THE GRAFT RING
I
Quincy Thornwell was dining with his Aunt Cornelia. He called her that,
scrupulously, though he was only two years her junior; he had done it,
scrupulously, for forty-five years, since he had been a freshman at
Harvard, and she had married into the older generation. Every so often
he came to dinner, as a mark of respect, and because family solidarity
must be maintained, as the last trace of order in a disintegrating
world. For the same reason he put on his honorific clothes; a matter
of ritual, a symbol of membership in a group which did the right thing
always, as a matter of course and without discussion.
Cornelia also did her part. Her dinner-gown was years out of fashion,
but that was a sign that she was superior to fashion. Her little
apartment was in a tenement, but that did not matter, because everybody
knew it was eccentricity, not necessity. Visiting members of the
family had brought boxes now and then, quite casually, and almost
without mentioning it; so now she had silver, and shining crystal, and
old family china, and linen with strawberry designs, lighted by four
tall thin tapering candles. There were flowers in the center of the
table--sent with Quincy’s card. The Negro maid wore a white cap and
apron, and had learned how to serve a meal, because Deborah had sent a
real servant to give her lessons. No matter how “red” your poor mother
may turn in her old age, she must be kept in touch with the decencies
of life.
Quincy--continue to pronounce him like a disease of the throat--was
dieting under a doctor’s orders, and shrinking up rapidly in the
process, so that there were more wrinkles in his face every time
you met him. He had become almost entirely bald, and with a bright
pink scalp. His nose and cheeks were red, with fine little veins of
purple--his blue blood showing through, he would say, mockingly. The
extraordinary thing was that when he opened his mouth in laughter,
which he did frequently, you saw a cavern of exactly the same color; it
seemed unhuman, and when you knew him well you realized that it was.
No more canvas-backs, cooked a quick brown on the outside and deep
purple inside, according to the fastidious taste of an habitué of the
Somerset Club! No more good honest roast beef, not even any more Boston
beans, since they too were high protein, and suspected of uric acid!
You must have fish for Quincy, and then chicken--white meat, if you
please; and no mayonnaise on the salad--the devil of it was it made you
talk about food, and started other people telling their diets, and the
women with their everlasting reducing. Thence the company got onto the
subject of drink, and after that there was nothing but the private life
of their bootleggers. Good conversation was dead in Boston.
What Quincy meant by good conversation was gossip about the hundred or
two persons he knew, and the thousand or two he knew about. They were
always doing queer things, or getting into trouble, and he would tell
the tales with comical embellishments, and throw back his head and
chuckle. He had been a widower for the greater part of his life, so no
woman had felt free to point out to him how queer he looked when he
revealed his dental plates. But his mother or some one had taught him
very young that it is bad form to laugh, so he had a series of chuckles
which became convulsive, and turned his face a deeper red, but never
became audible.
He talked about the family. Poor old Father was failing fast; he had
to have a man to go about with him. He still insisted on riding a pony
along with the Scatterbridge children, so the attendant had to have
a pony too--impossible to imagine a more comical spectacle than that
family procession, riding all over the estate but never going off it,
for fear of automobiles. Impossible to play chess with Father any more,
yet it was necessary to pretend to play, to avoid breaking the old
man’s heart. The universal curse of life, that our ambitions exceed our
abilities! Nothing of that sort for Quincy, he had found out what he
could do, and confined his wishes to the possible. He might never be
heroic, but he would be a lot safer.
James Scatterbridge was one of the unsafe ones. Tried to do too much
with those enormous mills. It seemed there would never be any market
for cotton goods again. Rupert and John Quincy--that was Quincy’s
older brother--were having the devil’s own time pulling James through.
Both of them were showing the strain of running all the finance of New
England. To the devil with it, said Quincy; enough for him if he could
watch the beast, and judge the right moment, and step in and slice off
a juicy chunk. Rupert and John scolded him because he didn’t produce
anything; and he chuckled--a fine mess they had produced!
The maid brought in a pitcher of steaming hot water, with a couple
of glasses; and Quincy took from his hip-pocket a silver flask,
comfortably curved to fit that portion of the anatomy. He understood
that he had to “bring his own” when he came to Aunt Cornelia’s, because
she was engaged in more serious kinds of law-breaking, and could not
afford to expose herself to the lesser risks. Quincy mixed himself a
mild dose of rum and sugar and water, and Cornelia took a sip, in order
to be good company. “My ancestors used to smuggle in molasses to make
this stuff,” said the old gentleman. “Now the stuff itself is smuggled,
and a new aristocracy is emerging, that will dine on spaghetti from
gold plate.”
So he talked about prohibition! They were bringing it in by the
schooner-load, everywhere along the coast, every night that didn’t
happen to be moonlit or stormy. Yet the prices got higher and higher,
and the quality worse and worse. You might get ever so good a
bootlegger, and investigate his ancestry, his police record, his church
affiliations and all that, and still you couldn’t be sure, because
the rascal dealers would fool him. They were making synthetic stuff
in the cellars of Boston slums, putting it onto boats, unloading it
on the shore, and selling it for Canadian Scotch. The “booties” were
being held up all along the line, they would pay the police where they
started from, and then the police would send a motor-cycle cop after
them to hold them up and get some more.
It was a good thing for labor, Quincy admitted; made it possible to
get work done on Monday, so for that reason the law would probably
stay. But it was mighty demoralizing; graft was spreading so fast,
you hardly knew the old New England. Quincy had been talking that day
with a politician in a boardroom, watching the course of stocks, and
this politician had quoted the value of the pickpocket, burglary, and
confidence men concessions of Suffolk and Middlesex counties. “What
do you think of that?” said Quincy, and had one of his convulsions of
chuckling.
“It makes me think of something I want to ask you,” said Cornelia. “I
also have connections with the underworld nowadays.”
“I know,” said Quincy, “those two wops of yours.”
“No,” said his aunt, “not the wops, but the officials who are
prosecuting them. I need a lot of advice, provided it can be
confidential.”
The old gentleman became instantly serious. “My dear Aunt Cornelia, I
gossip about every family in the world but one!”
II
Cornelia set forth her problem. The Italians who were trying to save
the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti found no difficulty in believing that
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was corrupt. They knew all the
bootleggers--some of them _were_ bootleggers--and were used to paying
the police. But Cornelia herself found it hard to believe that the
woman, Mrs. De Falco, who told them they could buy the freedom of Sacco
and Vanzetti for fifty thousand dollars, really knew what she was
talking about, and had the power she claimed.
Quincy Thornwell looked thoughtful. “Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of
money, Aunt Cornelia, even for our politicians. My advice would be, say
forty, and when you come to the real showdown, it will be thirty.”
It might have been possible to see a humorous aspect to that reply, but
Cornelia was not in a smiling mood. “You mean it is genuine, then?”
Quincy answered, it surprised him a little, coming from Plymouth and
Norfolk counties. Suffolk everybody knew about, it was Irish, and the
decent people had moved out and let the “micks” have their own way.
Suffolk County comprised the city of Boston proper; and years ago,
when it had gone Democratic, the old aristocracy of wealth and fashion
had begun an exodus, and now lived in suburban towns, where they could
run their local governments and spend their own taxes. They regarded
Boston as the place where they came to clip their coupons and do their
shopping and go to the theater. So long as the politicians refrained
from stealing the banks and public buildings, the blue bloods generally
let them alone.
“It sounds like regular city hall stuff,” continued Quincy. “You know
that people refer to the city hall as the ‘steal works.’ When they
arrested those wops, the gang thought they had no friends, and could be
sent up without trouble, and it would be a good mark for the police.
But now it appears they have money, and money is more than good marks.
It seems obvious enough.”
“Quincy, do you think a civilization can endure on the basis of
corruption like that?”
“No, of course it can’t.”
“You give up our civilization?”
“I gave it up a generation ago, when I saw we didn’t have sense enough
to keep the scum of Europe out. We built a nation on the basis of
self-government, and we could do it because we had people who were
capable of self-government. But when we let ourselves be overrun by
hordes of peasants, we signed our own death-warrant. A few of us old
fogies protested, but we couldn’t stop it, and we gave up. I said to
Uncle Josiah, thirty years ago, I wouldn’t touch politics again with a
ten-foot pole. And Father said the same.”
“Josiah insisted we could teach them, Quincy.”
“The last thing in the world they want is to learn anything from us.
They hate us because we are different, and better, and we know it.
All they want is to rob us of everything we have. You saw those wops
plundering the shoe companies--and now the Irish step in to plunder the
wops. That’s the way it goes in the jungle.”
“But, Quincy, the government in Norfolk County is Yankee, and so are
most of the voters!”
“That’s all right, but if you dig into it, you’ll find it’s the Irish
ring, mark my words. Some of the loot will go to Larry Shay, the head
fixer for the crime concessions.”
Said Cornelia, “I went to see Shay about this case. Henry told me he’d
be a good lawyer to try it.”
“None better in Massachusetts. What did he say?”
“He wanted fifty thousand dollars.”
Quincy had one of his spells of chuckling. “And you didn’t notice the
coincidence in price! Don’t you see, Aunt Cornelia--when you didn’t
take up Larry’s proposition, he tried it on the Italians! He figured
that you, being a simple old lady, might really believe the wops to
be innocent; but the Italians wouldn’t share your touching faith, so
they’d talk turkey. If the politicians had been wise, they’d have
warned the Italians not to mention the matter to you.”
“As a matter of fact, they did,” admitted Cornelia. “They tried to keep
Lee Swenson out also. The woman has refused to meet him.”
“Well, there you are,” said Quincy. “He has a bad reputation--he’s
a labor agitator and a publicity seeker, and they want to deal with
criminals. No, Aunt Cornelia, you don’t have to worry about it, all you
have to do is raise the money. Have you got it in sight?”
“I don’t know. Some of the Italians have hinted it might be got.”
“Send out the boys and raid another payroll!” said Quincy, with a grin.
“Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not a millionaire, as you know, and I have
to work for my money--even though it seems easy to those who never
played the market. But I’ll chip in a few thousand to help you out of
this trouble. I think the family would put up the whole amount, if they
could be sure it would teach you a lesson.”
“You mean,” said Cornelia, “I would never again believe in the
government of Massachusetts?” There was a naughty twinkle in her eye.
But now her worldly-wise old nephew was “talking turkey” himself. “I
mean that you’d take a little care of yourself, and quit fooling with
anarchists.”
“But, Quincy, don’t you think it is up to us people of the old stock to
set the wops an example? If I sell out, what will be left for them?”
“Don’t you really want to get your friends out of trouble?”
“Yes, but I want to get a lot of others out of trouble also. It would
be a poor bargain, from our point of view, to save two men from the
electric chair and leave millions in slavery.”
“Now, Aunt Cornelia, don’t start your Bolshevik propaganda on me! I
know I’m a parasite and a bloodsucker, but every last one of your wops
would take my place if he could get it, and I assure you, before he
does get it, he’s got to fight.”
To which Cornelia replied: “If you only knew how much like a Bolshevik
you talk, you’d be quite shocked by yourself!”
III
The first serious split in the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was
developing over the problem of the De Falco offer. On the one side was
Lee Swenson, backed by Betty and Joe, who were like two bloodhounds
held in leash. On the other side were some of the anarchists--those who
stayed in the background, and were not seen in headquarters.
Lee Swenson came to Cornelia. “Nonna, we have a marvelous case to
fight. I know what I’m talking about, I can make it the most famous
labor case in American history, if the committee will only stand behind
me, and give me the funds. This De Falco thing is plain blackmail; the
police know that Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent of the crime, but they
think they’ve got other things on the group, and expect to trade on
our fears. You know how it is with the anarchists, they are liable to
be deported--and maybe there are other secrets that break their nerve.
Some of them want to settle; they won’t say it plainly, but they are
blocking my moves.”
“But, Lee! Yesterday Bart said to me he’d rather die than be bought
out.”
“I know; but Bart is in jail, and it’s the committee that is paymaster.
I have an idea some of them are going ahead with their plans to raise
the money and close the deal. If we persist in having our way, they
might throw us down and ruin us.”
“Oh, surely not that!”
“You are new at the game of intrigue, Nonna. It might even happen by
accident--we have got to allow for the spies on our committee. The
prosecution will have one, and the Department of Justice will have one,
and they probably won’t even know each other. If we delay too long and
talk too much, we may find ourselves arrested, charged with an effort
to bribe the noble-minded authorities.”
Joe and Betty had already made a few automobile excursions, following
Mrs. De Falco’s car. They had seen it spend a couple of evenings parked
near the car of the gentleman who was to be employed for a retaining
fee now reduced to forty thousand dollars. On one of these occasions a
public official’s car had come up, and he had entered the house. Also
Lee Swenson had investigated some “references” the woman had offered;
that is to say, murder cases and other crimes which had resulted in
dismissals and acquittals through her intervention. What Lee found was
that when he started to question the lawyers and relatives who had
negotiated these settlements, they became ill at ease and refused to
talk--which was to be expected under the circumstances.
Also he had an “investigator” looking into Mrs. De Falco herself. She
was one of the many who hung around the courts, looking for openings to
be of service to lawyers and witnesses. In short, she was a “runner,”
one of those who intervene between accused persons and lawyers.
Ignorant foreigners who have broken the law are badly frightened, and
the “runner” is a comforting friend, who helps to steer them in a
strange world--and incidentally finds out how much money they have, or
how much their friends can raise, so that the lawyer can fix the fee
at the maximum, and then “split” with the “runner.” Such a person soon
learns the tricks of the courts, and profits by many forms of graft.
An odd circumstance, that the investigators reported Mrs. De Falco had
an improvident husband, and the fruits of her legal labors went to
maintain a home for several children. A complicated world to work in!
She persisted in refusing to see Lee Swenson under any circumstances;
so Lee sent to New York for his dictograph--the one he had used in
breaking up the government witnesses in a frame-up against the I.W.W.
in Seattle five years previously. He set it up in the room where
Felicani had been meeting Mrs. De Falco, a big barren place in an old
tenement house, next door to a print-shop. He got his own stenographer,
and another whom he could trust--and whom the jury would have to
trust, because she had served with the A.E.F. in France! The trap was
set for seven o’clock in the evening, and the De Falco woman came on
schedule time and repeated her assurances of what she was able to do,
and explained that it was impossible to come any lower in the price.
Meantime several persons strolled casually into the room and out
again, so as to be able to testify that Felicani and Mrs. De Falco were
talking; and the stenographers diligently took down what they got of
the conversation. Unfortunately the printer next door, not having been
warned of the plot, started up one of his presses, which caused the
dictograph to sound like an avalanche in Switzerland!
However, part of the conversation was recorded; and now, what next?
Some of the committee insisted upon waiting, they wanted to get money
and mark it, and pay it to Mrs. De Falco. But they delayed to act, and
Lee Swenson suspected they were playing for time, their real purpose
was to raise the full amount and settle the case. He insisted, such a
story would not lie quiet more than a day or two; so many persons knew
about it, and the moment the authorities got a hint it was a matter of
minutes which would act first. Joe Randall, as a newspaper man, backed
up Lee in this; everything depended on how the story first reached the
public. If the authorities filed a complaint, charging Felicani with an
effort to purchase justice, that would be what the world would believe
about the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, regardless of what evidence
might later be produced. Trust the capitalist press for that!
So Lee took matters into his own hands, and filed a complaint, charging
Mrs. De Falco with soliciting a bribe. It was a matter for which some
of the anarchists never forgave either him or Joe. Who were these two,
non-anarchists, therefore enemies of anarchism, to come in and play
with the lives of two comrades? To involve Sacco and Vanzetti in an
effort to use capitalist courts, which they regarded with abhorrence!
Was not Mrs. De Falco herself a human being, a victim of the class
system? What business had an anarchist giving information against her,
and trying to send her to jail? The Italians did not hesitate to charge
that Lee Swenson wanted to get the money, instead of the De Falco
woman; he wanted a big legal case for himself!
IV
A terrible world to live in! A world full of tangles impossible to
unravel, of dangers impossible to foresee! A world in which wild
beasts roamed in the darkness, slaying and devouring--no change from
the old days of the jungle!
About twenty-four hours after the De Falco story was spread on the
front page of all the Boston newspapers--“Reds Charge Bribery Plot
to State,” and so on--Cornelia’s telephone rang, and she heard the
voice of her oldest daughter. “Mother, is that you?” The voice was
trembling, so that Cornelia’s heart started at the first sound. “What
has happened?”
“Oh, Mother, the most dreadful thing! I can’t tell you over the phone!
I will come at once. Be at home!” There was a sob in Deborah’s voice,
something that was rarely heard. But no chance to ask more--she hung up
the receiver.
Half an hour later she came in, breathless from hurrying up the stairs.
Her mother had never seen such distress on her face. Mutely she held
out a letter, which Cornelia took. It had a canceled special delivery
stamp, on an ordinary envelope, such as you buy at the post office,
addressed on a typewriter to Mrs. Rupert Alvin at the Commonwealth
Avenue address. Cornelia opened it, and found a typewritten sheet of
paper, which seemed to burn her eyeballs as she read:
“Call off your daughter and your mother from the aiding and
abetting of anarchists, or you and your family will live to regret
it. Why do you let your daughter travel about town day and night
with a young anarchist with a criminal record? Look up his wife
he deserted. Do you want the world to know that your daughter
sleeps with him under your mother’s protection? We want no Russian
free love in Boston. We will expose them in the papers if they do
not get out of town, and your other daughter’s wedding will be
postponed again.
“AMERICAN PATRIOT.”
So there was a bagful of cats turned loose, to rampage over the place,
and maintain a dreadful clamor. No possibility of counting them--any
more than the stream of wild questions flung at Cornelia’s gray head.
One horror, of course, led the rest: was it true that Betty was living
in adulterous relations with a married man, and Cornelia abetting the
crime? It was a question difficult to answer without sounding cynical
to a pillar of Trinity Church in the City of Boston. Cornelia said,
as calmly as she could, that Betty and Joe loved each other truly,
and were going to marry as soon as the law permitted, after Joe’s wife
had got her Reno divorce. Oh, horrible! horrible! Deborah broke down,
and hid her face in her hands, because she could not contemplate such
depravity in her mother and her daughter. Or would it be more accurate
to say, because she thought that she ought not contemplate it? Human
motives are complicated, and in the effort to have our own way we
sometimes contrive elaborate emotional dramas.
Said Cornelia: “They will be a perfectly respectable married couple as
soon as it is over. There are some in our most fashionable society who
have done the same thing.”
“At least they had the decency to wait till they were divorced!”
“As to that, Deborah, you should ask your cousin Quincy. He dines
frequently at Mrs. Jack Gardner’s, where I understand they discuss such
cases in detail.”
Then the other counts of the indictment. “No Deborah, Joe has no
‘criminal record,’ I assure you.”
“But how do you know it?”
“I know it because I know Joe. He is a fine young idealist, whom I
love, and was glad to accept in his present rôle.”
“An anarchist free-lover!”
“In the first place, he isn’t an anarchist, but a socialist, which is
the opposite pole of thought. He is much more conservative than Betty,
and their honeymoon quarrels are over his efforts to tone her down. You
should be grateful to him.”
“But what does this letter mean--his ‘criminal record’?”
“It is nothing but a coward’s attempt to frighten and distress us.
Joe was connected with the American legation in Russia, and he saw
President Wilson begin his private war on the Russian people, which was
nothing but wholesale murder for the benefit of the British Tories. Joe
said what he thought about it, and he may have actually done something
to try to stop it. If he has a ‘criminal record,’ that is it, I am
sure.”
“And his wife--she is really going to get a divorce?”
“She is planning to remarry.”
Deborah made a face of disgust. Ugh, such a world! it seemed to say. It
did not improve the long lean features, so much like those of Josiah,
which Cornelia had come to know too well. She waited until the ugly
moment was past, and then said, very gently: “There are two great
improprieties, Deborah--one is love without marriage, and the other is
marriage without love. The latter was my portion, and I assure you, if
Betty had to choose one or the other, I am glad it was the other. I
did not will this situation, and if they had asked my advice, I would
have told them to wait. But they settled it for themselves, and it was
a condition and not a theory that confronted me. Betty offered to tell
you, but I could see no good in distressing you.”
V
They argued the ethics of free love versus purchased love for a while;
until Deborah’s practical mind got to work at its customary task of
telling other people what to do. “We must not have a scandal--now that
Priscilla’s wedding invitations have been sent out! We must think up
some reason for Betty to go to Europe at once, and stay until the man
can marry her.”
“I fear you will not be able to arrange that, Deborah. Betty is wrapped
up in this case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the trial is coming in the
spring. She and Joe are working over it day and night, and surely, when
a young couple are busy and happy, it is not the part of wisdom to
break them up.”
“But this, Mother! This!” Deborah held the letter in her trembling
hand. “How can we face this horrible thing?”
“It is an effort to break our nerve, and it must not succeed.”
“But what can we do--if they expose us?”
“How _can_ they expose us? Betty lives here, and Joe visits here
occasionally, but never unless I am in the apartment. Are they going to
break into my home to look for evidence against my granddaughter?”
“Betty must come back and stay with her parents at once!”
“Betty is a grown woman, responsible for her own life. I think you will
have to let her make her own decisions, and face her own enemies.”
They argued back and forth, and in the process Cornelia’s mind became
more clear. “I am quite certain nothing will happen, Deborah, except
the writing of more letters. The police have spies in the office of
our committee, and they pick up bits of gossip, but they don’t really
know anything. Surely we can stand upon our family dignity, and ignore
anonymous slanderers! You and I and Joe and Betty are the only ones who
know the facts, and we are not going to tell any one else--except, of
course, Rupert.”
Poor Rupert! He was almost worried to death, his wife broke out. That
dreadful man Jerry Walker was bringing a suit and charging all sorts
of outrageous things; and some of Rupert’s associates were quarreling
with him for having got them into the mess. They had entirely forgotten
how glad they were to get their share of the profits. And then this
business about the Boston Elevated--had Cornelia been told about that?
“Not much, except what has been in the papers.”
“Well, they are going to make all the members of the legislature
testify as to their stock investments, and they are looking up the
loans they got from some of the banks. They will call it bribery, of
course, but it was nothing in the world except that Rupert was trying
to save the Elevated from bankruptcy, and the stockholders from ruin,
and those vicious politicians were holding him up, refusing to grant
any increase in fares. They wouldn’t vote until they got money to buy
Elevated stocks. You can’t imagine what the politicians are!”
“My child, I know exactly what they are--they are trying to send two of
my friends to the electric chair, unless we will raise forty thousand
dollars to buy them off. Betty and Joe and I have been having to make
that decision in the last few days, and I think the reason you got this
letter is because we refused to pay.”
Deborah sat staring before her, her tall forehead wrinkled in thought.
Her surrender was not indicated by throwing up her hands, but merely by
beginning to talk sensibly. “Mother, I ought to meet that young man.”
“Of course you ought--that is, provided you will behave yourself, and
understand that he is your son-in-law.”
“Is he--does he look like a gentleman?”
“He comes from an Old Virginia family, and they think they are quite as
good as we are--in fact, I understand they sometimes make fun of us,
saying that we talk through our noses.”
“I suppose I’ll have to tell Rupert,” said Deborah. “He might get one
of these letters, too. I’ll tell him to-night, and we’ll make some
arrangement--I don’t know just what. I suppose this--what is his name,
Randall--ought to be invited to dinner.”
“Thank you, my dear, that is certainly sensible.”
“Well, if they are going to be married, we have to try to make it seem
decent. I don’t want people to say that Betty married a man she picked
up off the street.”
“No, it is not at all like that. You can tell people they met at the
first session of the Third International in Moscow.”
VI
Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell had been a sufficient time in her
grave for it to be proper for her grand-niece, Priscilla Thornwell
Alvin, to be united to the young mountain of copper. So there was
another of those stately ceremonials which mark the coming and going
of the generations, and advertise their social importance. Out of this
union there would proceed many copper hills and branch banks, bearing
the sacred names of Thornwell and Quincy and Adams and Shaw and Cabot,
shuffled into new combinations. Engraved invitations were sent to all
members of the clans, and the hot-houses of the florists were emptied,
and Trinity Church became a mid-winter bower, and the four organs
played the Lohengrin march coming and the Mendelssohn march going, and
there was a procession of two little “flower-girls,” and six young
ladies with faces rigid and intense with the effort of keeping in
step under the eyes of so many relatives. They wore drooping hats and
carried large bouquets of roses, as white as the driven snow before it
has been driven through the bituminous smoke of Boston. This symbolized
the undoubted purity of the bride, and nowhere in the consecrated
spaces of the brown-stone edifice was there a single red rose of
adultery.
Except in the hearts of the supposed-to-be-happy parents of the bride,
haunted by the cruel secret of their younger daughter’s shame. Rupert
and Deborah were in the grip of a terror such as had never before
attended a Thornwell wedding-service. Their imaginations played
with a string of horrors, which might be perpetrated by a writer of
devilish anonymous letters. After all, what limit could you set to
the perversity of such a creature? A bomb in the church--say in the
vestibule, where it would not kill any one, but would make a scandal
heard round the world! Or perhaps what was called a “stink-bomb,”
that would drive everybody from the edifice! Or foul whispers by an
old gipsy woman, or poison-leaflets distributed in the pews--it had
happened once in Boston history. There was a moment when the hearts
of Rupert and Deborah jumped into their throats--when the rector
pronounced the bold challenge: “If any man can show just cause, why
they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else
hereafter for ever hold his peace!”
A dreadful silence, during which Rupert and Deborah heard a voice shout
out that the younger sister of the bride was living in adultery, and
therefore the family was not “eligible.” But no one else heard a sound,
and the ceremony was completed; six immaculate ushers from Harvard
marched out with the six bridesmaids, and the little flower girls
carried the bride’s train. The bride and groom were whisked away to
the Alvin home, where an elaborate breakfast was served to the family
and intimate friends. The bride, now attired in traveling costume,
was kissed on both cheeks by relatives male and female--her pure
white forehead was stained by the red lips of adultery, and she did
not know it! Yes, Betty hugged and kissed her good old sister several
times, and wished her all the respectable luck which so respectable a
young lady was bound to have; and if there were tears in Betty’s eyes,
they were not tears of shame, because Betty was lost to shame, and
only her poor mother had to blush for her, and weep for the dreadful
hidden secret--and tremble, because the danger was not yet over--there
might be poison-leaflets thrown into the departing bridal-car, in
place of the rice and old shoes which Boston society had abandoned as
undignified.
But again the fears proved baseless, and the young couple departed
in blissful certainty that everything had happened exactly as it had
always happened, and as it ought to happen--one and the same thing in
Boston. They took the train to New York, and from there to Palm Beach,
where they stopped at the most expensive hotel, and dressed themselves
three times a day in the proper summer costumes, and innumerable
attendants rushed this way and that to anticipate their needs, and no
one embarrassed them by a smile or hint that they were suspected of not
being entirely accustomed to the intimacies of holy matrimony.
So, in secrecy and retirement, a young creature who was to bear a
string of honored names began his career; and the conscientious
young progenitors had nothing in the world to worry about except the
inescapable problem which dogs the footsteps of Boston blue-bloods
en voyage--whom is it safe to know and whom not? If people hail from
Seattle or Oshkosh, it may be rather amusing to talk to them, because
they will not presume to expect to know you at home; but if they come
from New England, then you have to speculate anxiously as to who they
are, and wish you had Mother or Aunt Alice to advise you. Can they
be the “right” Cabots? Do any of the “real” Lowells come from New
Hampshire? Are the Adamses of Scituate the ones who are cousins of the
Adamses of Concord, or can they be those dreadful people that were
divorced some years ago? Better to walk the esplanade in solemn dignity
by yourself, than take the risk of making such a serious misstep!
VII
An odd experience for Cornelia and Betty--to take part in this orgy
of hand-shaking and kissing--to be dipped, as it were, into an ocean
of propriety and perfume, to be transported to a fairy-land of white
veils and roses, frock-coats and silk hats and kid gloves, crystal and
silver and pearl and diamond wedding-presents--and then to step into a
motor-car and be carried along the Back Bay and across the river, and
find themselves within the gates of an ancient stone dungeon, stained
dark by factory smoke, with steel bars on the windows and steel doors
clanging, and faces of grim command, and faces of lowering hate, faces
brutalized and degraded, marked by disease, fear, cruelty--a thousand
evils which poverty, ignorance and neglect inflict upon the tormented
human race. Church doctrine teaches that between heaven and hell
there is an abyss across which none may travel; but Cornelia and her
granddaughter crossed it at least once, and sometimes two or three
times a week; they went back and forth between celestial and infernal
regions, associating freely with both angels and devils--and finding
them not so different one from the other as their fears and hates
caused them to believe!
Bart came, with the coal-dust hastily washed from his face and hands,
but not from his neck and wrists. He greeted them with his smile of
joy, and asked to sit near the window, in the sunshine, so rare in
his life. He saw the white roses they were wearing, and learned that
they were bridal roses; he traveled in fancy to the River Magra, where
weddings meant fiddles and dancing and wine, in addition to flowers and
white veils. Such lovely country, such happy people--if it were not for
landlord, for padrone, for wicked go-vérnment, taking boys away from
home to make soldier, to make cruel war!
They talked about the case, and Bart with tact and gentleness strove to
convey to his dear friends the unhappiness which was tormenting him.
Never had he thought it could happen that he would be the means of
sending any human being to prison, a place of wickedness and suffering
like this. “Is something should not be attempting, Nonna, it is not
according with filosofia anarchica. Mrs. De Falco is criminal, yes,
but is poor victim, is ignorant, is not blam-èd for what she do. It is
principle for me--it is wrong ever to call law, to punish wit’ judge
and sooch thing.”
“But, Bart, you told Lee you would leave it to his judgment.”
“I know, I have shame for that. I am stranger, poor man, have not
mooch knowledge. I think, friend have bring lawyer, he is educate, he
onderstand, he try hard for helping--how can I make contraddizione? But
then come Italian friend, they say, ‘What is this, Vanzett’, you are
anarchista, you make woman be arrest? You have deny principle of whole
living?’ And I say, ‘It is true, I have done wrong, I would better be
convict of any crime in world!’”
“Well, Bart”--it was Betty speaking--“you should have an anarchist
lawyer.”
“Is not many soocha t’ing, Betty, is hard for be. Should not have no
lawyer. Anarchista should stand in court, should say, ‘Is wicked place,
is wicked sistema. You have power, you have victim in hand, you can
crush him, but you cannot crush his soul, his doctrine it live, will
spread to whole umane kind.’”
“Then you really don’t want to be saved, Bart?”
“I want for anarchismo be sav-èd.”
“Joe has gone to Maine, to try to get the record of one of the
witnesses for the prosecution, that we have heard has been convicted
of crime. Now, if we find it is so, do you want us to use the fact? It
will hurt the man’s feelings, no doubt.”
Vanzetti sat with brow furrowed in thought. “I not know. I have said
always, it is good for speak truth. I think anarchista can speak what
is truth.”
“Yet you might be the cause of the man’s being sent to jail again. It
might turn out he is wanted by the police for something else.”
Time was needed to answer that! It was a complicated world, and often
it would happen that Vanzetti would agree to the proposals of Betty
and Joe and Lee Swenson, and then think it over, or hear the protests
of his comrades, and decide that it was not according to “filosofia
anarchica.” All he could say now, having brooded over the problem of
Mrs. De Falco through long hours in his cell, was that he did not want
her sent to jail, not even to save his life. Anyhow, he was sure the
move against her would not help his cause; rather it would embitter
the go-vérnment, it would make them redouble their efforts for a
conviction. It was difficult to explain this in a foreign language, but
Bart’s idea was that the authorities would consider Lee Swenson was
not playing the game. The law, from the point of view of a politician
in power, was an opportunity for graft, and the most dangerous person
in the world was not the bandit, but the man who threatened the graft
system.
“He is not so mooch fraid for bandit, he know plenty bandit, is us-èd
him, do plenty business with him. It is big bandit put up money for
election him. But man what expose, man what tell newspaper, tell
people, he is real nemico--what you say, enemy, he is one you musta
keell. I think he keell me for teach Lee Swenson he cannot break graft
in Massachusett.”
“I am sorry if we have made things worse, Bart.” It was Cornelia
speaking, and her words brought tears into the prisoner’s eyes. He
laid his hand upon her arm, and begged her pardon for his bad way of
saying things, it was hard to express these complicated ideas. He was
not afraid to die, and whatever happened, they must not grieve. He was
a poor, unknown man, he had talked for years unheeded; to be executed
for his beliefs was perhaps the one way he could make them known. But
he wanted to die with a clean conscience--not having caused a mother
of several children to be sent to jail, for trying to get her pitiful
share of that loot which the rich and powerful ones of the community
tried to keep for their own.
VIII
Lee Swenson had obtained a postponement of the Sacco-Vanzetti case
until the month of June, to give him time to prepare. The law of the
Puritans, otherwise stern and parsimonious, would be prodigal only
of delay. Sacco would sit in his cell in Dedham--when he grew bored
with standing on his head or walking on his hands--and wonder by what
malicious turn of fate it had happened that he who despised the law was
tangled in a legal net, denied even the boon of swift, uncomplicated
death. Now and then there would be papers he would have to sign on his
own behalf; invariably he would refuse to sign them, and there would
begin a campaign of diplomacy.
Visits from his wife, carrying the newly born infant, surely a reason
to make a fight for freedom! Visits from committees of this “gruppo”
and that, bringing messages and resolutions, a newspaper article, a
cablegram from Italy. You could never tell what odd circumstance might
turn the trick with Sacco: a bouquet of flowers, a chat about what was
to be planted in the garden this spring, or questions as to what would
be blooming in Torremaggiore at this time of year--and suddenly the
hard shell of anarchistic principle would melt, and the tormented man
would smile, and stretch out his hand for the paper, saying, “Is crazy
t’ing, but you say it, I sign heem.”
Meantime typewriters were clicking, and circulars and pamphlets going
out, and a scrapbook filling with clippings about the case. Throughout
labor and radical circles in America the names of Sacco and Vanzetti
were becoming known as the latest victims of the “frame-up” system.
Money was coming in, and several investigators were at work, and the
busy brain of Lee Swenson was spinning counterplots like a nest of
caterpillars in a pine tree. Under the law of the Commonwealth he had
the right to a list of the witnesses to be used by the prosecution; and
part of his preparation of the case was interviews with these persons,
and efforts to get their stories from them, to break them down, to
delve into their past and find out anything that would discredit them,
or frighten them, or cause them to swing over to the other side.
Under this system, a legal case became a miniature war, a contest of
sappers and miners, of spies and counterspies; some witnesses would
sell out more than once, and change their stories back and forth--one
statement to the Pinkerton detectives, a different one to the friends
of the defense, yet another to the district attorney, another to the
lawyers of the defense--and which one finally got to the jury was a
matter of price, or else of psychology. Some witnesses wanted money,
and then more money; but there were others who had a secret spring of
loyalty or prejudice, which, if you could touch it, might turn the
trick for a few days or forever. One would do anything to help a buddy
who had been in France, the next would do anything to oblige the Pope
of Rome; one wanted to electrocute all Italians because he had been
knifed by one in a street fight twenty years ago; another abhorred
Yankees because a school-teacher had beaten him as a child.
A singular education for a daughter of the blue-bloods, to help in
a job like this! An education which would surely not have won the
approval of her theocratic forefathers, nor yet of the plutocratic
trustees who supervised the curriculum of Radcliffe! But at least you
could say it was an education based upon fundamentals, and getting
to original sources. What was present-day New England actually like?
What did its people really do and think and feel? What was its working
governmental system, as distinguished from the one written on paper,
and taught in schools, and glorified in Fourth of July orations and
newspaper editorials? Surely these were matters worth knowing about,
even if you did not get a sheepskin diploma, and three Greek letters on
a key, and two Latin words at the end of your name!
Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin took two different trains and traveled
into the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and was bumped for ten or
fifteen miles in a buggy over country roads deep with the soft mud of
early spring, and in a ramshackle farmhouse, with the paint peeled off
and the fence palings molded and rotten, she met a girl who had been
working in the Rice and Hutchins shoe factory in South Braintree on
the afternoon when the bandits had opened fire on the paymaster and
the guard. This girl had a feeble chin and prematurely decayed teeth,
and a baby due to make its entrance into a world of torment in a very
few days. For some reason she got it into her weak head that Betty
was there in the interest of the district attorney’s office, and she
immediately became hysterical, bursting into tears and shrieking that
she was in no condition to come to a trial, and could not be forced
to testify; anyhow, she knew nothing, because when the shooting had
started, she had hidden under a bench.
Betty soothed her, assuring her there was no wish to force her to do
anything; so presently the girl calmed down and became communicative.
Too bad she could not go, because two of her former shopmates were
getting good pay to testify against those wops, and they sure ought to
be run out of the country, coming in and taking honest people’s jobs
away, and fighting and all that, and it sure was up to we Americans to
stand together against them. Later, by deft questioning, Betty drew
from this patriotic young person the information that her mother had
been an Irish peasant and her father a French peasant. A triumph of
“americanization,” and the speeding up processes of a machine age!
Betty’s ancestors, who had been tinners and carpenters and indentured
servants, had taken three hundred years to acquire their superiority
to the new immigrant workers; but here was a shoe factory girl who had
managed it in one-tenth of the time!
IX
The case of Mrs. De Falco was set for trial in a Boston police court,
and Betty and Joe turned their energies to this--digging into the
records of public officials, and running down clews of graft. Shudders
ran up and down the spines of persons high in political power, and
rage seethed in their hearts against blue-blood intruders who were not
content with the security which wealth and prominence conferred, but
turned traitor to their own privileges, and attacked the bases of law
and order. What did these high-hatted snobs want, anyhow? What was the
matter with them that they could not be content with public officials
who protected them, keeping them safe against bombers and blackmailers
and burglars and pickpockets and a thousand such predatory creatures;
making everything so comfortable, that they might be born, and grow up,
and live long, and go to pieces like the one-horse shay, of old age and
decrepitude, without ever knowing a moment of danger or making a real
effort in their lives?
The politicians and police might laugh at the blue-bloods, but they
respected and feared them, because of very real powers they still
held; not merely finance, utilities and the choicest real estate, but
solidarity, knowledge, culture--the latter a far-off, mysterious thing,
but awe-inspiring, like the power of a voodoo magician, who can cause
your right arm to wither and fall off; or anyhow, he says he can, and
how shall you be certain about it? The lower orders, having captured
the city, were afraid of their captives, and dared not make use of
their power; they stood, fierce-eyed barbarians, at the doors of the
temples, and watched the priests, clad in frock coats and high hats,
performing mysterious offices, impossible to comprehend or imitate. In
the end the barbarians capitulated, and sent their sons to study in the
temples, and become as much like the conquered caste as they could!
Politicians and police were used to many kinds of eccentricities on
the part of rich persons. Those who had enormous powers and no duties
necessarily had to work off steam. They dressed themselves in pink
coats, and rode to hounds and broke their necks; they raced motor cars
at high speeds, and learned to save themselves behind the steering-post
when they crashed; they flew in airplanes and landed on top of houses;
they built submarines and got stuck at the bottom of the sea; they
worked in chemical laboratories and asphyxiated themselves, or invented
explosives and blew themselves up; they went yachting to the North Pole
to hunt walruses, or to the equator to collect baby chimpanzees for a
psychological laboratory.
Hardly a millionaire estate without something weird and mysterious upon
it: the largest collection of old pewter in the world, or a single-tax
enclave, or an herbarium with Brazilian butterflies, or a laboratory
for the investigation of ghosts, or a mausoleum prepared in advance of
death, or a fireproof and bombproof shelter for safety against mobs!
And now and then a more sinister case--a clergyman with a fondness for
choir-boys, or an aged sybarite who must have fifteen-year-old virgins
shivering in his arms; a young lady of fashion who frequented the
“black and tan” cafés disguised as a man, or who taught the sex-lore of
the Orient to her female intimates!
The police were used to all this. They even got used to the idea that
now and then a rich eccentric would turn against his own and commit
class-suicide. They knew that in the home of a dead poet in Cambridge,
a shrine to which pilgrims traveled from all over America, the poet’s
grandson was upstairs entertaining syndicalists and communists, and
figuring the easiest way to overthrow the capitalist system. That was
treason, but it was treason to the rich, and the rich were the ones to
deal with it. What worried the politicians and police was when these
young fools took to hounding the politicians and police. That was the
treason that really mattered, that was a stab in the back, and the most
dangerous activity one could pursue in America.
And here was Betty Alvin quite blandly going to it, heedless of all
warnings. So came a string of developments, distressing to a blue-blood
family. Anonymous letters, more abusive and more widely scattered;
telephone calls, with sinister voices pronouncing dooms; visits to
Rupert from his banking associates, who talked about alarming rumors
they had heard; a call from the Republican boss with whom Rupert did
business, and who asked him if he didn’t have troubles enough! So again
Betty was summoned to her father’s home, and went through the worst
scene yet; she lost her serenity, and shed many tears, but she would
not go abroad, nor give up either her lover or her anarchists. Again
she was disinherited and disowned--whether in words, or actually upon
paper, she had no way to know.
A heavy strain upon Rupert, and a strange freak of fate! Or could it be
that there actually was some intelligence overseeing the universe, and
that Betty’s revolt was a punishment visited upon a great banker who
had left undone those things he ought to have done, and had done those
things he ought not to have done? Rupert could not escape this idea,
because he had been brought up in Trinity Church in the City of Boston,
and had heard it--not exactly preached, but skirted on the edge of,
every Sunday morning for fifty years. He would have liked to ask his
rector, or some other clergyman: could there be a God perverse enough
to object to Rupert’s having taken the felt-plants of Jerry Walker,
which Rupert could finance and Jerry couldn’t? Could any God have
wanted him to let the Boston Elevated stay on the rocks and be pounded
to pieces? Could any God be so silly as the fanatics and agitators
who denounced Rupert for having loaned money to legislators--when it
was perfectly obvious that it was not Rupert who had elected these
legislators, and that lending them money was the only way to get a
raise of fares and make the stock of the Elevated worth anything? No,
God was not going to punish the president of the Pilgrim National Bank
for having protected the people who had trusted their fortunes to him!
But then, how could God be letting Rupert’s lovely young daughter be
seduced by anarchist free love, and exposed to the furies of scandal,
at such a trying moment of her father’s life?
X
One by one the members of the family received “poison pen” letters.
Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge came to her mother, incredulous of the
scandal, because her maternal soul had never desired an impropriety.
Alice Thornwell Winters came, elegant and precious, regarding her
virtue as a hard-won possession, deserving of commensurate rewards.
No use expecting others to live up to one’s own standards--“though I
do think, Mother, Betty is beginning rather young. I must say I am
aghast at this new generation, they don’t even trouble to apologize for
their indiscretions. And I don’t know what to make of you, Mother--I
thought you believed in the old standards. I heard that these radicals
practiced free love, but somehow I didn’t think of it in relation to my
own mother.”
“Well, Alice,” said Cornelia, “you must consider my life. I was
faithful to the old standards, I lived my life without love, and where
did it get me?”
The carefully cultivated features of Alice Thornwell Winters wore
a puzzled look. Alice prided herself upon being sensitive to all
ethical and esthetic values--they were the same thing, she always
insisted--beauty was truth and beauty was goodness--but of course
beauty must be recognized by a discriminating intelligence--it was
something that could not be explained--it was a gift, very rare, but
Alice had it. “Really, Mother, how can you feel that you have had such
a hard life? Your children love you, and your grandchildren would, if
they saw more of you. Josiah was saying to me only yesterday it was
hard to understand why you found so much in Italian anarchists, and so
little in your own people.”
“Well, my dear, perhaps I know the Harvard values too well, and have
got bored with them. Tell Josiah to come to dinner, and tell me what
new things he has learned and accomplished. That is, unless you are
afraid to expose him to my free love ideas.”
That was a nasty stroke of a cat’s claws, and the sensitive Alice
winced. For everybody in the family had heard about the “wild oats” of
“Young Josiah,” only son of Alice and Henry--known as “Josie” to his
boyhood playmates, and as “Si” to the members of “Porcellian” and of
“Alpha Delta Phi.” Alice allowed for him, because he was a man, and
that was the way men did, apparently; they got over it in time, and
settled down. But nowadays the girls were doing it, too, and how would
there be any esthetic standards, if the women did not maintain them?
That was what shocked Alice in the episode of Betty and Joe--it was so
unesthetic, to come to the apartment where Betty’s grandmother lived!
To which Cornelia answered that she had never been to a roadhouse,
and could not judge, but it might be, of course, that some of them
were fixed up esthetically. Look out for the cat’s claws of this
gentle-seeming old woman!
Alice went away, and Josiah Thornwell Winters called up, and made an
appointment to dine with his grandmother, and tell her what he had
learned and accomplished as a Harvard senior. But when he came, he did
not mention the subject--because meantime the current of his thoughts
had been diverted. The grandson and namesake of the stern old governor
had fallen the newest victim to the calamities which were raining upon
his conspicuous family.
Cornelia happened to drop in at the office of the defense committee,
and Lee Swenson gave her the first news of the event. “I don’t like to
repeat gossip, Nonna, but my guess is, your latest family trouble is a
result of what you and Betty are doing, so you need to know about it.”
“What do you mean, Lee?”
“There’s a story all over town--last night the political gangs were
roaring drunk in their bootleg-joints, and when they had a round of
drinks, they would say, ‘Have one on Young Josiah!’”
“What has he done?”
“Well, they caught him in a hotel room with a woman. Undoubtedly
she lured him there--it’s a regular system they have. They took a
flashlight photograph of him, and Henry Cabot Winters paid seventy-five
thousand dollars to kill the story.”
Cornelia, the “Red,” was supposed to be lacking in shame; but now she
looked down, instead of at her friend. “Can it really be true, Lee?”
“It is what is being told. You can find out, of course.”
“They can do that kind of thing in Boston, and not be punished?”
“It’s the punishers who are doing it, Nonna. It’s a blackmail ring,
and the district attorneys get a share of the loot. There is an aged
millionaire in this town--perhaps you know him--old man Barbour?”
“I have met him.”
“Well, they got him in the same kind of jam, and soaked him to the
tune of three hundred and eighty-six thousand. You can hardly believe
that, but I got the amount from one of his lawyers. And then young
Searles--he inherited a fortune from his uncle, I think it was, and
the gang got him in an apartment with a couple of girls and cleaned
him out. Over in Woburn they got a bunch of moving-picture people in a
roadhouse for a wild party, and it cost those celebrities a hundred and
five thousand.”
“One might expect it of people like that,” said Cornelia. “But it is
something new for the Thornwells, unless I am mistaken. I’m glad that
my Josiah is not here to see what has become of his name.”
XI
So it was that when Josiah Thornwell Winters came to dinner two or
three days afterwards, his grandmother did not chat about the polite
nothings of the Harvard curriculum and of “Porcellian” and “Alpha
Delta Phi.” Throwing aside those reticences which are supposed to be
the crown of womanhood, she talked in plain language about unspeakable
things--“man to man,” as she put it. And “Young Josiah,” who had never
dreamed of such a thing from an old lady, turned pink to the roots
of his hair and looked as if he wanted to grab his hat and run; but
after a while he got used to it, and found it a relief to talk about
realities. He had come very close to shooting his head off, and neither
the horrified grief of his pure mother, nor the withering scorn of his
successful father had been of the slightest use to him.
He was twenty-two years old, and at the age of seventeen he had sprung
up to the Thornwell height of six feet and more, but had never filled
out his lean figure. His shoulders were stooped and his complexion
pale, and his fingers yellow with nicotine; but he had the most elegant
Harvard drawl, and a complete equipment of skepticism and boredom,
applied to matters about which he knew nothing, as well as to those
about which Harvard had taught him everything. His manner was “right,”
his clothing had the proper shade of carelessness, and his apartment on
the “Gold Coast” contained shelves of exquisite smut, beginning with
Petronius and ending with James Branch Cabell, in numbered editions at
from fifteen to fifty dollars a volume.
But now all that solemn pose of maturity had fallen like a cheap
actor’s cloak, and Cornelia confronted a raw, weedy youth with vicious
habits and a sick sense of shame. “I’m a rotter,” he said, “but I could
tell you things to show you it wasn’t entirely my fault. The Pater gave
me the razz--he all but told me I’d oblige him if I’d eat a chunk of
cyanide--and I said nothing. But you must know, Grandmother, he hasn’t
been any saint.”
“I know he keeps a woman,” said Cornelia, grimly.
“More than that. There’s a tradition on the crew--you know, after he
was graduated, the Pater coached the crew for a couple of years--and
he told the fellows they would have to go with prostitutes, or they’d
lose their virility. That made the church crowd hot, and they got rid
of him, but the story stayed on, and a lot of the fellows think he was
right. Now, of course, the Pater says I’ve gone too far, but then, who
is to do the measuring? It was my hard luck that I knew too much about
both my father and my mother. Do you want me to talk about Mother?”
“I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Well, Mother has wonderful emotions, but she’s a little short on
brains, and I rarely got anything useful from her. When I was about
fifteen, I heard a terrible quarrel between her and the Pater, they
told each other all the dirt they knew. I was behind a curtain, and had
to stay there, because I was ashamed to let them know I’d heard the
beginning. You know Mother’s way, she has platonic thrills, but she
doesn’t go the limit, so that makes it all right. The Pater had got a
story on her--her friends were talking about how she had traveled to
New York with one of her poets, and had lain in his arms all night in
the sleeping-car berth, but not parted with her virtue; that was her
remarkable spirituality, and the fellow was supposed to enjoy it, too.
The Pater called her some rotten names, and then she told what she knew
about him, and that was my introduction to the subject of love. It
wasn’t exactly helpful, was it?”
Cornelia accepted the plea.
“Well, when I was sixteen, I was visiting a fellow from St. Mark’s.
It was a place on the North Shore, and he had an aunt--one of these
up-to-date ladies who had divorced one husband and was getting rid of
another, and her lover was in Europe, and she was bored. She came from
New York, and they are ahead of us--but not more than a year or two, I
have found--perhaps because they get the new shows a season earlier.
Anyhow, this was good family, a country club crowd, no end of money,
and it seemed all right. She came to my room at night--all fixed up,
very beautiful and sweet-smelling, and what chance did a kid stand
against a proposition like that? She stayed around a while, and taught
me a lot--until her lover came back from Europe, and then we said
good-by. But it was only a week before a young widow took me on. You
can’t imagine how it is, Grandmother--I know it wasn’t that way in your
time. The women know what they want, and they just go to it.”
“Are they trying to marry you?”
“Not often. Some have husbands, but they’ve been reading Freud, and
have got the idea that all their troubles are repressions. And the
young girls are worse.”
“All of them, Josiah?”
“No, of course not--there are plenty of girls like Priscilla and
Betty--I suppose they are straight. What happened to me was, I got
a reputation, so I drew the wild ones. I was supposed to be a
lady-killer. I don’t imagine I’m abnormally attractive, but family
counts for a lot, and Harvard, of course--the high-hat stuff. Anyhow,
I assure you I never had to do any seducing, and I never made any
promises I didn’t keep. I’ve spent a lot of money, but always in
respectable ways, I mean entertainments and presents and so on. I never
got stuck for blackmail but this once.”
Cornelia smiled. “You remember Æsop’s fable,” she said, “about the
lioness who had only one cub, but that one was a lion.”
XII
Young Josiah skirted around the cage of this “lion” for quite a while.
It didn’t seem really decent to tell such “dirt” to one’s grandmother.
But Cornelia pinned him down. “I have other grandchildren coming along,
and I need to know about my city.”
“Well, it’s a rotten hole,” said the youth. “I think this blackmail
business is a result of the fact that Bostonians have to pretend to be
so much better than they can be. Or maybe it’s the Irish, bringing us
Yankees off our high horses.”
“Who was the woman?”
“She belongs to what is known as ‘Larry Shay’s stable’--not a very
elegant name, but you say you want to know Boston. She looked like a
society girl, and I really thought she was.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“I had seen her around Harvard Square for a week or two, and I thought
she lived in the neighborhood--a neglected young wife or something. She
can’t be over nineteen; she was dressed up to the minute, and looked
like springtime. I suppose she was watching me, finding out about my
habits. Anyhow, she passed me now and then, and always looked willing,
but not too eager. This time I was sitting in my car, waiting for a
fellow, and she came along smiling, and naturally I was smiling, and
she walked up and said, ‘You are Josiah Winters, aren’t you?’ She
said, ‘I know your cousin, Betty Alvin, but I’m not a “Red” like her,
so don’t be afraid of me.’ She had got posted about Betty, and of
course I thought Betty knew lots of people that the rest of the family
wouldn’t know. I laughed, and asked her if she’d like to ride, and she
got in, and we rode all over, and I kissed her a few times, and she
said she had never done anything like this before, and paid me a lot
of compliments, but she wouldn’t go to a roadhouse, and when we came
back to town we had supper, and a little champagne, and--the upshot of
it was, she knew a hotel where a girl-friend of hers lived, and she
wouldn’t be afraid to go there. So we went to a room; and about ten
minutes after we got in, somebody put his shoulder to the door, and
there were half a dozen men, and one of them held a camera, and another
set off a flashlight, and they said they were county detectives, and I
was under arrest, and the picture would be in the Boston ‘Telegram’ the
next afternoon. The girl went into hysterics--she was a good actress,
I must say--or maybe she liked me and was sorry--I’m fool enough to
wonder, because she was so young. But there it was, and the Pater
pungled up seventy-five thousand bucks, and took it out by telling me
what he really thought of me. It took quite a while, and went into
details.”
Cornelia was moved to say, “You must allow for the financial strain.”
“No, it is what he really thinks; he’s been cherishing it up for a long
time. He is disappointed in me, I’m a weakling, and he needs a strong
man for his successor. He might stop and think, what has there been
in my life to develop strength--assuming I had the possibility? When
the Pater got through Harvard he had to pitch in and fight his own
way; but I never had to, it was no good trying to fool myself with the
idea that I was anything but a millionaire’s son. Of course Mother’s
spoiling me was from affection, but that didn’t change the result. I
have enough of the Pater’s brains to understand what happened. I never
had to do anything but call somebody else. If the car was out of order,
tell the chauffeur; if I wanted a bunch of flowers, tell the gardener.
So many servants to wait on one kid; so many courtiers, to make you
think you’re the top of the heap--so why should you climb any higher?
And then the women come, and after that, it is impossible to break
through. I don’t mean merely sex--I mean all the things they want to
do--tea-parties and dances and motoring and yachting. Honest truth,
Grandmother, except for things like this blackmail, there’s nothing to
choose between the fashionable girls and the ones you pick up; they
want to do the same things, and the only difference is where you go,
and how much it costs. The one thing none of them will let you do is
any serious work.”
There was more to this revealing story, and Cornelia listened to it
all and asked many questions. “I ought to have known these things many
years ago,” she said. “I might have helped you a great deal.”
“Yes, of course. Nobody talks straight to us fellows. Mother doesn’t
know much that is real, and the Pater has been so busy making
money--too busy to think what good it will do anybody. He must be
pretty sick, because I show so few signs of solving the problem for
him.”
“Wouldn’t you like to come and see me now and then? Perhaps Betty and I
could bring you in touch with people who are doing worth-while things.”
“Well, Grandmother, of course, I’ll meet anybody you say, but I don’t
see much hope in that crowd of yours. The way it looks to me, you and
Betty have got a little money, and family position, and they are using
you for what you are worth.”
“Yes, my boy,” said Cornelia, gently, “but what I thought was, you
might forget those Harvard ideas. I will take you to Charlestown prison
and introduce you to one of my wops, who has never had either money
or family position, and no education except what he picked up after
washing dishes fourteen hours a day. He cannot express himself in
English very well, yet he has managed to impress me as a very great
man. It is possible he might impress you also, and make you realize
what it means to men who lose the money that you get.”
“I don’t understand just what you mean by that,” said Young Josiah from
Harvard.
XIII
The trial of Mrs. De Falco came up in a Boston police court, and
Cornelia extended her knowledge of the “blackmail ring” and its power.
A long-haired Swede from the West had come into Massachusetts to
tell them how to run their system of justice; a “Red” and an enemy
of society, who would not play the game as other lawyers played it,
but tried to throw sticks into the machinery! Well, they would show
him--and they did.
The magistrate was an Irish-Catholic, an ardent patriot, and these
were the days of most bitter prejudice against anarchists, atheists
and wops. The lawyer representing the defendant was an aggressive
and loud-mouthed Jew, and the way he and the judge collaborated was
a prophecy of an immortal drama of the emotions called “Abie’s Irish
Rose.” When Felicani, and Lopez, a Spanish anarchist, explained
their conscientious objections to taking an oath, the devout Hebrew
gentleman went after them hammer and tongs, and the devout Catholic
gentleman beamed with delight. After that, it ceased to be the trial
of an alleged bribe-seeker, and became the trial of two self-confessed
free-thinkers. The judge actually ordered Lopez under arrest, and it
took a lot of persuading to change his mind.
The two stenographers took the stand, and the fact that one of them
had served with the A.E.F. in France did not help them in the least.
Did they know the voice of Mrs. De Falco? If not, how could they be
sure that the voice they had heard over the dictaphone was the voice
of Mrs. De Falco? To be sure, others had seen Mrs. De Falco talking in
the room; but maybe these others were lying, maybe somebody had staged
a performance to fool the stenographers and make them think they were
listening to Mrs. De Falco, when in reality they were listening to
some other Italian woman making a bribe proposition! Who could set a
limit to the rascalities that atheists and anarchists might contrive,
in order to discredit the legal system of the great Commonwealth of
Massachusetts?
And then Mrs. De Falco herself, an alert and capable young woman, whose
wits had been sharpened by years of battle for life in the police
courts. She sturdily denied every charge; and especially she denied
any trace of connection between herself and any officials. The high
officials of Norfolk and Plymouth counties were upright and honorable
gentlemen, and never had made any proposition to let criminals escape
for a money consideration, and never had the employment of a relative
as counsel for accused criminals, had anything to do with subsequent
dismissal of proceedings against such criminals. That was, of course,
the real issue being tried in this police court; to find the Italian
woman guilty meant to find the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts
guilty, and how could a patriotic judge do that? When the testimony
about the officials began to come in, the judge ordered everybody out
of the court-room except the witness and the counsel.
The defendant was acquitted; and Lee Swenson, feeling very blue, went
off by himself, and sat down at a luncheon table in a restaurant--when
who should come in but the aggressive and loud-mouthed Jewish lawyer!
He was feeling good, naturally, and joined his victim at the table,
and “kidded” him a bit, after the fashion of lawyers--and incidentally
talked about the case, as one sensible man to another. Mrs. De Falco
had hung around the courts for so many years, she of course knew both
the high official and his brother, and she had tried to capitalize
her knowledge and get some money out of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense.
She knew the details of other court cases, enough to be able to
make it appear that she was able to “swing” deals; she had gone to
meeting-places with officials, to talk about other matters--knowing
that she would be followed by the defense, who would thus conclude that
she had a “pull.”
Maybe so, said Lee; but it seemed to him a little strange that a lawyer
should be saying such things about his client, and making so elaborate
a defense of two other persons who were not his clients! Could it be
that any of the officials were paying for this legal victory? The
lawyer denied it, and Lee smiled his patient Swedish smile. Of course,
you could never be sure; it might be that it had all happened as the
other said; sometimes truth really was stranger than fiction. It might
be that the officials had happened in while Mrs. De Falco was there,
purely as a coincidence; or again, it might be that all of them had met
there to say their prayers.
The judge had been of that opinion, and the case was history. The one
thing Lee Swenson had accomplished--he realized it, now that it was
too late--was to exacerbate the prosecution, to give to all officials
having anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case a reason for bitter
and personal animus. The name of Lee Swenson became a byword to all
politicians and officials; the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee
became a nest of active and dangerous foes, and the task of sending
two wops to the electric chair became one with the defense of every
criminal-in-office in the entire community. Which was exactly as
Vanzetti, lying through those endless hours in his prison cell, had
figured out and predicted. Always it happened, sooner or later, that
everything turned out as Vanzetti had figured out and predicted!