The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age-old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful weakness of his fellows.
In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case. Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning, the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the court room he sat waiting and watching.
When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting among the witnesses. “They have tricked you Mary,” he roared. “The tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell the naked truth or his blood be on your hands.”
A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet, objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice. “Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here,” he shouted. “They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them.”
The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her suggestion.
“Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart.”
In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick—the story of a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son—of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl—of the blow with the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man—of the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily pitched into the passageway.
“They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over,” wailed the woman.
McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of victory was on him and he strode along with his heart beating high. His way led over a bridge into the North Side and in his wanderings he passed the apple warehouse where he had made his start in the city and where he had fought with the German. When night came he walked in North Clark Street and heard the newsboys shouting of his victory. Before him danced a new vision, a vision of himself as a big figure in the city. Within himself he felt the power to stand forth among men, to outwit them and outfight them, to get for himself power and place in the world.
The miner's son was half drunk with the new sense of achievement that swept in on him. Out of Clark Street he went and walked east along a residence street to the lake. By the lake he saw a street of great houses surrounded by gardens and the thought came that at some time he might have such a house of his own. The disorderly clatter of modern life seemed very far away. When he came to the lake he stood in the darkness thinking of the useless rowdy of the mining town suddenly become a great lawyer in the city and the blood ran swiftly through his body. “I am to be one of the victors, one of the few who emerge,” he whispered to himself and with a jump of the heart thought also of Margaret Ormsby looking at him with her fine questioning eyes as he stood before the men in the court room and by the force of his personality pushed his way through a fog of lies to victory and truth.
Margaret Ormsby was a natural product of her age and of American social life in our times. As an individual she was lovely. Although her father David Ormsby the plough king had come up to his position and his wealth out of obscurity and poverty and had known during his early life what it was to stand face to face with defeat, he had made it his business to see that his daughter had no such experience. The girl had been sent to Vassar, she had been taught to catch the fine distinction between clothes that are quietly and beautifully expensive and clothes that merely look expensive, she knew how to enter a room and how to leave a room and had also a strong well trained body and an active mind. Added to these things she had, without the least knowledge of life, a vigorous and rather high handed confidence in her ability to meet life.
During the years spent in the eastern college Margaret had made up her mind that whatever happened she was not going to let her life be dull or uninteresting. Once when a girl friend from Chicago came to the college to visit her the two went for a day out of doors and sat down upon a hillside to talk things over. “We women have been fools,” Margaret had declared. “If Father and Mother think that I am going to come home and marry some stick of a man they are mistaken. I have learned to smoke cigarettes and have had my share of a bottle of wine. That may not mean anything to you. I do not think it amounts to much either but it expresses something. It fairly makes me ill when I think of how men have always patronised women. They want to keep evil things away from us—Bah! I am sick of that idea and a lot of the other girls here feel the same way. What right have they? I suppose some day some little whiffit of a business man will set himself up to take care of me. He had better not. I tell you there is a new kind of women growing up and I am going to be one of them. I am going to adventure, to taste life strongly and deeply. Father and Mother might as well make up their minds to that.”
The excited girl had walked up and down before her companion, a mild looking young woman with blue eyes, and had raised her hands above her head as though to strike a blow. Her body was like the body of a fine young animal standing alert to meet an enemy and her eyes reflected the intoxication of her mood. “I want all of life,” she cried; “I want the lust and the strength and the evil of it. I want to be one of the new women, the saviours of our sex.”
Between David Ormsby and his daughter there was an unusual bond. Six foot three, blue eyed, broad shouldered, his presence had a strength and dignity which marked him out among men and the daughter sensed his strength. She was right in that. In his way the man was inspired. Under his eye the trivialities of plough-making had become the details of a fine art. In the factory he never lost the air of command which inspires confidence. Foremen running into the office filled with excitement because of a break in the machinery or an accident to a workman returned to do his bidding quietly and efficiently. Salesmen going from village to village to sell ploughs became under his influence filled with the zeal of missionaries carrying the gospel to the unenlightened. Stockholders of the plough company rushing to him with rumours of coming business disaster stayed to write checks for new assessments on their stock. He was a man who gave men back their faith in business and their faith in men.
To David plough-making was an end in life. Like other men of his type he had other interests but they were secondary. In secret he thought of himself as capable of a broader culture than most of his daily associates and without letting it interfere with his efficiency tried to keep in touch with the thoughts and movements of the world by reading. After the longest and hardest day in the office he sometimes spent half the night over a book in his room.
As Margaret Ormsby grew into womanhood she was a constant source of anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst from an impulsive girl who had but yesterday fallen asleep at evening in his arms. It confused him to think that an honest ploughmaker should have a letter from his little girl talking of the kind of living that he believed could only lead a woman to destruction.
And then the next day there sat beside him at his table a new and commanding figure demanding his attention. David got up from the table and hurried away to his room. He wanted to readjust his thoughts. On his desk was a photograph brought home by the daughter from school. He had the common experience of being told by the photograph what he had been trying to grasp. Instead of a wife and child there were two women in the house with him.
Margaret had come out of college a thing of beauty in face and figure. Her tall straight well-trained body, her coal-black hair, her soft brown eyes, the air she had of being prepared for life's challenge caught and held the attention of men. There was in the girl something of her father's bigness and not a little of the secret blind desires of her mother. To an attentive household on the night of her arrival she announced her intention of living her life fully and vividly. “I am going to know things I can not get from books,” she said. “I am going to touch life at many corners, getting the taste of things in my mouth. You thought me a child when I wrote home saying that I wouldn't be cooped up in the house and married to a tenor in the church choir or to an empty-headed young business man but now you are going to see. I am going to pay the price if necessary, but I am going to live.”
In Chicago Margaret set about the business of living as though nothing were needed but strength and energy. In a characteristic American way she tried to hustle life. When the men in her own set looked confused and shocked by the opinions she expressed she got out of her set and made the common mistake of supposing that those who do not work and who talk rather glibly of art and of freedom are by that token free men and artists.
Still she loved and respected her father. The strength in him made an appeal to the native strong-thing in her. To a young socialist writer who lived in the settlement house where she presently went to live and who sought her out to sit by her desk berating men of wealth and position she showed the quality of her ideals by pointing to David Ormsby. “My father, the leader of an industrial trust, is a better man than all of the noisy reformers that ever lived,” she declared. “He makes ploughs anyway—makes them well—millions of them. He does not spend his time talking and running his fingers through his hair. He works and his work has lightened the labours of millions while the talkers sit thinking noisy thoughts and getting round-shouldered.”
In truth Margaret Ormsby was puzzled. Had she been allowed by a common fellowship in living to be a real sister to all other women and to know their common heritage of defeat, had she like her father when he was a boy but known what it was to walk utterly broken and beaten in the face of men and then to rise again and again to battle with life she would have been splendid.
She did not know. To her mind any kind of defeat had in it a touch of something like immorality. When she saw all about her only a vast mob of defeated and confused human beings trying to make headway in the midst of a confused social organisation she was beside herself with impatience.
The distraught girl turned to her father and tried to get hold of the keynote of his life; “I want you to tell me things,” she said, but the father not understanding only shook his head. It did not occur to him to talk to her as to a fine man friend and a kind of bantering half serious companionship sprang up between them. The ploughmaker was happy in the thought that the jolly girl he had known before his daughter went to college had come back to live with him.
After Margaret went to the settlement house she lunched with her father almost every day. The hour together in the midst of the din that filled their lives became for them both a treasured privilege. Day after day they sat for an hour in a fashionable down-town eating place renewing and strengthening their comradeship, laughing and talking amid the crowds, delightful in their intimacy. With each other they playfully took on the air of the two men of affairs, each in turn treating the work of the other as something to be passed over lightly. Secretly neither believed as he talked.
In her effort to get hold of and move the sordid human wrecks floating in and out of the door of the settlement house Margaret thought of her father at his desk directing the making of ploughs. “It is clean and important work,” she thought. “He is a big and effective man.”
At his desk in the office of the plough trust David thought of his daughter in the settlement house at the edge of the First Ward. “She is a white shining thing amid dirt and ugliness,” he thought “Her whole life is like the life of her mother during the hours when she once lay bravely facing death for the sake of a new life.”
On the day of her meeting with McGregor, father and daughter sat as usual in the restaurant. Men and women passed up and down the long carpeted aisles and looked at them admiringly. A waiter stood at Ormsby's shoulder anxious for the generous tip. Into the air that hung over them, the little secret atmosphere of comradeship they cherished so carefully, was thrust the sense of a new personality. Floating in Margaret's mind beside the quiet noble face of her father, with its stamp of ability and kindliness, was another face—the face of the man who had talked to her in the settlement house, not as Margaret Ormsby daughter of David Ormsby of the plough trust but as a woman who could serve his ends and whom he meant should serve. The vision in her mind haunted her and she listened indifferently to the talk of her father. She felt that the stern face of the young lawyer with its strong mouth and its air of command was as something impending and tried to get back the feeling of dislike she had felt when first he thrust himself in at the settlement house door. She succeeded only in recalling certain firm lines of purpose that offset and tempered the brutality of his face.
Sitting there in the restaurant opposite her father, where day after day they had tried so hard to build a real partnership in existence, Margaret suddenly burst into tears.
“I have met a man who has compelled me to do what I did not want to do,” she explained to the astonished man and then smiled at him through the tears that glistened in her eyes.
In Chicago the Ormsbys lived in a large stone house in Drexel Boulevard. The house had a history. It was owned by a banker who was a large stockholder and one of the directors of the plough trust. Like all men who knew him well the banker admired and respected the ability and integrity of David Ormsby. When the ploughmaker came to the city from a town in Wisconsin to be the master of the plough trust he offered him the house to use.
The house had come to the banker from his father, a grim determined old money-making merchant of a past generation who had died hated by half Chicago after toiling sixteen hours daily for sixty years. In his old age the merchant had built the house to express the power wealth had given him. It had floors and woodwork cunningly wrought of expensive woods by workmen sent to Chicago by a firm in Brussels. In the long drawing room at the front of the house hung a chandelier that had cost the merchant ten thousand dollars. The stairway leading to the floor above was from the palace of a prince in Venice and had been bought for the merchant and brought over seas to the house in Chicago.
The banker who inherited the house did not want to live in it. Even before the death of his father and after his own unsuccessful marriage he lived at a down town club. In his old age the merchant, retired from business, lived in the house with another old man, an inventor. He could not rest although he had given up business with that end in view. Digging a trench in the lawn at the back of the house he with his friend spent his days trying to reduce the refuse of one of his factories to something having commercial value. Fires burned in the trench and at night the grim old man, hands covered with tar, sat in the house under the chandelier. After the death of the merchant the house stood empty, staring at passers-by in the street, its walks and paths overgrown with weeds and rank grass.
David Ormsby fitted into his house. Walking through the long halls or sitting smoking his cigar in an easy chair on the wide lawn he looked arrayed and environed. The house became a part of him like a well-made and intelligently worn suit of clothes. Into the drawing room under the ten thousand dollar chandelier he moved a billiard table and the click of ivory balls banished the churchliness of the place.
Up and down the stairway moved American girls, friends of Margaret, their skirts rustling and their voices running through the huge rooms. In the evening after dinner David played billiards. The careful calculation of the angles and the English interested him. Playing in the evening with Margaret or with a man friend the fatigue of the day passed and his honest voice and reverberating laugh brought a smile to the lips of people passing in the street. In the evening David brought his friends to sit in talk with him on the wide verandas. At times he went alone to his room at the top of the house and buried himself in books. On Saturday evenings he had a debauch and with a group of friends from town sat at a card table in the long parlour playing poker and drinking highballs.
Laura Ormsby, Margaret's mother, had never seemed a real part of the life about her. Even as a child the daughter had thought her hopelessly romantic. Life had treated her too well and from every one about her she expected qualities and reactions which in her own person she would not have tried to achieve.
David had already begun to rise when he married her, the slender brown-haired daughter of a village shoemaker, and even in those days the little plough company with its ownership scattered among the merchants and farmers of the vicinity had started under his hand to make progress in the state. People already spoke of its master as a coming man and of Laura as the wife of a coming man.
To Laura this was in some way unsatisfactory. Sitting at home and doing nothing she had still a passionate wish to be known as a character, an individual, a woman of action. On the street as she walked beside her husband, she beamed upon people but when the same people spoke, calling them a handsome couple, a flush rose to her cheeks and a flash of indignation ran through her brain.
Laura Ormsby lay awake in her bed at night thinking of her life. She had a world of fancies in which she at such times lived. In her dream world a thousand stirring adventures came to her. She imagined a letter received through the mail, telling of an intrigue in which David's name was coupled with that of another woman and lay abed quietly hugging the thought. She looked at the face of the sleeping David tenderly. “Poor hard-pressed boy,” she muttered. “I shall be resigned and cheerful and lead him gently back to his old place in my heart.”
In the morning after a night spent in this dream world Laura looked at David, so cool and efficient, and was irritated by his efficiency. When he playfully dropped his hand upon her shoulder she drew away and sitting opposite him at breakfast watched him reading the morning paper all unconscious of the rebel thoughts in her mind.
Once after she had moved to Chicago and after Margaret's return from college Laura had the faint suggestion of an adventure. Although it turned out tamely it lingered in her mind and in some way sweetened her thoughts.
She was alone on a sleeping car coming from New York. A young man sat in a seat opposite her and the two fell into talk. As she talked Laura imagined herself eloping with the young man and under her lashes looked sharply at his weak and pleasant face. She kept the talk alive as others in the car crawled away for the night behind the green swaying curtains.
With the young man Laura discussed ideas she had got from reading Ibsen and Shaw. She grew bold and daring in the advancing of opinions and tried to stir the young man to some overt speech or action that might arouse her indignation.
The young man did not understand the middle-aged woman who sat beside him and talked so boldly. He knew of but one prominent man named Shaw and that man had been governor of Iowa and later a member of the cabinet of President McKinley. It startled him to think that a prominent member of the Republican party should have such thoughts or express such opinions. He talked of fishing in Canada and of a comic opera he had seen in New York and at eleven o'clock yawned and disappeared behind the green curtains. As the young man lay in his berth he muttered to himself, “Now what did that woman want?” A thought came into his mind and he reached up to where his trousers swung in a little hammock above the window and looked to see that his watch and pocket-book were still there.
At home Laura Ormsby nursed the thought of the talk with the strange man on the train. In her mind he became something romantic and daring, a streak of light across what she was pleased to think of as her sombre life.
Sitting at dinner she talked of him describing his charms. “He had a wonderful mind and we sat late into the night talking,” she said, watching the face of David.
When she had spoken Margaret looked up and said laughingly, “Have a heart Dad. Here is romance. Do not be blind to it. Mother is trying to scare you about an alleged love affair.”
One evening three weeks after the great murder trial McGregor took a long walk in the streets of Chicago and tried to plan out his life. He was troubled and disconcerted by the event that had crowded in upon the heels of his dramatic success in the court room and more than troubled by the fact that his mind constantly played with the dream of having Margaret Ormsby as his wife. In the city he had become a power and instead of the names and the pictures of criminals and keepers of disorderly houses his name and his picture now appeared on the front pages of newspapers. Andrew Leffingwell, the political representative in Chicago of a rich and successful publisher of sensational newspapers, had visited him in his office and had proposed to make him a political figure in the city. Finley a noted criminal lawyer had offered him a partnership. The lawyer, a small smiling man with white teeth, had not asked McGregor for an immediate decision. In a way he had taken the decision for granted. Smiling genially and rolling a cigar across McGregor's desk he had spent an hour telling stories of famous court room triumphs.
“One such triumph is enough to make a man,” he declared. “You have no idea how far such a success will carry you. The word of it keeps running through men's minds. A tradition is built up. The remembrance of it acts upon the minds of jurors. Cases are won for you by the mere connection of your name with the case.”
McGregor walked slowly and heavily through the streets without seeing the people. In Wabash Avenue near Twenty-third Street he stopped in a saloon and drank beer. The saloon was in a room below the level of the sidewalk and the floor was covered with sawdust. Two half drunken labourers stood by the bar quarrelling. One of the labourers who was a socialist continually cursed the army and his words started McGregor to thinking of the dream he had so long held and that now seemed fading. “I was in the army and I know what I am talking about,” declared the socialist. “There is nothing national about the army. It is a privately owned thing. Here it is secretly owned by the capitalists and in Europe by the aristocracy. Don't tell me—I know. The army is made up of bums. If I'm a bum I became one then. You will see fast enough what fellows are in the army if the country is ever caught and drawn into a great war.”
Becoming excited the socialist raised his voice and pounded on the bar. “Hell, we don't know ourselves at all,” he cried. “We never have been tested. We call ourselves a great nation because we are rich. We are like a fat boy who has had too much pie. Yes sir—that's what we are here in America and as far as our army goes it is a fat boy's plaything. Keep away from it.”
McGregor sat in the corner of the saloon and looked about. Men came in and went out at the door. A child carried a pail down the short flight of steps from the street and ran across the sawdust floor. Her voice, thin and sharp, pierced through the babble of men's voices. “Ten cents' worth—give me plenty,” she pleaded, raising the pail above her head and putting it on the bar.
The confident smiling face of Finley the lawyer came back into McGregor's mind. Like David Ormsby the successful maker of ploughs the lawyer looked upon men as pawns in a great game and like the ploughmaker his intentions were honourable and his purpose clear. He was intent upon making much of his life, being successful. If he played the game on the side of the criminal that was but a chance. Things had fallen out so. In his mind was something else—the expression of his own purpose.
McGregor rose and went out of the saloon. In the street men stood about in groups. At Thirty-ninth Street a crowd of youths scuffling on the sidewalk pushed against the tall muttering man who passed with his hat in his hand. He began to feel that he was in the midst of something too vast to be moved by the efforts of any one man. The pitiful insignificance of the individual was apparent. As in a long procession the figures of the individuals who had tried to rise out of the ruck of American life passed before him. With a shudder he realised that for the most part the men whose names filled the pages of American history meant nothing. The children who read of their deeds were unmoved. Perhaps they had only increased the disorder. Like the men passing in the street they went across the face of things and disappeared into the darkness.
“Perhaps Finley and Ormsby are right,” he whispered. “They get what they can, they have the good sense to know that life runs quickly like a flying bird passing an open window. They know that if a man thinks of anything else he is likely to become another sentimentalist and spend his life being hypnotised by the wagging of his own jaw.”
In his wanderings McGregor came to an out-of-door restaurant and garden far out on the south side. The garden had been built for the amusement of the rich and successful. Upon a little platform a band played. Although the garden was walled about it was open to the sky and above the laughing people seated at the tables shone the stars.
McGregor sat alone at a little table on a balcony beneath a shaded light. Below him along a terrace were other tables occupied by men and women. On a platform in the centre of the garden dancers appeared.
McGregor who had ordered a dinner left it untouched. A tall graceful girl, strongly suggestive of Margaret Ormsby, danced upon the platform. With infinite grace her body gave expression to the movements of the dance and like a thing blown by the wind she moved here and there in the arms of her partner, a slender youth with long black hair. In the figure of the dancing woman there was expressed much of the idealism man has sought to materialise in women and McGregor was thrilled by it. A sensualism so delicate that it did not appear to be sensualism began to invade him. With a new hunger he looked forward to the time when he would again see Margaret.
Upon the platform in the garden appeared other dancers. The lights at the tables were turned low. From the darkness laughter arose. McGregor stared about. The people seated at the tables on the terrace caught and held his attention and he began looking sharply at the faces of the men. How cunning they were, these men who had been successful in life. Were they not after all the wise men? Behind the flesh that had grown so thick upon their bones what cunning eyes. There was a game of life and they had played it. The garden was a part of the game. It was beautiful and did not all that was beautiful in the world end by serving them? The arts of men, the thoughts of men, the impulses toward loveliness that came into the minds of men and women, did not all these things work solely to lighten the hours of the successful? The eyes of the men at the tables as they looked at the women who danced were not too greedy. They were filled with assurance. Was it not for them that the dancers turned here and there revealing their grace? If life was a struggle had they not been successful in the struggle?
McGregor arose from the table and left his food untouched. Near the entrance to the gardens he stopped and leaning against a pillar looked again at the scene before him. Upon the platform appeared a whole troupe of women-dancers. They were dressed in many-coloured garments and danced a folk dance. As McGregor watched a light began to creep back into his eyes. The women who now danced were unlike her who had reminded him of Margaret Ormsby. They were short of stature and there was something rugged in their faces. Back and forth across the platform they moved in masses. By their dancing they were striving to convey a message. A thought came to McGregor. “It is the dance of labour,” he muttered. “Here in this garden it is corrupted but the note of labour is not lost. There is a hint of it left in these figures who toil even as they dance.”
McGregor moved away from the shadows of the pillar and stood, hat in hand, beneath the garden lights waiting as though for a call out of the ranks of the dancers. How furiously they worked. How the bodies twisted and squirmed. Out of sympathy with their efforts sweat appeared on the face of the man who stood watching. “What a storm must be going on just below the surface of labour,” he muttered. “Everywhere dumb brutalised men and women must be waiting for something, not knowing what they want. I will stick to my purpose but I will not give up Margaret,” he said aloud, turning and half running out of the garden and into the street.
In his sleep that night McGregor dreamed of a new world, a world of soft phrases and gentle hands that stilled the rising brute in man. It was a world-old dream, the dream out of which such women as Margaret Ormsby have been created. The long slender hands he had seen lying on the desk in the settlement house now touched his hands. Uneasily he rolled about in bed and desire came to him so that he awakened. On the Boulevard people still passed up and down. McGregor arose and stood in the darkness by the window of his room watching. A theatre had just spat forth its portion of richly dressed men and women and when he had opened the window the voices of the women came clear and sharp to his ears.
The distracted man stared into the darkness and his blue eyes were troubled. The vision of the disordered and disorganised band of miners marching silently in the wake of his mother's funeral into whose lives he by some supreme effort was to bring order was disturbed and shattered by the more definite and lovely vision that had come to him.
During the days since she had seen McGregor Margaret had thought of him almost constantly. She weighed and balanced her own inclinations and decided that if the opportunity came she would marry the man whose force and courage had so appealed to her. She was half disappointed that the opposition she had seen in her father's face when she had told him of McGregor and had betrayed herself by her tears did not become more active. She wanted to fight, to defend the man she had secretly chosen. When nothing was said of the matter she went to her mother and tried to explain. “We will have him here,” the mother said quickly. “I am giving a reception next week. I will make him the chief figure. Let me have his name and address and I will attend to the matter.”
Laura arose and went into the house. A shrewd gleam came into her eyes. “He will act like a fool before our people,” she told herself. “He is a brute and will be made to look like a brute.” She could not restrain her impatience and sought out David. “He is a man to fear,” she said; “he would stop at nothing. You must think of some way to put an end to Margaret's interest in him. Do you know of a better plan than to have him here where he will look the fool?”
David took the cigar from his lips. He felt annoyed and irritated that an affair concerning Margaret had been brought forward for discussion. In his heart he also feared McGregor. “Let it alone,” he said sharply. “She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any other woman I know.” He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda into the grass. “Women are not understandable,” he half shouted. “They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up understanding you and now I am being compelled to give up understanding Margaret.”
At Mrs. Ormsby's reception McGregor appeared arrayed in the black suit he had purchased for his mother's funeral. His flaming red hair and rude countenance arrested the attention of all. About him on all sides crackled talk and laughter. As Margaret had been alarmed and ill at ease in the crowded court room where a fight for life went on, so he among these people who went about uttering little broken sentences and laughing foolishly at nothing, felt depressed and uncertain. In the midst of the company he occupied much the same position as a new and ferocious animal safely caught and now on caged exhibition. They thought it clever of Mrs. Ormsby to have him and he was, in not quite the accepted sense, the lion of the evening. The rumour that he would be there had induced more than one woman to cut other engagements and come to where she could take the hand of and talk with this hero of the newspapers, and the men shaking his hand, looked at him sharply and wondered what power and what cunning lay in him.
In the newspapers after the murder trial a cry had sprung up about the person of McGregor. Fearing to print in full the substance of his speech on vice, its ownership and its significance, they had filled their columns with talk of the man. The huge Scotch lawyer of the Tenderloin was proclaimed as something new and startling in the grey mass of the city's population. Then as in the brave days that followed the man caught irresistibly the imagination of writing men, himself dumb in written or spoken words except in the heat of an inspired outburst when he expressed perfectly that pure brute force, the lust for which sleeps in the souls of artists.
Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest. Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover.
One after another Margaret brought forward the men and women of her world to couple their names with McGregor's and try to establish him in the atmosphere of assurance and ease that pervaded the house and the people. He stood by the wall bowing and staring boldly about and thought that the confusion and distraction of mind that had followed his first visit to Margaret at the settlement house was being increased immeasurably with every passing moment. He looked at the glittering chandelier on the ceiling and at the people moving about—the men at ease, comfortable—the women with wonderfully delicate expressive hands and with their round white necks and shoulders showing above their gowns and a feeling of utter helplessness pervaded him. Never before had he been in a company so feminine. He thought of the beautiful women about him, seeing them in his direct crude and forceful way merely as females at work among males, carrying forward some purpose. “With all the softly suggestive sensuality of their dress and their persons they must in some way have sapped the strength and the purpose of these men who move among them so indifferently,” he thought. Within himself he knew of nothing to set up as a defence against what he believed such beauty must become to the man who lived with it. Its power he thought must be something monumental and he looked with admiration at the quiet face of Margaret's father, moving among his guests.
McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. “The fine lady,” he thought, “is no better than the women of the First Ward. She has an idea I will surrender without a fight.”
Out of his mind went the fear of the assurance and stability of Margaret's people that had almost overcome him in the house. The woman who had all her life thought of herself as one waiting only the opportunity to appear as a commanding figure in affairs made by her presence a failure of the effort to submerge McGregor.
On the veranda stood the three people. McGregor the silent became the talkative. Seized with one of the inspirations that were a part of his nature he threw talk about, sparring and returning thrust for thrust with Mrs. Ormsby. When he thought that the time had come for him to get at the thing that was in his mind he went into the house and presently came out carrying his hat. The quality of harshness that crept into his voice when he was excited or determined startled Laura Ormsby. Looking down at her, he said, “I am going to take your daughter for a walk in the street. I want to talk with her.”
Laura hesitated and smiled uncertainly. She determined to speak out, to be like the man crude and direct. When she had her mind fixed and ready Margaret and McGregor were already half way down the gravel walk to the gate and the opportunity to distinguish herself had passed.
McGregor walked beside Margaret, absorbed in thoughts of her. “I am engaged in a work here,” he said, waving his hand vaguely toward the city. “It is a big work and it takes a lot out of me. I have not come to see you, because I've been uncertain. I've been afraid you would overcome me and drive thoughts of the work out of my head.”
By the iron gate at the end of the gravel walk they turned and faced each other. McGregor leaned against the brick wall and looked at her. “I want you to marry me,” he said. “I think of you constantly. Thinking of you I can only half do my work. I get to thinking that another man may come and take you and I waste hour after hour being afraid.”
She put a trembling hand upon his arm and he thinking to check an attempt at an answer before he had finished, hurried on.
“There are things to be said and understood between us before I can come to you as a suitor. I did not think I should feel toward a woman as I feel toward you and I have certain adjustments to make. I thought I could get along without your kind of women. I thought you were not for me—with the work I have thought out to do in the world. If you will not marry me I'll be glad to know now so that I can get my mind straightened out.”
Margaret raised her hand and laid it on his shoulder. The act was a kind of acknowledgment of his right to talk to her so directly. She said nothing. Filled with a thousand messages of love and tenderness she longed to pour into his ear she stood in silence on the gravel path with her hand on his shoulder.
And then an absurd thing happened. The fear that Margaret might come to some quick decision that would affect all of their future together made McGregor frantic. He did not want her to speak and wished his own words unsaid. “Wait. Not now,” he cried and threw up his hand intending to take her hand. His fist struck the arm that lay on his shoulder and it in turn knocked his hat flying into the road. McGregor started to run after it and then stopped. He put his hand to his head and appeared lost in thought. When he turned again to pursue the hat Margaret, unable longer to control herself, shouted with laughter.
Hatless, McGregor walked up Drexel Boulevard in the soft stillness of the summer night. He was annoyed at the outcome of the evening and in his heart half wished that Margaret had sent him away defeated. His arms ached to have her against his breast but his mind kept presenting one after another the objections to marriage with her. “Men are submerged by such women and forget their work,” he told himself. “They sit looking into the soft brown eyes of their beloved, thinking of happiness. A man should go about his work thinking of that. The fire that runs through the veins of his body should light his mind. One wants to take the love of woman as an end in life and the woman accepts that and is made happy by it.” He thought with gratitude of Edith in her shop on Monroe Street. “I do not sit in my room at night dreaming of taking her in my arms and pouring kisses on her lips,” he whispered.
In the door of her house Mrs. Ormsby had stood watching McGregor and Margaret. She had seen them stop at the end of the walk. The figure of the man was lost in shadows and that of Margaret stood alone, outlined against a distant light. She saw Margaret's hand thrust out—was she clutching his sleeve—and heard the murmur of voices. And then the man precipitating himself into the street. His hat catapulted ahead of him and a quick outburst of half-hysterical laughter broke the stillness.
Laura Ormsby was furious. Although she hated McGregor she could not bear the thought that laughter should break the spell of romance. “She is just like her father,” she muttered. “At least she might show some spirit and not be like a wooden thing, ending her first talk with a lover with a laugh like that.”
As for Margaret she stood in the darkness trembling with happiness. She imagined herself going up the dark stairway to McGregor's office in Van Buren Street where once she had gone to take him news of the murder case—laying her hand upon his shoulder and saying, “Take me in your arms and kiss me. I am your woman. I want to live with you. I am ready to renounce my people and my world and to live your life for your sake.” Margaret, standing in the darkness before the huge old house in Drexel Boulevard, imagined herself with Beaut McGregor—living with him as his wife in a small apartment over a fish market on a West Side street. Why a fish market she could not have said.