The Peck's Bad Boy Megapack

by George W. Peck

  Yours,

  Hennery.

  CHAPTER XX.

  The Bad Boy Tells About the Land of the Czar and the Trouble They Had to Get There—Dad Does a Stunt and Mixes It Up with the People and Soldiers.

  St. Petersburg, Russia.—

  My Dear Groceryow-ski: Well, sir, I ‘spose you will be surprised to hear from me in Russia, but there was no use talking when Dad said he was going to St. Petersburg if it was the last act of his life. He got talking with a Japaneser in Rome and the Jap said the war in the far east would last until every Russian was killed, unless America interfered to put a stop to it, and as Roosevelt didn’t appear to have sand enough to offer his services to the czar, what it needed was for some representative American citizen who was brave and had nerve to go to St. Petersburg and see the czarovitch and give him the benefit of a good American talk. The Jap said the American who brought about peace, by a few well chosen remarks, would be the greatest man of the century, and would live to be bowed down to by kings and emperors and all the world would doff hats to him.

  At first dad was a little leary about going on such a mission without credentials from Washington, but as luck would have it, he met an exiled Russian at a restaurant, who told dad that he reminded him of Gen. Grant, because dad had a wart on the side of his nose, and he told dad that Russia would keep on fighting until every Japanese was killed unless some distinguished American should be raised up who deemed it his duty to go to St. Petersburg and see the Little Father, and in the interest of humanity advise the czar to call a halt before he had exterminated the whole yellow race. Dad asked the Russian if he thought the czar would grant an audience to an American of eminence in his own country, and the Russian told dad that Nicholas just doted on Americans, and that there was hardly ever an American ballet dancer that went to Russia but what the czar sent for her to come and see him and dance before the grand dukes, and he always gave them jewels and cans of caviar as souvenirs of their visit.

  Dad thought it over all night, and the next morning we started for Russia and I wish we had joined an expedition to discover the North Pole instead of coming here. Say, it is harder to get into Russia than it would be to get out of a penitentiary at home. At the frontier we were met by guards on horseback and on foot, policemen, detectives and other grafters, who took our passports and money, and one fellow made me exchange my socks with him. Then they imprisoned us in a stable with some cows until they could hold a coroner’s inquest on our passports and divide our money. We slept with the cows the first night in Russia, and I do not want to sleep again with animals that chew cuds all night, and get up half a dozen times to hump up their backs and stretch and bellow. We never slept a wink, and could look out through the cracks in the stable and see the guards shaking dice for our money.

  Finally they looked at the great seal on our passports and saw it was an American document, and they began to turn pale, as pale as a Russian can get without using soap, and when I said, “Washington, embassador, minister plenipotentiary, Roosevelt, Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, E Pluribus Unum, whoopla, San Juan Hill,” and pointed to dad, who was just coming out of the stable, looking like Washington at Valley Forge, the guards and other robbers bowed to dad, gave him a bag full of Russian money in place of that which they had taken away, and let us take a freight train for St. Petersburg, and they must have told the train men who we were, because everybody on the cars took off their hats to us, and divided their lunch with us.

  Dad could not understand the change in the attitude of the people towards us until I told him that they took him for a distinguished American statesman, and that as long as we were in Russia he must try to look like George Washington and act like Theodore Roosevelt, so every little while dad would stand up in the aisle of the car and pose like George Washington and when anybody gave him a sandwich or a cigarette he would show his teeth and say, “Deelighted,” and all the way to St. Petersburg dad carried out his part of the programme and we were not robbed once on the trip, but dad tried to smoke one of the cigarettes that was given him by a Cossack, and he died in my arms, pretty near.

  They make cigarettes out of baled hay that has been used for beddings and covered with paper that has been used to poison flies. I never smelled anything so bad since they fumigated our house by the board of health after the hired girl had smallpox.

  Well, we got to St. Petersburg in an awful time, and went to a hotel, suspected by the police, and marked as undesirable guests by the Cossacks, and winked at by the walking delegates and strikers, who thought we were non-union men looking for their jobs.

  The next day the religious ceremony of “blessing the Neva” took place, where all the population gets out on the bank of the river, with overshoes on, and fur coats, and looks down on the river, covered with ice four feet thick, and the river is blessed. In our country the people would damn a river that had ice four feet thick, but in Russia they bless anything that will stand it. We got a good place on the bank of the river, with about a million people who had sheepskin coats on, and who steamed like a sheep ranch, and were enjoying the performance, looking occasionally at the Winter palace, where the czar was peeking out of a window, wondering from which direction a bomb would come to blow him up, when a battery of artillery across the river started to fire a salute, and then the devil was to pay. It seems that the gentlemen who handled the guns, and who were supposed to fire blank cartridges into the air, put in loaded cartridges, filled with grape shot, and took aim at the Winter palace, and cut loose at Mr. Czar.

  Well, you would have been paralyzed to see the change that came over that crowd, blessing the river one minute and damning the czar and the grand dukes the next. The shot went into the Winter palace and tore the furniture and ripped up the ceiling of the room the czar was in, and in a moment all was chaos, as though every Russian knew the czar was to be assassinated at that particular moment, and all rushed toward the Winter palace as though they expected pieces of the Little Father would be thrown out the window for them to play football with. For a people who are supposed to be lawful and law-abiding, and who love their rulers, it seemed strange to see them all so tickled when they thought he was blown higher than a kite by his own soldiers.

  Dad and I started with the crowd for the Winter palace, and then we had a taste of monarchial government. The crowd was rushing over us and dad got mad and pulled off his coat and said he could whip any confounded foreigner that rubbed against him with a sheepskin coat on, and he was just on the point of smiting a fellow with whiskers that looked like scrambled bristles off a black hog when a regiment of Cossacks came down on the crowd, riding horses like a wild west show, and with whips in their hands, with a dozen lashes to each whip, and they began to lash the crowd and ride over them, while the people covered their faces with their arms, and run away, afraid of the whips, which cut and wound and kill, as each lash has little lead bullets fastened to them and a stroke of the whip is like being shot with buck shot or kicked with a frozen boot.

  Well, sir, dad was going to show the Cossacks that he was pretty near an American citizen and didn’t propose to be whipped like a school boy by a teacher that looked like a valentine, so he tried to look like George Washington defying the British, but it didn’t work, for a Cossack rode right up to him and lashed him over the back (and about 15 buck shot in his whip took dad right where the pants are tight when you bend over to pick up something) and the Cossack laughed when dad straightened up and started to run. I never saw such a change in a man as there was in dad. He started for our hotel, and as good a sprinter as I am I couldn’t keep up with him, but I kept him in sight. Before we got to the hotel a sledge came along, not an “old sledge,” such as you play with cards, high-low-Jack-game, but a sort of a sleigh, with three horses abreast, and I yelled to dad to take a hitch on the sledge, and he grabbed on with his feet on the runners, and a man in the sledge with a uniform on, who seemed to be a grand duke, ’cause everybody was chasing him and yelling to head him off, hit dad
in the nose with the butt of a revolver, and dad fell off in the snow and the crowd that was chasing the grand duke picked dad up and carried him on their shoulders because they thought he had tried to assassinate the duke, and we were escorted to our hotel by the strikers.

  We didn’t know what they were, but you can tell the laboring men here because they wear blouses and look hungry, and when they left us the landlord notified the police that suspicious characters were at the hotel, and came there escorted by the mob, and the police surrounded the house and dad went to our room and used witch hazel on himself where the Cossack hit him with the loaded whip. He says Russia will pay pretty dear for that stroke of the whip by the Cossack, and I think dad is going to join the revolution that is going to be pulled off next Sunday.

  They are going to get about a million men to take a petition to the czar, workingmen and anarchists, and dad says he is going as an American anarchist who is smarting from injustice, and I guess no native is smarting more than dad is, ’cause he has to stand up to eat and lie on his stummick to sleep. There is going to be a hades of a time here in St. Petersburg this next week, and dad and I are going to be in it clear up to our necks.

  Dad has given up trying to see the czar about stopping the war and says the czar and the whole bunch can go plum (to the devil) and he will die with the mob and follow a priest who is stirring the people to revolt.

  Gee, I hope dad will not get killed here and be buried in a trench with a thousand Russians, smelling as they do.

  I met a young man from Chicago, who is here selling reapers for the harvester trust, and he says if you are once suspected of having sympathy with the working people who are on a strike you might just as well say your prayers and take rough on rats, ’cause the Cossacks will get you, and he would advise me and dad to get out of here pretty quick, but when I told dad about it he put one hand on his heart and the other on his pants and said “Arnica, arnica, arnica!” and the police that were on guard near his room thought he meant anarchy, and they sent four detectives to stay in dad’s room.

  The people here, the Chicago young man told me, think the Cossacks are human hyenas, that they have had their hearts removed by a surgical operation when young, and a piece of gizzard put in in place of the heart, and that they are natural murderers, the sight of blood acting on them the same as champagne on a human being, and that but for the Cossacks Russia would have a population of loving subjects that would make it safe for the Little Father to go anywhere in Russia unattended, but with Cossacks ready to whip and murder and laugh at suffering, the people are becoming like men bitten by rabid dogs, and they froth at the mouth and have spasms and carry bombs up their sleeves, ready to blow up the members of the royal family, and there you are.

  If you do not hear from me after next Sunday you can put dad’s obituary and mine in the local papers and say we died of an overdose of Cossack. If we get through this revolution alive you will hear from me, but this is the last revolution I am going to attend.

  Yours,

  Hennery.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  Dad Sees a Russian Revolution and Faints—The Bad Boy Arranges a Wolf Hunt—Dad Threatens to Throw the Boy to the Wolves.

  St. Petersburg, Russia.—

  My Dear Grocery-witz: Well, sir, dad and I have got too much of Russia the quickest of any two tourists you ever heard of. That skirmish we saw, the day the Russians blessed the Neva, and shot blank cartridges filled with old iron at the czar, was not a marker to the trouble the next Sunday, when the working people marched to the Winter Palace, to present a petition to the “Little Father.”

  We thought a revolution was like a play, and that it would be worth going miles to see. Dad was in South America once when there was a revolution, where more than a dozen greasers, with guns that wouldn’t shoot, put on a dozen different kinds of uniforms, and yelled: “Down with the government,” and frothed at the mouth, and drank buttermilk and yelled Spanish swear words, and acted brave, until a native soldier with white pajamas came out with a gun and shot one of the revolutionists in the thumb, when the revolution was suppressed and the next day the revolutionists were pounding stone, with cannon balls chained to their legs; and dad thought a revolution in Russia would be something like that, and that we could get on a front porch and watch it as it went by, and joke with the revolution, and throw confetti, like it was a carnival, but that Sunday that the Russian revolution was begun, we had enough blood to last us all our lives.

  We got a place sitting on an iron picket fence, and we saw the people coming up the street towards the Winter Palace, dressed mostly in blouses, and looking as innocent as a crowd of sewer diggers at home going up to the city hall to ask for a raise in wages of two shillings a day. Nobody had a gun, and no one would have known how to use a gun, and all looked like poor people going to prayers. There were troops everywhere, and every soldier acted as though he was afraid something would happen to spoil their chance of killing anybody. The snow on the streets was clean and as white as the wings of a peace dove, and dad said the show was no better than a parade of laboring men at home on Labor day.

  Suddenly some officer yelled to the parade to stop, and the priest at the head of the procession, who was carrying a cross, slowed up a little, like the drum major of a band when the populace at home begins to throw eggs, but they kept on, and then the shooting began, and in a minute men, women and children were rolling in the snow, bleeding and dying, the marchers were too stunned to run, and the deadly guns kept on spitting fire, and the street was full of dead and dying, and then the Cossacks rode over the dead and sabered and knouted the living, and as the snow was patched with red blood, dad fainted away and fell off the picket fence, and hung by one pant leg, which caught on a picket, and crowds rushed in every direction, and it was an hour before I could get a drosky to haul dad to the hotel.

  Dad collapsed when he got to the hotel, and I got a doctor and a nurse, and for two days I had to watch the revolution alone, while dad had fits of remorse ’cause he brought me to such a charnel house, he said.

  Well, if you ever go anywhere, traveling for pleasure, do not go to Russia, because it is the saddest place on earth. I have seen no person smile or laugh in all the ten days we have been here, except a Cossack when he run a saber through a little girl, and his laugh was like the coyote on the prairie when he captures a little lamb. The people look either heart-broken or snarly, like the people confined in an insane asylum at home.

  The czar, who a week ago was loved by the people, who believed if they went to him, as to their God, and appealed for guidance, is to-day hated by all, and instead of “Nicholas the Good,” since he scampered away to a castle in the country, and crawled under a bed, all the people call him “the Little Jack Rabbit,” and his fate is sealed, as a bomb will blow him into pieces so small they will have to be swept up in a dustpan for burial, maybe before dad and I can get out of Russia.

  Going to St. Petersburg for a pleasant outing is a good deal like visiting the Chicago stockyards to watch the bloody men kill the cattle, and the butchers in the stockyards, calloused against any feeling for suffering animals, are like the soldiers here who shoot down their neighbors because they are hired to do so. The murder of those unarmed working men, that Sunday, has changed a helpless, pleading people into anarchists with deadly bombs in their blouses, where they were accustomed to carry black bread to sustain life, and with the menace of Japan in the far east and an outraged people at home, Russia is in a bad way, and if I was the czar or a grand duke, I would find a woodchuck hole and arrange with the woodchuck for a furnished flat.

  I didn’t think there was going to be anything going on in Russia except bloodshed and bombs, and things to make you sorry that you were here, and I was willing to take chloroform and let them carry me home in a box, with my description on the cover, until the doctor told me that dad was in a condition of nervousness, that he needed something to happen to get his mind off of the awful scenes he had witnessed, and asked me
if I couldn’t think of something to excite him and wake him up, and then dad said, after he got so he could go out doors: “Hennery, you have always been Johnny on the spot when I needed diversion, and I want you to take your brain apart, and oil the works, and see if you can’t conjure up something to get my blood circulating and my pores open for business, and anything you think of goes, and I swear I will not kick if you scare the boots off of me.”

  Well, that was right into my hand; and I set my mind to strike at four p.m. I had been out riding once with the Chicago man, in a sledge, with three horses abreast, all runaway horses, and the driver was a Cossack who lashed the horses into a run every smooth place he found in the road, and it was like running to a fire, so I got the Chicago fellow to go with me and we found the Cossack, and he was drunker than usual. There is a kind of liquor here called vodka, which skins wood alcohol and carbolic acid to a finish, and when a man is full of it he is so mad he wants to cut his own throat. This driver had put up sideboards on his neck and had two jags in one, and we hired him by the hour.

  I told the Chicago man the circumstances and that I had got to get dad out of his trance, and he said he would help me. When I was out riding the day before I noticed that the road was full of great dane dogs, wolf hounds and stag hounds, which followed their master’s sledges out in the country, and the dogs loafed around, hungry, looking for bones, and fighting each other, so I decided to get the dogs to chase our sledge and make dad think we were chased by wolves. I thought that would make dad stand without hitching, and it did.