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.
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.
