She was alone in the house all day with Peter, and
she got to seem more and more pretty as he got to
know her better. Also it was evident that she
liked Peter more and more as Peter played his game.
Peter revealed himself as deeply sympathetic, and a
quick convert to the cause; he saw everything that
Jennie explained to him, he was horrified at the horrible
stories, he was ready to help her end the European
war by starting a revolution among the working people
of American City. Also, he told her about himself,
and awakened her sympathy for his harsh life, his
twenty years of privation and servitude; and when
she wept over this, Peter liked it. It was fine,
somehow, to have her so sorry for him; it helped to
compensate him for the boredom of hearing her be sorry
for the whole working class.
Peter didn’t know whether Jennie had learned
about his bad record, but he took no chances—he
told her everything, and thus took the sting out of
it. Yes, he had been trapped into evil ways, but
it wasn’t his fault, he hadn’t known any
better, he had been a pitiful victim of circumstances.
He told how he had been starved and driven about and
beaten by “Old Man” Drubb, and the tears
glistened in Jennie’s grey eyes and stole down
her cheeks. He told about loneliness and heartsickness
and misery in the orphan asylum. And how could
he, poor lad, realize that it was wrong to help Pericles
Priam sell his Peerless Pain Paralyzer? How could
he know whether the medicine was any good or not—he
didn’t even know now, as a matter of fact.
As for the Temple of Jimjambo, all that Peter had
done was to wash dishes and work as a kitchen slave,
as in any hotel or restaurant.
It was a story easy to fix up, and especially easy
because the first article in the creed of Socialist
Jennie was that economic circumstances were to blame
for human frailties. That opened the door for
all varieties of grafters, and made the child such
an easy mark that Peter would have been ashamed to
make a victim of her, had it not been that she happened
to stand in the path of his higher purposes—and
also that she happened to be young, only seventeen,
with tender grey eyes, and tempting, sweet lips, alone
there in the house all day.
Section 16
Peter’s adventures in love had so far been pretty
much of a piece with the rest of his life experiences;
there had been hopes, and wonderful dreams, but very
few realizations. Peter knew a lot about such
matters; in the orphan asylum there were few vicious
practices which he did not witness, few obscene imaginings
with which he was not made familiar. Also, Pericles
Priam had been a man like the traditional sailor,
with a girl in every port; and generally in these
towns and villages there had been no place for Peter
to go save where Pericles went, so Peter had been
the witness of many of his master’s amours and
the recipient of his confidences. But none of
Copyrights
100%: the Story of a Patriot from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
