________________________________________________
_ The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for
McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago.
He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the
endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening
after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at
the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from
life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had
been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his
and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of
the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.
McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep
human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his
Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern
tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of
success that is equally meaningless.
On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook
County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of
McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked
along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into
the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and
the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked
over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be
filled with contempt for them.
He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a
west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing
crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left,
gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set
himself up before the eyes of men.
When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening
and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood
looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his
contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness.
"They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be
Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail
shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over
and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown--
the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on
me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.
At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to
go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red
hair.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of
herself.
* * * * *
America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and
on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined
and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After
each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written
into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried
through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for
the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry
in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through
their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the
market reports.
And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might
have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today
spreads its terrible details over everything.
Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring
the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the
tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and
exhaustively the story of a crime.
And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible
stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled
himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of
Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on
looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no
progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to
the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She
won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find
out."
* * * * *
In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of
womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a
good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for
existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the
man.
Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life.
She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust
with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine
assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the
Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous
and intense.
With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter
security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad,
went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all
women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to
herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive
McGregor to approach with caution.
Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went
in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk
facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First
Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined
that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her
across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse
sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.
"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me
what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've
come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that
want to be useful."
The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern
daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had
she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and
sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business-
like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.
"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your
beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing
the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.
"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy
in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a
fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to
look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the
parlour of their houses.
"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them
tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that
killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to
tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they
half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.
"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here.
They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of
these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching
you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You
can do the job if you're any good."
After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him.
For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no
way diverted by her beauty nor her self--possession. A hot wave, half
anger, half admiration, swept over her.
McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he
said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and
I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a
girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your
way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women
talk and tell you and then you tell me."
When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the
settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's
office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech
and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise
that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about
her in the First Ward. Her self--possession was shaken. "If they are
children--these women of the town--then I am a child, a child swimming
with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."
A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child--that McGregor.
He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."
She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the
man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of
the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom
we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."
In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she
realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to
pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I
will have to do that," she whispered to herself. _
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