menu_book Chapter 1

100% The Story of a Patriot by Upton Sinclair. 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 nothing.' "'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 got 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-centres 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 through 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 wheat tea in the home of the shoemaker's wife, and might still have been busy with his job of stirring up dissension in the first apostolic church, otherwise known as the Holy Rollers, and of getting the Reverend Gamma-Mail Lunk turned out and Shoemaker Smithers established at the job of pastor, with Peter Gudge as his right-hand man.

All this had been like that through Peter's twenty years of life. Time after time he would get his feeble clutch fixed upon the ladder of prosperity and then something would happen, some wretched thing like the stealing of a fried doughnut, to pry him loose and tumble him down again into the pit of misery. So Peter walked along with his belt drawn tight and his restless blue eyes wandering

here and there looking for a place to get a meal. There were jobs to be had, but there were hard jobs, and Peter wanted an easy one. There are people in this world who live by their muscles and others who live by their wits. Peter belonged to the latter class and had missed many a meal rather than descend in

the social scale. Peter looked into the faces of everyone he passed, searching for a possible opening. Some returned his glance, but never for more than a second, for they saw an insignificant looking man, undersized, undernourished, and with one shoulder higher than the other, a weak chin and mouth, crooked teeth, and a brown moustache too feeble to hold itself

up at the corners. Peter's straw hat had many straws missing and his second-hand brown suit was become third-hand and his shoes were turning over at the sides. In a city where everybody was hustling, everybody, as they phrased it, on the make, why should anyone take a second glance at Peter Gudge?

Why should anyone care about the restless soul hidden inside him, or dream that Peter was, in his own obscure way, a sort of genius? No one did care. No one did dream. It was about two o'clock of an afternoon in July and the sun beat down upon the streets

of American City. There were crowds upon the streets and Peter noticed that everywhere were flags and bunting. Once or twice he heard the strains of distant music and wondered what was up. Peter had not been reading the newspapers. All his attention had been taken up by the quarrels of the Smithers faction and the Lunk

faction in the First Apostolic Church, otherwise known as the Holy Rollers, and great events that had been happening in the world outside were of no concern to him. Peter knew vaguely that on the other side of the world half a dozen mighty nations were locked together in a grip of death. The whole earth was shaken with their struggles and Peter had felt a bit of the trembling

now and then, but Peter did not know that his own country had anything to do with this European quarrel and did not know that certain great interests throughout the country had set themselves to rouse the public to action. This movement had reached American City and the streets had broken out in a blaze of patriotic display.

In all the windows of the stores there were signs, Wake up America! Across the broad main street there were banners, America, prepare! Down in the square at one end of the street a small army was gathering, old veterans of

the Civil War and middle-aged veterans of the Spanish War and regiments of the state militia, and brigades of marines and sailors from the ships in the harbor, and members of fraternal lodges with their Lord High Chief Grand Marshals on horseback with gold sashes and waving white plumes, and all the notables of the city in carriages and a score of bands to stir their feet and ten thousand flags waving above their heads.

Wake up America! And here was Peter Gudge with an empty stomach, coming suddenly upon the swarming crowds in Main Street and having no remotest idea what it was all about. A crowd suggested one thing to Peter. For seven years of his young life he had been an assistant to Pericles Priam and had traveled

over America selling Priam's Peerless Pain Paralyzer. They had written in an automobile and wherever there was a fair or a convention or an excursion or a picnic they were on hand and Pericles Priam would stop at a place where the crowds were thickest and ring a dinner bell and deliver his super eloquent message to humanity. The elixir of life revealed, suffering banished from the earth and all inconveniences of this

mortal state brought to an end for one dollar per bottle of fifteen percent opium. It had been Peter's job to handle the bottles and take in the coin, and so now, when he saw the crowd, he looked about him eagerly. Perhaps there might be some vendor of corn plasters or ink stain removers, or some three-card Monty Man to whom Peter could attach himself for the price of a sandwich.

Peter wormed his way through the crowd for two or three blocks but saw nothing more promising than vendors of American flags on little sticks and of patriotic buttons with Wake Up America. But then on the other side of the street, at one of the crossings, Peter saw a man standing on a truck making a speech and he dug his way through the crowd, elbowing, sliding this way and that, begging everyone's pardon, until at last he was out of the crowd and

standing in the open way which had been cleared for the procession, a seemingly endless road lined with solid walls of human beings with blue uniformed policemen holding them back. Peter started to run across, and at that same instant came the end of the world. Question 2. One who seeks to tell about events in words comes occasionally upon a fundamental difficulty.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain. The event may reveal itself without a moment's warning, but if one is to give a sense of it in words one must prepare for it, build up to it, awaken anticipation, establish a climax.

If the description of this event which fate sprung upon Peter Gudge as he was crossing the street were limited to the one word, bang, in letters a couple of inches high across the page, the impression would hardly be adequate. The end of the world, it seemed to Peter, when he was able to collect enough of his terrified wits to think about it, but at first there was no thinking, there was only sensation,

a terrific roar, as if the whole universe had suddenly turned to sound, a blinding white glare, as of all the lightnings of the heavens, a blow that picked him up as if he had been a piece of thistle down and flung him across the street and against the side of a building. Peter fell upon the sidewalk in a heap, deafened, blinded, stunned, and there he lay. He had no idea how long until gradually his senses began to return to him and from the

confusion certain factors began to stand out, a faint grey smoke that seemed to lie upon the ground, a bitter odour that stung the nostrils and tongue, and screams of people moaning and sobbing and general uproar. Something lay across Peter's chest and he felt that he was suffocating and struggled convulsively to push it away.

The hands with which he pushed felt something hot and wet and slimy, and the horrified Peter realised that it was half the body of a mangled human being. Yes, it was the end of the world. Only a couple of days previously Peter Gudge had been a devout member of the First Apostolic Church, otherwise known as the Holy Rollers, and had listened at prayer meetings to soul-shaking

imaginings out of the Book of Revelations. So Peter knew that this was it, and having many sins upon his conscience, and being in no way eager to confront his God, he looked out over the bodies of the dead and the writhing wounded and saw a row of boxes standing against the building, having been placed there by people who wished to see over the heads of the crowd.

Peter started to crawl and found that he was able to do so, and wormed his way behind one of these packing boxes and got inside and lay hidden from his God. There was blood on him and he did not know whether it was his own or other people's. He was trembling with fright, his crooked teeth were hammering together like those of an angry woodchuck, but the effects of the shock continued to pass away and his wits

to come back to him, and at last Peter realised that he never had taken seriously the ideas of the First Apostolic Church of American City. He listened to the moans of the wounded and to the shouts and uproar of the crowd, and began seriously figuring out what could have happened. There had once been an earthquake in American City.

Could this be another one? Or had a volcano opened up in the midst of Main Street? Or could it have been a gas main? And was this the end? Or would it explode some more?

Would the volcano go on erupting and blow Peter and his frail packing box through the walls of Guggenheim's department store? So Peter waited and listened to the horrible sounds of people in agony and leading with others to put them out of it. Peter heard voices of men giving orders and realised that these must be policemen and

that no doubt there would be ambulances coming. Maybe there was something the matter with him, and he ought to crawl out and get himself taken care of. All of a sudden Peter remembered his stomach, and his wits, which had been sharpened by 20 years' struggle against the hostile world, realised in a flash the opportunity which

fate had brought to him. He must pretend to be wounded, badly wounded. He must be unconscious, suffering from shock and shattered nerves. Then they would take him to the hospital and put him in a soft bed and give him things to eat.

Maybe he might stay there for weeks, and they might give him money when he came out. Or perhaps he might get a job in the hospital, something that was easy and required only alert intelligence. Perhaps the head doctor in the hospital might want somebody to watch the other doctors to see if they were neglecting the patients, or perhaps flirting with some of the nurses.

There was sure to be something like that going on. It had been that way in the orphan's home where Peter had spent a part of his childhood till he ran away. It had been that way again in the great temple of Jimjambu, conducted by Pastian El Calandra, chief Magistrian of Elithorinian exoticism.

Peter had worked as scullion in the kitchen in that mystic institution and had worked his way upward until he possessed the confidence of Tushbar Akragas, major domo and right-hand man of the prophet himself. Wherever there was a group of people and a treasure to be administered, there Peter knew was backbiting and scandal and intriguing and spying, and a chance for somebody whose

brains were, all there. It might seem strange that Peter should think about such things, just then when the earth had opened up in front of him and the air had turned to roaring noise and blinding white flame and had hurled him against the side of a building and dropped the bleeding half of a woman's body across his chest.

But Peter had lived from earliest childhood by his wits and by nothing else, and such a fellow has to learn to use his wits under any and all circumstances, no matter how bewildering. Peter's training covered almost every emergency one could think of. He had even at times occupied himself by imagining what he would do if the Holy Rollers should turn out to be right, and if suddenly Gabriel's trumpet were to blow and he were to find himself

confronting Jesus in a long white nightgown. End of sections 1 and 2.