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.”
McGregor began to attend some classes at Chicago University and walked about among the massive buildings, erected for the most part through the bounty of one of his country's leading business men, wondering why the great centre of learning seemed so little a part of the city. To him the University seemed something entirely apart, not in tune with its surrounding. It was like an expensive ornament worn on the soiled hand of a street urchin. He did not stay there long.
One day he got into disfavour with the professor in one of the classes. He sat in a room among other students, his mind busy with thoughts of the future and of how he might get his movement of the marching men under way. In a chair beside him sat a large girl with blue eyes and hair like yellow wheat. She like McGregor was unconscious of what was going on about her and sat with half-closed eyes watching him. In the corners of her eyes lurked a gleam of amusement. She drew sketches of his huge mouth and nose on a pad of Paper.
At McGregor's left with his legs sprawled into the aisle sat a youth who was thinking of the yellow-haired girl and planning a campaign against her. His father was a manufacturer of berry boxes in a brick building on the West Side and he wished he were in school in another city so that it would not be necessary to live at home. All day he thought of the evening meal and of the coming of his father, nervous and tired, to quarrel with his mother about the management of the servants. Now he was trying to evolve a plan for getting money from his mother with which to enjoy a dinner at a downtown restaurant. With delight he contemplated such an evening with a box of cigarettes on the table and the yellow-haired girl sitting opposite him under red lights. He was a typical American youth of the upper middle class and was in the University only because he was in no hurry to begin his life in the commercial world.
In front of McGregor sat another typical student, a pale nervous young man who drummed with his fingers on the back of a book. He was very serious about acquiring learning and when the professor paused in his talk he threw up his hands and asked a question. When the professor smiled he laughed loudly. He was like an instrument on which the professor struck chords.
The professor, a short man with a bushy black beard, heavy shoulders and large powerful eye-glasses, spoke in a shrill voice surcharged with excitement.
“The world is full of unrest,” he said; “men are struggling like chicks in the shell. In the hinterland of every man's mind uneasy thoughts stir. I call your attention to what is going on in the Universities of Germany.”
The professor paused and glared about. McGregor was so irritated by what he took to be the wordiness of the man that he could not restrain himself. He felt as he had felt when the socialist orator talked on the streets of Coal Creek. With an oath he arose and kicked out his foot to push his chair away. The pad of paper fell out of the large girl's lap and scattered its leaves about the floor. A light burned in McGregor's blue eyes. As he stood in the classroom before the startled class his head, big and red, had something of nobility about it like the head of a fine beast. His voice rumbled out of his throat and the girl looked at him, her mouth standing open.
“We go from room to room hearing talk,” began McGregor. “On the street corners downtown in the evenings and in towns and villages men talk and talk. Books are written, jaws wag. The jaws of men are loose. They wabble about—saying nothing.”
McGregor's excitement grew. “If there is all this unrest why does it not come to something?” he demanded. “Why do not you who have trained brains strive to find the secret of order in the midst of this disorder? Why is something not done?”
The professor ran up and down on the platform. “I do not know what you mean,” he cried nervously. McGregor turned slowly and stared at the class. He tried to explain. “Why do not men lead their lives like men?” he asked. “They must be taught to march, hundreds of thousands of men. Do you not think so?”
McGregor's voice rose and his great fist was raised. “The world should become a great camp,” he cried. “The brains of the world should be at the organisation of mankind. Everywhere there is disorder and men chatter like monkeys in a cage. Why should some man not begin the organisation of a new army? If there are men who do not understand what is meant let them be knocked down.”
The professor leaned forward and peered through his spectacles at McGregor. “I understand your kind,” he said, and his voice trembled. “The class is dismissed. We deprecate violence here.”
The professor hurried through a door and down a long hallway with the class chattering at his heels. McGregor sat in his chair in the empty class room and stared at the wall. As the professor hurried away he muttered to himself: “What's getting in here? What's getting into our schools?”
Late on the following afternoon McGregor sat in his room thinking of what had happened in the class. He had decided that he would not spend any more time at the University but would devote himself entirely to the study of law. Several young men came in.
Among the students at the University McGregor had seemed very old. Secretly he was much admired and had often been the subject of talk. Those who had now come to see him wanted him to join a Greek Letter Fraternity. They sat about his room, on the window sill and on a trunk by the wall. They smoked pipes and were boyishly eager and enthusiastic. A glow shone in the cheeks of the spokesman—a clean-looking youth with black curly hair and round pink—and—white cheeks, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Iowa.
“You have been picked by our fellows to be one of us,” said the spokesman. “We want you to become an Alpha Beta Pi. It is a grand fraternity with chapters in the best schools in the country. Let me tell you.”
He began reeling off a list of names of statesmen, college professors, business men and well known athletes who belonged to the order.
McGregor sat by the wall looking at his guests and wondering what he would say. He was a little amused and half hurt and felt like a man who has had a Sunday School scholar stop him on the street to ask him about the welfare of his soul. He thought of Edith Carson waiting for him in her store on Monroe Street, of the angry miners standing in the saloon in Coal Creek plotting to break into the restaurant while he sat with the hammer in his hands waiting for battle, of old Mother Misery walking at the heels of the soldiers' horses through the streets of the mining village, and last of all of the terrible certainty that these bright-eyed boys would be destroyed, swallowed up by the huge commercial city in which they were to live.
“It means a lot to be one of us when a chap gets out into the world,” the curly-haired youth said. “It helps you get on, get in with the right people. You can't go on without men you know. You ought to get in with the best fellows.” He hesitated and looked at the floor. “I don't mind telling you,” he said with an outburst of frankness, “that one of our stronger men—Whiteside, the mathematician—wanted us to have you. He said you were worth while. He thought you ought to see us and get to know us and that we ought to see and get to know you.”
McGregor got up and took his hat from a nail on the wall. He felt the utter futility of trying to express what was in his mind and walked down the stairs to the street with the file of boys following in embarrassed silence and stumbling in the darkness of the hallway at his heels. At the street door he stopped and faced them, struggling to put his thoughts into words.
“I can't do what you ask,” he said. “I like you and like your asking me to come in with you, but I'm going to quit the University.” His voice softened. “I would like to have you for friends,” he added. “You say a man needs to know people after awhile. Well, I would like to know you while you are what you are now. I don't want to know you after you become what you will become.”
McGregor turned and ran down the remaining steps to the stone sidewalk and went rapidly up the street. A stern hard look was in his face and he knew he would spend a silent night thinking of what had happened. “I hate hitting boys,” he thought as he hurried away to his evening's work at the restaurant.
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.
In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On the glass panel of the door was the inscription, “Henry Hunt, Real Estate Broker.” When he had finished with the morning papers he disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.
The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, “If any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for a while.”
Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the deep dust.
It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to the “boss” of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's appearance as a public character in Chicago.
One night a young man—son of one of the city's plunging millionaire wheat speculators—was found dead in a little blind alley back of a resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner of the alley.
For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the alley the young man ran away up the street.
The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the identity of the dead man became known. The “boss,” a mild-looking blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache, stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police official.
For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward. Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places, their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage. A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the front page of the morning papers.
Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation disclosed.
The powers that ruled the First—quiet shrewd men who knew how to make and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism—were frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory for years.
Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the small soft-speaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively. Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries. Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward. From house to house he uttered his cry—“Lay low! Pull off nothing.”
The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from Henry Hunt to the police official. “It is no time for hesitation,” he said. “It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have action.”
Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. “It might have been Andy Brown,” he said, puffing at the stogie.
The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again soft and mild. “It was Andy Brown,” he said. “Whisper the word about. Let aTribuneman locate Brown for you. Handle this right and you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of the First.”
The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown. Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the heads of articles on “Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face.”
An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men—a storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused city.
The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange savage land—“Judge Mac, the Big 'un.”
When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said what he thought should be said. “You are in a hole,” he began. “You don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over there.” He waved his hand in the direction of the First. “They're going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him.”
Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he spoke quickly and determinedly. “You do what I say,” he growled. “You take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in the cards. But you get the job just the same.”
He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. “Look here, Big 'un,” he said, “the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and you get it.”
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.