Book IV: Chapter III

by Sherwood Anderson

　　When McGregor was admitted to the bar and ready to take his placeamong the thousands of young lawyers scattered over the Chicago loopdistrict he half drew back from beginning the practice of hisprofession. To spend his life quibbling over trifles with otherlawyers was not what he wanted. To have his place in life fixed by hisability in quibbling seemed to him hideous.

　　Night after night he walked alone in the streets thinking of thematter. He grew angry and swore. Sometimes he was so stirred by themeaninglessness of whatever way of life offered itself that he wastempted to leave the city and become a tramp, one of the hordes ofadventurous dissatisfied souls who spend their lives drifting back andforth along the American railroads.

　　He continued to work in the South State Street restaurant that got itspatronage from the underworld. In the evenings from six until twelvetrade was quiet and he sat reading books and watching the restlessthrashing crowds that passed the window. Sometimes he became soabsorbed that one of the guests sidled past and escaped through thedoor without paying his bill. In State Street the people moved up anddown nervously, wandering here and there, going without purpose likecattle confined in a corral. Women in cheap imitations of the gownsworn by their sisters two blocks away in Michigan Avenue and withpainted faces leered at the men. In gaudily lighted store-rooms thathoused cheap suggestive shows pianos kept up a constant din.

　　In the eyes of the people who idled away the evenings in South StateStreet was the vacant purposeless stare of modern life accentuated andmade horrible. With the stare went the shuffling walk, the waggingjaw, the saying of words meaning nothing. On the wall of a buildingopposite the door of the restaurant hung a banner marked "SocialistHeadquarters." There where modern life had found well-nigh perfectexpression, where there was no discipline and no order, where men didnot move, but drifted like sticks on a sea-washed beach, hung thesocialist banner with its promise of the co-operative commonwealth.

　　McGregor looked at the banner and at the moving people and was lost inmeditation. Walking from behind the cashier's desk he stood in thestreet by the door and stared about. A fire began to burn in his eyesand the fists that were thrust into his coat pockets were clenched.Again as when he was a boy in Coal Creek he hated the people. The finelove of mankind that had its basis in a dream of mankind galvanised bysome great passion into order and meaning was lost.

　　In the restaurant after midnight trade briskened Waiters andbartenders from fashionable restaurants of the loop district began todrop in to meet friends from among the women of the town. When a womancame in she walked up to one of these young men. "What kind of a nighthave you had?" they asked each other.

　　The visiting waiters stood about and talked in low tones. As theytalked they absentmindedly practised the art of withholding money fromcustomers, a source of income to them. They played with coins, pitchedthem into the air, palmed them, made them appear and disappear withmarvellous rapidity. Some of them sat on stools along the countereating pie and drinking cups of hot coffee.

　　A cook clad in a long dirty apron came into the room from the kitchenand putting a dish on the counter stood eating its contents. He triedto win the admiration of the idlers by boasting. In a blustering voicehe called familiarly to women seated at tables along the wall. At sometime in his life the cook had worked for a travelling circus and hetalked continually of his adventures on the road, striving to makehimself a hero in the eyes of his audience.

　　McGregor read the book that lay before him on the counter and tried toforget the squalid disorder of his surroundings. Again he read of thegreat figures of history, the soldiers and statesmen who have beenleaders of men. When the cook asked him a question or made some remarkintended for his ears he looked up, nodded and read again. When adisturbance started in the room he growled out a command and thedisturbance subsided. From time to time well dressed middle-aged men,half gone in drink, came and leaned over the counter to whisper tohim. He made a motion with his hand to one of the women sitting at thetables along the wall and idly playing with toothpicks. When she cameto him he pointed to the man and said, "He wants to buy you a dinner."

　　The women of the underworld sat at the tables and talked of McGregor,each secretly wishing he might become her lover. They gossiped likesuburban wives, filling their talk with vague reference to things hehad said. They commented upon his clothes and his reading. When helooked at them they smiled and stirred uneasily about like timidchildren.

　　One of the women of the underworld, a thin woman with hollow redcheeks, sat at a table talking with the other women of the raising ofwhite leghorn chickens. She and her husband, a fat old roan, a waiterin a loop restaurant, had bought a ten-acre farm in the country andshe was helping to pay for it with the money made in the streets inthe evening. A small black-eyed woman who sat beside the chickenraiser reached up to a raincoat hanging on the wall and taking a pieceof white cloth from the pocket began to work out a design in pale blueflowers for the front of a shirtwaist. A youth with unhealthy lookingskin sat on a stool by the counter talking to a waiter.

　　"The reformers have raised hell with business," the youth boasted ashe looked about to be sure of listeners. "I used to have four womenworking for me here in State Street in World's Fair year and now Ihave only one and she crying and sick half the time."

　　McGregor stopped reading the book. "In every city there is a vicespot, a place from which diseases go out to poison the people. Thebest legislative brains in the world have made no progress againstthis evil," it said.

　　He closed the book, threw it away from him and looked at his big fistlying on the counter and at the youth talking boastfully to thewaiter. A smile played about the corners of his mouth. He opened andclosed his fist reflectively. Then taking a law book from a shelfbelow the counter he began reading again, moving his lips and restinghis head upon his hands.

　　McGregor's law office was upstairs over a secondhand clothing store inVan Buren Street. There he sat at his desk reading and waiting and atnight he returned to the State Street restaurant. Now and then he wentto the Harrison Street police station to hear a police court trial andthrough the influence of O'Toole was occasionally given a case thatnetted him a few dollars. He tried to think that the years spent inChicago were years of training. In his own mind he knew what he wantedto do but did not know how to begin. Instinctively he waited. He sawthe march and countermarch of events in the lives of the peopletramping on the sidewalks below his office window, saw in his mind theminers of the Pennsylvania village coming down from the hills todisappear below the ground, looked at the girls hurrying through theswinging doors of department stores in the early morning, wonderingwhich of them would presently sit idling with toothpicks in O'Toole'sand waited for the word or the stir on the surface of that sea ofhumanity that would be a sign to him. To an onlooker he might haveseemed but another of the wasted men of modern life, a drifter on thesea of things--but it was not so. The people plunging through thestreets afire with earnestness concerning nothing had not succeeded insucking him into the whirlpool of commercialism in which theystruggled and into which year after year the best of America's youthwas drawn.

　　The idea that had come into his mind as he sat on the hill above themining town grew and grew. Day and night he dreamed of the actualphysical phenomena of the men of labour marching their way into powerand of the thunder of a million feet rocking the world and driving thegreat song of order purpose and discipline into the soul of Americans.

　　Sometimes it seemed to him that the dream would never be more than adream. 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 alongthe old road, that youth would continue always to grow into manhood,become fat, decay and die with the great swing and rhythm of life ameaningless mystery to them. "They will see the seasons and theplanets marching through space but they will not march," he muttered,and went to stand by the window and stare down into the dirt anddisorder of the street below.