Suddenly Peter started, and Miriam too. There came a voice from the doorway. “So this is one of your lady friends, is it?” And there stood Gladys, staring, rigid with anger, her little hands clenched. “So this is one of your Red sweethearts, one of your nationalized women?” And she stamped her foot. “Get up, you hussy! Get up, you slut!” And as Miriam continued to kneel, motionless with surprise, Gladys rushed at her, and clutched two handfuls of her heavy black hair, and pulled so that Miriam fell prone on the floor. “I’ll teach you, you free lover!” she screamed. “I’ll teach you to make love to my husband!” And she dragged Miriam about by that mop of black hair, kicking her and clawing her, until finally several of the bulls had to interfere to save the girl’s life.
As a matter of fact Gladys had been told about Peter’s shameful past before she married him; Guffey had told her, and she had told Peter that Guffey had told her, she had reminded Peter of it many, many times. But the actual sight of one of these “nationalized women” had driven her into a frenzy, and it was a week before peace was restored in the Gudge family. Meantime poor Peter was buffeted by storms of emotion, both at home and in his office. They were getting ready the first Red train, and it seemed as if every foreign Red that Peter had ever known was besieging him, trying to get at him and harrow his soul and his conscience. Sadie Todd’s cousin, who had been born in England, was shipped out on this first train, and also a Finnish lumberman whom Peter had known in the I. W. W., and a Bohemian cigar worker at whose home he had several times eaten, and finally Michael Dubin, the Jewish boy with whom he had spent fifteen days in jail, and who had been one of the victims of the black-snake whippings.
Michael made no end of wailing, because he had a wife and three babies, and he set up the claim that when the “bulls” had raided his home they had stolen all his savings, two or three hundred dollars. Peter, of course, insisted that he could do nothing; Dubin was a Red and an alien, and he must go. When they were loading them on the train, there was Dubin’s wife and half a hundred other women, shrieking and wringing their hands, and trying to break thru the guards to get near their loved ones. The police had to punch them in the stomachs with their clubs to hold them back, and in spite of all these blows, the hysterical Mrs. Dubin succeeded in breaking thru the guards, and she threw herself under the wheels of the train, and they were barely able to drag her away in time to save her life. Scenes like this would, of course, have a bad effect upon the public, and so Guffey called up the editors of all the newspapers, and obtained a gentleman’s agreement that none of them would print any details.
Section 84
All over the country the Red trains were moving eastward, loaded with “wobblies” and communists, pacifists and anarchists, and a hundred other varieties of Bolsheviks. They got a shipload together and started them off for Russia—the “Red Ark” it was called, and the Red soap-boxers set tip a terrific uproar, and one Red clergyman compared the “Red Ark” to the Mayflower! Also there was some Red official in Washington, who made a fuss and cancelled a whole block of deportation orders, including some of Peter’s own cases. This, naturally, was exasperating to Peter and his wife; and on top of it came another incident that was still more humiliating.
There was a “pink” mass meeting held in American City, to protest against the deportations. Guffey said they would quite probably raid the meeting, and Peter must go along, so as to point out the Reds to the bulls. The work was in charge of a police detective by the name of Garrity, head of what was called the “Bomb Squad”; but this man didn’t know very much, so he had the habit of coming to Peter for advice. Now he had the whole responsibility of this meeting, and he asked Peter to come up on the platform with him, and Peter went. Here was a vast audience—all the Red fury which had been pent up for many months, breaking loose in a whirlwind of excitement. Here were orators, well dressed and apparently respectable men, not in any way to be distinguished from the born rulers of the country, coming forward on the platform and uttering the most treasonable sentences, denouncing the government, denouncing the blockade against Russia, praising the Bolshevik government of Russia, declaring that the people who went away in the “Soviet Ark” were fortunate, because they were escaping from a land of tyranny into a land of freedom. At every few sentences the orator would be stopped by a storm of applause that broke from the audience.
And what was a poor Irish Catholic police detective to make of a proposition like that? Here stood an orator declaring: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” And Garrity turned to Peter. “What do you think of that?” he said, his good-natured Irish face blank with dismay.
Peter thought it was the limit. Peter knew that thousands of men all over America had been sent to prison for saying things less dangerous than that. Peter had read many sets of instructions from the office of the Attorney-General of the United States, and knew officially that that was precisely the thing you were never under any circumstances permitted to say, or to write, or even to think. So Peter said to Garrity: “That fellow’s gone far enough. You better arrest him.” Garrity spoke to his men, and they sprang forward on the platform, and stopped the orator and placed him and all his fellow-orators under arrest, and ordered the audience out of the building. There were a couple of hundred policemen and detectives on hand to carry out Garrity’s commands, and they formed a line with their clubs, and drove the crowd before them, and carted the speakers off in a patrol wagon. Then Peter went back to Guffey’s office, and told what he had done—and got a reception that reminded him of the time Guffey had confronted him with the letter from Nell Doolin! “Who do you think that was you pinched?” cried Guffey. “He’s the brother of a United States senator! And what do you think he was saying? That was a sentence from the Declaration of Independence!”