Book II: Chapter II

by Sherwood Anderson

　　The street in which McGregor lived in Chicago was called WycliffPlace, after a family of that name that had once owned the landthereabout. The street was complete in its hideousness. Nothing moreunlovely could be imagined. Given a free hand an indiscriminate lot ofbadly trained carpenters and bricklayers had builded houses beside thecobblestone road that touched the fantastic in their unsightliness andinconvenience.

　　The great west side of Chicago has hundreds of such streets and thecoal mining town out of which McGregor had come was more inspiring asa place in which to live. As an unemployed young man, not much givento chance companionships, Beaut had spent many long evenings wanderingalone on the hillsides above his home town. There was a kind ofdreadful loveliness about the place at night. The long black valleywith its dense shroud of smoke that rose and fell and formed itselfinto fantastic shapes in the moonlight, the poor little housesclinging to the hillside, the occasional cry of a woman being beatenby a drunken husband, the glare of the coke fires and the rumble ofcoal cars being pushed along the railroad tracks, all of these made agrim and rather inspiring impression on the young man's mind so thatalthough he hated the mines and the miners he sometimes paused in hisnight wanderings and stood with his great shoulders lifted, breathingdeeply and feeling things he had no words in him to express.

　　In Wycliff Place McGregor got no such reactions. Foul dust filled theair. All day the street rumbled and roared under the wheels of trucksand light hurrying delivery wagons. Soot from the factory chimneys wascaught up by the wind and having been mixed with powdered horse manurefrom the roadway flew into the eyes and the nostrils of pedestrians.Always a babble of voices went on. At a corner saloon teamstersstopped to have their drinking cans filled with beer and stood aboutswearing and shouting. In the evening women and children went back andforth from their houses carrying beer in pitchers from the samesaloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men reeled along the sidewalkand the women of the town appeared in their cheap finery and paradedbefore the idlers about the saloon door.

　　The woman who rented the room to McGregor boasted to him of Wycliffblood. It was that she told him that had brought her to Chicago fromher home at Cairo, Illinois. "The place was left to me and not knowingwhat else to do with it I came here to live," she said. She explainedto him that the Wycliffs had been people of note in the early historyof Chicago. The huge old house with the cracked stone steps and theROOMS TO RENT sign in the window had once been their family seat.

　　The history of this woman was characteristic of the miss-fire qualityof much of American life. She was at bottom a wholesome creature whoshould have lived in a neat frame house in a village and tended agarden. On Sunday she should have dressed herself with care and goneoff to sit in a country church with her hands crossed and her soul atrest.

　　The thought of owning a house in the city had however paralysed herbrain. The house itself was worth a certain number of thousands ofdollars and her mind could not rise above that fact, so her good broadface had become grimy with city dirt and her body weary from theendless toil of caring for roomers. On summer evenings she sat on thesteps before her house clad in some bit of Wycliff finery taken from atrunk in the attic and when a lodger came out at the door she lookedat him wistfully and said, "On such a night as this you could hear thewhistles on the river steamers in Cairo."

　　McGregor lived in a small room at the end of a tall on the secondfloor of the Wycliff house. The windows of the room looked down into adirty little court almost surrounded by brick warehouses. The room wasfurnished with a bed, a chair that vas always threatening to come topieces and a desk with weak carved legs.

　　In this room sat McGregor night after night striving to realise hisCoal Creek dream of training his mind and making himself of someaccount in the world. From seven-thirty until nine-thirty he sat at adesk in a night school. From ten until midnight he read in his room.He did not think of his surroundings, of the vast disorder of lifeabout him, but tried with all his strength to bring something likeorder and purpose into his own mind and his own life.

　　In the little court under the window lay heaps of discarded newspapertossed about by the wind. There in the heart of the city, walled in bythe brick warehouse and half concealed under piles of chair legs cansand broken bottles, lay two logs in their time no doubt, a part of thegrove that once lay about the house. The neighbourhood had passed sorapidly from country estate to homes and from homes to rented lodgingsand huge brick warehouses that the marks of the lumberman's axe stillshowed in the butts of the logs.

　　McGregor seldom saw the little court except when its ugliness wasrefined and glossed over by darkness or by the moonlight. On hotevenings he laid down his book and leaning far out of the windowrubbed his eyes and watched the discarded newspapers, worried by thewhirlpools of wind in the court, run here and there, dashing againstthe warehouse walls and vainly trying to escape over the roof. Thesight fascinated him and brought a thought into his mind. He began tothink that the lives of most of the people about him were much likethe dirty newspaper harried by adverse winds and surrounded by uglywalls of facts. The thought drove him from the window to renewedeffort among his books. "I'll do something here anyway. I'll showthem," he growled.

　　One living in the house with McGregor during those first years in thecity might have thought his life stupid and commonplace but to him itdid not seem so. It was for the miner's son a time of sudden andtremendous growth. Filled with confidence in the strength andquickness of his body he was beginning to have also confidence in thevigour and clearness of his brain. In the warehouse he went about witheyes and ears open, devising in his mind new methods of moving goods,watching the men at work, marking the shirkers, preparing to pounceupon the tall German's place as foreman.

　　The superintendent of the warehouse, not understanding the turn of thetalk with McGregor on the sidewalk before the saloon, decided to likehim and laughed when they met in the warehouse. The tall Germanmaintained a policy of sullen silence and went to laborious lengths toavoid addressing him.

　　In his room at night McGregor began to read law, reading each pageover and over and thinking of what he had read through the next day ashe rolled and piled apple barrels in the passages in the warehouse.

　　McGregor had an aptitude and an appetite for facts. He read law asanother and gentler nature might have read poetry or old legends. Whathe read at night he remembered and thought about during the day. Hehad no dream of the glories of the law. The fact that these rules laiddown by men to govern their social organisation were the result ofages of striving toward perfection did not greatly interest him and heonly thought of them as weapons with which to attack and defend in thebattle of brains he meant presently to fight. His mind gloated inanticipation of the battle.