Peter Gudge often went along on these hunting parties.
Peter, curiously enough, discovered in himself the
same “complex” as the balked soldier boys.
Peter had been reading war news for five years, but
had missed the fighting; and now he discovered that
he liked to fight. What had kept him from liking
to fight in the past was the danger of getting hurt;
but now that there was no such danger, he could enjoy
it. In past times people had called him a coward,
and he had heard it so often that he had come to believe
it; but now he realized that it was not true, he was
just as brave as anybody else in the crowd.
The truth was that Peter had not had a happy time
in his youth, he had never learned, like the younger
members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Merchants’
and Manufacturers’ Association, to knock a little
white ball about a field with various shapes and sizes
of clubs. Peter was like a business man who has
missed his boyhood, and then in later years finds
the need of recreation, and takes up some form of
sport by the orders of his physician. It became
Peter’s, form of sport to stick an automatic
revolver in his hip-pocket, and take a blackjack in
his hand, and rush into a room where thirty or forty
Russians or “Sheenies” of all ages and
lengths of beard were struggling to learn the intricacies
of English spelling. Peter would give a yell,
and see this crowd leap and scurry hither and thither,
and chase them about and take a whack at a head wherever
he saw one, and jump into a crowd who were bunched
together like sheep, trying to hide their heads, and
pound them over the exposed parts of their anatomy
until they scattered into the open again. He liked
to get a lot of them started downstairs and send them
tumbling heels over head; or if he could get them
going out a window, that was more exhilarating yet,
and he would yell and whoop at them. He learned
some of their cries—outlandish gibberish
it was—and he would curse them in their
own language. He had a streak of the monkey in
him, and as he got to know these people better he
would imitate their antics and their gestures of horror,
and set a whole room full of the “bulls”
laughing to split their sides. There was a famous
“movie” comedian with big feet, and Peter
would imitate this man, and waddle up to some wretched
sweat-shop worker and boot him in the trousers’
seat, or step on his toes, or maybe spit in his eye.
So he became extremely popular among the “bulls,”
and they would insist on his going everywhere with
them.
Later on, when the government set to work to break
up the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party,
Peter’s popularity and prestige increased still
more. For now, instead of just raiding and smashing,
the police and detectives would round up the prisoners
and arrest them by hundreds, and carry them off and
put them thru “examinations.” And
Peter was always needed for this; his special knowledge
