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.
