Marching Men by Sherwood Anderson - HTML preview

CHAPTER IV.3

When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his place among the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loop district he half drew back from beginning the practice of his profession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with other lawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by his ability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.

Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of the matter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by the meaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he was tempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes of adventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back and forth along the American railroads.

He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got its patronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelve trade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restless thrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became so absorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through the door without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up and down nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose like cattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gowns worn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and with painted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms that housed cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.

In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South State Street was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated and made horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the wagging jaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a building opposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "Socialist Headquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfect expression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men did not move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung the socialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.

McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost in meditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in the street by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyes and the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched. Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The fine love of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised by some great passion into order and meaning was lost.

In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters and bartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began to drop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a woman came in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a night have you had?" they asked each other.

The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As they talked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money from customers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitched them into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear with marvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the counter eating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.

A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchen and putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He tried to win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voice he called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At some time in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and he talked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to make himself a hero in the eyes of his audience.

McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried to forget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of the great figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have been leaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remark intended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When a disturbance started in the room he growled out a command and the disturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men, half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper to him. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at the tables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she came to him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."

The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor, each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped like suburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things he had said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When he looked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timid children.

One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow red cheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising of white leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiter in a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country and she was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets in the evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chicken raiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a piece of white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blue flowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy looking skin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.

"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted as he looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four women working for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now I have only one and she crying and sick half the time."

McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vice spot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. The best legislative brains in the world have made no progress against this evil," it said.

He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fist lying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to the waiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened and closed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelf below the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and resting his head upon his hands.

McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store in Van Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and at night he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he went to the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial and through the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case that netted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent in Chicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wanted to do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He saw the march and countermarch of events in the lives of the people tramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind the miners of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills to disappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through the swinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wondering which of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole's and waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea of humanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might have seemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on the sea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through the streets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded in sucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which they struggled and into which year after year the best of America's youth was drawn.

The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above the mining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actual physical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into power and of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving the great song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than a dream. In the dusty little office he sat and tears came into his eyes. At such times he was convinced that mankind would go on forever along the old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood, become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life a meaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and the planets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered, and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt and disorder of the street below.

CHAPTER IV.4

In the office McGregor occupied in Van Buren Street there was another desk besides his own. The desk was owned by a small man with an extraordinary long moustache and with grease spots on the lapel of his coat. In the morning he came in and sat in his chair with his feet on his desk. He smoked long black stogies and read the morning papers. On the glass panel of the door was the inscription, "Henry Hunt, Real Estate Broker." When he had finished with the morning papers he disappeared, returning tired and dejected late in the afternoon.

The real estate business of Henry Hunt was a myth. Although he bought and sold no property he insisted on the title and had in his desk a pile of letterheads setting forth the kind of property in which he specialised. He had a picture of his daughter, a graduate of the Hyde Park High School, in a glass frame on the wall. When he went out at the door in the morning he paused to look at McGregor and said, "If any one comes in about property tend to them for me. I'll be gone for a while."

Henry Hunt was a collector of tithes for the political bosses of the first ward. All day he went from place to place through the ward interviewing women, checking their names off a little red book he carried in his pocket, promising, demanding, making veiled threats. In the evening he sat in his flat overlooking Jackson Park and listened to his daughter play on the piano. With all his heart he hated his place in life and as he rode back and forth to town on the Illinois Central trains he stared at the lake and dreamed of owning a farm and living a free life in the country. In his mind he could see the merchants standing gossiping on the sidewalk before the stores in an Ohio village where he had lived as a boy and in fancy saw himself again a boy, driving cows through the village street in the evening and making a delightful little slap slap with his bare feet in the deep dust.

It was Henry Hunt in his secret office as collector and lieutenant to the "boss" of the first ward who shifted the scenes for McGregor's appearance as a public character in Chicago.

One night a young man--son of one of the city's plunging millionaire wheat speculators--was found dead in a little blind alley back of a resort known as Polk Street Mary's place. He lay crumpled up against a board fence quite dead and with a bruise on the side of his head. A policeman found him and dragged him to the street light at the corner of the alley.

For twenty minutes the policeman had been standing under the light swinging his stick. He had heard nothing. A young man came up, touched him on the arm and whispered to him. When he turned to go down the alley the young man ran away up the street.

* * * * *

The powers that rule the first ward in Chicago were furious when the identity of the dead man became known. The "boss," a mild-looking blue-eyed little man in a neat grey suit and with a silky moustache, stood in his office opening and closing his fists convulsively. Then he called a young man and sent for Henry Hunt and a well known police official.

For some weeks the newspapers of Chicago had been conducting a campaign against vice. Swarms of reporters had over-run the ward. Daily they issued word pictures of life in the underworld. On the front pages of the papers with senators and governors and millionaires who had divorced their wives, appeared also the names of Ugly Brown Chophouse Sam and Carolina Kate with descriptions of their places, their hours of closing and the class and quantity of their patronage. A drunken man rolled on the floor at the back of a Twenty-second Street saloon and robbed of his pocketbook had his picture on the front page of the morning papers.

Henry Hunt sat in his office on Van Buren Street trembling with fright. He expected to see his name in the paper and his occupation disclosed.

The powers that ruled the First--quiet shrewd men who knew how to make and to take profits, the very flower of commercialism--were frightened. They saw in the prominence of the dead man a real opportunity for their momentary enemies the press. For weeks they had been sitting quietly, weathering the storm of public disapproval. In their minds they thought of the ward as a kingdom in itself, something foreign and apart from the city. Among their followers were men who had not been across the Van Buren Street line into foreign territory for years.

Suddenly through the minds of these men floated a menace. Like the small softspeaking boss the ward gripped its fist conclusively. Through the streets and alleys ran a cry, a warning. Like birds of prey disturbed in their nesting places they fluttered, uttering cries. Throwing his stogie into the gutter Henry Hunt ran through the ward. From house to house he uttered his cry--"Lay low! Pull off nothing."

The little boss in his office at the front of his saloon looked from Henry Hunt to the police official. "It is no time for hesitation," he said. "It will prove a boon if we act quickly. We have got to arrest and try that murderer and do it now. Who is our man? Quick. Let's have action."

Henry Hunt lighted a fresh stogie. He played nervously with the ends of his fingers and wished he were out of the ward and safely out of range of the prying eyes of the press. In fancy he could hear his daughter screaming with horror at the sight of his name spread in glaring letters before the world and thought of her with a flush of abhorrence on her young face turning from him forever. In his terror his mind darted here and there. A name sprang to his lips. "It might have been Andy Brown," he said, puffing at the stogie.

The little boss whirled his chair about. He began picking up the papers scattered about his desk. When he spoke his voice was again soft and mild. "It was Andy Brown," he said. "Whisper the word about. Let a _Tribune_ man locate Brown for you. Handle this right and you will save your own scalp and get the fool papers off the back of the First."

* * * * *

The arrest of Brown brought respite to the ward. The prediction of the shrewd little boss made good. The newspapers dropped the clamorous cry for reform and began demanding instead the life of Andrew Brown. Newspaper artists rushed into police headquarters and made hurried sketches to appear an hour later blazoned across the face of extras on the streets. Grave scientific men got their pictures printed at the heads of articles on "Criminal Characteristics of the Head and Face."

An adept and imaginative writer for an afternoon paper spoke of Brown as a Jekyll and Hyde of the Tenderloin and hinted at other murders by the same hand. From the comparatively quiet life of a not markedly industrious yeggman Brown came out of the upper floor of a State Street lodging house to stand stoically before the world of men--a storm centre about which swirled and eddied the wrath of an aroused city.

The thought that had flashed into the mind of Henry Hunt as he sat in the office of the soft-voiced boss was the making of an opportunity for McGregor. For months he and Andrew Brown had been friends. The yeggman, a strongly built slow talking man, looked like a skilled mechanic of a locomotive engineer. Coming into O'Toole's in the quiet hours between eight and twelve he sat eating his evening meal and talking in a half bantering humorous vein to the young lawyer. In his eyes lurked a kind of hard cruelty tempered by indolence. It was he who gave McGregor the name that still clings to him in that strange savage land-"Judge Mac, the Big 'un."

When he was arrested Brown sent for McGregor and offered to give him charge of his case. When the young lawyer refused he was insistent. In a cell at the county jail they talked it over. By the door stood a guard watching them. McGregor peered into the half darkness and said what he thought should be said. "You are in a hole," he began. "You don't want me, you want a big name. They're all set to hang you over there." He waved his hand in the direction of the First. "They're going to hand you over as an answer to a stirred up city. It's a job for the biggest and best criminal lawyer in town. Name the man and I'll get him for you and help raise the money to pay him."

Andrew Brown got up and walked to McGregor. Looking down at him he spoke quickly and determinedly. "You do what I say," he growled. "You take this case. I didn't do the job. I was asleep in my room when it was pulled off. Now you take the case. You won't clear me. It ain't in the cards. But you get the job just the same."

He sat down again upon the iron cot at the corner of the cell. His voice became slow and had in it a touch of cynical humour. "Look here, Big 'un," he said, "the gang's picked my number out of the hat. I'm going across but there's good advertising in the job for some one and you get it."

CHAPTER IV.5

The trial of Andrew Brown was both an opportunity and a test for McGregor. For a number of years he had lived a lonely life in Chicago. He had made no friends and his mind had not been confused by the endless babble of small talk on which most of us subsist. Evening after evening he had walked alone through the streets and had stood at the door of the State Street restaurant a solitary figure aloof from life. Now he was to be drawn into the maelstrom. In the past he had been let alone by life. The great blessing of isolation had been his and in his isolation he had dreamed a big dream. Now the quality of the dream and the strength of its hold upon him was to be tested.

McGregor was not to escape the influence of the life of his day. Deep human passion lay asleep in his big body. Before the time of his Marching Men he had yet to stand the most confusing of all the modern tests of men, the beauty of meaningless women and the noisy clamour of success that is equally meaningless.

On the day of his conversation with Andrew Brown in the old Cook County jail on Chicago's North Side we are therefore to think of McGregor as facing these tests. After the talk with Brown he walked along the street and came to the bridge that led over the river into the loop district. In his heart he knew that he was facing a fight and the thought thrilled him. With a new lift to his shoulders he walked over the bridge. He looked at the people and again let his heart be filled with contempt for them.

He wished that the fight for Brown were a fight with fists. Boarding a west side car he sat looking out through the car window at the passing crowd and imagined himself among them, striking right and left, gripping throats, demanding the truth that would save Brown and set himself up before the eyes of men.

When McGregor got to the Monroe Street millinery store it was evening and Edith was preparing to go out to the evening meal. He stood looking at her. In his voice rang a note of triumph. Out of his contempt for the men and women of the underworld came boastfulness. "They have given me a job they think I can't do," he said. "I'm to be Brown's counsel in the big murder case." He put his hands on her frail shoulders and pulled her to the light. "I'm going to knock them over and show them," he boasted. "They think they're going to hang Brown-- the oily snakes. Well they didn't count on me. Brown doesn't count on me. I'm going to show them." He laughed noisily in the empty shop.

At a little restaurant McGregor and Edith talked of the test he was to go through. As he talked she sat in silence and looked at his red hair.

 

"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart," she said, thinking of herself.

 

* * * * *

America is the land of murders. Day after day in cities and towns and on lonely country roads violent death creeps upon men. Undisciplined and disorderly in their way of life the citizens can do nothing. After each murder they cry out for new laws which, when they are written into the books of laws, the very lawmaker himself breaks. Harried through life by clamouring demands, their days leave them no time for the quietude in which thoughts grow. After days of meaningless hurry in the city they jump upon trains or street cars and hurry through their favourite paper to the ball game, the comic pictures and the market reports.

And then something happens. The moment arrives. A murder that might have got a single column on an inner page of yesterday's paper today spreads its terrible details over everything.

Through the streets hurry the restless scurrying newsboys, stirring the crowds with their cries. The men who have passed impatiently the tales of a city's shame snatch the papers and read eagerly and exhaustively the story of a crime.

And into the midst of such a maelstrom of rumours, hideous impossible stories and well-laid plans to defeat the truth, McGregor hurled himself. Day after day he wandered through the vice district south of Van Buren Street. Prostitutes, pimps, thieves and saloon hangers-on looked at him and smiled knowingly. As the days passed and he made no progress he became desperate. One day an idea came to him. "I'll go to the good looking woman at the settlement house," he told himself. "She won't know who killed the boy but she can find out. I'll make her find out."

* * * * *

In Margaret Ormsby McGregor was to know what was to him a new kind of womanhood, something sure, reliant, hedged about and prepared as a good soldier is prepared, to have the best of it in the struggle for existence. Something he had not known was yet to make its cry to the man.

Margaret Ormsby like McGregor himself had not been defeated by life. She was the daughter of David Ormsby, head of the great plough trust with headquarters in Chicago, a man who because of a certain fine assurance in his attitude toward life had been called "Ormsby the Prince" by his associates. Her mother Laura Ormsby was small nervous and intense.

With a self-conscious abandonment, lacking just a shade of utter security, Margaret Ormsby, beautiful in body and beautifully clad, went here and there among the outcasts of the First Ward. She like all women was waiting for an opportunity of which she did not talk even to herself. She was something for the single-minded and primitive McGregor to approach with caution.

Hurrying along a narrow street lined with cheap saloons McGregor went in at the door of the settlement house and sat in a chair at a desk facing Margaret Ormsby. He knew something of her work in the First Ward and that she was beautiful and self-possessed. He was determined that she should help him. Sitting in the chair and looking at her across the flat-top desk he choked back into her throat the terse sentences with which she was wont to greet visitors.

"It is all very well for you to sit there dressed up and telling me what women in your position can do and can't do," he said, "but I've come here to tell you what you will do if you are of the kind that want to be useful."

The speech of McGregor was a challenge which Margaret, the modern daughter of one of our modern great men, could not well let pass. Had she not brazened out her timidity to go calmly among prostitutes and sordid muttering drunkards, serene in her consciousness of business- like purpose? "What is it you want?" she asked sharply.

"You have just two things that will help me," said McGregor; "your beauty and your virginity. These things are a kind of magnet, drawing the women of the street to you. I know. I've heard them talk.

"There are women who come in here who know who it was killed that boy in the passageway and why it was done," McGregor went on. "You're a fetish with these women. They are children and they come in here to look at you as children peep around curtains at guests sitting in the parlour of their houses.

"Well I want you to call these children into the room and let them tell you family secrets. The whole ward here knows the story of that killing. The air is filled with it. The men and women keep trying to tell me, but they're afraid. The police have them scared and they half-tell me and then run away like frightened animals.

"I want them to tell you. You don't count with the police down here. They think you're too beautiful and too good to touch the real life of these people. None of them--the bosses or the police--are watching you. I'll keep kicking up dust and you get the information I want. You can do the job if you're any good."

After McGregor's speech the woman sat in silence and looked at him. For the first time she had met a man who overwhelmed her and was in no way diverted by her beauty nor her self--possession. A hot wave, half anger, half admiration, swept over her.

McGregor stared at the woman and waited. "I've got to have facts," he said. "Give me the story and the names of those who know the story and I'll make them tell. I have some facts now--got them by bullying a girl and by choking a bartender in an alley. Now I want you in your way to put me in the way of getting more facts. You make the women talk and tell you and then you tell me."

When McGregor had gone Margaret Ormsby got up from her desk in the settlement house and walked across the city toward her father's office. She was startled and frightened. In a moment and by the speech and manner of this brutal young lawyer she had been made to realise that she was but a child in the hands of the forces that played about her in the First Ward. Her self--possession was shaken. "If they are children--these women of the town--then I am a child, a child swimming with them in a sea of hate and ugliness."

A new thought came into her mind. "But he is no child--that McGregor. He is a child of nothing. He stands on a rock unshaken."

She tried to become indignant because of the blunt frankness of the man's speech. "He talked to me as he would have talked to a woman of the streets," she thought. "He was not afraid to assume that at bottom we are alike, just playthings in the hands of the man who dares."

In the street she stopped and looked about. Her body trembled and she realised that the forces about her had become living things ready to pounce upon her. "Anyway, I will do what I can. I will help him. I will have to do that," she whispered to herself.

CHAPTER IV.6

The clearing of Andrew Brown made a sensation in Chicago. At the trial McGregor was able to introduce one of those breath-taking dramatic climaxes that catch the attention of the mob. At the tense dramatic moment of the trial a frightened hush fell upon the court room and that evening in their houses men turned instinctively from the reading of the papers to look at their beloved sitting about them. A chill of fear ran over the bodies of women. For a moment Beaut McGregor had given them a peep under the crust of civilisation that awoke an age- old trembling in their hearts. In his fervour and impatience McGregor had cried out, not against the incidental enemies of Brown but against all modern society and its formlessness. To the listeners it seemed that he shook mankind by the throat and that by the power and purposefulness of his own solitary figure he revealed the pitiful weakness of his fellows.

In the court room McGregor had sat, grim and silent, letting the State build up its case. In his face was a challenge. His eyes looked out from beneath swollen eyelids. For weeks he had been as tireless as a bloodhound running through the First Ward and building his case. Policemen had seen him emerge from alleyways at three in the morning, the soft spoken boss hearing of his activities had eagerly questioned Henry Hunt, a bartender in a dive on Polk Street had felt the grip of a hand at his throat and a trembling girl of the town had knelt before him in a little dark room begging protection from his wrath. In the court room he sat waiting and watching.

When the special counsel for the State, a man of great name in the courts, had finished his insistent persistent cry for the blood of the silent unemotional Brown, McGregor acted. Springing to his feet he shouted hoarsely across the silent court room to a large woman sitting among the witnesses. "They have tricked you Mary," he roared. "The tale about the pardon after the excitement dies is a lie. They're stringing you. They're going to hang Andy Brown. Get up there and tell the naked truth or his blood be on your hands."

A furor arose in the crowded court room. Lawyers sprang to their feet, objecting, protesting. Above the noise arose a hoarse accusing voice. "Keep Polk Street Mary and every woman from her place in here," he shouted. "They know who killed your man. Put them back there on the stand. They'll tell. Look at them. The truth is coming out of them."

The clamour in the room subsided. The silent red-haired attorney, the joke of the case, had scored. Walking in the streets at night the words of Edith Carson had come back into his brain, and with the help of Margaret Ormsby he had been able to follow a clue given by her suggestion.
"Find out if your man Brown has a sweetheart."

In a moment he saw the message the women of the underworld, patrons of O'Toole's, had been trying to convey to him. Polk Street Mary was the sweetheart of Andy Brown. Now in the silent court room the voice of a woman arose broken with sobs. To the listening crowd in the packed little room came the story of the tragedy in the darkened house before which stood the policeman idly swinging his night stick--the story of a girl from an Illinois village procured and sold to the broker's son --of the desperate struggle in the little room between the eager lustful man and the frightened brave-hearted girl--of the blow with the chair in the hands of the girl that brought death to the man--of the women of the house trembling on the stairs and the body hastily pitched into the passageway.

"They told me they would get Andy off when this blew over," wailed the woman.

 

* * * * *

McGregor went out of the court room into the street. The glow of victory was on him