Marching Men eBook

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

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.