Marching Men Part 19

"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 embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sion and then something happens. All unconsciously a change creeps over us.

Youth pa.s.ses. We become shrewd, careful, submerged in little things.

Life, art, great pa.s.sions, dreams, all of these pa.s.s. 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 ma.s.s.

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 ma.s.sed 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 G.o.ds and realise that I myself saw something of the birth of such a G.o.d. For he was near to being a G.o.d 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: "h.e.l.l'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 t.i.thes 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?"