yes. "It's going to work," he
cried. "It's bound to work. At last a man has come to lead the men of
labor."




CHAPTER II


John Van Moore a young Chicago advertising man went one afternoon to
the offices of the Wheelright Bicycle Company. The company had both
its factory and offices far out on the west side. The factory was a
huge brick affair fronted by a broad cement sidewalk and a narrow
green lawn spotted with flower beds. The building used for offices was
smaller and had a veranda facing the street. Up the sides of the
office building vines grew.

Like the reporter who had watched the Marching Men in the field by the
factory wall John Van Moore was a dapper young man with a moustache.
In his leisure hours he played a clarinet. "It gives a man something
to cling to," he explained to his friends. "One sees life going past
and feels that he is not a mere drifting log in the stream of things.
Although as a musician I amount to nothing, it at least makes me
dream."

Among the men in the advertising office where he worked Van Moore was
known as something of a fool, redeemed by his ability to string words
together. He wore a heavy black braided watch chain and carried a cane
and he had a wife who after marriage had studied medicine and with
whom he did not live. Sometimes on a Saturday evening the two met at
some restaurant and sat for hours drinking and laughing. When the wife
had gone to her own place the advertising man continued the fun, going
from saloon to saloon and making long speeches setting forth his
philosophy of life. "I am an individualist," he declared, strutting up
and down and swinging the cane about. "I am a dabbler, an experimenter
if you will. Before I die it is my dream that I will discover a new
quality in existence."

For the bicycle company the advertising man was to write a booklet
telling in romantic and readable form the history of the company. When
finished the booklet would be sent out to those who had answered
advertisements put into magazines and newspapers. The company had a
process of manufacture peculiar to Wheelright bicycles and in the
booklet this was to be much emphasised.

The manufacturing process in regard to which John Van Moore was to wax
eloquent had been conceived in the brain of a workman and was
responsible for the company's success. Now the workman was dead and
the president of the company had decided that he would take credit for
the idea. He had thought a good deal of the matter and had decided
that in truth the notion must have been more than a little his own.
"It must have been so," he told himself, "otherwise it would not have
worked out so well."

In the offices of the bicycle company the president, a grey gross man
with tiny eyes, walked up and down a long room heavily carpeted. In
reply to questions asked by the advertising man, who sat at a table
with a pad of paper before him, he raised himself on his toes, put a
thumb in the armhole of his vest and told a long rambling tale of
which he was the hero.

The tale concerned a purely imaginary young workman who spent all of
the earlier years of his life labouring terribly. At evening he ran
quickly from the shop where he was employed and going without sleep
toiled for long hours in a little garret. When the workman had
discovered the secret that made successful the Wheelright bicycle he
opened a shop and began to reap the reward of his efforts.

"That was me. I was that fellow," cried the fat man who in reality had
bought his interest in the bicycle company after the age of forty.
Tapping himself on the breast he paused as though overcome with
feeling. Tears came into his eyes. The young workman had become a
reality to him. "All day I ran about the little shop crying 'Quality!
Quality!' I do that now. It is a fetish with me. I do not make
bicycles for money but because I am a workman with pride in my work.
You may put that in the book. You may quote me as saying that. A big
point should be made of my pride in my work." The advertising man
nodded his head and scribbled upon the pad of paper. Almost he could
have written the story without the visit to the factory. When the fat
man was not looking he turned his face to one side and listened
attentively. With a whole heart he wished the president would go away
and leave him alone to wander in the factory.

On the evening before, John Van Moore had taken part in an adventure.
With a companion, a fellow who drew cartoons for the daily papers, he
had gone into a saloon and there had met another man of the
newspapers.

In the saloon the three men had sat until late into the night drinking
and talking. The second newspaper man--that same dapper fellow who had
watched the marchers by the factory wall--had told over and over the
story of McGregor and his Marchers. "I tell you there is something
growing up here," he had said. "I have seen this McGregor and I know.
You may believe me or not but the fact is that he has found out
something. There is an element in men that up to now has not been
understood--there is a thought hidden away within the breast of
labour, a big unspoken thought--it is a part of men's bodies as well
as their minds. Suppose this fellow has figured that out and
understands it, eh!"

Becoming more and more excited as he continued to drink the newspaper
man had been half wild in his conjectures as to what was to happen in
the world. Thumping with his fist upon a table wet with beer he had
addressed the writer of advertisements. "There are things that animals
know that have not been understood by men," he cried. "Consider the
bees. Have you thought that man has not tried to work out a collective
intellect? Why should man not try to work that out?"

The newspaper man's voice became low and tense. "When you go into a
factory I want you to keep your eyes and your ears open," he said. "Go
into one of the great rooms where many men are at work. Stand
perfectly still. Don't try to think. Wait."

Jumping out of his seat the excited man had walked up and down before
his companions. A group of men standing before the bar listened, their
glasses held half way to their lips.

"I tell you there is already a song of labour. It has not got itself
expressed and understood but it is in every shop, in every field where
men work. In a dim way the men who work are conscious of the song
although if you talk of the matter they only laugh. The song is low
harsh rhythmical. I tell you it comes out of the very soul of labour.
It is akin to the thing that artists understand and that is called
form. This McGregor understands something of that. He is the first
leader of labour that has understood. The world shall hear from him.
One of these days the world shall ring with his name."

In the bicycle factory John Van Moore looked at the pad of paper
before him and thought of the words of the half drunken man in the
saloon. In the great shop at his back there was the steady grinding
roar of many machines. The fat man, hypnotised by his own words,
continued to walk up and down telling of the hardship that had once
confronted the imaginary young workman and above which he had risen
triumphant. "We hear much of the power of labour but there has been a
mistake made," he said. "Such men as myself--we are the power. Do you
see we have come out of the mass? We stand forth."

Stopping before the advertising man and looking down the fat man
winked. "You do not need to say that in the book. There is no need of
quoting me there. Our bicycles are being bought by workingmen and it
would be foolish to offend them but what I say is nevertheless true.
Do not such men as I, with our cunning brains and our power of
patience build these great modern organisations?"

The fat man waved his arm toward the shops from which the roar of
machinery came. The advertising man absentmindedly nodded his head. He
was trying to hear the song of labour talked of by the drunken man. It
was quitting time and there was the sound of many feet moving about
the floor of the factory. The roar of the machinery stopped.

Again the fat man walked up and down talking of the career of the
labourer who had come forth from the ranks of labour. From the factory
the men began filing out into the open. There was the sound of feet
scuffling along the wide cement sidewalk past the flowerbeds.

Of a sudden the fat man stopped. The advertising man sat with pencil
suspended above the paper. From the walk below sharp commands rang
out. Again the sound of men moving about came in through the windows.

The president of the bicycle company and the advertising man ran to
the window. There on the cement sidewalk stood the men of the company
formed into columns of fours and separated into companies. At the head
of each company stood a captain. The captains swung the men about.
"Forward! March!" they shouted.

The fat man stood with his mouth open and looked at the men. "What's
going on down there? What do you mean? Quit that!" he bawled.

A derisive laugh floated up through the window.

"Attention! Forward, guide right!" shouted a captain.

The men went swinging down the broad cement sidewalk past the window
and the advertising man. In their faces was something determined and
grim. A sickly smile flitted across the face of the grey-haired man
and then faded. The advertising man, without knowing just what was
going on felt that the older man was afraid. He sensed the terror in
his face. In his heart he was glad to see it.

The manufacturer began to talk excitedly. "Now what's this?" he
demanded. "What's going on? What kind of a volcano are we men of
affairs walking over? Haven't we had enough trouble with labour? What
are they doing now?" Again he walked up and down past the table where
the advertising man sat looking at him. "We'll let the book go," he
said. "Come to-morrow. Come any time. I want to look into this. I want
to find out what's going on."

Leaving the office of the bicycle company John Van Moore ran along the
street past stores and houses. He did not try to follow the Marching
Men but ran forward blindly, filled with excitement. He remembered the
words of the newspaper man about the song of labour, and was drunk
with the thought that he had caught the swing of it. A hundred times
he had seen men pouring out of factory doors at the end of the day.
Always before they had been just a mass of individuals. Each had been
thinking of his own affairs and each man had shuffled off into his own
street and had been lost in the dim alleyways between the tall grimy
buildings. Now all of this was changed. The men did not shuffle off
alone but marched along the street shoulder to shoulder.

A lump came also into the throat of this man and he like that other by
the factory wall began to say words. "The song of labour is here. It
has begun to get itself sung!" he cried.

John Van Moore was beside himself. The face of the fat man pale with
terror came back into his mind. On the sidewalk before a grocery store
he stopped and shouted with delight. Then he began dancing wildly
about, startling a group of children who with fingers in their mouths
stood with staring eyes watching.




CHAPTER III


All through the early months of that year in Chicago, rumours of a new
and not understandable movement among labourers ran about among men of
affairs. In a way the labourers understood the undercurrent of terror
their marching together had inspired and like the advertising man
dancing on the sidewalk before the grocery were made happy by it. Grim
satisfaction dwelt in their hearts. Remembering their boyhoods and the
creeping terror that invaded their fathers' houses in times of
depression they were glad to spread terror among the homes of the rich
and the well-to-do. For years they had been going through life
blindly, striving to forget age and poverty. Now they felt that life
had a purpose, that they were marching toward some end. When in the
past they had been told that power dwelt in them they had not
believed. "He is not to be trusted," thought the man at the machine
looking at the man at work at the next machine. "I have heard him talk
and at bottom he is a fool."

Now the man at the machine did not think of his brother at the next
machine. In his dreams at night he was beginning to have a new vision.
Power had breathed its message into his brain. Of a sudden he saw
himself as a part of a giant walking in the world. "I am like a drop
of blood running through the veins of labour," he whispered to
himself. "In my own way I am adding strength to the heart and the
brain of labour. I have become a part of this thing that has begun to
move. I will not talk but will wait. If this marching is the thing
then I will march. Though I am weary at the end of the day that shall
not stop me. Many times I have been weary and was alone. Now I am a
part of something vast. This I know, that a consciousness of power has
crept into my brain and although I be persecuted I shall not surrender
what I have gained."

In the offices of the plough trust a meeting of men of affairs was
called. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the movement going
on among the workers. At the plough works it had broken out. No more
at evening did the men shuffle along, like a disorderly mob but
marched in companies along the brick-paved street that ran by the
factory door.

At the meeting David Ormsby had been as always quiet and self-
possessed. A halo of kindly intent hung over him and when a banker,
one of the directors of the company, had finished a speech he arose
and walked up and down, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets.
The banker was a fat man with thin brown hair and delicate hands. As
he talked he held a pair of yellow gloves and beat with them on a long
table at the centre of the room. The soft thump of the gloves upon the
table made a chorus to the things he had to say. David motioned for
him to be seated. "I will myself go to see this McGregor," he said,
walking across the room and putting an arm about the shoulder of the
banker. "Perhaps there is as you say a new and terrible danger here
but I do not think so. For thousands, no doubt for millions of years,
the world has gone on its way and I do not think it is to be stopped
now.

"It has been my fortune to see and to know this McGregor," added David
smiling at the others in the room. "He is a man and not a Joshua to
make the sun stand still."

In the office in Van Buren Street, David, the grey and confident,
stood before the desk at which sat McGregor. "We will get out of here
if you do not mind," he said. "I want to talk to you and I would not
like being interrupted. I have a fancy that we talk out of doors."

The two men went in a street car to Jackson Park and, forgetting to
dine, walked for an hour along the paths under the trees. The wind
from the lake had chilled the air and the park was deserted.

They went to stand on a pier that ran out into the lake. On the pier
David tried to begin the talk that was the object of their being
together but felt that the wind and the water that beat against the
piling of the pier made talk too difficult. Although he could not have
told why, he was relieved by the necessity of delay. Into the park
they went again and found a seat upon a bench facing a lagoon.

In the presence of the silent McGregor David felt suddenly embarrassed
and awkward. "By what right do I question him?" he asked himself and
in his mind could find no answer. A half dozen times he started to say
what he had come to say but stopped and his talk ran off into
trivialities. "There are men in the world you have not taken into
consideration," he said finally, forcing himself to begin. With a
laugh he went on, relieved that the silence had been broken. "You see
the very inner secret of strong men has been missed by you and
others."

David Ormsby looked sharply at McGregor. "I do not believe that you
believe we are after money, we men of affairs. I trust you see beyond
that. We have our purpose and we keep to our purpose quietly and
doggedly."

Again David looked at the silent figure sitting in the dim light and
again his mind ran out, striving to penetrate the silence. "I am not a
fool and perhaps I know that the movement you have started among the
workers is something new. There is power in it as in all great ideas.
Perhaps I think there is power in you. Why else should I be here?"

Again David laughed uncertainly. "In a way I am in sympathy with you,"
he said. "Although all through my life I have served money I have not
been owned by it. You are not to suppose that men like me have not
something beyond money in mind."

The old plough maker looked away over McGregor's shoulder to where the
leaves of the trees shook in the wind from the lake. "There have been
men and great leaders who have understood the silent competent
servants of wealth," he said half petulantly. "I want you to
understand these men. I should like to see you become such a one
yourself--not for the wealth it would bring but because in the end you
would thus serve all men. You would get at truth thus. The power that
is in you would be conserved and used more intelligently."

"To be sure, history has taken little or no account of the men of whom
I speak. They have passed through life unnoticed, doing great work
quietly."

The plough maker paused. Although McGregor had said nothing the older
man felt that the interview was not going as it should. "I should like
to know what you have in mind, what in the end you hope to gain for
yourself or for these men," he said somewhat sharply. "There is after
all no point to our beating about the bush."

McGregor said nothing. Arising from the bench he began again to walk
along the path with Ormsby at his side.

"The really strong men of the world have had no place in history,"
declared Ormsby bitterly. "They have not asked that. They were in Rome
and in Germany in the time of Martin Luther but nothing is said of
them. Although they do not mind the silence of history they would like
other strong men to understand. The march of the world is a greater
thing than the dust raised by the heels of some few workers walking
through the streets and these men are responsible for the march of the
world. You are making a mistake. I invite you to become one of us. If
you plan to upset things you may get yourself into history but you
will not really count. What you are trying to do will not work. You
will come to a bad end."

When the two men emerged from the park the older man had again the
feeling that the interview had not been a success. He was sorry. The
evening he felt had marked for him a failure and he was not accustomed
to failures. "There is a wall here that I cannot penetrate," he
thought.

Along the front of the park beneath a grove of trees they walked in
silence. McGregor seemed not to have heard the words addressed to him.
When they came to where a long row of vacant lots faced the park he
stopped and stood leaning against a tree to look away into the park,
lost in thought.

David Ormsby also became silent. He thought of his youth in the little
village plough factory, of his efforts to get on in the world, of the
long evenings spent reading books and trying to understand the
movements of men.

"Is there an element in nature and in youth that we do not understand
or that we lose sight of?" he asked. "Are the efforts of the patient
workers of the world always to be abortive? Can some new phase of life
arise suddenly upsetting all of our plans? Do you, can you, think of
men like me as but part of a vast whole? Do you deny to us
individuality, the right to stand forth, the right to work things out
and to control?"

The ploughmaker looked at the huge figure standing beside the tree.
Again he was irritated and kept lighting cigars which after two or
three puffs he threw away. In the bushes at the back of the bench
insects began to sing. The wind coming now in gentle gusts swayed
slowly the branches of the trees overhead.

"Is there an eternal youth in the world, a state out of which men pass
unknowingly, a youth that forever destroys, tearing down what has been
built?" he asked. "Are the mature lives of strong men of so little
account? Have you like the empty fields that bask in the sun in the
summer the right to remain silent in the presence of men who have had
thoughts and have tried to put their thoughts into deeds?"

Still saying nothing McGregor pointed with his finger along the road
that faced the park. From a side street a body of men swung about a
corner, coming with long strides toward the two. As they passed
beneath a street lamp that swung gently in the wind their faces
flashing in and out of the light seemed to be mocking David Ormsby.
For a moment anger burned in him and then something, perhaps the
rhythm of the moving mass of men, brought a gentler mood. The men
swinging past turned another corner and disappeared beneath the
structure of an elevated railroad.

The ploughmaker walked away from McGregor. Something in the interview,
terminating thus with, the presence of the marching figures had he
felt unmanned him. "After all there is youth and the hope of youth.
What he has in mind may work," he thought as he climbed aboard a
street car.

In the car David put his head out at the window and looked at the long
line of apartment buildings that lined the streets. He thought again
of his own youth and of the evenings in the Wisconsin village when,
himself a youth, he went with other young men singing and marching in
the moonlight.

In a vacant lot he again saw a body of the Marching Men moving back
and forth and responding quickly to the commands given by a slender
young man who stood on the sidewalk beneath a street lamp and held a
stick in his hand.

In the car the grey-haired man of affairs put his head down upon the
back of the seat in front. Half unconscious of his own thoughts his
mind began to dwell upon the figure of his daughter. "Had I been
Margaret I should not have let him go. No matter what the cost I
should have clung to the man," he muttered.




CHAPTER IV


It is difficult not to be of two minds about the manifestation now
called, and perhaps rightly, "The Madness of the Marching Men." In one
mood it comes back to the mind as something unspeakably big and
inspiring. We go each of us through the treadmill of our lives caught
and caged like little animals in some vast menagerie. In turn we love,
marry, breed children, have our moments of blind futile passion and
then something happens. All unconsciously a change creeps over us.
Youth passes. We become shrewd, careful, submerged in little things.
Life, art, great passions, dreams, all of these pass. Under the night
sky the suburbanite stands in the moonlight. He is hoeing his radishes
and worrying because the laundry has torn one of his white collars.
The railroad is to put on an extra morning train. He remembers that
fact heard at the store. For him the night becomes more beautiful. For
ten minutes longer he can stay with the radishes each morning. There
is much of man's life in the figure of the suburbanite standing
absorbed in his own thoughts in the midst of his radishes.

And so about the business of our lives we go and then of a sudden
there comes again the feeling that crept over us all in the year of
the Marching Men. In a moment we are again a part of the moving mass.
The old religious exaltation, strange emanation from the man McGregor,
returns. In fancy we feel the earth tremble under the feet of the men
--the marchers. With a conscious straining of the mind we strive to
grasp the processes of the mind of the leader during that year when
men sensed his meaning, when they saw as he saw the workers--saw them
massed and moving through the world.

My own mind, striving feebly to follow that greater and simpler mind,
gropes about. I remember sharply the words of a writer who said that
men make their own gods and realise that I myself saw something of the
birth of such a god. For he was near to being a god then--our
McGregor. The thing he did rumbles in the minds of men yet. His long
shadow will fall across men's thoughts for ages. The tantalising
effort to understand his meaning will tempt us always into endless
speculation.

Only last week I met a man--he was a steward in a club and lingered
talking to me by a cigar case in an empty billiard-room--who suddenly
turned away to conceal from me two large tears that had jumped into
his eyes because of a kind of tenderness in my voice at the mention of
the Marching Men.

Another mood comes. It may be the right mood. I see sparrows jumping
about in an ordinary roadway as I walk to my office. From the maple
trees the little winged seeds come fluttering down before my eyes. A
boy goes past sitting in a grocery wagon and over-driving a rather
bony horse. As I walk I overtake two workmen shuffling along. They
remind me of those other workers and I say to myself that thus men
have always shuffled, that never did they swing forward into that
world-wide rhythmical march of the workers.

"You were drunk with youth and a kind of world madness," says my
normal self as I go forward again, striving to think things out.

Chicago is still here--Chicago after McGregor and the Marching Men.
The elevated trains still clatter over the frogs at the turning into
Wabash Avenue; the surface cars clang their bells; the crowds pour up
in the morning from the runway leading to the Illinois Central trains;
life goes on. And men in their offices sit in their chairs and say
that the thing that happened was abortive, a brain storm, a wild
outbreak of the rebellious the disorderly and the hunger in the minds
of men.

What begging of the question. The very soul of the Marching Men was a
sense of order. That was the message of it, the thing that the world
has not come up to yet. Men have not learned that we must come to
understand the impulse toward order, have that burned into our
consciousness, before we move on to other things. There is in us this
madness for individual expression. For each of us the little moment of
running forward and lifting our thin childish voices in the midst of
the great silence. We have not learned that out of us all, walking
shoulder to shoulder, there might arise a greater voice, something to
make the waters of the very seas to tremble.

McGregor knew. He had a mind not sick with much thinking of trifles.
When he had a great idea he thought it would work and he meant to see
that it did work.

Mightily was he equipped. I have seen the man in halls talking, his
huge body swaying back and forth, his great fists in the air, his
voice harsh, persistent, insistent--with something of the quality of
the drums in it--beating down into the upturned faces of the men
crowded into the stuffy little places.

I remember that newspaper men used to sit in their little holes and
write saying of him that the times made McGregor. I do not know about
that. The city caught fire from the man at the time of that terrible
speech of his in the court room when Polk Street Mary grew afraid and
told the truth. There he stood, the raw untried red-haired miner from
the mines and the Tenderloin, facing an angry court and a swarm of
protesting lawyers and uttering that city-shaking philippic against
the old rotten first ward and the creeping cowardice in men that lets
vice and disease go on and pervade all modern life. It was in a way
another "J'Accuse!" from the lips of another Zola. Men who heard it
have told me that when he had finished in the whole court no man spoke
and no man dared feel guiltless. "For the moment something--a section,
a cell, a figment, of men's brains opened--and in that terrible
illuminating instant they saw themselves as they were and what they
had let life become."

They saw something else, or thought they did, saw McGregor a new force
for Chicago to reckon with. After the trial one young newspaper man
returned to his office and running from desk to desk yelled in the
faces of his brother reporters: "Hell's out for noon. We've got a big
red-haired Scotch lawyer up here on Van Buren Street that is a kind of
a new scourge of the world. Watch the First Ward get it."

But McGregor never looked at the First Ward. That wasn't bothering
him. From the court room he went to march with men in a new field.

Followed the time of waiting and of patient quiet work. In the
evenings McGregor worked at the law cases in the bare room in Van
Buren Street. That queer bird Henry Hunt still stayed with him,
collecting tithes for the gang and going to his respectable home at
night--a strange triumph of the small that had escaped the tongue of
McGregor on that day in court when so many men had their names bruited
to the world in McGregor's roll call--the roll call of the men who
were but merchants, brothers of vice, the men who should have been
masters in the city.

And then the movement of the Marching Men began to come to the
surface. It got into the blood of men. That harsh drumming voice began
to shake their hearts and their legs.

Everywhere men began to see and hear of the Marchers. From lip to lip
ran the question, "What's going on?"

"What's going on?" How that cry ran over Chicago. Every newspaper man
in town got assignments on the story. The papers were loaded with it
every day. All over the city they appeared, everywhere--the Marching
Men.

There were leaders enough! The Cuban War and the State Militia had
taught too many men the swing of the march step for there not to be at
least two or three competent drill masters in every little company of
men.

And there was the marching song the Russian wrote for McGregor. Who
could forget it? Its high pitched harsh feminine strain rang in the
brain. How it went pitching and tumbling along in that wailing calling
endless high note. It had strange breaks and intervals in the
rendering. The men did not sing it. They chanted it. There was in it
just the weird haunting something the Russians know how to put into
their songs and into the books they write. It isn't the quality of the
soil. Some of our own music has that. But in this Russian song there
was something else, something world-wide and religious--a soul, a
spirit. Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strange
land and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.

Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thing
Americans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, the
offices, the alleys and in the air overhead--the wail--half shout. No
noise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.

And there was the fellow who wrote the music down for McGregor. He was
the real thing and he bore the marks of the shackles on his legs. He
had remembered the march from hearing the men sing it as they went
over the Steppes to Siberia, the men who were going up out of misery
to more misery. "It would come out of the air," he explained. "The
guards would run down the line of men to shout and strike out with
their short whips. 'Stop it!' they cried. And still it went on for
hours, defying everything, there on the cold cheerless plains."

And he had brought it to America and put it to music for McGregor's
marchers.

Of course the police tried to stop the marchers. Into a street they
would run crying "Disperse!" The men did disperse only to appear again
on some vacant lot working away at the perfection of the marching.
Once an excited squad of police captured a company of them. The same
men were back in line the next evening. The police could not arrest a
hundred thousand men because they marched shoulder to shoulder along
the streets and chanted a weird march song as they went.

The whole thing was not an outbreak of labour. It was something
different from anything that had come into the world before. The
unions were in it but besides the unions there were the Poles, the
Russian Jews, the Hunks from the stockyards and the steel works in
South Chicago. They had their own leaders, speaking their own
languages. And how they could throw their legs into the march! The
armies of the old world had for years been training men for the
strange demonstration that had broken out in Chicago.

The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it
now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers
of that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught and held.

Every train brought writers tumbling into Chicago. In the evening
fifty of them would gather in the back room at Weingardner's
restaurant where such men congregate.

And then the thing broke out all over the country, in steel towns like
Pittsburgh and Johnstown and Lorain and McKeesport and men working in
little independent factories in towns down in Indiana began drilling
and chanting the march song on summer evenings on the village baseball
ground.

How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle class people were
afraid! It swept over the country like a religious revival, the
creeping dread.

The writing men got to McGregor, the brain back of it all, fast
enough. Everywhere his influence appeared. In the afternoon there
would be a hundred newspaper men standing on the stairway leading up
to the big bare office in Van Buren Street. At his desk he sat, big
and red and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose the
thing that was in their minds had something to do with the way men
looked at him but in any case the crowd in Weingardner's agreed that
there was in the man something of the same fear-inspiring bigness
there was in the movement he had started and was guiding.

It seems absurdly simple now. There he sat at his desk. The police
might have walked in and arrested him. But if you begin figuring that
way the whole thing was absurd. What differs it if men march coming
from work, swinging along shoulder to shoulder or shuffle aimlessly
along, and what harm can come out of the singing of a song?

You see McGregor understood something that all of us had not counted
on. He knew that every one has an imagination. He was at war with
men's minds. He challenged something in us that we hardly realised was
there. He had been sitting there for years thinking it out. He had
watched Dr. Dowie and Mrs. Eddy. He knew what he was doing.

A crowd of newspaper men went one night to hear McGregor at a big
outdoor meeting up on the North Side. Dr. Cowell was with them--the
big English statesman and writer who later was drowned on the
_Titanic._ He was a big man, physically and mentally, and was in
Chicago to see McGregor and try to understand what he was doing.

And McGregor got him as he had all men. Out there under the sky the
men stood silent, Cowell's head sticking up above the sea of faces,
and McGregor talked. The newspaper men declared he could not talk.
They were wrong about that. McGregor had a way of throwing up his arms
and straining and shouting out his sentences, that got to the souls of
men.

He was a kind of crude artist drawing pictures on the mind.

That night he talked about labour as always--labour personified--huge
crude old Labour. How he made the men before him see and feel the
blind giant who has lived in the world since time began and who still
goes stumbling blindly about, rubbing his eyes and lying down to sleep
away centuries in the dust of the fields and the factories.

A man arose in the audience and climbed upon the platform beside
McGregor. It was a daring thing to do and men's knees trembled. While
the man was crawling up to the platform shouts arose. One has in mind
a picture of a bustling little fellow going into the house and into
the upper room where Jesus and his followers were having the last
supper together, going in there to wrangle about the price to be paid
for the wine.

The man who got on the platform with McGregor was a socialist. He
wanted to argue.

But McGregor did not argue with him. He sprang forward, it was a quick
tiger-like movement, and spun the socialist about, making him stand
small and blinking and comical before the crowd.

Then McGregor began to talk. He made of the little stuttering arguing
socialist a figure representing all labour, made him the
personification of the old weary struggle of the world. And the
socialist who went to argue stood with tears in his eyes, proud of his
position in men's eyes.

All over the city McGregor talked of old Labour and how he was to be
built up and put before men's eyes by the movement of the Marching
Men. How our legs tingled to fall in step and go marching away with
him.

Out of the crowds there came the note of that wailing march. Some one
always started that.

That night on the North Side Doctor Cowell got hold of the shoulder of
a newspaper man and led him to a car. He who knew Bismarck and who had
sat in council with kings went walking and babbling half the night
through the empty streets.

It is amusing now to think of the things men said under the influence
of McGregor. Like old Doctor Johnson and his friend Savage they walked
half drunk through the streets swearing that whatever happened they
would stick to the movement. Doctor Cowell himself said things just as
absurd as that.

And all over the country men were getting the idea--the Marching Men--
old Labour in one mass marching before the eyes of men--old Labour
that was going to make the world see--see and feel its bigness at
last. Men were to come to the end of strife--men united--Marching!
Marching! Marching!




CHAPTER V


In all of the time of The Marching Men there was but one bit of
written matter from the leader McGregor. It had a circulation running
into the millions and was printed in every tongue spoken in America. A
copy of the little circular lies before me now.

THE MARCHERS

   "They ask us what we mean.
   Well, here is our answer.
   We mean to go on marching.
   We mean to march in the morning and in the evening when the sun
goes down.
   On Sundays they may sit on their porches or shout at men playing
ball in a field
   But we will march.
   On the hard cobblestones of the city streets and through the dust
of country roads we will march.
   Our legs may be weary and our throats hot and dry,
   But still we will march, shoulder to shoulder.
   We will march until the ground shakes and tall buildings tremble.
   Shoulder to shoulder we will go--all of us--
   On and on forever.
   We will not talk nor listen to talk.
   We will march and we will teach our sons and our daughters to
march.
   Their minds are troubled. Our minds are clear.
   We do not think and banter words.
   We march.
   Our faces are coarse and there is dust in our hair and beards.
   See, the inner parts of our hands are rough.
   And still we march--we the workers."




CHAPTER VI


Who will ever forget that Labour Day in Chicago? How they marched!--
thousands and thousands and more thousands! They filled the streets.
The cars stopped. Men trembled with the import of the impending hour.

Here they come! How the ground trembles! The chant chant chant of that
song! It must have been thus that Grant felt at the great review of
the veterans in Washington when all day long they marched past him,
the men of the Civil War, the whites of their eyes showing in the tan
of their faces. McGregor stood on the stone curbing above the tracks
in Grant Park. As the men marched they massed in there about him,
thousands of them, steel workers and iron workers and great red-necked
butchers and teamsters.

And in the air wailed the marching song of the workers.

All of the world that was not marching jammed into the buildings
facing Michigan Boulevard and waited. Margaret Ormsby was there. She
sat with her father in a carriage near where Van Buren Street ends at
the Boulevard. As the men kept crowding in about them she clutched
nervously at the sleeve of David Ormsby's coat. "He is going to
speak," she whispered and pointed. Her tense air of expectancy
expressed much of the feeling of the crowd. "See, listen, he is going
to speak out."

It must have been five in the afternoon when the men got through
marching. They were massed in there clear down to the Twelfth Street
Station of the Illinois Central. McGregor lifted his hands. In the
hush his harsh voice carried far. "We are at the beginning," he
shouted and silence fell upon the people. In the stillness one
standing near her might have heard Margaret Ormsby weeping softly.
There was the gentle murmur that always prevails where many people
stand at attention. The weeping of the woman was scarcely audible but
it persisted like the sound of little waves on a beach at the end of
the day.





BOOK VII



CHAPTER I


The idea prevalent among men that the woman to be beautiful must be
hedged about and protected from the facts of life has done something
more than produce a race of women not physically vigorous. It has made
them deficient in strength of soul also. After the evening when she
stood facing Edith and when she had been unable to arise to the
challenge flung at her by the little milliner Margaret Ormsby was
forced to stand facing her own soul and there was no strength in her
for the test. Her mind insisted on justifying her failure. A woman of
the people placed in such a position would have been able to face it
calmly. She would have gone soberly and steadily about her work and
after a few months of pulling weeds in a field, trimming hats in a
shop or instructing children in a schoolroom would have been ready to
thrust out again, making another trial at life. Having met many
defeats she would have been armed and ready for defeat. Like a little
animal in a forest inhabited by other and larger animals she would
have known the effectiveness of lying perfectly still for a long
period, making her patience a part of her equipment for living.

Margaret had decided that she hated McGregor. After the scene in her
house she gave up her work in the settlement house and for a long time
went about nursing her hatred. In the street as she walked about her
mind kept bringing accusations against him and in her room at night
she sat by the window looking at the stars and said strong words. "He
is a brute," she declared hotly, "a mere animal untouched by the
culture that makes for gentleness. There is something animal-like and
horrible in my nature that has made me care for him. I shall pluck it
out. In the future I shall make it my business to forget the man and
all of the dreadful lower strata of life that he represents."

Filled with this idea Margaret went about among her own people and
tried to become interested in the men and women she met at dinners and
receptions. It did not work and when, after a few evenings spent in
the company of men absorbed in the getting of money, she found them
only dull creatures whose mouths were filled with meaningless words,
her irritation grew and she blamed McGregor for that also. "He had no
right to come into my consciousness and then take himself off," she
declared bitterly. "The man is more of a brute than I thought. He no
doubt preys upon everyone as he has preyed upon me. He is without
tenderness, knows nothing of the meaning of tenderness. The colourless
creature he has married will serve his body. That is what he wants. He
does not want beauty. He is a coward who dare not stand up to beauty
and is afraid of me."

When the Marching Men Movement began to make a stir in Chicago
Margaret went on a visit to New York. For a month she lived with two
women friends at a big hotel near the sea and then hurried home. "I
will see the man and hear him talk," she told herself. "I cannot cure
myself of the consciousness of him by running away. Perhaps I am
myself a coward. I shall go into his presence. When I hear his brutal
words and see again the hard gleam that sometimes comes into his eyes
I shall be cured."

Margaret went to hear McGregor talk to a gathering of workingmen in a
West Side hall and came away more alive to him than ever. In the hall
she sat concealed in deep shadows by the door and waited with
trembling eagerness.

On all sides of her were men crowded together. Their faces were washed
but the grime of the shops was not quite effaced. Men from the steel
mills with the cooked look that follows long exposure to intense
artificial heat, men of the building trades with their broad hands,
big men and small men, misshapen and straight, labouring men, all sat
at attention, waiting.

Margaret noticed that as McGregor talked the lips of the working men
moved. Fists were clenched. Applause came quick and sharp like the
report of guns.

In the shadows at the further side of the hall the black coats of the
workers made a blot out of which intense faces looked and across which
the flickering gas jets in the centre of the hall threw dancing
lights.

The words of the speaker were shot forth. The sentences seemed broken
and disconnected. As he talked giant pictures flashed through the
minds of the hearers. Men felt themselves big and exalted. A little
steel worker sitting near Margaret, who earlier in the evening had
been abused by his wife because he wanted to come to the meeting
instead of helping with the dishes at home, stared fiercely about. He
thought he would like to fight hand in hand with a wild animal in a
forest.

Standing on the narrow stage McGregor seemed a giant seeking
expression. His mouth worked, the sweat stood upon his forehead and he
moved restlessly up and down. At times, with his hands advanced and
with the eager forward crouch of his body, he was like a wrestler
waiting to grapple with an opponent.

Margaret was deeply moved. Her years of training and of refinement
were stripped off and she felt that, like the women of the French
Revolution, she would like to go out into the streets and march
screaming and fighting in feminine rage for the things of this man's
mind.

McGregor had scarcely begun to talk. His personality, the big eager
something in him, had caught and held this audience as it had caught
and held other audiences in other halls and was to hold them night
after night for months.

McGregor was something the men to whom he talked understood. He was
themselves become expressive and he moved them as no other leader had
ever moved them before. His very lack of glibness, the things in him
wanting expression and not getting expressed, made him seem like one
of them. He did not confuse their minds but drew for them great
scrawling pictures and to them he cried, "March!" and for marching he
promised them realisation of themselves.

"I have heard men in colleges and speakers in halls talk of the
brotherhood of man," he cried. "They do not want such a brotherhood.
They would flee before it. But we will make by our marching such a
brotherhood that they will tremble and say to one another, 'See, Old
Labour is awake. He has found his strength.' They will hide themselves
and eat their words of brotherhood.

"A clamour of voices will arise, many voices, crying out, 'Disperse!
Cease marching! I am afraid!'

"This talk of brotherhood. The words mean nothing. Man cannot love
man. We do not know what they mean by such love. They hurt us and
underpay us. Sometimes one of us gets an arm torn off. Are we to lie
in our beds loving the man who gets rich from the iron machine that
ripped the arm from the shoulder?

"On our knees and in our arms we have borne their children. On the
streets we see them--the petted children of our madness. See we have
let them run about misbehaving. We have given them automobiles and
wives with soft clinging dresses. When they have cried we have cared
for them.

"And they being children with the minds of children are confused. The
noise of affairs alarms them. They run about shaking their ringers and
commanding. They speak with pity of us--Labour--their father.

"And now we will show them their father in his might. The little
machines they have in their factories are toys we have given them and
that for the time we leave in their hands. We do not think of the toys
nor the soft-bodied women. We make of ourselves a mighty army, a
marching army going along shoulder to shoulder. We can love that.

"When they see us, hundreds of thousands of us, marching into their
minds and into their consciousness, then will they be afraid. And at
the little meetings they have when three or four of them sit talking,
daring to decide what things we shall have from life, there will be in
their minds a picture. We will stamp it there.

"They have forgotten our power. Let us reawaken it. See, I shake Old
Labour by the shoulder. He arouses. He sits up. He thrusts his huge
form up from where he was asleep in the dust and the smoke of the
mills. They look at him and are afraid. See, they tremble and run
away, falling over each other. The did not know Old Labour was so big.

"But you workers are not afraid. You are the arms and the legs and the
hands and the eyes of Labour. You have thought yourself small. You
have not got yourself into one mass so that I could shake and arouse
you.

"You must get that way. You must march shoulder to shoulder. You must
march so that you yourselves shall come to know what a giant you are.
If one of your number whines or complains or stands upon a box
throwing words about knock him down and keep marching.

"When you have marched until you are one giant body then will happen a
miracle. A brain will grow in the giant you have made.

"Will you march with me?"

Like a volley from a battery of guns came the sharp reply from the
eager upturned faces of the audience. "We will! Let us march!" they
shouted.

Margaret Ormsby went out at the door and into the crowds on Madison
Street. As she walked in the press she lifted her head in pride that a
man possessed of such a brain and of the simple courage to try to
express such magnificent ideas through human beings had ever shown
favour toward her. Humbleness swept over her and she blamed herself
for the petty thoughts concerning him that had been in her mind. "It
does not matter," she whispered to herself. "Now I know that nothing
matters, nothing but his success. He must do this thing he has set out
to do. He must not be denied. I would give the blood out of my body or
expose my body to shame if that could bring him success."

Margaret became exalted in her humbleness. When her carriage had taken
her to her house she ran quickly upstairs to her own room and knelt by
her bed. She started to pray but presently stopped and sprang to her
feet. Running to the window she looked off across the city. "He must
succeed," she cried again. "I shall myself be one of his marchers. I
will do anything for him. He is tearing the veil from my eyes, from
all men's eyes. We are children in the hands of this giant and he must
not meet defeat at the hands of children."




CHAPTER II


On the day of the great demonstration, when McGregor's power over the
minds and the bodies of the men of labour sent hundreds of thousands
marching and singing in the streets, there was one man who was
untouched by the song of labour expressed in the threshing of feet.
David Ormsby had in his quiet way thought things out. He expected that
the new impetus given to solidity in the ranks of labour would make
trouble for him and his kind, that it would express itself finally in
strikes and in wide-spread industrial disturbance. He was not worried.
In the end he thought that the silent patient power of money would
bring his people the victory. On that day he did not go to his office
but in the morning stayed in his own room thinking of McGregor and of
his daughter. Laura Ormsby was out of the city but Margaret was at
home. David believed he had measured accurately the power of McGregor
over her mind but occasional doubts came to him. "Well the time has
come to have it out with her," he decided. "I must reassert my
ascendency over her mind. The thing that is going on here is really a
struggle of minds. McGregor differs from other leaders of labour as I
differ from most leaders of the forces of money. He has brains. Very
well. I shall meet him on that level. Then, when I have made Margaret
think as I think, she will return to me."

       *       *       *       *       *

When he was still a small manufacturer in the Wisconsin town David had
been in the habit of driving out in the evening with his daughter.
During the drives he had been almost a lover in his attentions to the
child and now when he thought of the forces at work within her he was
convinced that she was still a child. Early in the afternoon he had a
carriage brought to the door and drove off with her to the city. "She
will want to see the man in the height of his power. If I am right in
thinking that she is still under the influence of his personality
there will be a romantic desire for that.

"I will give her the chance," he thought proudly. "In this struggle I
ask no quarter from him and shall not make the common mistake of
parents in such cases. She is fascinated by the figure he has made of
himself. Showy men who stand out from the crowd have that power. She
is still under his influence. Why else her constant distraction and
her want of interest in other things? Now I will be with her when the
man is most powerful, when he shows to the greatest advantage, and
then I will make my fight for her. I will point out to her another
road, the road along which the real victors in life must learn to
travel."

Together David the quiet efficient representative of wealth and his
woman child sat in the carriage on the day of McGregor's triumph. For
the moment an impassable gulf seemed to separate them and with intense
eyes each watched the hordes of men who massed themselves about the
labour leader. At the moment McGregor seemed to have caught all men in
the sweep of his movement. Business men had closed their desks, labour
was exultant, writers and men given to speculation in thought walked
about dreaming of the realisation of the brotherhood of man. In the
long narrow treeless park the music made by the steady never-ending
thresh of feet arose to something vast and rhythmical. It was like a
mighty chorus come up out of the hearts of men. David was unmoved.
Occasionally he spoke to the horses and looked from the faces of the
men massed about him to his daughter's face. In the coarse faces of
the men he thought he saw only a crude sort of intoxication, the
result of a new kind of emotionalism. "It will not outlast thirty days
of ordinary living in their squalid surroundings," he thought grimly.
"It is not the kind of exaltation for Margaret. I can sing her a more
wonderful song. I must get myself ready for that."

When McGregor arose to speak Margaret was overcome with emotions.
Dropping to her knees in the carriage she put her head down upon her
father's arm. For days she had been telling herself that in the future
of the man she loved there was no place for failure. Now again she
whispered to herself that this great sturdy figure must not be denied
the fulfilment of its purpose. When in the hush that followed the
massing of the labourers about him the harsh booming voice floated
over the heads of the people her body shook as with a chill.
Extravagant fancies invaded her mind and she wished it were possible
for her to do something heroic, something that would make her live
again in the mind of McGregor. She wanted to serve him, to give him
something out of herself, and thought wildly that there might yet come
a time and a way by which the beauty of her body could be laid like a
gift before him. The half mythical figure of Mary the lover of Jesus
came into her mind and she aspired to be such another. With her body
shaken with emotions she pulled at the sleeve of her father's coat.
"Listen! It is going to come now," she murmured. "The brain of labour
is going to express the dream of labour. An impulse sweet and lasting
is going to come into the world."

       *       *       *       *       *

David Ormsby said nothing. When McGregor had begun to speak he touched
the horses with the whip and drove slowly along Van Buren Street past
the silent attentive ranks of men. When he had got into one of the
streets near the river a vast cheer arose. It seemed to shake the city
and the horses reared and leaped forward over the rough cobblestones.
With one hand David quieted them while with the other he gripped the
hand of his daughter. They drove over a bridge and into the West Side
and as they went the marching song of the workers rising up out of
thousands of throats rang in their ears. For a time the air seemed to
pulsate with it but as they went westward it grew continually less and
less distinct. At last when they had turned into a street lined by
tall factories it died out altogether. "That is the end of him for me
and mine," thought David and again set himself for the task he had to
perform.

Through street after street David let the horses wander while he clung
to his daughter's hand and thought of what he wanted to say. Not all
of the streets were lined with factories. Some, and these in the
evening light were the most hideous, were bordered by the homes of
workers. The houses of the workers, jammed closely together and black
with grime, were filled with noisy life. Women sat in the doorways and
children ran screaming and shouting in the road. Dogs barked and
howled. Everywhere was dirt and disorder, the terrible evidence of
men's failure in the difficult and delicate art of living. In one of
the streets a little girl child who sat on the post of a fence made a
ludicrous figure. As David and Margaret drove past she beat with her
heels against the sides of the post and screamed. Tears ran down her
cheeks and her dishevelled hair was black with dirt. "I want a banana!
I want a banana!" she howled, staring at the blank walls of one of the
houses. In spite of herself Margaret was touched and her mind left the
figure of McGregor. By an odd chance the child on the post was the
daughter of that socialist orator who one night on the North Side had
climbed upon a platform to confront McGregor with the propaganda of
the Socialist Party.

David turned the horses into a wide boulevard that ran south through
the factory district of the west. As they came out into the boulevard
they saw sitting on the sidewalk before a saloon a drunkard with a
drum in his hand. The drunkard beat upon the drum and tried to sing
the marching song of the workers but succeeded only in making a queer
grunting noise like a distressed animal. The sight brought a smile to
David's lips. "Already it has begun to disintegrate," he muttered. "I
brought you into this part of town on purpose," he said to Margaret.
"I wanted you to see with your own eyes how much the world needs the
thing he is trying to do. The man is terribly right about the need for
discipline and order. He is a big man doing a big thing and I admire
his courage. He would be a really big man had he the greater courage."

On the boulevard into which they had turned all was quiet. The summer
sun was setting and over the roofs of buildings the west was ablaze
with light. They passed a factory surrounded by little patches of
garden. Some employer of labour had tried thus feebly to bring beauty
into the neighbourhood of the place where his men worked. David
pointed with the whip. "Life is a husk," he said, "and we men of
affairs who take ourselves so seriously because the fates have been
good to us have odd silly little fancies. See what this fellow has
been at, patching away, striving to create beauty on the shell of
things. He is like McGregor you see. I wonder if the man has made
himself beautiful, if either he or McGregor has seen to it that there
is something lovely inside the husk he wears around and that he calls
his body, if he has seen through life to the spirit of life. I do not
believe in patching nor do I believe in disturbing the shell of things
as McGregor has dared to do. I have my own beliefs and they are the
beliefs of my kind. This man here, this maker of little gardens, is
like McGregor. He might better let men find their own beauty. That is
my way. I have, I want to think, kept myself for the sweeter and more
daring effort."

David turned and looked hard at Margaret who had begun to be
influenced by his mood. She waited, looking with averted face at the
sky over the roofs of buildings. David began to talk of himself in
relation to her and her mother. A note of impatience came into his
voice.

"How far you have been carried away, haven't you?" he said sharply.
"Listen. I am not talking to you now as your father nor as Laura's
daughter. Let us be clear about that I love you and am in a contest to
win your love. I am McGregor's rival. I accept the handicap of
fatherhood. I love you. You see I have let something within myself
alight upon you. McGregor has not done that. He refused what you had
to offer but I do not. I have centred my life upon you and have done
it quite knowingly and after much thought. The feeling I have is
something quite special. I am an individualist but believe in the
oneness of man and woman. I would dare venture into but one other life
beyond my own and that the life of a woman. I have chosen to ask you
to let me venture so into your life. We will talk of it."

Margaret turned and looked at her father. Later she thought that some
strange phenomena must have happened at the moment Something like a
film was torn from her eyes and she saw the man David, not as a shrewd
and calculating man of affairs, but as something magnificently young.
Not only was he strong and solid but in his face there was at the
moment the deep lines of thought and suffering she had seen on the
countenance of McGregor. "It is strange," she thought. "They are so
unlike and yet the two men are both beautiful."

"I married your mother when I was a child as you are a child now,"
David went on. "To be sure I had a passion for her and she had one for
me. It passed but it was beautiful enough while it lasted. It did not
have depth or meaning. I want to tell you why. Then I am going to make
you understand McGregor so that you may take your measure of the man.
I am coming to that. I have to begin at the beginning.

"My factory began to grow and as an employer of labour I became
concerned in the lives of a good many men."

His voice again became sharp. "I have been impatient with you," he
said. "Do you think this McGregor is the only man who has seen and
thought of other men in the mass? I have done that and have been
tempted. I also might have become sentimental and destroyed myself. I
did not. Loving a woman saved me. Laura did that for me although when
it came to the real test of our love, understanding, she failed. I am
nevertheless grateful to her that she was once the object of my love.
I believe in the beauty of that."

Again David paused and began to tell his story in a new way. The
figure of McGregor came back into Margaret's mind and her father began
to feel that to take it entirely away would be an accomplishment full
of significance. "If I can take her from him, I and my kind can take
the world from him also," he thought. "It will be another victory for
the aristocracy in the never-ending battle with the mob."

"I came to a turning point," he said aloud. "All men come to that
point. To be sure the great mass of people drift quite stupidly but we
are not now talking of people in general. There is you and me and
there is the thing McGregor might be. We are each in our way something
special. We come, people like us, to a place where there are two roads
to take. I took one and McGregor has taken another. I know why and
perhaps he knows why. I concede to him knowledge of what he has done.
But now it is time for you to decide which road you will take. You
have seen the crowds moving along the broad way he has chosen and now
you will set out on your own way. I want you to look down my road with
me."

They came to a bridge over a canal and David stopped the horses. A
body of McGregor's marchers passed and Margaret's pulse began to beat
high again. When she looked at her father however he was unmoved and
she was a little ashamed of her emotions. For a moment David waited,
as though for inspiration, and when the horses started on again he
began to talk. "A labour leader came to my factory, a miniature
McGregor with a crooked twist to him. He was a rascal but the things
he said to my men were all true enough. I was making money for my
investors, a lot of it. They might have won in a fight with me. One
evening I went out into the country to walk alone under the trees and
think it over."

David's voice became harsh and Margaret thought it had become
strangely like the voice of McGregor talking to workingmen. "I bought
the man off," David said. "I used the cruel weapon men like me have to
use. I gave him money and told him to get out, to let me alone. I did
it because I had to win. My kind of men always have to win. During the
walk I took alone I got hold of my dream, my belief. I have the same
dream now. It means more to me than the welfare of a million men. For
it I would crush whatever opposed me. I am going to tell you of the
dream.

"It is too bad one has to talk. Talk kills dreams and talk will also
kill all such men as McGregor. Now that he has begun to talk we will
get the best of him. I do not worry about McGregor. Time and talk will
bring about his destruction."

David's mind ran off in a new direction. "I do not think a man's life
is of much importance," he said. "No man is big enough to grasp all of
life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he
cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One
has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of many lives and many
impulses.

"The man must strike at beauty. That is the realisation maturity
brings and that is where the woman conies in. That is what McGregor
was not wise enough to understand. He is a child you see in a land of
excitable children."

The quality of David's voice changed. Putting his arm about his
daughter he drew her face down beside his own. Night descended upon
them. The woman who was tired from much thinking began to feel
grateful for the touch of the strong hand on her shoulder. David had
accomplished his purpose. He had for the moment made his daughter
forget that she was his daughter. There was something hypnotic in the
quiet strength of his mood.

"I come now to women, to your part," he said. "We will talk of the
thing I want to make you understand. Laura failed as the woman. She
never saw the point. As I grew she did not grow with me. Because I did
not talk of love she did not understand me as a lover, did not know
what I wanted, what I demanded of her.

"I wanted to fit my love down upon her figure as one puts a glove on
his hand. You see I was the adventurer, the man mussed and moiled by
life and its problems. The struggle to exist, to get money, could not
be avoided. I had to make that struggle. She did not. Why could she
not understand that I did not want to come into her presence to rest
or to say empty words. I wanted her to help me create beauty. We
should have been partners in that. Together we should have undertaken
the most delicate and difficult of all struggles, the struggle for
living beauty in our everyday affairs."

Bitterness swept over the old ploughmaker and he used strong words.
"The whole point is in what I am now saying. That was my cry to the
woman. It came out of my soul. It was the only cry to another I have
ever made. Laura was a little fool. Her mind flitted away to little
things. I do not know what she wanted me to be and now I do not care.
Perhaps she wanted me to be a poet, a stringer together of words, one
to write shrill little songs about her eyes and lips. It does not
matter now what she wanted.

"But you matter."

David's voice cut through the fog of new thoughts that were confusing
his daughter's mind and she could feel his body stiffen. A thrill ran
through her own body and she forgot McGregor. With all the strength of
her spirit she was absorbed in what David was saying. In the challenge
that was coming from the lips of her father she began to feel there
would be born in her own life a definite purpose.

"Women want to push out into life, to share with men the disorder and
mussiness of little things. What a desire! Let them try it if they
wish. They will sicken of the attempt. They lose sight of something
bigger they might undertake. They have forgotten the old things, Ruth
in the corn and Mary with the jar of precious ointment, they have
forgotten the beauty they were meant to help men create.

"Let them share only in man's attempt to create beauty. That is the
big, the delicate task to which they should consecrate themselves. Why
attempt instead the cheaper, the secondary task? They are like this
McGregor."

The ploughmaker became silent. Taking up the whip he drove the horses
rapidly along. He thought that his point was made and was satisfied to
let the imagination of his daughter do the rest. They turned off the
boulevard and passed through a street of small stores. Before a saloon
a troop of street urchins led by a drunken man without a hat gave a
grotesque imitation of McGregor's Marchers before a crowd of laughing
idlers. With a sinking heart Margaret realised that even at the height
of his power the forces that would eventually destroy the impulses
back of McGregor's Marchers were at work. She crept closer to David.
"I love you," she said. "Some day I may have a lover but always I
shall love you. I shall try to be what you want of me."

It was past two o'clock that night when David arose from the chair
where he had been for several hours quietly reading. With a smile on
his face he went to a window facing north toward the city. All through
the evening groups of men had been passing the house. Some had gone
scuffling along, a mere disorderly mob, some had gone shoulder to
shoulder chanting the marching song of the workers and a few, under
the influence of drink, had stopped before the house to roar out
threats. Now all was quiet. David lighted a cigar and stood for a long
time looking out over the city. He was thinking of McGregor and
wondering what excited dream of power the day had brought into the
man's head. Then he thought of his daughter and of her escape. A soft
light came into his eyes. He was happy but when he had partially
undressed a new mood came and he turned out the lights in the room and
went again to the window. In the room above Margaret had been unable
to sleep and had also crept to the window. She was thinking again of
McGregor and was ashamed of her thoughts. By chance both father and
daughter began at the same moment to doubt the truth of what David had
said during the drive along the boulevard. Margaret could not express
her doubts in words but tears came into her eyes.

As for David, he put his hand on the sill of the window and for just a
moment his body trembled as with age and weariness. "I wonder," he
muttered--"if I had youth--perhaps McGregor knew he would fail and yet
had the courage of failure, I wonder if both Margaret and myself lack
the greater courage, if that evening long ago when I walked under the
trees I made a mistake? What if after all this McGregor and his woman
knew both roads. What if they, after looking deliberately along the
road toward success in life, went without regret along the road to
failure? What if McGregor and not myself knew the road to beauty?"

END





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