Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; City and town life -- Fiction; Coal mines and mining -- Pennsylvania -- Fiction; Labor leaders -- Fiction
When the Marching Men Movement began to make a stir in Chicago Margaret
went on a visit to New York. For a month she lived with two women
friends at a big hotel near the sea and then hurried home. “I will see
the man and hear him talk,” she told herself. “I cannot cure myself of
the consciousness of him by running away. Perhaps I am myself a coward.
I shall go into his presence. When I hear his brutal words and see again
the hard gleam that sometimes comes into his eyes I shall be cured.”
Margaret went to hear McGregor talk to a gathering of workingmen in a
West Side hall and came away more alive to him than ever. In the hall
she sat concealed in deep shadows by the door and waited with trembling
eagerness.
On all sides of her were men crowded together. Their faces were washed
but the grime of the shops was not quite effaced. Men from the steel
mills with the cooked look that follows long exposure to intense
artificial heat, men of the building trades with their broad hands, big
men and small men, misshapen and straight, labouring men, all sat at
attention, waiting.
Margaret noticed that as McGregor talked the lips of the working men
moved. Fists were clenched. Applause came quick and sharp like the
report of guns.
In the shadows at the further side of the hall the black coats of the
workers made a blot out of which intense faces looked and across which
the flickering gas jets in the centre of the hall threw dancing lights.
The words of the speaker were shot forth. The sentences seemed broken
and disconnected. As he talked giant pictures flashed through the minds
of the hearers. Men felt themselves big and exalted. A little steel
worker sitting near Margaret, who earlier in the evening had been abused
by his wife because he wanted to come to the meeting instead of helping
with the dishes at home, stared fiercely about. He thought he would like
to fight hand in hand with a wild animal in a forest.
Standing on the narrow stage McGregor seemed a giant seeking expression.
His mouth worked, the sweat stood upon his forehead and he moved
restlessly up and down. At times, with his hands advanced and with the
eager forward crouch of his body, he was like a wrestler waiting to
grapple with an opponent.
Margaret was deeply moved. Her years of training and of refinement were
stripped off and she felt that, like the women of the French Revolution,
she would like to go out into the streets and march screaming and
fighting in feminine rage for the things of this man's mind.
McGregor had scarcely begun to talk. His personality, the big eager
something in him, had caught and held this audience as it had caught
and held other audiences in other halls and was to hold them night after
night for months.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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