Edith Carson the milliner, whom fate had thrown into the company of McGregor, was a frail woman of thirty-four and lived alone in two rooms at the back of her millinery store. Her life was almost devoid of colour. On Sunday morning she wrote a long letter to her family on an Indiana farm and then put on a hat from among the samples in the show case along the wall and went to church, sitting by herself in the same seat Sunday after Sunday and afterward remembering nothing of the sermon.
On Sunday afternoon Edith went by street-car to a park and walked alone under the trees. If it threatened rain she sat in the larger of the two rooms back of the shop sewing on new dresses for herself or for a sister who had married a blacksmith in the Indiana town and who had four children.
Edith had soft mouse-coloured hair and grey eyes with small brown spots on the iris. She was so slender that she wore pads about her body under her dress to fill it out. In her youth she had had a sweetheart—a fat round-cheeked boy who lived on the next farm. Once they had gone together to the fair at the county seat and coming home in the buggy at night he had put his arm about her and kissed her. “You ain't very big,” he had said.
Edith sent to a mail order house in Chicago and bought the padding which she wore under her dress With it came an oil which she rubbed on herself. The label on the bottle spoke of the contents with great respect as a wonderful developer. The heavy pads wore raw places on her side against which her clothes rubbed but she bore the pain with grim stoicism, remembering what the fat boy had said.
After Edith came to Chicago and opened a shop of her own she had a letter from her former admirer. “It pleases me to think that the same wind that blows over me blows also over you,” it said. After that one letter she did not hear from him again. He had the phrase out of a book he had read and had written the letter to Edith that he might use it. After the letter had gone he thought of her frail figure and repented of the impulse that had tricked him into writing. Half in alarm he began courting and soon married another girl.
Sometimes on her rare visits home Edith had seen her former lover driving along the road. The sister who had married the blacksmith said that he was stingy, that his wife had nothing to wear but a cheap calico dress and that on Saturday he drove off to town alone, leaving her to milk the cows and feed the pigs and horses. Once he encountered Edith on the road and tried to get her into the wagon to ride with him. Although she had walked along the road ignoring him she took the letter about the wind that blew over them both out of a drawer on spring evenings or after a walk in the park and read it over. After she had read it she sat in the darkness at the front of the store looking through the screen door at people in the street and wondered what life would mean to her if she had a man on whom she could bestow her love. In her heart she believed that, unlike the wife of the fat youth, she would have borne children.
In Chicago Edith Carson had made money. She had a genius for economy in the management of her business. In six years she had cleared a large debt from the shop and had a comfortable balance in the bank. Girls who worked in factories or in stores came and left most of their meagre surplus in her shop and other girls who didn't work came in, throwing dollars about and talking about “gentlemen friends.” Edith hated the bargaining but attended to it with shrewdness and with a quiet disarming little smile on her face. What she liked was to sit quietly in the room and trim hats. When the business grew she had a woman to tend the shop and a girl to sit beside her and help with the hats. She had a friend, the wife of a motorman on the street-car line, who sometimes came to see her in the evening. The friend was a plump little woman, dissatisfied with her marriage, and she got Edith to make her several new hats a year for which she paid nothing.
Edith went to the dance at which she met McGregor with the motorman's wife and a girl who lived upstairs over a bakery next door to the shop, The dance was held in a hall over a saloon and was given for the benefit of a political organisation in which the baker was a leader. The wife of the baker came in and sold Edith two tickets, one for herself and one for the wife of the motorman who happened to be sitting with her at the time.
That evening after the motorman's wife had gone home Edith decided to go to the dance and the decision was something like an adventure in itself. The night was hot and sultry, lightning flashed in the sky and clouds of dust swept down the street. Edith sat in the darkness behind the bolted screen door and looked at the people who hurried homeward down the street. A wave of revolt at the narrowness and emptiness of her life ran through her. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed the shop door and going into the room at the back lighted the gas and stood looking at herself in the mirror. “I'll go to the dance,” she thought. “Perhaps I shall get a man. If he won't marry me he can have what he wants of me anyway.”
In the dance hall Edith sat demurely by the wall near a window and watched the couples whirl about on the floor. Through an open door she could see couples sitting in another room around tables and drinking beer. A tall young man in white trousers and white slippers went about on the dance floor. He smiled and bowed to the women. Once he started across the floor toward Edith and her heart beat rapidly, but just when she thought he intended to speak to her and to the motorman's wife he turned and went to another part of the room. Edith followed him with her eyes, admiring his white trousers and his shining white teeth.
The wife of the motorman went away with a small straight man with a grey moustache whom Edith thought had unpleasant eyes and two girls came and sat beside her. They were customers of her store and lived together in a flat over a grocery on Monroe Street. Edith had heard the girl who sat in the workroom with her speak slightingly of them. The three sat together along the wall and talked of hats.
And then across the floor of the dance hall came two men, a huge red-haired fellow and a little man with a black beard. The two women hailed them and the five sat together making a party by the wall, the little man keeping up a running stream of comments about the people on the floor with Edith's two companions. A dance struck up and taking one of the women the black-bearded man danced away. Edith and the other woman again talked of hats. The huge fellow beside her said nothing but followed the women about the dance hall with his eyes. Edith thought she had never seen so homely a fellow.
At the end of the dance the black-bearded man went through the door into the room filled with little tables and made a sign to the red-haired man to follow. A boyish looking fellow appeared and went away with the other woman and Edith sat alone on the bench by the wall beside McGregor.
“This place doesn't interest me,” said McGregor quickly. “I don't like to sit watching people hop about on their toes. If you want to come with me we'll get out of here and go to some place where we can talk and get acquainted.”
The little milliner walked across the floor on the arm of McGregor, her heart jumping with excitement. “I've got a man,” she thought, exulting. That the man had deliberately chosen her she knew. She had heard the introductions and the bantering talk of the black-bearded man and had noted the indifference of the big man to the other women.
Edith looked at her companion's huge frame and forgot his homeliness. Into her mind came a picture of the fat boy, grown into a man, driving down the road in the wagon and leeringly asking her to ride with him. A flood of anger at the memory of the look of greedy assurance in his eyes came over her. “This one could knock him over a six-rail fence,” she thought.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
McGregor looked down at her. “To some place where we can talk,” he said. “I was sick of this place. You ought to know where we're going. I'm going with you. You aren't going with me.”
McGregor wished he were in Coal Creek. He felt he would like to take this woman over the hill and sit on the log to talk of his father.
As they walked along Monroe Street Edith thought of the resolution she had made as she stood before the mirror in her room at the back of the shop on the evening when she had decided to come to the dance. She wondered if the great adventure was about to come to her and her hand trembled on McGregor's arm. A hot wave of hope and fear shot through her.
At the door of the millinery shop she fumbled with uncertain hands as she unlocked the door. A delicious feeling shook her. She felt like a bride, glad and yet ashamed and afraid.
In the room at the back of the shop McGregor lighted the gas and pulling off his overcoat threw it on the couch at the side of the room. He was not in the least excited and with a steady hand lighted the fire in the little stove and then looking up he asked Edith if he might smoke. He had the air of a man come home to his own house and the woman sat on the edge of her chair to unpin her hat and waited hopefully to see what course the night's adventure would take.
For two hours McGregor sat in the rocking chair in Edith Carson's room and talked of Coal Creek and of his life in Chicago. He talked freely, letting himself go as a man might in talking to one of his own people after a long absence. His attitude and the quiet ring in his voice confused and puzzled Edith. She had expected something quite different.
Going to the little room at the side she brought forth a teakettle and prepared to make tea. The big man still sat in her chair smoking and talking. A delightful feeling of safety and coziness crept over her. She thought her room beautiful but mingled with her satisfaction was a faint grey streak of fear. “Of course he won't come back again,” she thought.
In the year following the beginning of his acquaintanceship with Edith Carson McGregor continued to work hard and steadily in the warehouse and with his books at night. He was promoted to be foreman, replacing the German, and he thought he had made progress with his studies. When he did not go to the night school he went to Edith Carson's place and sat reading a book and smoking his pipe by a little table in the back room.
About the room and in and out of her shop moved Edith, going softly and quietly. A light began to come into her eyes and colour into her cheeks. She did not talk but new and daring thoughts visited her mind and a thrill of reawakened life ran through her body. With gentle insistence she did not let her dreams express themselves in words and almost hoped that she might be able to go on forever thus, having this strong man come into her presence and sit absorbed in his own affairs within the walls of her house. Sometimes she wanted him to talk and wished that she had the power to lead him into the telling of little facts of his life. She wanted to be told of his mother and father, of his boyhood in the Pennsylvania town, of his dreams and his desires but for the most part she was content to wait and only hoped that nothing would happen to bring an end to her waiting.
McGregor began to read books of history and became absorbed in the figures of certain men, all soldiers and leaders of soldiers who stalked across the pages wherein was written the story of man's life. The figures of Sherman, Grant, Lee, Jackson, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Wellington seemed to him to stand starkly up among the other figures in the books and going to the Public Library at the noon hour he got books concerning these men and for a time lost interest in the study of law and devoted himself to contemplation of the breakers of laws.
There was something beautiful about McGregor in those days. He was as virginal and pure as a chunk of the hard black coal out of the hills of his own state and like the coal ready to burn himself out into power. Nature had been kind to him. He had the gift of silence and of isolation. All about him were other men, perhaps as strong physically as himself and with better trained minds who were being destroyed and he was not being destroyed. For the others life let itself run out in the endless doing of little tasks, the thinking of little thoughts and the saying of groups of words over and over endlessly like parrots that sit in cages and earn their bread by screaming two or three sentences to passers by.
It is a terrible thing to speculate on how man has been defeated by his ability to say words. The brown bear in the forest has no such power and the lack of it has enabled him to retain a kind of nobility of bearing sadly lacking in us. On and on through life we go, socialists, dreamers, makers of laws, sellers of goods and believers in suffrage for women and we continuously say words, worn-out words, crooked words, words without power or pregnancy in them.
The matter is one to be thought of seriously by youths and maidens inclined to garrulousness. Those who have the habit of it will never change. The gods who lean over the rim of the world to laugh at us have marked them for their barrenness.
And yet the word must run on. McGregor, the silent, wanted his word. He wanted his true note as an individual to ring out above the hubbub of voices and then he wanted to use the strength and the virility within himself to carry his word far. What he did not want was that his mouth become foul and his brain become numb with the saying of the words and the thinking of the thoughts of other men and that he in his turn become a mere toiling food-consuming chattering puppet to the gods.
For a long time the miner's son wondered what power lay in the men whose figures stood up so boldly in the pages of the books he read. He tried to think the matter out as he sat in Edith's room or walked by himself through the streets. In the warehouse he looked with new curiosity at the men who worked in the great rooms piling and unpiling apple barrels and the boxes of eggs and fruit When he came into one of the rooms the men who had been standing in groups idly talking of their own affairs began to run busily about. They no longer chattered but as long as he remained worked desperately, furtively watching as he stood staring at them.
McGregor wondered. He tried to fathom the mystery of the power that made them willing to work until their bodies were bent and stooped, that made them unashamed to be afraid and that left them in the end mere slaves to words and formulas.
The perplexed young man who watched the men in the warehouse began to think that the passion for reproduction might have something to do with the matter. Perhaps his constant association with Edith awakened the thought. His own loins were heavy with the seeds of children and only his absorption in the thought of finding himself kept him from devoting himself to the feeding of his lusts. One day he had a talk concerning the matter at the warehouse. The talk came about in this way.
In the warehouse the men came in at the door in the morning, drifting in like flies that wander in at the open windows on a summer day. With downcast eyes they shuffled across the long floor, white with lime. Morning after morning they came in at the door and went silently to their places looking at the floor and scowling. A slender bright-eyed young man who acted as shipping clerk during the day sat in a little coop and to him the men as they passed called out their numbers. From time to time the shipping clerk who was an Irishman tried to joke with one of them, tapping sharply upon his desk with a pencil as though to compel attention. “They are no good,” he said to himself, when in response to his sallies they only smiled vaguely. “Although they get but a dollar and a half a day they are overpaid!” Like McGregor he had nothing but contempt for the men whose numbers he put in the book. Their stupidity he took as a compliment to himself. “We are the kind who get things done,” he thought as he put the pencil back of his ear and closed the book. In his mind the futile pride of the middle class man flamed up. In his contempt for the workers he forgot also to have contempt for himself.
One morning McGregor and the shipping clerk stood upon a board platform facing the street and the shipping clerk talked of parentage. “The wives of the workers here have children as cattle have calves,” said the Irishman. Moved by some hidden sentiment within himself he added heartily. “Oh well, what's a man for? It's nice to see kids around the house. I've got four kids myself. You should see them play about in the garden at my place in Oak Park when I come home in the evening.”
McGregor thought of Edith Carson and a faint hunger began to grow within him. A desire that was later to come near to upsetting the purpose of his life began to make itself felt. With a growl he fought against the desire and confused the Irishman by making an attack upon him. “Well how are you any better?” he asked bluntly. “Do you think your children any more important than theirs? You may have a better mind but their bodies are better and your mind hasn't made you a very striking figure as far as I can see.”
Turning away from the Irishman who had begun to sputter with wrath McGregor went up an elevator to a distant part of the building to think of the Irishman's words. From time to time he spoke sharply to a workman who loitered in one of the passages between the piles of boxes and barrels. Under his hand the work in the warehouse had begun to take on order and the little grey-haired superintendent who had employed him rubbed his hands with delight.
In a corner by a window stood McGregor wondering why he also did not want to devote his life to being the father of children. In the dim light across the face of the window a fat old spider crawled slowly. In the hideous body of the insect there was something that suggested to the mind of the struggling thinker the sloth of the world. Vaguely his mind groped about trying to get hold of words and ideas to express what was in his brain. “Ugly crawling things that look at the floor,” he muttered. “If they have children it is without order or orderly purpose. It is an accident like the accident of the fly that falls into the net built by the insect here. The coming of the children is like the coming of the flies, it feeds a kind of cowardice in men. In the children men hope vainly to see done what they have not the courage to try to do.”
With an oath McGregor smashed with his heavy leather glove the fat thing wandering aimlessly across the light. “I must not be confused by little things. There is still going on the attempt to force me into the hole in the ground. There is a hole here in which men live and work just as there is in the mining town from which I came.”
Hurrying out of his room that evening McGregor went to see Edith. He wanted to look at her and to think. In the little room at the back he sat for an hour trying to read a book and then for the first time shared his thoughts with her. “I am trying to discover why men are of so little importance,” he said suddenly. “Are they mere tools for women? Tell me that. Tell me what women think and what they want?”
Without waiting for an answer he turned again to the reading of the book. “Oh well,” he added “it doesn't need to bother me. I won't let any women lead me into being a reproductive tool for her.”
Edith was alarmed. She took McGregor's outburst as a declaration of war against herself and her influence and her hands began to tremble. Then a new thought came to her. “He needs money to get on in the world,” she told herself and a little thrill of joy ran through her as she thought of her own carefully guarded hoard. She wondered how she could offer it to him so that there would be no danger of a refusal.
“You're all right,” said McGregor, preparing to depart. “You do not interfere with a man's thoughts.”
Edith blushed and like the workmen in the warehouse looked at the floor. Something in his words startled her and when he was gone she went to her desk and taking out her bankbook turned its pages with new pleasure. Without hesitation she who indulged herself in nothing would have given all to McGregor.
And out into the street went the man, thinking of his own affairs. He dismissed from his mind the thoughts of women and children and began again to think of the stirring figures of history that had made so strong an appeal to him. As he passed over one of the bridges he stopped and stood leaning over the rail to look at the black water below. “Why has thought never succeeded in replacing action?” he asked himself. “Why are the men who write books in some way less full of meaning than the men who do things?”
McGregor was staggered by the thought that had come to him and wondered if he had started on a wrong trail by coming to the city and trying to educate himself. For an hour he stood in the darkness and tried to think things out. It began to rain but he did not mind. Into his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each part without regard to the purpose of the whole. “There is danger in thinking too,” he muttered vaguely. “Everywhere there is danger, in labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?”
McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. A new thought swept like a broad path of light across the darkness of his mind. He began to see that the soldiers who had led thousands of men into battle had appealed to him because in the working out of their purposes they had used human lives with the recklessness of gods. They had found the courage to do that and their courage was magnificent. Away down deep in the hearts of men lay sleeping a love of order and they had taken hold of that love. If they had used it badly did that matter? Had they not pointed the way?
Back into McGregor's mind came a night scene in his home town. Vividly he saw in fancy the poor unkempt little street facing the railroad tracks and the groups of striking miners huddled in the light before the door of a saloon while in the road a body of soldiers marched past, their uniforms looking grey and their faces grim in the uncertain light. “They marched,” whispered McGregor. “That's what made them seem so powerful. They were just ordinary men but they went swinging along, all as one man. Something in that fact ennobled them. That's what Grant knew and what Caesar knew. That's what made Grant and Caesar seem so big. They knew and they were not afraid to use their knowledge. Perhaps they did not bother to think how it would all come out. They hoped for another kind of man to do the thinking. Perhaps they did not think of anything at all but just went ahead and tried to do each his own part.
“I will do my part here,” shouted McGregor. “I will find the way.” His body shook and his voice roared along the footpath of the bridge. Men stopped to look back at the big shouting figure. Two women walking past screamed and ran into the roadway. McGregor walked rapidly away toward his own room and his books. He did not know how he would be able to use the new impulse that had come to him but as he swung along through dark streets and past rows of dark buildings he thought again of the great machine running crazily and without purpose and was glad he was not a part of it. “I will keep myself to myself and be ready for what happens,” he said, burning with new courage.
When McGregor had secured the place in the apple-warehouse and went home to the house in Wycliff Place with his first week's pay, twelve dollars, in his pocket he thought of his mother, Nance McGregor, working in the mine offices in the Pennsylvania town and folding a five dollar bill sent it to her in a letter. “I will begin to take care of her now,” he thought and with the rough sense of equity in such matters, common to labouring people, had no intention of giving himself airs. “She has fed me and now I will begin to feed her,” he told himself.
The five dollars came back. “Keep it. I don't want your money,” the mother wrote. “If you have money left after your expenses are paid begin to fix yourself up. Better get a new pair of shoes or a hat. Don't try to take care of me. I won't have it. I want you to look out for yourself. Dress well and hold up your head, that's all I ask. In the city clothes mean a good deal. In the long run it will mean more to me to see you be a real man than to be a good son.”
Sitting in her rooms over the vacant bake-shop in Coal Creek Nance began to get new satisfaction out of the contemplation of herself as a woman with a son in the city. In the evening she thought of him moving along the crowded thoroughfares among men and women and her bent little old figure straightened with pride. When a letter came telling of his work in the night school her heart jumped and she wrote a long letter filled with talk of Garfield and Grant and of Lincoln lying by the burning pine knot reading his books. It seemed to her unbelievably romantic that her son should some day be a lawyer and stand up in a crowded court room speaking thoughts out of his brain to other men. She thought that if this great red-haired boy, who at home had been so unmanageable and so quick with his fists, was to end by being a man of books and of brains then she and her man, Cracked McGregor, had not lived in vain. A sweet new sense of peace came to her. She forgot her own years of toil and gradually her mind went back to the silent boy sitting on the steps with her before her house in the year after her husband's death while she talked to him of the world, and thus she thought of him, a quiet eager boy, going about bravely there in the distant city.
Death caught Nance McGregor off her guard. After one of her long days of toil in the mine office she awoke to find him sitting grim and expectant beside her bed. For years she in common with most of the women of the coal town had been afflicted with what is called “trouble with the heart.” Now and then she had “bad spells.” On this spring evening she got into bed and sitting propped among the pillows fought out her fight alone like a worn-out animal that has crept into a hole in the woods.
In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she would die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for her. In the street two drunken men stood talking, their voices concerned with their own human affairs coming in through the window and making life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. “I've been everywhere,” said one of the men. “I've been in towns and cities I don't even remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who keeps a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there.”
The other man laughed. “You've been in Jake's drinking too much beer,” he jeered.
Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that life with all of its colour sound and meaning was running away from her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque, staring silently past her into the sky.
Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight not to dream dreams.
Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about in the old days before her marriage, of the walks she as a young girl had taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons and of the times when they had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming country. As in a vision the dying woman saw the broad fertile land spread out before her and blamed herself that she had not done more toward helping her man in the fulfilment of the plans she and he had made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy came and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night.
Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy feet on the stairs. “That will be Beaut coming up from the shop,” she muttered and fell back upon the pillow dead.
Beaut McGregor went home to Pennsylvania to bury his mother and on a summer afternoon walked again on the streets of his native town. From the station he went at once to the empty bake-shop, above which he had lived with his mother but he did not stay there. For a moment he stood bag in hand listening to the voices of the miners' wives in the room above and then put the bag behind an empty box and hurried away. The voices of women broke the stillness of the room in which he stood. Their thin sharpness hurt something within him and he could not bear the thought of the equally thin sharp silence he knew would fall upon the women who were attending his mother's body in the room above when he came into the presence of the dead.
Along Main Street he went to a hardware store and from there went to the mine office. Then with a pick and shovel on his shoulder he began to climb the hill up which he had walked with his father when he was a lad. On the train homeward bound an idea had come to him. “I will her among the bushes on the hillside that looks down into the fruitful valley,” he told himself. The details of a religious discussion between two labourers that had gone on one day during the noon hour at the warehouse had come into his mind and as the train ran eastward he for the first time found himself speculating on the possibility of a life after death. Then he brushed the thoughts aside. “Anyway if Cracked McGregor does come back it is there you will find him, sitting on the log on the hillside,” he thought.
With the tools on his shoulder McGregor climbed the long hillside road, now deep with black dust. He was going to dig the grave for the burial of Nance McGregor. He did not glare at the miners who passed swinging their dinner-pails as they had done in the old days but looked at the ground and thought of the dead woman and a little wondered what place a woman would yet come to occupy in his own life. On the hillside the wind blew sharply and the great boy just emerging into manhood worked vigorously making the dirt fly. When the hole had grown deep he stopped and looked to where in the valley below a man who was hoeing corn shouted to a woman who stood on the porch of a farm house. Two cows that stood by a fence in a field lifted up their heads and bawled lustily. “It is the place for the dead to lie,” whispered McGregor. “When my own time comes I shall be brought up here.” An idea came to him. “I will have father's body moved,” he told himself. “When I have made some money I will have that done. Here we shall all lie in the end, all of us McGregors.”
The thought that had come to McGregor pleased him and he was pleased also with himself for thinking the thought. The male in him made him throw back his shoulders. “We are two of a feather, father and me,” he muttered, “two of a feather and mother has not understood either of us. Perhaps no woman was ever intended to understand us.”
Jumping out of the hole he strode over the crest of the hill and began the descent toward the town. It was late afternoon and the sun had gone down behind clouds. “I wonder if I understand myself, if any one understands,” he thought as he went swiftly along with the tools clanking on his shoulder.
McGregor did not want to go back to the town and to the dead woman in the little room. He thought of the miners' wives, attendants to the dead, who would sit with crossed hands looking at him and turned out of the road to sit on the fallen log where once on a Sunday afternoon he had sat with the black-haired boy who worked in the poolroom and where the daughter of the undertaker had come to sit beside him.
And then up the long hill came the woman herself. As she drew near he recognised her tall figure and for some reason a lump came into his throat She had seen him depart from the town with the pick and shovel on his shoulder and after waiting what she thought an interval long enough to still the tongues of gossip had followed. “I wanted to talk with you,” she said, climbing over logs and coming to sit beside him.
For a long time the man and woman sat in silence and stared at the town in the valley below. McGregor thought she had grown more pale than ever and looked at her sharply. His mind, more accustomed to look critically at women than had been the mind of the boy who had once sat talking to her on the same log, began to inventory her body. “She is already becoming stooped,” he thought. “I would not want to make love to her now.”
Along the log toward him moved the undertaker's daughter and with a swift impulse toward boldness slipped a thin hand into his. She began to talk of the dead woman lying in the upstairs room in the town. “We have been friends since you went away,” she explained. “She liked to talk of you and I liked that too.”
Made bold by her own boldness the woman hurried on. “I do not want you to misunderstand me,” she said. “I know I can't get you. I'm not thinking of that.”
She began to talk of her own affairs and of the dreariness of life with her father but McGregor's mind could not centre itself on her talk. When they started down the hill he had the impulse to take her in his arms and carry her as Cracked McGregor had once carried him but was so embarrassed that he did not offer to help her. He thought that for the first time some one from his native town had come close to him and he watched her stooped figure with an odd new feeling of tenderness. “I won't be alive long, maybe not a year. I've got the consumption,” she whispered softly as he left her at the entrance to the hallway leading up to her home, and McGregor was so stirred by her words that he turned back and spent another hour wandering alone on the hillside before he went to see the body of his mother.
In the room above the bakery McGregor sat at an open window and looked down into the dimly lighted street. In a corner of the room lay his mother in a coffin and two miners' wives sat in the darkness behind him. All were silent and embarrassed.
McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group of miners who gathered at a corner. He thought of the undertaker's daughter, now nearing death, and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to him. “It is not because she is a woman, I know that,” he told himself and tried to dismiss the matter from his mind by watching the people in the street below.
In the mining town a meeting was being held. A box lay at the edge of the sidewalk and upon it climbed that same young Hartnet who had once talked to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds' eggs and trapping squirrels in the hills. He was frightened and talked rapidly. Presently he introduced a large man with a flat nose who, when he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell stories and anecdotes designed to make the miners laugh.
McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker's daughter were there to sit in the darkened room beside him. He thought he would like to tell her of his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded his mind and he thought of his dead mother and of how this other woman would presently die. “It's just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no orderly march toward an orderly end. Perhaps one has to die and return to nature to achieve that,” he whispered to himself.
In the street below the man upon the box, who was a travelling socialist orator, began to talk of the coming social revolution. As he talked it seemed to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together and without force. The speaker danced up and down on the box and his arms flapped about and these also seemed loose, not a part of the body.
“Vote with us and the thing is done,” he shouted. “Are you going to let a few men run things forever? Here you live like beasts paying tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves. Join us in the struggle. You yourselves can be masters if you will only think so.”
“You will have to do something more than think,” roared McGregor, as he leaned far out at the window. Again as always when he had heard men saying words he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered the walks he had sometimes taken at night in the city streets and the air of disorderly ineffectiveness all about him. And here in the mining town it was the same. On every side of him appeared blank empty faces and loose badly knit bodies.
“Mankind should be like a great fist ready to smash and to strike. It should be ready to knock down what stands in its way,” he cried, astonishing the crowd in the street and frightening into something like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside the dead woman in the darkened room.
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.