Section 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!
