McGregor leaned out of the window and watched a group
of miners who gathered at a corner. He thought
of the undertaker’s daughter, now nearing death,
and wondered why she had suddenly come so close to
him. “It is not because she is a woman,
I know that,” he told himself and tried to dismiss
the matter from his mind by watching the people in
the street below.
In the mining town a meeting was being held.
A box lay at the edge of the sidewalk and upon it
climbed that same young Hartnet who had once talked
to McGregor and who made his living by gathering birds’
eggs and trapping squirrels in the hills. He
was frightened and talked rapidly. Presently
he introduced a large man with a flat nose who, when
he had in turn climbed upon the box, began to tell
stories and anecdotes designed to make the miners
laugh.
McGregor listened. He wished the undertaker’s
daughter were there to sit in the darkened room beside
him. He thought he would like to tell her of
his life in the city and of how disorganised and ineffective
all modern life seemed to him. Sadness invaded
his mind and he thought of his dead mother and of
how this other woman would presently die. “It’s
just as well. Perhaps there is no other way, no
orderly march toward an orderly end. Perhaps
one has to die and return to nature to achieve that,”
he whispered to himself.
In the street below the man upon the box, who was
a travelling socialist orator, began to talk of the
coming social revolution. As he talked it seemed
to McGregor that his jaw had become loose from much
wagging and that his whole body was loosely put together
and without force. The speaker danced up and
down on the box and his arms flapped about and these
also seemed loose, not a part of the body.
“Vote with us and the thing is done,”
he shouted. “Are you going to let a few
men run things forever? Here you live like beasts
paying tribute to your masters. Arouse yourselves.
Join us in the struggle. You yourselves can be
masters if you will only think so.”
“You will have to do something more than think,”
roared McGregor, as he leaned far out at the window.
Again as always when he had heard men saying words
he was blind with anger. Sharply he remembered
the walks he had sometimes taken at night in the city
streets and the air of disorderly ineffectiveness
all about him. And here in the mining town it
was the same. On every side of him appeared blank
empty faces and loose badly knit bodies.
“Mankind should be like a great fist ready to
smash and to strike. It should be ready to knock
down what stands in its way,” he cried, astonishing
the crowd in the street and frightening into something
like hysterics the two women who sat with him beside
the dead woman in the darkened room.
