McGregor

“ Day after day she sat in her shop at work, quiet, strong in her own kind of faith, ready to give her money, her reputation, and if need be her life to the working out of her own dream of womanhood. She did not see in McGregor the making of a man of genius as did Margaret and did not hope to express through him a secret desire for power. She was a working woman and to her he represented all men. In her secret heart she thought of him merely as the man—her man.
And to McGregor Edith was companion and friend. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Meantime, McGregor pulled himself together and began to laugh as if from his stomach.
“I guess that means a scrap,” he grunted.
“Not that I know of,” put in Phil. “But I like to see fair play. The youngster wasn’t hurting you.”
For answer McGregor unbuckled his belt and handed it to his friend called Stitchy, spitting noisily on the saw-dusted floor.
The hotel proprietor jumped over the counter and interfered.
“There’s going to be no rough-house here. If you fools want to fight get out on the back lot where there’s plenty of room. Come on,––out you go! The whole caboodle of you!” ”

“ McGregor went out of the house and stood in the half darkness on the veranda. When Mrs. Ormsby and Margaret followed he looked at the older woman and sensed her antagonism. The old love of battle swept in on him and he turned and stood in silence looking at her. “The fine lady,” he thought, “is no better than the women of the First Ward. She has an idea I will surrender without a fight.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The next morning when Beaut McGregor pushed his baker's cart along the street and began climbing the hill toward the miners' cottages, he went, not as Norman McGregor, the town baker boy, only product of the loins of Cracked McGregor of Coal Creek, but as a personage, a being, the object of an art. The name given him by Uncle Charlie Wheeler had made him a marked man. He was as the hero of a popular romance, galvanised into life and striding in the flesh before the people. Men looked at him with new interest, inventorying anew the huge mouth and nose and the flaming hair. ”

“ Though the McGregor seems to have a good farm, his house is little better than a shanty, a rather cheerless place for the “woman” to slave away her uneventful life in, and bring up her scantily clothed and semi-wild flock of children. ”

“ Val knows every one, I believe, and got acquainted with him in Halifax. You never saw any one so proud as Mr. McGregor. I didn't say anything, my dear; but I thought of the time when lords and marquises, and dukes and captains without end, used to be entertained at Castle Blake," said Miss Jo, sighing.
"And what does he look like? Is he handsome?" asked Mrs. Marsh, with interest; for Castle Blake and its melancholy reminiscences were an old story to her.
"Uncommon," said Miss Jo; "and I believe Mrs. McGregor thinks her Jane will get him. You never saw any one so tickled in your life. ”

“ McGregor thought that his mind swept down over the men, that the impulses of his mind like living things ran among them, crying to them, touching them, caressing them. Love invaded his spirit and made his body tingle. He thought of the workers in the Chicago warehouse and of the millions of others workers who in that great city, in all cities, everywhere, went at the end of the day shuffling off along the streets to their houses carrying with them no song, no hope, nothing but a few paltry dollars with which to buy food and keep the endless hurtful scheme of things alive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Half beside himself McGregor ran up and down swinging his arms. Again turning to the reporter who stood by a factory wall—a rather dandified figure he was with a tiny moustache—he shouted:
“Don't you see?” he cried. His voice was harsh. “See how they march! They are finding out what I mean. They have caught the spirit of it!”
McGregor began to explain. He talked hurriedly, his words coming forth in short broken sentences. “For ages there has been talk of brotherhood. Always men have babbled of brotherhood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dropping McGregor's arm Edith ran across the room and stood before Margaret. “How do you know you are more beautiful or can bear more beautiful children?” she demanded. “What do you mean by beauty anyway? I deny your beauty.” She turned to McGregor. “Look,” she cried, “she does not stand the test.”
Pride swept over the woman that had come to life within the body of the little milliner. With calm eyes she stared at the people in the room and when she looked again toward Margaret there was a challenge in her voice.
“Beauty has to endure,” she said swiftly. “It has to be daring. ”

“ McGregor smiled,—a smile it had cost him twenty years of service in the best families to acquire,—a smile which expressed respectful appreciation of the facetiousness intended without any personal share in it. He never allowed himself to be more amused than a butler should be.
Winifred Anstice dropped into the chair which he held for her, and took up, one by one, the letters which lay on the silver tray by her side. ”

“ However it may appear in print, his military career would not bear close scrutiny; for that reason McGregor does not propose to scrutinise it. And as for his indomitable will, he sees nothing to admire in the man's persistence, since, when he stops persisting, he'll become ungummed and, at the best, forgotten.
So said McGregor, and when I besought him to come to the point, he said he'd dealt with it, and if I had any sympathy left for HINDENBURG or his line I was no better than a slave-driving, sit-at-home-and-push-others-over-the-parapet Prussian militarist myself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ McGregor felt that he had to prepare himself. He believed that he could study books and learn much from men's ideas expressed in books without being overwhelmed by their thoughts. He became a student and quit the place in the apple-warehouse to the secret relief of the little bright-eyed superintendent who had never been able to get himself up to the point of raging at this big red fellow as he had raged at the German before McGregor's time. The warehouse man felt that during the meeting on the corner before the saloon on the day McGregor began to work for him something had happened. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Unlike the men the beautifully gowned women at the reception had no fear of McGregor. They saw in him something to be tamed and conquered and they gathered in groups to engage him in talk and return the inquiring stare in his eyes. They thought that with such an unconquered soul about, life might take on new fervour and interest. Like the women who sat playing with toothpicks in O'Toole's restaurant, more than one of the women at Mrs. Ormsby's reception had a half unconscious wish that such a man might be her lover. ”

“ In the dim light McGregor raised his fists above his head and talked aloud. “It's creeping in among them,” he said. “The thing that can't be put into words is getting itself expressed. Something is being done here in this field. A new force is coming into the world.” ”

“ When you get an insight into a man it brings a certain revulsion—that is, such a man as McGregor. I no longer wondered about him.
At the foot of the ladder I ran into Howell, mounting with his instruments for the noon sight. He halted and gave me a look.
“Nothing doing. False alarm. What's happened to you?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “McGregor doesn't need any more explaining, that's all.”
“Oh!” He laughed silently, amusedly. “All right, m'lad, keep your eye peeled!”
That wound up everything. Wang Shui was not aboard and we had gone off on a false scent; nothing more to be done about it. ”

“ McGregor, as you may guess, is a Scot, whose national sense of economy seems to have spread to his uniform, in that the cap he wears covers but a third-part of his head, and his tunic (which I ought really not to call a tunic but a service jacket) appears to have exhausted itself and its material at the fourth button. ”

“ Of these, Lieutenant Archer and ten men were told to stay as the last band to cover the retreat, and the enemy made a determined attempt to annihilate them. McGregor was with Henry and his ten. All the pluck that ever animated hero inspired those twelve men. Each felt the honour of being chosen for such a post. No time for words; no time for more thoughts than one, namely, "England expects every man to do his duty."
But of course Malcolm McGregor had a thought underlying the thought of duty to Queen and country; he remembered his promise to the widowed mother: he must "have an eye to Henry!" ”

“ Although he had not been out of the valley and had grown strong and big there, Beaut McGregor knew something of the outside world. It isn't a time when men are shut off from their fellows. Newspapers and magazines have done their work too well. They reached even into the miner's cabin and the merchants along Main Street of Coal Creek stood before their stores in the afternoon and talked of the doings of the world. Beaut McGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that not everywhere did men toil all day black and grimy underground, that not all women were pale bloodless and bent. ”

“ Into his brain began to creep a dream of a vast order coming out of disorder. He was like one standing in the presence of some gigantic machine with many intricate parts that had begun to run crazily, each part without regard to the purpose of the whole. “There is danger in thinking too,” he muttered vaguely. “Everywhere there is danger, in labour, in love and in thinking. What shall I do with myself?”
McGregor turned about and threw up his hands. ”

“ When McGregor started to speak he put his hand up as though to ward off a new thought or another question. “I'm not trying to dodge,” he said. “I'm trying to get thoughts that have been in my head day after day in shape to tell. I haven't tried to express them before. I know men and women cling to their children. It's the only thing they have left of the dream they had before they married. I felt that way. It held me for a long time. It would be holding me now only that the violins pulled so hard at me.” ”