Chapter XI: The Graft Ring (1)

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.