How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle class people were
afraid! It swept over the country like a religious revival, the
creeping dread.
The writing men got to McGregor, the brain back of it all, fast
enough. Everywhere his influence appeared. In the afternoon there
would be a hundred newspaper men standing on the stairway leading up
to the big bare office in Van Buren Street. At his desk he sat, big
and red and silent. He looked like a man half asleep. I suppose the
thing that was in their minds had something to do with the way men
looked at him but in any case the crowd in Weingardner's agreed that
there was in the man something of the same fear-inspiring bigness
there was in the movement he had started and was guiding.
It seems absurdly simple now. There he sat at his desk. The police
might have walked in and arrested him. But if you begin figuring that
way the whole thing was absurd. What differs it if men march coming
from work, swinging along shoulder to shoulder or shuffle aimlessly
along, and what harm can come out of the singing of a song?
You see McGregor understood something that all of us had not counted
on. He knew that every one has an imagination. He was at war with
men's minds. He challenged something in us that we hardly realised was
there.
Pages:
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268