Perhaps it is just the spirit that broods over that strange
land and people. There was something of Russia in McGregor himself.
Anyway the marching song was the most persistently penetrating thing
Americans had ever heard. It was in the streets, the shops, the
offices, the alleys and in the air overhead--the wail--half shout. No
noise could drown it. It swung and pitched and rioted through the air.
And there was the fellow who wrote the music down for McGregor. He was
the real thing and he bore the marks of the shackles on his legs. He
had remembered the march from hearing the men sing it as they went
over the Steppes to Siberia, the men who were going up out of misery
to more misery. "It would come out of the air," he explained. "The
guards would run down the line of men to shout and strike out with
their short whips. 'Stop it!' they cried. And still it went on for
hours, defying everything, there on the cold cheerless plains."
And he had brought it to America and put it to music for McGregor's
marchers.
Of course the police tried to stop the marchers. Into a street they
would run crying "Disperse!" The men did disperse only to appear again
on some vacant lot working away at the perfection of the marching.
Once an excited squad of police captured a company of them.
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