The woman put up her hands and plead with him.
The grip of his hands in her hair brought the tears
to her eyes. She thrust the roll of bills into
his hands and waited, trembling, thinking he intended
to kill her.
A new feeling swept over McGregor. The thought
of having come into the house at the invitation of
this woman was revolting to him. He wondered
how he could have been such a beast. As he stood
in the dim light thinking of this and looking at the
woman he became lost in thought and wondered why the
idea given him by the barber, that had seemed so clear
and sensible, now seemed so foolish. His eyes
stared at the woman as his mind returned to the black-bearded
barber talking on the park bench and he was seized
with a blind fury, a fury not directed at the people
in the foul little room but at himself and his own
blindness. Again a great hatred of the disorder
of life took hold of him and as though all of the
disorderly people of the world were personified in
her he swore and shook the woman as a dog might have
shaken a foul rag.
“Sneak. Dodger. Mussy fool,”
he muttered, thinking of himself as a giant attacked
by some nauseous beast. The woman screamed with
terror. Seeing the look on her assailant’s
face and mistaking the meaning of his words she trembled
and thought again of death. Reaching under the
pillow on the bed she got another roll of bills and
thrust that also into McGregor’s hands.
“Please go,” she plead. “We
were mistaken. We thought you were some one else.”
McGregor strode to the door past the man on the floor
who groaned and rolled about. He walked around
the corner to Madison Street and boarded a car for
the night school. Sitting in the car he counted
the money in the roll thrust into his hand by the
kneeling woman and laughed so that the people in the
car looked at him in amazement. “Turner
has spent eleven dollars among them in two years and
I have got twenty-seven dollars in one night,”
he thought. He jumped off the car and walked
along under the street lights striving to think things
out. “I can’t depend on any one,”
he muttered. “I have to make my own way.
The barber is as confused as the rest of them and he
doesn’t know it. There is a way out of
the confusion and I’m going to find it, but
I’ll have to do it alone. I can’t
take any one’s word for anything.”
CHAPTER V
The matter of McGregor’s attitude toward women
and the call of sex was not of course settled by the
fight in the house in Lake Street. He was a man
who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed
strongly to the mating instinct in women and more
than once his purpose was to be shaken and his mind
disturbed by the forms, the faces and the eyes of
women.
McGregor thought he had settled the matter. He
forgot the black-eyed girl in the hallway and thought
only of advancement in the warehouse and of study
in his room at night. Now and then he took an
evening off and went for a walk through the streets
or in one of the parks.
Copyrights
Marching Men from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
