________________________________________________
_ When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place
among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop
district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his
profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other
lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his
ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.
Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the
matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the
meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was
tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of
adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and
forth along the American railroads.
He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its
patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve
trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless
thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so
absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the
door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and
down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like
cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns
worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with
painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that
housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.
In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State
Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and
made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging
jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building
opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist
Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect
expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did
not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the
socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.
McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in
meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the
street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes
and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched.
Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine
love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by
some great passion into order and meaning was lost.
In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and
bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to
drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman
came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night
have you had?" they asked each other.
The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they
talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from
customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched
them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with
marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter
eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.
A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen
and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried
to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice
he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some
time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he
talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make
himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.
McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to
forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the
great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been
leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark
intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a
disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the
disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men,
half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to
him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the
tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came
to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."
The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor,
each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like
suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he
had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he
looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid
children.
One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red
cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of
white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter
in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and
she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in
the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken
raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece
of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue
flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking
skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.
"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as
he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women
working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I
have only one and she crying and sick half the time."
McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice
spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The
best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against
this evil," it said.
He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist
lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the
waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and
closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf
below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting
his head upon his hands.
McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in
Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at
night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went
to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and
through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that
netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in
Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted
to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw
the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people
tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the
miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to
disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the
swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering
which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's
and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of
humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have
seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the
sea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through the
streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in
sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they
struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth
was drawn.
The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the
mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual
physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power
and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the
great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a
dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes.
At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along
the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood,
become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a
meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the
planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered,
and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and
disorder of the street below. _
Read next: BOOK IV: CHAPTER IV
Read previous: BOOK IV: CHAPTER II
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