§ 5
The police had got the crowds driven back by now, and had ropes
across the street to hold them, and inside the roped space were several
ambulances and a couple of patrol-wagons. Peter was shoved into one of
these latter, and a policeman sat by his side, and the bell clanged, and
the patrol-wagon forced its way slowly thru the struggling crowd. Half
an hour later they arrived at the huge stone jail, and Peter was marched
inside. There were no formalities, they did not enter Peter on the
books, or take his name or his finger prints; some higher power had
spoken, and Peter's fate was already determined. He was taken into an
elevator, and down into a basement, and then down a flight of stone
steps into a deeper basement, and there was an iron door with a tiny
slit an inch wide and six inches long near the top. This was the "hole,"
and the door was opened and Peter shoved inside into utter darkness. The
door banged, and the bolts rattled; and then silence. Peter sank upon a
cold stone floor, a bundle of abject and hideous misery.
These events had happened with such terrifying rapidity that
Peter Gudge had hardly time to keep track of them. But now he had
plenty of time, he had nothing but time. He could think the whole thing
out, and realize the ghastly trick which fate had played upon him. He
lay there, and time passed; he had no way of measuring it, no idea
whether it was hours or days. It was cold and clammy in the stone cell;
they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of
the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just
left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the
rest.
And surely no more tormented mind than the mind of
Peter Gudge had ever been put in that black hole. It was the more
terrible, because so utterly undeserved, so preposterous. For such a
thing to happen to him, Peter Gudge, of all people — who took such pains
to avoid discomfort in life, who was always ready to oblige anybody, to
do anything he was told to do, so as to have'an easy time, a sufficiency
of food, and a warm corner to crawl into! What could have persuaded fate
to pick him for the victim of this cruel prank; to put him into this
position, where he could not avoid suffering, no matter what he did?
They wanted him to tell something, and Peter would have been perfectly
willing to tell anything — but how could he tell it when he did not know
it?
The more Peter thought about it, the more outraged he became. It
was monstrous! He sat up and glared into the black darkness. He talked
to himself, he talked to the world outside, to the universe which had
forgotten his existence. He stormed, he wept. He got on his feet and
flung himself about the cell, which was six feet square, and barely tall
enough for him to stand erect. He pounded on the door with his one hand
which Guffey had not lamed, he kicked, and he shouted. But there was no
answer, and so far as he could tell, there was no one to hear.
When he had exhausted himself, he sank down, and fell into a
haunted sleep; and then he wakened again, to a reality worse than any
nightmare. That awful man was coming after him again! He was going to
torture him, to make him tell what he did not know! All the ogres and
all the demons that had ever been invented to frighten the imagination
of children were as nothing compared to the image of the man called
Guffey, as Peter thought of him.
Several ages after Peter had been locked up, he heard
sounds outside, and the door was opened. Peter was cowering
in the corner, thinking that Guffey had come. There
was a scraping on the floor, and then the door was banged
again, and silence fell. Peter investigated and discovered
that they had put in a chunk of bread and a pan of water.
Then more ages passed, and Peter's impotent ragings
were repeated; then once more they brought bread and water,
and Peter wondered, was it twice a day they brought
it, or was this a new day? And how long did they mean
to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He
asked these questions of the man who brought the bread
and water, but the man made no answer, he never at any
time spoke a word. Peter had no company in that "hole"
but his God; and Peter was not well acquainted with his
God, and did not enjoy a tete-a-tete with Him.
What troubled Peter most was the cold; it got into his bones, and
his teeth were chattering all the time. Despite all his moving about, he
could not keep warm. When the man opened the door, he cried out to him,
begging for a blanket; each time the man came, Peter begged more
frantically than ever. He was ill, he had been injured in the explosion,
he needed a doctor, he was going to die! But there was never any
answer. Peter would lie there and shiver and weep, and writhe, and
babble, and lose consciousness for a while, and not know whether be was
awake or asleep, whether he was living or dead. He was becoming
delirious, and the things that were happening to him, the people who
were tormenting him, became monsters and fiends who carried him away
upon far journeys, and plunged him thru abysses of terror and torment.
And yet, many and strange as were the phantoms which Peter's sick
imagination conjured up, there was no one of them as terrible as the
reality which prevailed just then in the life of American City, and was
determining the destiny of a poor little man by the name of Peter Gudge.
There lived in American City a group of men who had taken possession of
its industries and dominated the lives of its population. This group,
intrenched in power in the city's business and also in its government,
were facing the opposition of a new and rapidly rising power, that of
organized labor, determined to break the oligarchy of business and take
over its powers. The struggle of these two groups was coming to its
culmination. They were like two mighty wrestlers, locked in a grip of
death; two giants in combat, who tear up trees by the roots and break
off fragments of cliffs from the mountains to smash in each other's
skulls. And poor Peter — what was he? An ant which happened to come
blundering across the ground where these combatants met. The earth was
shaken with their trampling, the dirt was kicked this way and that, and
the unhappy ant was knocked about, tumbled head over heels, buried in
the debris; and suddenly — Smash! — a giant foot came down upon the place
where he was struggling and gasping!
