§ 79
And just as ardently as Gladys Frisbie Gudge adored the rich, so
ardently did she object to the poor. If you pinned her down to it, she
would admit that there had to be poor; there could not be gentility,
except on the basis of a large class of ungentility. The poor were all
right in their place; what Gladys objected to was their presuming to try
to get out of their place, or to criticise their betters. She had a word
by which she summed up everything that she despised in the world, and
that word was "common;" she used it to describe the sort of people she
declined to meet, and she used it in correcting Peter's manners and his
taste in hats. To be "common" was to be damned; and when Gladys saw
people who were indubitably and inescapably "common," presuming to set
themselves up and form standards of their own, she took it as a personal
affront, she became vindictive and implacable towards
them. Each and every one of them became to her a personal enemy, an
enemy to something far more precious than her person, an enemy to the
thing she aspired to become, to her ideal.
Peter had once been like that himself, but now he was so
comfortable, he had a tendency to become lazy and easy-going. It was
well, therefore, that he had Gladys to jack him up, and keep him on his
job. Gladys at first did not meet any Reds face to face, she knew them
only by the stories that Peter brought home to her when his day's work
was done. But each new group that he was hounding became to Gladys an
assemblage of incarnate fiends, and while she sat polishing the
finger-nails of stout society ladies who were too sleepy to talk,
Gladys' busy mind would be working over schemes to foil these fiends.
Sometimes her ideas were quite wonderful. She had a woman's
intuition, the knowledge of human foibles, all the intricate subtleties
of the emotional life; she would bring to Peter a program for the
undoing of some young radical, as complete as if she had known the man
or woman all her life. Peter took her ideas to McGivney, and then to
Guffey, and the result was that her talents were recognized, and by the
lever of a generous salary she was pried loose from the manicure parlor.
Guffey sent her to make the acquaintance of the servants in the
household of a certain rich man who was continually making contributions
to the Direct Primary Association and other semi-Red organizations, and
who was believed to have a scandal in his private life. So successful
was Gladys at this job that presently Guffey set her at the still more
delicate task of visiting rich ladies, and impressing upon them the
seriousness of the Red peril,
and persuading them to meet the continually increasing
expenses of Guffey's office.
Just now was a busy time in the anti-Red campaign. For nearly
two years, ever since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, there had been
gradually developing a split in the Socialist movement, and the
"under-cover" operatives of the Traction Trust, as well as those of the
district attorney's office and of the Federal government, had been
working diligently to widen this split and develop dissensions in the
organization. There were some Socialists who believed in politics, and
were prepared to devote their lives to the slow and tedious job of
building up a party. There were others who were impatient, looking for a
short cut, a general strike or a mass insurrection of the workers which
would put an end to the slavery of capitalism. The whole game of
politics was rotten, these would argue; a politician could find more
ways to fool the workers in a minute than the workers could thwart in a
year. They pointed to the German Socialists, those betrayers of
internationalism. There were people who called themselves Socialists
right here in American City who wanted to draw the movement into the
same kind of trap!
This debate was not conducted in the realm of abstractions; the
two wings of the movement would attack one another with bitterness. The
"politicians" would denounce the "impossibilists," calling them
"anarchists;" and the other side, thus goaded, would accuse their
enemies of being in the hire of the government. Peter would supply
McGivney with bits of scandal which the "under cover" men would start
going among the "left-wingers;" and in the course of the long wrangles
in the local these accusations
would come out. Herbert Ashton would mention them with his biting
sarcasm, or "Shorty" Gunton would shout them in one of his
tirades — "hurling them into his opponents teeth," as he phrased it.
"Shorty" Gunton was a tramp printer, a wandering agitator who was
all for direct action, and didn't care a hang who knew it. "Violence?"
he would say. "How many thousand years shall we submit to the violence
of capitalist governments, and never have the right to reply?" And then
again he would say, "Violence? Yes, of course we must repudiate
violence — until we get enough of it!" Peter had listened to "Shorty's"
railings at the "compromisers" and the "political traders," and had
thought him one of the most dangerous men in American City. But later
on, after the episode of Joe Angell had opened Peter's eyes, he decided
that "Shorty" must also be a secret agent like himself.
Peter was never told definitely, but he picked up a fact here and
there, and fitted them together, and before long his suspicion had
become certainty. The "left wing" Socialists split off from the party,
and called a convention of their own, and this convention in turn split
up, one part forming the Communist Party, and another part forming the
Communist Labor Party. While these two conventions were in session,
McGivney came to Peter, and said that the Federal government had a man
on the platform committee of the Communist Party, and they wanted to
write in some phrases that would make membership in that party in itself
a crime, so that everybody who held a membership card could be sent to
prison without further evidence. These phrases must be in the orthodox
Communist lingo, and this was where Peter's specialized knowledge was
needed.
So Peter wrote the phrases, and a couple of days later he read in
the newspapers an account of the convention proceedings. The platform
committee had reported, and "Shorty" Gunton had submitted a minority
report, and had made a fiery speech in the convention, with the result
that his minority report was carried by a narrow margin. This minority
report contained all the phrases that Peter had written. A couple of
months later, when the government had its case ready, and the wholesale
raids upon the Communists took place, "Shorty" Gunton was arrested, but
a few days later he made a dramatic escape by sawing his way thru the
roof of the jail!
