________________________________________________
_ It was late in the summer of 1893 when McGregor came to Chicago, an
ill time for boy or man in that city. The big exposition of the year
before had brought multiplied thousands of restless labourers into the
city and its leading citizens, who had clamoured for the exposition
and had loudly talked of the great growth that was to come, did not
know what to do with the growth now that it had come. The depression
that followed on the heels of the great show and the financial panic
that ran over the country in that year had set thousands of hungry men
to wait dumbly on park benches poring over want advertisements in the
daily papers and looking vacantly at the lake or had driven them to
tramp aimlessly through the streets, filled with forebodings.
In time of plenty a great American city like Chicago goes on showing a
more or less cheerful face to the world while in nooks and crannies
down side-streets and alleys poverty and misery sit hunched up in
little ill-smelling rooms breeding vice. In times of depression these
creatures crawl forth and joined by thousands of the unemployed tramp
the streets through the long nights or sleep upon benches in the
parks. In the alleyways off Madison Street on the West Side and off
State Street, on the South Side, eager women driven by want sold their
bodies to passersby for twenty-five cents. An advertisement in the
newspapers of one unfilled job brought a thousand men to block the
streets at daylight before a factory door. In the crowds men swore and
knocked each other about. Working-men driven to desperation went forth
into quiet streets and knocking over citizens took their money and
watches and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth
Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by
thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the
University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked
into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a
position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to
pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the
brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street
threw a stone through the window of a store. A policeman hustled him
through the crowd. "You'll get a workhouse sentence for this," he
said.
"You fool that's what I want. I want to make property that won't
employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the
cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a
Lincoln suffering for mankind.
Into this maelstrom of misery and grim desperate want walked Beaut
McGregor of Coal Creek--huge, graceless of body, indolent of mind,
untrained, uneducated, hating the world. Within two days he had
snatched before the very eyes of that hungry marching army three
prizes, three places where a man might by working all day get clothes
to wear upon his back and food to put into his stomach.
In a way McGregor had already sensed something the realisation of
which will go far toward making any man a strong figure in the world.
He was not to be bullied with words. Orators might have preached to
him all day about the progress of mankind in America, flags might have
been flapped and newspapers might have dinned the wonders of his
country into his brain. He would only have shaken his big head. He did
not yet know the whole story of how men, coming out of Europe and
given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and
forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have
produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder
of man. McGregor did not know the fullness of the tragic story of his
race. He only knew that the men he had seen were for the most part
pigmies. On the train coming to Chicago a change had come over him.
The hatred of Coal Creek that burned in him had set fire to something
else. He sat looking out of the car window at the stations running
past during the night and the following day at the cornfields of
Indiana, making his plans. In Chicago he meant to do something. Coming
from a community where no man arose above a condition of silent brute
labour he meant to step up into the light of power. Filled with hatred
and contempt of mankind he meant that mankind should serve him. Raised
among men who were but men he meant to be a master.
And his equipment was better than he knew. In a disorderly haphazard
world hatred is as effective an impulse to drive men forward to
success as love and high hope. It is a world-old impulse sleeping in
the heart of man since the day of Cain. In a way it rings true and
strong above the hideous jangle of modern life. Inspiring fear it
usurps power.
McGregor was without fear. He had not yet met his master and looked
with contempt upon the men and women he had known. Without knowing it
he had, besides a huge body hard as adamant, a clear and lucid brain.
The fact that he hated Coal Creek and thought it horrible proved his
keenness. It was horrible. Well might Chicago have trembled and rich
men strolling in the evening along Michigan Boulevard have looked
fearfully about as this huge red fellow, carrying the cheap handbag
and staring with his blue eyes at the restless moving mobs of people,
walked for the first time through its streets. In his very frame there
was the possibility of something, a blow, a shock, a thrust out of the
lean soul of strength into the jelly-like fleshiness of weakness.
In the world of men nothing is so rare as a knowledge of men. Christ
himself found the merchants hawking their wares even on the floor of
the temple and in his naive youth was stirred to wrath and drove them
through the door like flies. And history has represented him in turn
as a man of peace so that after these centuries the temples are again
supported by the hawking of wares and his fine boyish wrath is
forgotten. In France after the great revolution and the babbling of
many voices talking of the brotherhood of man it wanted but a short
and very determined man with an instinctive knowledge of drums, of
cannons and of stirring words to send the same babblers screaming
across open spaces, stumbling through ditches and pitching headlong
into the arms of death. In the interest of one who believed not at all
in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word
brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to
achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies
and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe
and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and
for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By
grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have
made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the
thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of
his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his
soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of
brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat
and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder
against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned,
instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the
forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles
or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for
accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land,
by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.
In Chicago in 1893 and in the men who went aimlessly seeking work in
the streets of Chicago in that year there were none of these signs.
Like the coal mining town from which Beaut McGregor had come, the city
lay sprawling and ineffective before him, a tawdry disorderly dwelling
for millions of men, built not for the making of men but for the
making of millions by a few odd meat-packers and drygoods merchants.
With a slight lifting of his great shoulders McGregor sensed these
things although he could not have expressed his sense of them and the
hatred and contempt of men, born of his youth in the mining town, was
rekindled by the sight of city men wandering afraid and bewildered
through the streets of their own city.
Knowing nothing of the customs of the unemployed McGregor did not walk
the streets looking for signs marked "Men Wanted." He did not sit on
park benches studying want advertisements, the want advertisements
that so often proved but bait put out by suave men up dirty stairways
to glean the last few pennies from pockets of the needy. Going along
the street he swung his great body through the doorways leading to the
offices of factories. When some pert young man tried to stop him he
did not say words but drew back his fist threateningly and, glowering,
walked in. The young men at the doors of factories looked at his blue
eyes and let him pass unchallenged.
In the afternoon of his first day of seeking Beaut got a place in an
apple warehouse on the North Side, the third place offered him during
the day and the one that he accepted. The chance came to him through
an exhibition of strength. Two men, old and bent, struggled to get a
barrel of apples from the sidewalk up to a platform that ran waist
high along the front of the warehouse. The barrel had rolled to the
sidewalk from a truck standing in the gutter. The driver of the truck
stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A German with blond hair
stood upon the platform swearing in broken English. McGregor stood
upon the sidewalk and looked at the two men who were struggling with
the barrel. A feeling of immense contempt for their feebleness shone
in his eyes. Pushing them aside he grasped the barrel and with a great
heave sent it up onto the platform and spinning through an open
doorway into the receiving room of the warehouse. The two workmen
stood on the sidewalk smiling sheepishly. Across the street a group of
city firemen who lounged in the sun before an engine house clapped
their hands. The truck driver turned and prepared to send another
barrel along the plank extending from the truck across the sidewalk to
the warehouse platform. At a window in the upper part of the warehouse
a grey head protruded and a sharp voice called down to the tall
German. "Hey Frank, hire that 'husky' and let about six of the dead
ones you've got around here go home."
McGregor jumped upon the platform and walked in at the warehouse door.
The German followed, inventorying the size of the red-haired giant
with something like disapproval. His look seemed to say, "I like
strong fellows but you're too strong." He took the discomfiture of the
two feeble workmen on the sidewalk as in some way reflecting upon
himself. The two men stood in the receiving room and looked at each
other. A bystander might have thought them preparing to fight.
And then a freight elevator came slowly down from the upper part of
the warehouse and from it jumped a small grey-haired man with a yard
stick in his hand. He had a sharp restless eye and a short stubby grey
beard. Striking the floor with a bound he began to talk. "We pay two
dollars for nine hours' work here--begin at seven, quit at five. Will
you come?" Without waiting for an answer he turned to the German.
"Tell those two old 'rummies' to get their time and get out of here,"
he said, turning again and looking expectantly at McGregor.
McGregor liked the quick little man and grinned with approval of his
decisiveness. He nodded his assent to the proposal and, looking at the
German, laughed. The little man disappeared through a door leading to
an office and McGregor walked out into the street. At a corner he
turned and saw the German standing on the platform before the
warehouse looking after him. "He is wondering whether or not he can
whip me," thought McGregor.
* * * * *
In the apple warehouse McGregor worked for three years, rising during
his second year to be foreman and replacing the tall German. The
German expected trouble with McGregor and was determined to make short
work of him. He had been offended by the action of the gray-haired
superintendent in hiring the man and felt that a prerogative belonging
to himself had been ignored. All day he followed McGregor with his
eyes, trying to calculate the strength and courage in the huge body.
He knew that hundreds of hungry men walked the streets and in the end
decided that the need of work if not the spirit of the man would make
him submissive. During the second week he put the question that burned
in his brain to the test. He followed McGregor into a dimly-lighted
upper room where barrels of apples, piled to the ceiling, left only
narrow ways for passage. Standing in the semi-darkness he shouted,
calling the man who worked among the apple barrels a foul name, "I
won't have you loafing in there, you red-haired bastard," he shouted.
McGregor said nothing. He was not offended by the vileness of the name
the German had called him and took it merely as a challenge that he
had been expecting and that he meant to accept. With a grim smile on
his lips he walked toward the German and when but one apple barrel lay
between them reached across and dragged the foreman sputtering and
swearing down the passageway to a window at the end of the room. By
the window he stopped and putting his hand to the throat of the
struggling man began to choke him into submission. Blows fell on his
face and body. Struggling terribly the German kicked McGregor's legs
with desperate energy. Although his ears rang with the hammer-like
blows that fell about his neck and cheeks McGregor stool silent under
the storm. His blue eyes gleamed with hatred and the muscles of his
great arms danced in the light from the window. As he looked into the
protruding eyes of the writhing German he thought of fat Reverend
Minot Weeks of Coal Creek and added an extra twitch to the flesh
between his fingers. When a gesture of submission came from the man
against the wall he stepped back and let go his grip. The German
dropped to the floor. Standing over him McGregor delivered his
ultimatum. "You report this or try to get me fired and I'll kill you
outright," he said. "I'm going to stay here on this job until I get
ready to leave it. You can tell me what to do and how to do it but
when you speak to me again say 'McGregor'--Mr. McGregor, that's my
name."
The German got to his feet and began walking down the passageway
between the rows of piled barrels. As he went he helped himself along
with his hands. McGregor went back to work. After the retreating form
of the German he shouted, "Get a new place when you can Dutch, I'll be
taking this job away from you when I'm ready for it."
That evening as McGregor walked to the car he saw the little grey-
haired superintendent standing waiting for him before a saloon. The
man made a sign and McGregor walked across and stood beside him. They
went together into the saloon and stood leaning against the bar and
looked at each other. A smile played about the lips of the little man.
"What have you been doing to Frank?" he asked.
McGregor turned to the bartender who stood waiting before him. He
thought that the superintendent intended to try to patronise him by
buying him a drink and he did not like the thought. "What will you
have? I'll take a cigar for mine," he said quickly, defeating the
superintendent's plan by being the first to speak. When the bartender
brought the cigars McGregor paid for them and walked out at the door.
He felt like one playing a game. "If Frank meant to bully me into
submission this man also means something."
On the sidewalk before the saloon McGregor stopped. "Look here," he
said, turning and facing the superintendent, "I'm after Frank's place.
I'm going to learn the business as fast as I can. I won't put it up to
you to fire him. When I get ready for the place he won't be there."
A light flashed into the eyes of the little man. He held the cigar
McGregor had paid for as though about to throw it into the street.
"How far do you think you can go with your big fists?" he asked, his
voice rising.
McGregor smiled. He thought he had earned another victory and lighting
his cigar held the burning match before the little man. "Brains are
intended to help fists," he said, "I've got both."
The superintendent looked at the burning match and at the cigar
between his fingers. "If I don't which will you use on me?" he asked.
McGregor threw the match into the street. "Aw! don't bother asking,"
he said, holding out another match.
McGregor and the superintendent walked along the street. "I would like
to fire you but I won't. Some day you'll run that warehouse like a
clock," said the superintendent.
McGregor sat in the street-car and thought of his day. It had been he
felt a day of two battles. First the direct brutal battle of fists in
the passageway and then this other battle with the superintendent. He
thought he had won both fights. Of the fight with the tall German he
thought little. He had expected to win that. The other was different.
The superintendent he felt had wanted to patronise him, patting him on
the back and buying him drinks. Instead he had patronised the
superintendent. A battle had gone on in the brains of the two men and
he had won. He had met a new kind of man, one who did not live by the
raw strength of his muscles and he had given a good account of
himself. The conviction that he had, besides a good pair of fists, a
good brain swept in on him glorifying him. He thought of the sentence,
"Brains are intended to help fists," and wondered how he had happened
to think of it. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER II
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER IV
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