Chapter 3
Section 5 The police had got the crowds driven back by now, and had ropes across the street to hold them, and inside the roped space were several ambulances and a couple of patrol wagons. Peter was shoved into one of these latter, and a policeman sat by his side, and the bell
clanged, and the patrol wagon forced its way slowly through the struggling crowd. Half an hour later they arrived at the huge stone jail, and Peter was marched inside. There were no formalities, they did not enter Peter on the books, or take his name or his fingerprints. Some higher power had spoken, and Peter's fate was already determined.
He was taken into an elevator and down into a basement, and then down a flight of stone steps into a deeper basement, and there was an iron door with a tiny slit an inch wide and six inches long near the top. This was the hole, and the door was opened and Peter shoved inside into utter darkness. The door banged, the bolts rattled, and then silence.
Peter sank upon a cold stone floor, a bundle of abject and hideous misery. These events had happened with such terrifying rapidity that Peter Gudge had hardly time to keep track of them. But now he had plenty of time. He had nothing but time.
He could think the whole thing out, and realized the ghastly trick which fate had played upon him. He lay there and time passed. He had no way of measuring it, no idea whether it was hours or days. It was cold and clammy in the stone cell.
They called it the cooler, and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device. They just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest. And surely no more tormented mind than the mind of Peter Gudge had ever been put in that
black hole. It was the more terrible, because so utterly undeserved, so preposterous. For such a thing to happen to him, Peter Gudge, of all people, who took such pains to avoid discomfort in life, who was always ready to oblige anybody, to do anything he was told so as to have an easy time, a sufficiency of food and a warm corner to crawl into.
What could have persuaded fate to pick him for the victim of this cruel prank, to put him into this position where he could not avoid suffering no matter what he did? They wanted him to tell something, and Peter would have been perfectly willing to tell anything, but how could he tell it when he did not know it? The more Peter thought about it, the more outraged he became.
It was monstrous. He sat up and glared into the black darkness. He talked to himself. He talked to the world outside, to the universe which had forgotten his existence. He stormed.
He wept. He got on his feet and flung himself about the cell, which was six feet square and barely tall enough for him to stand erect. He pounded on the door with his one hand which Guffy had not lamed. He kicked and he shouted.
But there was no answer, and so far as he could tell, there was no one to hear. When he had exhausted himself, he sank down and fell into a haunted sleep. And then he wakened again, to a reality worse than any nightmare. That awful man was coming after him again. He was going to torture him, to make him tell what he did not know.
All the ogres and all the demons that had ever been invited to frighten the imagination of children were as nothing compared to the image of the man called Guffy, as Peter thought of him. Well ages after Peter had been locked up, he heard sounds outside and the door was opened. Peter was cowering in the corner, thinking that Guffy had come.
There was a scraping on the floor and then the door was banged again, and silence fell. Peter investigated and discovered that they had put in a chunk of bread in a pan of water. Then more ages passed, and Peter's impotent raging were repeated. Then once more they brought bread and water, and Peter wondered, was it twice a day they brought it, or was this a new day?
And how long did they mean to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He asked these questions of the man who brought the bread and water, but the man made no answer. He never at any time spoke a word. Peter had no company in that hole but his god, and Peter was not well acquainted with
his god, and did not enjoy a tete-a-tete with him. What troubled Peter most was the cold. It got into his bones and his teeth were chattering all the time. Despite all his moving about, he could not keep warm. When the man opened the door, he cried out to him, begging for a blanket.
Each time the man came, Peter begged more frantically than ever. He was ill. He had been injured in the explosion. He needed a doctor. He was going to die.
But there was never any answer. Peter would lie there and shiver and weep and writhe and babble, then lose consciousness for a while, and not know whether he was awake or asleep, whether he was living or dead. He was becoming delirious, and the things that were happening to him, the people who
were tormenting him, became monsters and fiends who carried him away upon far journeys and plunged him through abysses of terror and torment. And yet, many and strange as were the phantoms which Peter's sick imagination conjured up, there was no one of them as terrible as the reality which prevailed just then in the life of American City, and was determining the destiny of a poor little man by the name of
Peter Gudge. There lived in American City a group of men who had taken possession of its industries and dominated the lives of its population. This group, entrenched in power in the city's business and also in its government, were facing the opposition of a new and rapidly rising power, that of organized labor, determined
to break the oligarchy of business and take over its powers. The struggle of these two groups was coming to its culmination. They were like two mighty wrestlers locked in a grip of death, two giants in combat, who tear up trees by the roots and break off fragments of cliffs from the mountains to smash in each other's skulls.
And poor Peter, what was he? An ant which happened to come blundering across the ground where these combatants met. The earth was shaken with their trampling, the dirt was kicked this way and that, and the unhappy ant was knocked about, tumbled head over heels, buried in the debris, and suddenly, smash.
A giant foot came down upon the place where he was struggling and gasping. Section 6 Peter had been in the hole perhaps three days, perhaps a week. He did not know, and no one ever told him. The door was opened again, and for the first time he heard a voice.
Come out here! Peter had been longing to hear a voice, but now he shrunk, terrified, into a corner. The voice was the voice of Guffey, and Peter knew what it meant. His teeth began to rattle again, and he wailed, I don't know anything!
I can't tell anything! A hand reached in and took him by the collar, and he found himself walking down the corridor in front of Guffey. Shut up! said the man, in answer to all his wailings, and took him into a room and threw him into a chair as if he had been a bundle of bedding, and pulled up another chair and
sat down in front of Peter. Now look here, he said. I want to have an understanding with you. Do you want to go back into that hole again? No, moaned Peter.
Well, I want you to know that you'll spend the rest of your life in that hole, except when you're talking to me. And when you're talking to me, you'll be having your arms twisted off you, and splinters driven into your fingernails, then your skin burned with matches, until you tell me what I want to know.
Nobody's going to help you. Nobody's going to know about it. You're going to stay here with me until you come across. Peter could only sob and moan. Now, continued Guffey, I've been finding out all about you.
I got your life story from the day you were born, and there's no use your trying to hide anything. I know you're a part in this here bomb plot, and I can send you to the gallows without any trouble whatever. But there's some things I can't prove on the other fellows.
They're the big ones, the real devils, and they're the ones I want, so you've got a chance to save yourself, and you better be thankful for it. Peter went on moaning and sobbing. Shut up! cried the man.
And then, fixing Peter's frightened gaze with his own, he continued, understand, you've got a chance to save yourself. All you've got to do is tell what you know. Then you can come out, and you won't have any more trouble. They'll take good care of you.
Everything will be easy for you. Peter continued to gaze like a fascinated rabbit, and such a longing has surged up in his soul to be free and out of trouble and taken care of. If only he had known anything to tell. If only there was some way he could find out something to tell.
End of sections five and six.
