Chapter 15
But more than anything else Peter was troubled by fear. Peter, the ant, perceived the conflict of the giants becoming more ferocious, and realized the precariousness of his position under the giants’ feet. The passions of both sides were mounting, and the fiercer their hate became, the greater the chance of Peter’s being discovered, the more dreadful his fate if he were discovered. It was all very well for McGivney to assure him that only four of Guffey’s men knew the truth, and that all these might be trusted to the death. Peter remembered a remark he had heard Shawn Grady make, and which had caused him to lose his appetite for more than one meal. “They’ve got spies among us,” the young Irishman had said. “Well, sooner or later we’ll do a bit of spying of our own!”
And now these words came back to Peter like a voice from the grave. Suppose one of the Reds who had money were to hire somebody to get a job in Guffey’s office! Suppose some Red girl were to try Peter’s device, and seduce one of Guffey’s men--by no means a difficult task! The man mightn’t even mean to reveal that Peter Gudge was a secret agent; he might just let it slip, as little Jennie had let slip the truth about Jack Ibbetts! Thus Mac would know who had framed him up; and what would Mac do to Peter when he got out on bail? When Peter thought of things like that he realized what it meant to go to war; he saw that he had gained nothing by staying at home, he might as well have been in the front-line trenches! After all, this was war, class-war; and in all war the penalty for spying is death.
Also Peter was worried about Nell. She had been in her new position for nearly a week, and he hadn’t heard a word from her. She had forbidden him to write, for fear he might write something injudicious. Let him just wait, Edythe Eustace would know how to take care of herself. And that was all right, Peter had no doubt about the ability of Edythe Eustace to take care of herself. What troubled him was the knowledge that she was working on another “frame-up,” and he stood in fear of the exuberance of her imagination. The last time that imagination had been pregnant, it had presented him with a suit-case full of dynamite. What it might bring forth next time he did not know, and was afraid to think. Nell might cause him to be found out by Guffey; and that would be nearly as horrible as to be found out by Mac!
Peter got his morning “Times,” and found a whole page about the whipping of the Reds, portraying the job as a patriotic duty heroically performed; and that naturally cheered Peter up considerably. He turned to the editorial page, and read a two column “leader” that was one whoop of exultation. It served still more to cure Peter’s ache of conscience; and when he read on and found a series of interviews with leading citizens, giving cordial endorsement to the acts of the “vigilantes,” Peter became ashamed of his weakness, and glad that he had not revealed it to anyone. Peter was trying his best to become a real “he-man,” a 100% red-blooded American, and he had the “Times” twice each day, morning and evening, to guide, sustain and inspire him.
Peter had been told by McGivney to fix himself up and pose as one of the martyrs of the night’s affair, and this appealed to his sense of humor. He cut off the hair from a part of his head, and stuck some raw cotton on top, and plastered it over with surgical tape. He stuck another big wad of surgical tape across his forehead, and a criss-cross of it on his cheek, and tied up his wrist in an excellent imitation of a sprain. Thus rigged out he repaired to the American House, and McGivney rewarded him with a hearty laugh, and then proceeded to give some instructions which, entirely restored Peter’s usual freshness of soul. Peter was going up on Mount Olympus again!
The rat-faced man explained in detail. There was a lady of great wealth--indeed, she was said to be several times a millionaire--who was an openly avowed Red, a pacifist of the most malignant variety. Since the arrest of young Lackman she had come forward and put up funds to finance the “People’s Council,” and the “Anti-Conscription League,” and all the other activities which for the sake of convenience were described by the term “pro-German.” The only trouble was this lady was so extremely wealthy it was hard to do anything to her. Her husband was a director in a couple of Nelse Ackerman’s banks, and had other powerful connections. The husband was a violent, anti-Socialist, and a buyer of liberty bonds; he quarrelled with his wife, but nevertheless he did not want to see her in jail, and this made an embarrassing situation for the police and the district attorney’s office, and even for the Federal authorities, who naturally did not want to trouble one of the courtiers of the king of American City. “But something’s got to be done,” said McGivney. “This camouflaged German propaganda can’t go on.” So Peter was to try to draw Mrs. Godd into some kind of “overt action.”
“Mrs. Godd?” said Peter. It seemed to him a singular coincidence that one of the dwellers on Mount Olympus should bear that name. The great lady lived on a hilltop out in the suburbs, not so far from the hilltop of Nelse Ackerman. One of the adventures looked forward to by Reds and pacifists in distress was to make a pilgrimage to this palace and obtain some long, green plasters to put over their wounds. Now was the time at all times for Peter to go, said McGivney. Peter had many wounds to be plastered, and Mrs. Godd would be indignant at the proceedings of last night, and would no doubt express herself without restraint.
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Peter hadn’t been so excited since the time when he had waited to meet young Lackman. He had never quite forgiven himself for this costly failure, and now he was to have another chance. He took a trolley ride out into the country, and walked a couple of miles to the palace on the hilltop, and mounted thru a grove of trees and magnificent Italian gardens. According to McGivney’s injunctions, he summoned his courage, and went to the front door of the stately mansion and rang the bell.
Peter was hot and dusty from his long walk, the sweat had made streaks down his face and marred the pristine whiteness of his plasters. He was never a distinguished-looking person at best, and now, holding his damaged straw hat in his hands, he looked not so far from a hobo. However, the French maid who came to the door was evidently accustomed to strange-looking visitors. She didn’t order Peter to the servant’s entrance, nor threaten him with the dogs; she merely said, “Be seated, please. I will tell madame”--putting the accent on the second syllable, where Peter had never heard it before.
And presently here came Mrs. Godd in her cloud of Olympian beneficence; a large and ample lady, especially built for the role of divinity. Peter felt suddenly awe-stricken. How had he dared come here? Neither in the Hotel de Soto, with its many divinities, nor in the palace of Nelse Ackerman, the king, had he felt such a sense of his own lowliness as the sight of this calm, slow-moving great lady inspired. She was the embodiment of opulence, she was “the real thing.” Despite the look of kindliness in her wide-open blue eyes, she impressed him with a feeling of her overwhelming superiority. He did not know it was his duty as a gentleman to rise from his chair when a lady entered, but some instinct brought him to his feet and caused him to stand blinking as she crossed to him from the opposite end of the big room.
“How do you do?” she said in a low, full voice, gazing at him steadily out of the kind, wide-open blue eyes. Peter stammered, “How d-dy do, M--Mrs. Godd.”
In truth, Peter was almost dumb with bewilderment. Could it really, possibly be that this grand personage was a Red? One of the things that had most offended him about all radicals was their noisiness, their aggressiveness; but here was a grand serenity of looks and manner, a soft, slow voice--here was beauty, too, a skin unlined, despite middle years, and glowing with health and a fine cleanness. Nell Doolin had had a glowing complexion, but there was always a lot of powder stuck on, and when you investigated closely, as Peter had done, you discovered muddy spots in the edges of her hair and on her throat. But Mrs. Godd’s skin shone just as the skin of a goddess would be expected to shine, and everything about her was of a divine and compelling opulence. Peter could not have explained just what it was that gave this last impression so overwhelmingly. It was not that she wore many jewels, or large ones, for Mrs. James had beaten her at that; it was not her delicate perfume, for Nell Doolin scattered more sweetness on the air; yet somehow even poor, ignorant Peter felt the difference--it seemed to him that none of Mrs. Godd’s costly garments had ever been worn before, that the costly rugs on the floor had never been stepped on before, the very chair on which he sat had never been sat on before!
Little Ada Ruth had called Mrs. Godd “the mother of all the world;” and now suddenly she became the mother of Peter Gudge. She had read the papers that morning, she had received a half dozen telephone calls from horrified and indignant Reds, and so a few words sufficed to explain to her the meaning of Peter’s bandages and plasters. She held out to him a beautiful cool hand, and quite without warning, tears sprang into the great blue eyes.
“Oh, you are one of those poor boys! Thank God they did not kill you!” And she led him to a soft couch and made him lie down amid silken pillows. Peter’s dream of Mount Olympus had come literally true! It occurred to him that if Mrs. Godd were willing to play permanently the role of mother to Peter Gudge, he would be willing to give up his role of anti-Red agent with its perils and its nervous strains; he would forget duty, forget the world’s strife and care; he would join the lotus-eaters, the sippers of nectar on Mount Olympus!
She sat and talked to him in the soft, gentle voice, and the kind blue eyes watched him, and Peter thought that never in all his life had he encountered such heavenly emotions. To be sure, when he had gone to see Miriam Yankovich, old Mrs. Yankovich had been just as kind, and tears of sympathy had come into her eyes just the same. But then, Mrs. Yankovich was nothing but a fat old Jewess, who lived in a tenement and smelt of laundry soap and partly completed washing; her hands had been hot and slimy, and so Peter had not been in the least grateful for her kindness. But to encounter tender emotions in these celestial regions, to be talked to maternally and confidentially by this wonderful Mrs. Godd in soft white chiffons just out of a band-box _this _was quite another matter!
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Peter did not want to set traps for this mother of Mount Olympus, he didn’t want to worm any secrets from her. And as it happened, he found that he did not have to, because she told him everything right away, and without the slightest hesitation. She talked just as the “wobblies” had talked in their headquarters; and Peter, when he thought it over, realized that there are two kinds of people who can afford to be frank in their utterance--those who have nothing to lose, and those who have so much to lose that they cannot possibly lose it.
Mrs. Godd said that what had been done to those men last night was a crime, and it ought to be punished if ever a crime was punished, and that she would like to engage detectives and get evidence against the guilty ones. She said furthermore that she sympathized with the Reds of the very reddest shade, and if there were any color redder than Red she would be of that color. She said all this in her quiet, soft voice. Tears came into her eyes now and then, but they were well-behaved tears, they disappeared of their own accord, and without any injury to Mrs. Godd’s complexion, or any apparent effect upon her self-possession.
Mrs. Godd said that she didn’t see how anybody could fail to be a Red who thought about the injustices of present-day society. Only a few days before she had been in to see the district attorney, and had tried to make a Red out of him! Then she told Peter how there had come to see her a man who had pretended to be a radical, but she had realized that he didn’t know anything about radicalism, and had told him she was sure he was a government agent. The man had finally admitted it, and showed her his gold star--and then Mrs. Godd had set to work to convert him! She had argued with him for an hour or two, and then had invited him to go to the opera with her. “And do you know,” said Mrs. Godd, in an injured tone, “he wouldn’t go! They don’t want to be converted, those men; they don’t want to listen to reason. I believe the man was actually afraid I might influence him.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” put in Peter, sympathetically; for he was a tiny bit afraid himself.
“I said to him, `Here I live in this palace, and back in the industrial quarter of the city are several thousand men and women who slave at machines for me all day, and now, since the war, all night too. I get the profits of these peoples’ toil--and what have I done to earn it? Absolutely nothing! I never did a stroke of useful work in my life.’ And he said to me, `Suppose the dividends were to stop, what would you do?’ ‘I don’t know what I’d do,’ I answered, `I’d be miserable, of course, because I hate poverty, I couldn’t stand it, it’s terrible to think of--not to have comfort and cleanliness and security. I don’t see how the working-class stand it--that’s exactly why I’m a Red, I know it’s wrong for anyone to be poor, and there’s no excuse for it. So I shall help to overthrow the capitalist system, even if it means I have to take in washing for my living!”
Peter sat watching her in the crisp freshness of her snowy chiffons. The words brought a horrible image to his mind; he suddenly found himself back in the tenement kitchen, where fat and steaming Mrs. Yankovich was laboring elbow deep in soap-suds. It was on the tip of Peter’s tongue to say: “If you really had done a day’s washing, Mrs. Godd, you wouldn’t talk like that!”
But he remembered that he must play the game, so he said, “They’re terrible fellows, them Federal agents. It was two of them pounded me over the head last night.” And then he looked faint and pitiful, and Mrs. Godd was sympathetic again, and moved to more recklessness of utterance.
“It’s because of this hideous war!” she declared. “We’ve gone to war to make the world safe for democracy, and meantime we have to sacrifice every bit of democracy at home. They tell you that you must hold your peace while they murder one another, but they may try all they please, they’ll never be able to silence me! I know that the Allies are just as much to blame as the Germans, I know that this is a war of profiteers and bankers; they may take my sons and force them into the army, but they cannot take my convictions and force them into their army. I am a pacifist, and I am an internationalist; I want to see the workers arise and turn out of office these capitalist governments, and put an end to this hideous slaughter of human beings. I intend to go on saying that so long as I live.” There sat Mrs. Godd, with her lovely firm white hands clasped as if in prayer, one large diamond ring on the left fourth finger shining defiance, and a look of calm, child-like conviction upon her face, confronting in her imagination all the federal agents and district attorneys and capitalist judges and statesmen and generals and drill sergeants in the civilized world.
She went on to tell how she had attended the trial of three pacifist clergymen a week or two previously. How atrocious that Christians in a Christian country should be sent to prison for trying to repeat the words of Christ! “I was so indignant,” declared Mrs. Godd, “that I wrote a letter to the judge. My husband said I would be committing contempt of court by writing to a judge during the trial, but I answered that my contempt for that court was beyond anything I could put into writing. Wait--”
And Mrs. Godd rose gravely from her chair and went over to a desk by the wall, and got a copy of the letter. “I’ll read it to you,” she said, and Peter listened to a manifesto of Olympian Bolshevism--
To His Honor:
As I entered the sanctuary, I gazed upward to the stained glass dome, upon which were inscribed four words: Peace. Justice. Truth. Law--and I felt hopeful. Before me were men who had violated no constitutional right, who had not the slightest criminal tendency, who, were opposed to violence of every kind.
The trial proceeded. I looked again at the beautiful stained glass dome, and whispered to myself those majestic-sounding words: “Peace. Justice. Truth. Law.” I listened to the prosecutors; the Law in their hands was a hard, sharp, cruel blade, seeking insistently, relentlessly for a weak spot in the armor of its victims. I listened to their Truth, and it was Falsehood. Their Peace was a cruel and bloody War. Their justice was a net to catch the victims at any cost--at the cost of all things but the glory of the Prosecutor’s office.
I grew sick at heart. I can only ask myself the old, old question: What can we, the people do? How can we bring Peace, justice, Truth and Law to the world? Must we go on bended knees and ask our public servants to see that justice is done to the defenceless, rather than this eternal prosecuting of the world’s noblest souls! You will find these men guilty, and sentence them to be shut behind iron bars--which should never be for human beings, no matter what their crime, unless you want to make beasts of them. Is that your object, sir? It would seem so; and so I say that we must overturn the system that is brutalizing, rather than helping and uplifting mankind.
Yours for Peace..Justice..Truth..Law--
Mary Angelica Godd.
What were you going to do with such a woman? Peter could understand the bewilderment of His Honor, and of the district attorney’s office, and of the secret service department of the Traction Trust--as well as of Mrs. Godd’s husband! Peter was bewildered himself; what was the use of his coming out here to get more information, when Mrs. Godd had already committed contempt of court in writing, and had given all the information there was to give to a Federal agent? She had told this man that she had contributed several thousand dollars to the Peoples’ Council, and that she intended to contribute more. She had put up bail for a whole bunch of Reds and Pacifists, and she intended to put up bail for McCormick and his friends, just as soon as the corrupt capitalist courts had been forced to admit them to bail. “I know McCormick well, and he’s a lovely boy,” she said. “I don’t believe he had anything more to do with dynamite bombs than I have.”
Now all this time Peter had sat there, entirely under the spell of Mrs. Godd’s opulence. Peter was dwelling among the lotus-eaters, and forgetting the world’s strife and care; he was reclining on a silken couch, sipping nectar with the shining ones of Mount Olympus. But now suddenly, Peter was brought back to duty, as one wakes from a dream to the sound of an alarm-clock. Mrs. Godd was a friend of Mac’s, Mrs. Godd proposed to get Mac out on bail! Mac, the most dangerous Red of them all! Peter saw that he must get something on this woman at once!
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Peter sat up suddenly among his silken cushions, and began to tell Mrs. Godd about the new plan of the Anti-conscription League, to prepare a set of instructions for young conscientious objectors. Peter represented the purpose of these instructions to be the advising of young men as to their legal and constitutional rights. But it was McGivney’s idea that Peter should slip into the instructions some phrase advising the young men to refuse military duty; if this were printed and circulated, it would render every member of the Anti-conscription League liable to a sentence of ten or twenty years in jail. McGivney had warned Peter to be very cautious about this, but again Peter found that there was no need of caution. Mrs. Godd was perfectly willing to advise young men to refuse military service. She had advised many such, she said, including her own sons, who unfortunately agreed with their father in being blood-thirsty.
It came to be lunch-time, and Mrs. Godd asked if Peter could sit at table--and Peter’s curiosity got the better of all caution. He wanted to see the Godd family sipping their nectar out of golden cups. He wondered, would the disapproving husband and the blood-thirsty sons be present?
There was nobody present but an elderly woman companion, and Peter did not see any golden cups. But he saw some fine china, so fragile that he was afraid to touch it, and he saw a row of silver implements, so heavy that it gave him a surprise each time he picked one up. Also, he saw foods prepared in strange and complicated ways, so chopped up and covered with sauces that it was literally true he couldn’t give the name of a single thing he had eaten, except the buttered toast.
He was inwardly quaking with embarrassment during this meal, but he saved himself by Mrs. James’s formula, to watch and see what the others were doing and then do likewise. Each time a new course was brought, Peter would wait, and when he saw Mrs. Godd pick up a certain fork or a certain spoon, he would pick up the same one, or as near to it as he could guess. He could put his whole mind on this, because he didn’t have to do any talking; Mrs. Godd poured out a steady stream of sedition and high treason, and all Peter had to do was to listen and nod. Mrs. Godd would understand that his mouth was too full for utterance.
After the luncheon they went out on the broad veranda which overlooked a magnificent landscape. The hostess got Peter settled in a soft porch chair with many cushions, and then waved her hand toward the view of the city with its haze of thick black smoke.
“That’s where my wage slaves toil to earn my dividends,” said she. “They’re supposed to stay there--in their `place,’ as it’s called, and I stay here in my place. If they want to change places, it’s called `revolution,’ and that is `violence.’ What I marvel at is that they use so little violence, and feel so little. Look at those men being tortured in jail! Could anyone blame them if they used violence? Or if they made an effort to escape?”
That suggested a swift, stabbing idea to Peter. Suppose Mrs. Godd could be induced to help in a jail delivery!
“It might be possible to help them to escape,” he suggested.
“Do you think so?” asked Mrs. Godd, showing excitement for the first time during that interview.
“It might be,” said Peter. “Those jailors are not above taking bribes, you know. I met nearly all of them while I was in that jail, and I think I might get in touch with one or two that could be paid. Would you like me to try it?”
“Well, I don’t know--” began the lady, hesitatingly. “Do you really think--”
“You know they never ought to have been put in at all!” Peter interjected.
“That’s certainly true!” declared Mrs. Godd.
“And if they could escape without hurting anyone, if they didn’t have to fight the jailors, it wouldn’t do any real harm--”
That was as far as Peter got with his impromptu conspiracy. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him: “What does this mean?” It was a male voice, fierce and trembling with anger; and Peter started from his silken cushions, and glanced around, thrusting up one arm with the defensive gesture of a person who has been beaten since earliest childhood.