§ 1
Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of
accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look
back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his
being has come. A young man is walking down the street, quite casually,
with an empty mind and no set purpose; he comes to a crossing, and for
no reason that he could tell he takes the right hand turn instead of the
left; and so it happens that he encounters a blue-eyed girl, who sets
his heart to beating. He meets the girl, marries her — and she became
your mother. But now, suppose the young man had taken the left hand turn
instead of the right, and had never met the blue-eyed girl; where would
you be now, and what would have become of those qualities of mind which
you consider of importance to the world, and those grave affairs of
business to which your time is devoted?
Something like that it was which befell Peter Gudge; just such an
accident, changing the whole current of his life, and making the series
of events with which this story deals. Peter was walking down the
street one afternoon, when a woman approached and held out to him a
printed leaflet. "Read this, please," she said.
And Peter, who was hungry, and at odds with the world,
answered gruffly: "I got no money." He thought it was
an advertising dodger, and he said: "I can't buy nothin'."
"It isn't anything for sale," answered the woman. "It's
a message."
"Religion?" said Peter. "I just got kicked out of a
church."
"No, not a church," said the woman. "It's something different;
put it in your pocket." She was an elderly woman with gray hair, and she
followed along, smiling pleasantly at this frail, poor-looking stranger,
but nagging at him. "Read it some time when you've nothing else to do."
And so Peter, just to get rid of her, took the leaflet and thrust it
into his pocket, and went on, and in a minute or two had forgotten all
about it.
Peter was thinking — or rather Peter's stomach was thinking for
him; for when you have had nothing to eat all day, and nothing on the
day before but a cup of coffee and one sandwich, your thought-centers
are transferred from the top to the middle of you. Peter was thinking
that this was a hell of a life. Who could have foreseen that just
because he had stolen one miserable fried doughnut, he would lose his
easy job and his chance of rising in the world? Peter's whole being was
concentrated on the effort to rise in the world; to get success, which
means money, which means ease and pleasure — the magic names which lure
all human creatures.
But who could have foreseen that Mrs. Smithers would
have kept count of those fried doughnuts every time anybody
passed thru her pantry? And it was only that one
ridiculous circumstance which had brought Peter to his
present misery. But for that he might have had his lunch
of bread and dried herring and weak tea in the home of
the shoe-maker's wife, and might have still been busy with
his job of stirring up dissension in the First Apostolic
Church, otherwise known as the Holy Rollers, and of getting
the Rev. Gamaliel Lunk turned out, and Shoemaker
Smithers established at the job of pastor, with Peter Gudge
as his right hand man.
Always it had been like that, thru Peter's twenty years
of life. Time after time he would get his feeble clutch
fixed upon the ladder of prosperity, and then something
would happen — some wretched thing like the stealing of a
fried doughnut — to pry him loose and tumble him down
again into the pit of misery.
So Peter walked along, with his belt drawn tight, and
his restless blue eyes wandering here and there, looking for
a place to get a meal. There were jobs to be had, but they
were hard jobs, and Peter wanted an easy one. There are
people in this world who live by their muscles, and others
who live by their wits; Peter belonged to the latter class;
and had missed many a meal rather than descend in the social
scale.
Peter looked into the faces of everyone he passed,
searching for a possible opening. Some returned his
glance, but never for more than a second, for they saw
an insignificant looking man, undersized, undernourished,
and with one shoulder higher than the other, a weak chin
and mouth, crooked teeth, and a brown moustache too feeble
to hold itself up at the corners. Peters' straw hat had
many straws missing, his second-hand brown suit was become
third-hand, and his shoes were turning over at the
sides. In a city where everybody was "hustling," everybody,
as they phrased it, "on the make," why should anyone
take a second glance at Peter Gudge? Why should anyone
care about the restless soul hidden inside him, or dream
that Peter was, in his own obscure way, a sort of genius?
No one did care; no one did dream.
It was about two o'clock of an afternoon in July, and the sun
beat down upon the streets of American City. There were crowds upon the
streets, and Peter noticed that everywhere were flags and bunting. Once
or twice he heard the strains of distant music, and wondered what was
"up." Peter had not been reading the newspapers; all his attention bad
been taken up by the quarrels of the Smithers faction and the Lunk
faction in the First Apostolic Church, otherwise known as the Holy
Rollers, and great events that had been happening in the world outside
were of no concern to him. Peter knew vaguely that on the other side of
the world half a dozen mighty nations were locked together in a grip of
death; the whole earth was shaken with their struggles, and Peter had
felt a bit of the trembling now and then. But Peter did not know that
his own country had anything to do with this European quarrel, and did
not know that certain great interests thruout the country had set
themselves to rouse the public to action.
This movement had reached American City, and the
streets had broken out in a blaze of patriotic display. In
all the windows of the stores there were signs: "Wake up,
America!" Across the broad Main Street there were banners:
"America Prepare!" Down in the square at one end
of the street a small army was gathering — old veterans of
the Civil War, and middle-aged veterans of the Spanish
War, and regiments of the state militia, and brigades of
marines and sailors from the ships in the harbor, and members
of fraternal lodges with their Lord High Chief Grand
Marshals on horseback with gold sashes and waving white
plumes, and all the notables of the city in carriages, and a
score of bands to stir their feet and ten thousand flags
waving above their heads. "Wake up America!" And here
was Peter Gudge, with an empty stomach, coming suddenly
upon the swarming crowds in Main Street, and having no
remotest idea what it was all about.
A crowd suggested one thing to Peter. For seven years
of his young life he had been assistant to Pericles Priam,
and had traveled over America selling Priam's Peerless
Pain Paralyzer; they had ridden in an automobile, and
wherever there was a fair or a convention or an excursion
or a picnic, they were on hand, and Pericles Priam would
stop at a place where the crowds were thickest, and ring
a dinner bell, and deliver his super-eloquent message to
humanity — the elixir of life revealed, suffering banished from
the earth, and all inconveniences of this mortal state brought
to an end for one dollar per bottle of fifteen per cent
opium. It had been Peter's job to handle the bottles and
take in the coin; and so now, when he saw the crowd, he
looked about him eagerly. Perhaps there might be here
some vender of corn-plasters or ink-stain removers, or
some three card monte man to whom Peter could attach
himself for the price of a sandwich.
Peter wormed his way thru the crowd for two or three
blocks, but saw nothing more promising than venders of
American flags on little sticks, and of patriotic buttons with
"Wake up America!" But then, on the other side of the
street at one of the crossings Peter saw a man standing on
a truck making a speech, and he dug his way thru the
crowd, elbowing, sliding this way and that, begging everybody's
pardon — until at last he was out of the crowd, and
standing in the open way which had been cleared for the
procession, a seemingly endless road lined with solid walls
of human beings, with blue-uniformed policemen holding
them back. Peter started to run across — and at that same
instant came the end of the world.
