wondering why the presence of McGregor irritated him.
From six o'clock in the evening until two in the morning McGregor now
worked as night-cashier in a restaurant on South State Street below
Van Buren and from two until seven in the morning he slept in a room
whose windows looked down into Michigan Boulevard. On Thursday he was
free, his place being taken for the evening by the man who owned the
restaurant, a small excitable Irishman by the name of Tom O'Toole.
McGregor got his chance to become a student through the bank account
belonging to Edith Carson. The opportunity arose in this way. On a
summer evening after his return from Pennsylvania he sat with her in
the darkened store back of the closed screen door. McGregor was morose
and silent. On the evening before he had tried to talk to several men
at the warehouse about the Marching Men and they had not understood.
He blamed his inability with words and sat in the half darkness with
his face in his hands and looked up the street saying nothing and
thinking bitter thoughts.
The idea that had come to him made him half drunk with its
possibilities and he knew that he must not let it make him drunk. He
wanted to begin forcing men to do the simple thing full of meaning
rather than the disorganised ineffective things and he had an ever-
present inclination to arise, to stretch himself, to run into the
streets and with his great arms see if he could not sweep the people
before him, starting them on the long purposeful march that was to be
the beginning of the rebirth of the world and that was to fill with
meaning the lives of men. Then when he had walked the fever out of his
blood and had frightened the people in the streets by the grim look in
his face he tried to school himself to sit quietly waiting.
The woman sitting beside him in a low rocking chair began trying to
tell him of something that had been in her mind. Her heart jumped and
she talked slowly, pausing between sentences to conceal the trembling
of her voice. "Would it help you in what you want to do if you could
quit at the warehouse and spend your days in study?" she asked.
McGregor looked at her and nodded his head absent-mindedly. He thought
of the nights in his room when the hard heavy work of the day in the
warehouse seemed to have benumbed his brain.
"Besides the business here I have seventeen hundred dollars in the
savings bank," said Edith, turning aside to conceal the eager hopeful
look in her eyes. "I want to invest it. I do not want it lying there
doing nothing. I want you to take it and make a lawyer of yourself."
Edith sat rigid in her chair waiting for his answer. She felt that she
had put him to a test. In her mind was a new hope. "If he takes it he
will not be walking out at the door some night and never coming back."
McGregor tried to think. He had not tried to explain to her his new
notion of life and did not know how to begin.
"After all why not stick to my plan and be a lawyer?" he asked
himself. "That might open the door. I'll do that," he said aloud to
the woman. "Both you and mother have talked of it so I'll give it a
trial. Yes, I'll take the money."
Again he looked at her as she sat before him flushed and eager and was
touched by her devotion as he had been touched by the devotion of the
undertaker's daughter in Coal Creek. "I don't mind being under
obligations to you," he said; "I don't know any one else I would take
it from."
In the street later the troubled man walked about trying to make new
plans for the accomplishment of his purpose. He was annoyed by what he
thought to be the dulness of his own brain and he thrust his fist up
into the air to look at it in the lamplight. "I'll get ready to use
that intelligently," he thought; "a man wants trained brains backed up
by a big fist in the struggle I'm going into."
It was then that the man from Ohio walked past with his hands in his
pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the
odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the
intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he
growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world,
the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would
like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run
about like ants when you kick over ant hills in the field." _
Read next: BOOK IV: CHAPTER II
Read previous: BOOK III: CHAPTER III
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