Chapter XV: The Whispering Gallery (1)

I

Sacco and Vanzetti were back in their cells: the former in jail in Dedham while his appeals were heard, the latter in Charlestown State Prison, working at his old sentence of fifteen years for the Bridgewater crime. Nick, as usual, had nothing to do all day--a cruel form of punishment; it required tact and sympathy on the part of visitors to persuade him that it was worthwhile to stand on his head and walk on his hands, as a means of not going mad. Bart was now making license plates for automobiles: the one industry which the Commonwealth had been able to save from the grasp of private capital, and which therefore could be used to keep state convicts from wholesale madness. It was not happy work, for it involved the touch and smell of acids, which gradually undermined Vanzetti’s health, and made more difficulty for those who lived with him in sympathy.

A black hour for the world, testing the souls of idealists. Famine in Russia; the notorious inefficiency of communist bureaucracy had caused the rains to stop falling--so it was reported by correspondents and explained by editorial writers of capitalist newspapers. Throughout Europe the White Terror enthroned; in Italy banded assassins in the pay of banks and industrialists, murdering the leaders and rooting out every trace of social protest, turning the country over to that ultimate product of natural selection, the beast with the brains of an engineer. Sacco and Vanzetti sat in their cells, and read of these events, and stretched out their hands to the future, whose children they were.

Each in his own way, they would learn to make their appeal to that future. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, dish-washer, ditch-digger and fish-peddler, would learn to write; he would labor all day at a stubborn and hostile language, and conquer it, and shape it to his ends. He, whose schooling had ceased at the age of thirteen, would make himself a master of letters; he who had never seen the inside of a college building, would write such prose as no living graduate of Harvard had ever achieved; he who was to die as a common criminal, would defend his faith in words of elemental eloquence, outranking anything produced by an American since Lincoln’s second inaugural.

It would take long practice. Locked up alone in his cell, Bart would write letters: letters to his lawyers, to members of the committee and friends of the defense; letters to strangers who wrote to him, letters to his anarchist comrades of Mexico, France, Russia. The rules of the institution allowed only two letters a month, but they did not prevent Bart’s handing a packet of manuscript to his lawyer.

At first his efforts would be crude; he would be looking up long words in the dictionary, and stringing them together, a kind of Babu English. He would use Italian words literally translated, producing novel effects. He would concoct strange polysyllables, apparently of his own imagining; you would start to smile, until it occurred to you that it might be a new kind of poetry. To Cornelia he wrote: “Even if we will be killed at once by the carnefice, or little by little by the confinement, you remain to hold light the banner of the human vindications, and to accomplished redemption.”

And again: “Do not desperate, comrade, of the cruelty of the human events. Out of every little doctrine all too small and inadequate, out of every party, petty and inefficient for the great problems of the human justice and freedom--will ripen the historical nemesy and the inevitable palingenesy.”

He began translating passages from Italian books into English, things which interested him, and which he wanted Cornelia to understand; he would take her criticisms and study them, and then try again--a correspondence course in composition, having the added excitement of a race with the executioner. He wrote:

“I was very beneficiated by your last visit and English-lesson. In
a letter received to-night, one Friend tells me that my English is
not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why
do not say horrible? Nevertheless, I can made a better translation
than the one in argument. I did it as I did for an experiment, to
prove if an almost letterally translation is intelligible. I show
it to some friends, asking them if they understand it. The answer
was ‘yes,’ while it should have been ‘no,’ that I might have remade
the work with much profit and better result.

“Of course, as the writing is beautiful in its original, and as
I labored very much at the dictionary, so I was thinking to have
accomplished something worth, and the disillution was, as almost
all disillatin, rather cruel. But when a poor one is surrounded
by many great difficulties, the small ones appear always a joke
to him, and after your visit I found myself in the best of the
mood--that is, I was decided to do in the future as much more good
than the much bad I did in the past. I analized attentively the
original--it is almost impossible intellectual pleasure--which for
hours has made me forget myself, the cell, and the other sorrowy
things.”

II

Cornelia’s contribution to the defense was to be a pamphlet telling the story of the case, and summarizing the evidence of the two trials. The procedures that she had watched with horror in Plymouth and Dedham she would now set down in black and white, so that her friends could take them home and study them. In the apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill sat the little old lady all day, her shoulders stooped over a volume of typewritten testimony, and sheafs of pencil-notes scattered over the vacant places in the room.

Betty and Joe came to help, and they sorted and classified and compared, and argued over this detail and that: identification testimony relating to Sacco, relating to Vanzetti, relating to both and to neither; alibi testimony, and refutation thereof; testimony relating to Sacco’s cap and to Vanzetti’s pistol--where was it Bart had said he had never fired the gun with which he had been arrested? Where was it that Katzmann asked him his reason for concealing the price he had paid for the gun? Betty would search, and Joe would search, and they filled note-books with lists of cross-references. The half-dozen thick volumes of typewritten testimony began to show signs of wear, and had to be bound more tightly. Precious objects they were, having cost the defense two or three thousand dollars of hard-begged money.

Cornelia was finding that as she grew older she wanted less and less sleep. Life was becoming more precious as its supply ran out, and nature was trying to save every moment. She would awaken at three or four o’clock in the morning, and the details of the pamphlet would come swarming into her mind, she would wonder about this point and that, and presently decide she might as well get up and go to work. So Betty would find her working by electric light, having failed to notice the coming of day. Betty would scold, and try to put her to bed again. Betty would threaten to get up early too, and Cornelia would have to scold. The pamphlet grew to the size of a book, and would have become an encyclopedia if they had let it. Then began the painful process of cutting down and summarizing; and every time they left out a point, it seemed that the life of Bart and Nick hung upon the decision.

Lee Swenson was retiring from the case: he had done his best, he said, and failed, now let some one else have a try. There were tears in the eyes of both when he said good-by to Cornelia. They promised they would never forget each other--little danger of the promise being broken! “Don’t worry about the past, Nonna,” said Lee; “you did your best.” She didn’t know what to answer; she didn’t know what to think about the questions that haunted her. What would have happened if she had done what Lee wanted? Would she have done it, if she had foreseen the present situation? And what was going to become of a country in which the law was a cheat, and dreamers of justice its predestined victims?

Fred Moore was taking over the case; a lawyer less hated by the authorities, it was hoped--though this proved a delusion. He was younger than Swenson, an Irishman and a fighter, wrapped up in the labor cause; a strange combination of emotional temperament and keen analytical brain; a man who suffered deeply--as all men did who took up the cause of the underdog in America. He, like Swenson, had witnessed dreadful things, and told Cornelia stories of savagery and corruption that made her shudder.

It was Moore’s task to prepare the appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court from the various rulings of Judge Thayer at the Dedham trial. To this end there must be drawn up what was known as a “bill of exceptions” in the case: that is to say, a list of the objections which the defense had made to the judge’s rulings, together with the testimony concerned. It amounted to a summary of the case, giving the essentials which the higher court would need; and it was necessary that the defense, the prosecution and the judge should agree to every word. The three parties had to sit day by day at a table, with a copy of the testimony before them, marking the passages to be recopied, and phrasing summaries of the rest. A long, slow job, for which Judge Thayer had allowed from the middle of July to the first of November.

Thayer, Moore and an assistant district attorney did the work. Thayer disliked Moore, but in the course of time he came to hate the assistant district attorney, and to like Moore by comparison, so he chose Moore to talk to about the case. A curious episode: one hot summer afternoon, the assistant district attorney had left the room, and the old judge looked up over the piles of papers and wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and shook his head sorrowfully. “Moore, there are mountains of perjury on both sides of this case!”

“Maybe so, Judge,” said the lawyer. “But your side has the most.”

The old man did not bother to resent this way of putting it. “I know,” he said, “you think those fellows are innocent!”

“I do, Judge.”

“Well, I _know_ they are guilty.”

“How do you know it?”

“Never mind how--but I know.” It was the formula of ruling-class Massachusetts, which for six years they would repeat; not in print, not for the public, but in the smoking-rooms of the clubs, in homes or offices, wherever one tried to pin them down and get the facts. “Never mind how--but I know!”

III

It was going to cost eighteen thousand dollars to print the “bill of exceptions”--two elaborate volumes; to say nothing of lawyers’ fees, and office expenses, and the cost of raising the money. You got lists of names--members of radical organizations, subscribers to liberal papers, contributors to charity organizations, members of women’s clubs--anybody who might have either a heart or a conscience; you got typists and had envelopes addressed, and prepared a begging circular and mailed it, and then with the money that came in you got more lists and more typists and more circulars--it was the wheel of life.

But the returns did not come fast enough. The case was lagging, threatening to die. The men were in jail, and they stayed there, and the public wanted to go to sleep and forget them--the usual way. Look at Mooney and Billings out in California, exclaimed the young radicals--men whom everybody knew to be innocent, yet they stayed in prison, forgotten--several years already, and it would be many, many more. The friends of the defense were not content to have lawyers pore over the testimony and appeal to a court without a heart; they wanted to dramatize the case, to find new evidence, to break down the witnesses of the government, above all to catch the real criminals, who had done the murders. They wanted to have mass-meetings in the cities, to have the story of this Massachusetts “frame-up” told to labor audiences. Naturally, it occurred to them, what an impression if a lady of Mrs. Thornwell’s respectability and prestige would take the platform! They wanted Cornelia to go to New York and address a meeting; and when she realized that there was no other way to get the indispensable money, she consented.

So then, more distress among the Thornwell clan. They had thought the limit was reached when the head of their family defended “anarchy” at home; but to go outside the Commonwealth, and attack its courts among strangers--that was really treason. Deborah came and protested with all her dignity; when that was in vain, Alice quit her “rest-cure,” and threatened to go completely insane; when this too failed, there was a family conference, fully as agitated as those of war-time. Great-uncle Abner insisted upon being brought. Because it was no longer possible to make him hear a word, they had to write out the proceedings for him; and every now and then he would punctuate the debate with his booming formula: “Lock her up!”

They turned the matter over to Henry Cabot Winters, because of his sense of humor, which they did not understand or like, but which they knew was the only hope. Rupert would put the information department of the Pilgrim National Bank at Henry’s service, and would himself call upon the representative of the Federal secret service in Boston. Henry would see the district attorney, and all together they would make a real effort, and pull the poor distracted old soul out of this mess.

Henry went to the telephone and called up Cornelia, who was not supposed to know about this conspiracy, but could guess. When she heard that her son-in-law wanted to be invited to dinner about a week from now, she laughed. “Are you going to bring that information you have been promising?”

“If it isn’t too late, Mother. I know, I have neglected you--but I’ve been so frightfully busy! Now we’ve got another extension on the Jerry Walker case, so I have a little breathing space. If it’s not too late, I really would like to take a week off and see what I can find out about your friends and their problem.”

“That’s very good of you, Henry; but you know we have no way to pay for such distinguished legal services.”

“You pay with your company, Mother. We are growing some dewberries on our place that are as long as your thumb, and I will send you a supply in the morning, and you can have them made into a short cake or a cobbler or whatever you fancy; and I’ll bring a bottle of Madeira--the real thing, because I am the only person that knows the combination to the vault!”

IV

Cornelia did her own shopping. She got a live and lively lobster, done up in a strong paper bag, with two holes in it so that he might breathe; like a condemned man, he must be kept alive till the moment of his execution. She got a small chicken, and some green peas, and a head of lettuce, and climbed the hill with them in a little basket, smiling to herself--it was old, _old_ “Boston”! The Negro maid was a-flutter, and Cornelia was a-flutter--treating Henry as if he were royalty. The remarkable dewberries had been brought by the chauffeur, each wrapped separately in tissue paper, to keep it from a bruise; they now reposed in whipped cream and sugar, on top of a thin flaky cake.

Exactly at the moment of seven-thirty came the great lawyer, dressed as if he were the principal orator at a banquet of the bar association. Treating Cornelia as if she were royalty; and yet smiling at himself, and at her--it was a game you played, and you did not take it too seriously, yet you must take it seriously enough; it was a way to make life worth living, to save yourself from beastliness, cruelty, and despair--the latter, especially, always reaching after you. Cornelia did everything a perfect hostess must do, and thinking to herself, “I have not escaped from the family! I never will escape from the family!”

Henry liked a good dinner, just enough to make it worth while to fix it for him, yet not enough to be gross. He praised everything, purposely while the maid was in the room, so that she stood, transfigured into a double row of shining white teeth. It was picturesque to have a mother-in-law who lived in a tenement; it was elegant to know that she was just as completely a lady, and served just as good a dinner, as if she were on the other side of Beacon Hill. All this stayed in the background of your thoughts, and upheld you in the hours when you thought about your hysterical wife, and your son who had the constitution and structure of a marshmallow, and your money-making, which brought you law-suits and scandals.

They sipped the real Madeira, and gossiped about amusing aspects of family life. Quincy Thornwell, incorrigible bachelor, had been smitten by the widow of a banker, killed in the war; would she have him, and what would they do with her three children, and what about the family, the new cousins and “in-laws” that would be added to the Thornwell clan? Andrew Alvin had been thrown from his polo-pony and got a broken shoulder; a man in his forties, Andrew’s one idea of happiness was to ride a horse as crazy as himself; they had made him master of the hunt in one of the suburban towns, where the smart set dressed themselves in pink coats and shiny leather boots, and rode at daybreak on autumn mornings to the music of horns, and paid enormous bills for damages to farmers’ crops. A certain fast-riding young lady was “setting her cap” at Andrew; her father had made many millions out of war-contracts, and now they were trying to “break in” upon the blue-bloods. Would Andrew condescend or wouldn’t he? It was typical blue-blood conversation.

V

With Madeira warming his stomach and the smoke of a cigar warming his head, Henry Cabot Winters sat by the open window, the sound of children shouting in the street below helping to make privacy for conversation. “Well, Mother, I have been making a few inquiries about those adopted sons of yours. I’ve brought some documents.” He pointed to a leather brief-case, stuffed to capacity, which lay upon the sofa.

“Well, Henry, what did you find?”

“They had a cache of dynamite, and on the night of the arrest they were getting Boda’s car to move the stuff to a safer place.”

“How did you learn that, Henry?” Cornelia tried to keep her tone playful.

“Needless to say, men who make and plant bombs to destroy their enemies do not invite me to their meetings. I have no first-hand knowledge of the fact--”

“Let’s cut short the preliminaries, Henry. You have been talking to the police, and that is what their under-cover agents have brought them. Did they tell you that Rosina Sacco once had her husband in court for failure to support her?”

“No.”

“That’s another of the stories they are circulating; I can tell you a dozen, if you’re interested. They say the fifty dollars poor Bart sent to Tresca to help pay Salsedo’s lawyer was part of the loot of the South Braintree crime. But I happened to know that Bart had saved up about four hundred dollars out of his fish business. Tell me, do your police friends know what became of the sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars those bandits got?”

“They tell me it went to Italy, Mother.”

“I see! When they started out, they were sure it was in Coacci’s trunk. When they didn’t find it there, they decided it was buried in Sacco’s garden. Now, they say it went to Italy. Have they given you any real evidence about it?”

“No, Mother.”

“Well, then, the situation is this: all the resources of state and Federal secret service have been used, and they have never been able to find that the group or any individual connected with the group has had any unusual amount of money, or has spent much money for anything; they have not one trace of a clew. Poor little Boda, whom they call a payroll bandit, had a car that was in hospital all winter--”

“That wasn’t the car he drove, Mother.”

“Can you prove that he drove any other car?”

“There is reason for believing it.”

“Well, it wasn’t a good enough reason to be put before a jury. Web Thayer threw Boda out of the case--but now you bring him back! I knew him well, a friendly little fellow, a salesman of macaroni--”

“Is that what he told you, Mother? He was a salesman of whisky.”

“Really? Well, that explains one mystery in the case--why Mike Stewart couldn’t find any of Boda’s macaroni customers! That was why Mike became suspicious. But now we have a perfectly respectable explanation--surely you, Henry, cannot blame Boda, since you buy whisky!”

“Not Boda’s kind, Mother!”

“Well, you haven’t come to argue about prohibition, so let me see what you’ve got in your brief-case.”

VI

There was a reading lamp on the table beside Henry Cabot Winters, and it threw strong shadows on his fine dark features and thin, sensitive hands. Cornelia noticed that the hands trembled as they drew out the documents. Was it the toll the competitive game was taking from the great lawyer? Or was it that he cared so especially about rescuing his mother-in-law from a career of crime? Cornelia watched with curiosity what came out of the brief-case: quantities of typewritten stuff bound together, reports and correspondence. Henry would no doubt be able to get access to secret service records; or Rupert would get them for him. Would it be ethical to ask him for answers to some of the problems which had been tormenting the defense?

Cornelia saw some red-bound pamphlets, then a red-bound book. “Is that some of the literature Vanzetti had? Or some they got at Sacco’s house?”

“They didn’t get much at Sacco’s, Mother; somebody had burned most of it. I am told the defense lawyers wanted some, and all they could find was a four-volume technical work on the chemistry of explosives. Is that so?”

“You have come to bring me things, Henry, not to get them.”

“Yes, but you ought to meet me half way. You don’t really _want_ to be fooled, do you?”

“Not in the least, Henry. I want all the real knowledge I can get.”

“Let me ask you, did you ever sit down and think seriously and honestly whether it might be possible that these men had connections with the fighting crowd?”

“Are you talking about bombs now--or about banditry?”

“Let us begin with bombs.”

“I have lain awake many a night debating it with myself. About Sacco I have to say that I don’t know; I never knew him well enough--and of course I can’t find out now; one does not talk about such things to him or to his friends. But I really knew Bart, and I try to imagine him committing an action that would destroy human life. He would have done it in a moment of rage against social injustice; he talked violently, and he would have fought the police on the picket-line, I am sure, and killed them. But to prepare in cold blood to blow a man up with a bomb--I try to imagine it, and it simply cannot be done--it is not my Bart any longer. I never knew a man who had more tenderness and pity.”

Said Henry, searching among the papers, “I have a curious document, a letter from Vera Figner, the Russian terrorist, in her own handwriting; I can’t read it, of course, but there’s a translation attached. She is telling about her days in the Schlues-selburg Fortress, and how she walked with another girl prisoner in the courtyard, and noticed that this girl would turn aside now and then from the path. When Vera Figner asked her why, the answer was that she could not bear to step on the bugs and other creatures in the path. Is that your Bart?”

“It might be.” Cornelia smiled.

“Yet this girl had blown up human beings with bombs, and had done other acts of desperate cruelty. She did them for the cause.”

“Yes--and I have to remember that Bart had seen just as dreadful evidence of class tyranny in America as that girl had seen in Russia. So I say: ‘It might have been. I cannot be sure.’ But you know, Henry, I lived in a crowded little place with him for over a year, and I never heard--”

“Your hearing was handicapped by the fact that you didn’t understand his language, Mother.”

“That is true. I learned to understand simple things, but not political discussions, of course.”

“Did you read his literature?”

“No, only what he translated to me.”

“In other words, what he considered proper for you to know--the sentimental and idealistic part. Did you ever see a book called ‘Faccia à Faccia col Nemico’--that is to say, ‘Face to Face with the Enemy’?” And Henry held up a thick book, bound in red paper covers.

VII

The little room in the apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill vanished, taking with it two years and a half of tragic history. Bart was a free man, selling fish in Plymouth, and Cornelia and Betty were paying him a visit, a few days before Betty’s sailing for Europe. There came two Italians with a motorcycle and a side-car, Coacci and Orciani, bringing a heavy package which Bart showed to Cornelia, with a twinkle in his dark eyes, saying that it was a bomb. He opened it, and showed her what he called “mental dinnameet.” “I take heem queek, I get him distriboot, never let polissman get heem, giammai!”

“Yes, Henry,” said Cornelia, “I have seen that book.”

“Bart’s group were the publishers of it, were they not?”

“Yes.”

“But you never read it?”

“No, Mr. Katzmann!”

“Mr. Katzmann is relieved to hear you say so. It is a dreadful book, Mother.”

“I know that it contains the life-stories of various anarchist martyrs. They were fighting for liberty in Europe, Henry--”

“Yes, if you insist--for liberty of a sort. But the point to get clear is, they were fighting with bombs and the assassin’s dagger. Without exception, they were men who did such terrorist acts; and all of them were idealists--many of them men of fine personal morality--who wouldn’t eat meat, or would step aside to avoid killing a bug. They correspond in every way to your boys--with the single exception that they admitted their guilt, and boasted of it.”

“A considerable difference, Henry.”

“Not when you consider the special circumstances. There is no hope for a revolution in America, but there is hope in Italy--or there was two years ago; so America is the place where money is collected, and Italy the place where it is spent.”

“You are talking about banditry again, now?”

“I am talking about both; for they are mixed up together in this book. I felt sure you hadn’t read it, so I had some translating done; a few passages that are crucial I took the trouble to verify myself, looking up word after word in the dictionary, so that I could assure you I wasn’t being fooled by the police.”

“That was very patient of you, Henry.” She saw the deep anxiety on the face of her son-in-law, and understood that he had come to wrestle with the powers of darkness for her soul.

“Here, for example, is a passage from the introduction. It tells us that these martyrs are worthy of emulation, and that we must not let the world’s disapproval influence or frighten us. Listen:

“‘To the latest critics of anarchism Ravachol appears a detestable degenerate; Caserio an epileptic or a paranoiac; Bresci a desperate self-destroyer.... But to the modern free people the enormous importance of individual acts of revolt remains unchallenged as a promise and a symptom.... Such acts are the thousand year stones of the great revolution; the first abrupt, short-lived sparks which the ashes of indifference easily cover and preserve, to be revived stronger than ever by, and added to, the great fire of freedom.’

“Now, Mother, why do men write and print and circulate words like that, unless they mean what they say? Read the book, and you discover that Ravachol was a bandit-anarchist; he made a business of robbing the rich and giving the money to the poor. He was scrupulous about it, never keeping a penny for himself.”

“I never knew Ravachol, Henry, but I do know Bart and Nick, and the idea does not fit them--it is unthinkable.” And she added: “I am arguing against violence on both sides, Henry; and neither will pay attention to me. Which side do you think ought to begin--those who have everything they want in life, or those who suffer misery and outrage?”

VIII

Henry Cabot Winters was not interested in pacifism; he was turning over the pages of the red-bound book. He got up and came over and laid it on the arm of the Morris chair in which his mother-in-law sat. “Look at that!” he said. “A diagram of one of the bombs used by the assassins. Is that strictly historical information? Or is it literary? Don’t you think it possible that the men who printed that picture might have had in mind that bombs could still be made that way? There are nearly five hundred pages of such stuff, Mother.”

“My guess about the matter would be this, Henry: that Vanzetti was the despair of his group--he could not follow along. He would have been torn between rage and pity--just as I am.”

“Here is ‘Fight for Your Lives.’ Here is the leaflet, ‘Plain Words’--an outrageous thing, widely circulated. I am told, Mother, that when Swenson and Moore went over Vanzetti’s anarchist books to get some exhibits for the jury, they had to reject many because they were too violent. They ventured to use others, only because the jury couldn’t read them. Maybe you know if that is true.”

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, Henry.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. This is a family matter.”

“Go ahead and tell me what you know.”

“I know that those fellows were up to some devilment the night they were arrested. They told a tangle of lies to the police--”

“You must know what had happened to Salsedo and Elia, Henry.”

“Yes, and it was a good reason for lying that night. But why go on lying for a year afterwards, when they knew what they were arrested for, and knew their lies had all been nailed down? Why go on lying to their own lawyers? I am told that Swenson and Moore couldn’t get the truth out of them at any time--and we don’t have to rely on police spies for that, Mother, it is in the record. Were you there the day Tom McAnarney cross-examined the couple--what were their names?-- Sacco and Vanzetti came to their house the night of the arrest.”

“The Johnsons. Yes, I heard that.”

“Well, the cross-examination aimed to show that the Johnsons weren’t sure about recognizing the men. In other words, Sacco and Vanzetti were going to deny they were there, and only after the trial started did they decide on the other story--that they had been hiding anarchist literature. I am told that the men’s own lawyers know they were hiding dynamite--the men have admitted it.”

“All I can tell you, Henry, is this--if it’s true, the lawyers haven’t told me.”

“They wouldn’t. But here’s another story--that Lee Swenson tried every way he knew to get you to make an alibi for Vanzetti; he didn’t give up until the very last day of the trial. Is that true?”

“I told you I wasn’t going to answer questions, Henry.”

The other smiled. “That is answer enough, Mother. But don’t worry--nobody is going to get anything out of me. And don’t imagine I am being shocked--I know the game of criminal law.”

Said Cornelia, “I have heard that some of our blue-blood lawyers have been known to frame testimony.”

“Yes, Mother, I have done it, more than once--when I was good and sure the other fellow was doing it. I am not after Lee Swenson--I am just trying to convince you that those two adopted sons of yours are not sentimental pacifists and saints.”

“I never thought that of them, Henry.”

“Well, it’s what your literature is telling the public. You are collecting money on that basis, from persons who wouldn’t give it on any other.”

“I am telling the public I believe the men to be innocent of the crime of which they have been convicted; that I attended both trials, and consider them travesties of justice. That is all I can tell, because it is all I know.”

“Not quite all, Mother--if you will pardon me for reminding you. Will you tell the public what doctrine these men taught? Will you say they circulated books calling for bombings, and giving diagrams of bombs?”

IX

There was a long silence. At last Cornelia said: “The public is ignorant. It believes that men who had anything to do with dynamiting would be apt to engage in banditry, and ought to be executed anyhow. To admit the possibility of dynamite means death. But surely, Henry, a lawyer can distinguish. Also you can see that it is impossible for me to establish a negative--to prove the men’s innocence. It is not enough for you to show a possibility--even of dynamite! You must bring real proof.”

Henry smiled. But then, noting a tear on the old woman’s cheek, his tone became gentler. “You don’t like to hear that your anarchist friend may have deceived you, Mother?”

“No, my son, not that at all. I know Vanzetti so much better than you could imagine--it is as if he were sitting in this room, listening to the conversation, and explaining matters to me. When I face the idea that he may have associated with terrorists, then I think, not that he deceived me--of course he would have had to deceive me, for his friends’ sake, if not for his own. What I think is, how he must have suffered--more even than I guessed!”

“The persons who were blown up with bombs also suffered, Mother.”

“Yes, I know, and that is what the world thinks of, inevitably. The bombs were aimed at members of our class, and they were highly inconvenient. But you see, I have been trying to understand both sides; to find out, not merely how bombs are made, but how bomb-makers are made. While you hear dynamite exploding, I hear policemen’s clubs falling on strikers’ heads. Don’t forget, I was on the picket-line, and heard that sound, I saw such crimes committed, I said to myself: ‘Never again will I blame these workers for anything they do!’ I said ‘anything,’ Henry--and now I don’t forget that I said it.”

“I know, Mother--”

“You don’t know! You haven’t the remotest idea! You cannot dream what it feels like to be down there in the social pit, stamped upon by the hob-nailed boots of policemen, and the iron-shod hoofs of horses! To have clubs splitting your skull, or beating your flesh black and blue! Remember, I saw Vanzetti carry a half-conscious man off the picket-line, I sat by while he bathed the broken head, I saw him weeping, I heard him babbling like a child, incoherent, hysterical, with mingled grief and rage. He has that temperament, he suffers more than either you or I do--he cares--that is the difference, he really cares! You and I care whether we have our dinner in proper style, whether the Madeira is real or not, whether the lobster was alive or not, whether the chicken is the right age and the salad dressing sufficiently solid, whether we have got on the right costume and the right tie, whether we hold our knives and forks the right way, whether we make a sufficient display of worldly cynicism, whether we are sufficiently skeptical about all enthusiasms, sufficiently dead to faith, hope and charity--”

“Now, Mother!”

“I know, you bring me facts, Henry--take a few in return! I could go over our conversation point by point, every remark we made about other people and about life, and that would be it. Last week it was Quincy sitting there, and he told me all the latest from Mrs. Jack’s sickroom; they came to ask for a contribution to the Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary of Boston, and she said, ‘I didn’t know there was a charitable eye or ear in Boston.’ That is our wit, Henry, the tone of our world. We are raising our young people on it--and then wonder why they are going to the devil!”

“You are setting me a large problem now, Mother.”

“No problem at all! We are living off the labor of these wops whom we despise, and hold in order with clubs and bayonets. Think of it, Henry--that man whose head I saw split open was getting nine dollars a week to keep a family on, and his crime was that he was asking twelve. We women were getting six dollars a week, and our crime was that we were asking eight--and Vanzetti’s crime was helping us! There was the greatest and richest cordage concern in the country--their net profits that year were nearly three million dollars! Think of the families we know who are living off those profits, doing nothing else, unless they choose! Think of the imbecilities--one collecting butterflies and one collecting pottery, several getting drunk, one doing charity--God save his soul, he is running a mission for newsboys just down the street here, and keeps it in a place over a pool-room, a hangout for pickpockets and pimps, where every now and then they hold a prizefight! But if you talk to cordage stockholders about going among their working-people and living with them, becoming real leaders and guides and friends, spending the surplus product upon a system of training in self-government, so that industry may become democratic without revolution and violence--if you should talk about that, they would say you had very bad taste, and stop inviting you to their dinner-parties!”

X

The little white-haired old lady had got up from her chair during this stump-speech. She was walking about, and had made several gestures--a consequence of having been so much among the wops. The poor soul was bound to be humiliated, having the truth pointed out to her; she would have to excuse herself, and blame somebody else--it was human nature. Henry Cabot Winters understood psychology, and sat patiently, waiting for the storm to blow over.

Cornelia began telling the story of Sacco, as Sacco had told it to her. He had been in the Milford foundry strike, and had been knocked down on the picket-line, and then thrown into jail. The police had followed their usual tactics of knocking down wholesale, for the purpose of breaking the courage of the workers; it was all that anybody in New England knew or thought about industry, it was the “American plan”--so said the widow of the late Governor Thornwell, pouring out her bitterness. “And remember, Henry, while you are bringing your indictment against these wops, they learned their anarchism right here in New England. Nick was a perfectly ignorant working-boy when he came, and Bart was a religious dreamer, slightly touched with utopianism. If they became militants and terrorists, we taught it to them!”

“They learned it in a foreign language, Mother; and certainly they followed foreign models.”

“That is true enough. But men don’t act upon what they read in books, they act upon the realities of their daily lives. The principal fact in Bart’s life for the past few years has been the war. The capitalist system was trying to put him into a uniform and send him out to kill his fellow-workers; and he was resisting with all his power. To abolish the slaughter of workingmen for the profit of masters--that has been his leading thought, ever since I have been his friend.”

“Does he expect to stop war by blowing people up with bombs?”

“Militant anarchists do; they think that if enough workers would resist, forcibly, to the death--if enough of them were willing to be martyrs--the capitalist class would lose its pleasure in exploitation. Whether that is right or wrong is another question--but that is what the militant anarchist thinks. And watching the thing as I have done, it seems that you men who are running our country want to prove him right, because you shut off every avenue of redress and hope. You corrupt politics, so that it is a piece of rusty junk instead of a running machine. You make the law into a net of red tape, in which the worker is tied hand and foot. You make the newspapers a mess of falsehood and sensation. Your colleges are busy turning young men into quick climbers. Your churches have no time for social justice--they are turning prayer-wheels and saying magic words--”

“In short, Mother, there is nothing left but dynamite!” There was a touch of acid in the great lawyer’s tone; it was getting to be a very long stump-speech.

“There are two things for the rebel, Henry; one is to die suffering, and the other is to die fighting. I try to persuade them that the former is more effective in the long run, but I can’t always get them to see it. Sometimes I imagine there is a pleading look in Bart’s eyes, as if he would like to tell me that he wishes he had taken my advice.”

“Yes, I know,” said Henry, “we are familiar with the fact that men are militants until they get caught, and pacifists afterwards. It is the purpose of jails to effect that transformation.”

XI

This duel of moral forces continued until the arrival of Betty and Joe, who had been to a theater, and then walked home. Betty had been told that her uncle was coming, and she had had no trouble in guessing what for. When she and Joe entered the living-room, and saw the little white-haired old lady in the Morris chair, looking so anxious and strained, and the great lawyer completely surrounded by an array of documents, it seemed to Betty that the combat was one-sided. “Well, Grannie dear, has he succeeded in convincing you that our boys are bandits? Or is it dynamiters they are, Uncle Henry?”

“Henry,” said Cornelia, “these young persons are so clever I cannot keep anything to myself.”

Said Betty, “The efforts of my family to keep me in the nursery at the age of twenty-three are mysteriously unsuccessful! I suppose Father and Uncle Henry have been interviewing the police, and getting all the dirt on Bart and Nick. Let me tell you some, Uncle Henry--I understand that Captain Proctor interviewed all the witnesses, and told Mike Stewart he had got the wrong men, and wouldn’t have any more to do with the case. Is that true?”

“I haven’t talked with Proctor,” said the lawyer.

“Well, you could help us so much, if you only would, Uncle Henry. I’m told that Chief Gallivan of South Braintree says the whole thing was a frame-up. Make him talk! Make Katzmann give us the address of Roy Gould, the man who got a bullet through his overcoat. And those witnesses that Mike Stewart had at the Brockton police station--surely our good uncle who loves us ought to get their names!”

The “good uncle” continued to wear the genial smile which was part of his stock in trade as man of the world. He was interested in the phenomenon known as the “new generation.” He looked at this vision in pale blue chiffon, with a little basket of blue straw turned upside down on her hair cut like a boy’s; her cheeks shining from a long walk, apparently without the artificial aids which were coming to be the fashion, even among the blue-bloods. An amazing thing that a girl with such charms, who might have gone anywhere, should be devoting herself exclusively to Bolsheviks!

Said Betty, as fast as her thoughts: “Grannie, you look tired; you have been worrying! Is it because the police say the money went to Italy, to make an anarchist revolution? Or have they found out how Bart and Nick were hiding dynamite the night they were arrested?”

“You seem to be well informed, my dear niece,” said the lawyer.

“Some day, Uncle Henry, after our boys are on the street--or in their graves, whichever it is--I’ll tell you what I know about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and you’ll think you are listening to the memoirs of Mata Hari, the international spy. Your dear niece has become the super-sleuth of the social revolution--if the movie people knew what I have, Hollywood would be a deserted village, and studios would rise on the shores of the Back Bay. It is my job, when the police send a new spy, to get him alone and remind him that he is an Italian, and get him to tell me what he has told the police. Do you know how they found the maps of Sacco’s buried treasure in Lee Swenson’s trash-basket, and had three men digging in Mr. Kelly’s garden one whole night?”

Henry Cabot Winters still wore his smile; but it was not in his voice as he said, “My niece does not seem to be much horrified at the idea of blowing people up with bombs.”

“Uncle Henry, to be blown up with a bomb seems to me a nice clean experience, compared with things I saw in Europe, caused by the greed of elderly statesmen whose shirt-fronts were entirely covered with ribbons and decorations.”

“So then, because statesmen blundered--”

“Blundering had no part in it, Uncle Henry--they knew exactly what they wanted, and they took it. It is the organized greed called patriotism that I’m talking about. And while I’m sick of all kinds of killing, it is the men who kill for greed that I am out to get. Those who kill for a cause, no matter how mistaken--those who risk their lives for the good of the workers--seem to me to shine with a bright light in comparison.”

“That halo extends to bandits, my dear niece?”

“I will answer you, Uncle Henry, that small bandits break the law and are punished, while big bandits make the law and go free.”

Cornelia thought that conversation had gone far enough. She knew exactly what Betty had in her mind--the Jerry Walker case. In a minute more, the child would be referring to it! “Betty dear, if you love me--”

“Love you, Grannie? I love you enough to let you think your own thoughts and live your own life, which is more than anybody else will do for you. I love you so much that I will suppress my combative impulses, and show respect to my elders. Uncle Henry, you want to know if I think Sacco and Vanzetti ever did a job of banditry. If I knew, I would tell you; but of course, nobody really knows, except the men who did the job. The spies who bring tales to the police are earning their livings by pretending to know what they only guess, and the evidence they bring is not fit to hang a dog on. I can only estimate the chances. I have tried with all my might to picture Bart and Nick committing such a crime, and I cannot do it--the idea is preposterous and unthinkable. And this much I really do know--this I would die for--they never were proved guilty, and their trials were a shameful and wicked farce. Now, is that a respectful answer, Grannie?”

“Yes, dear--”

“All right; and if it won’t be presuming, you look very tired, and I think we ought to adjourn and talk about something cheerful. May I tell them the news, Joe?”

Joe Randall, who realized that he did not have even the status of an “in-law” in this family, had retired to a corner of the room and lighted a cigarette. “It’s all right with me,” he said.

“Well, Joe has a telegram advising him that the divorce decree has been made final, so to-morrow we are going to be married, and the shadow of the great scandal will be lifted from the family, and we shall no longer get poison-pen letters in our mail, and Joe won’t have to go off to his own place when he brings me home from the theater, for fear one of my relatives will be shocked by the sight of him staying here.”

Henry Cabot Winters rose with his most courtly manner. “Permit me to be excused, and not inconvenience you!”

“No, no, Uncle Henry, it’s an old story to us, we have been a scandal for so long that we shall miss it. At least I shall--Joe will be relieved, because at heart he is an old-fashioned Virginia gentleman--look at him blushing!”

Yes, Joe was blushing! It made him cross as the devil that Betty insisted upon placarding their love affairs before the family. He knew why she did it, of course--she was determined not to be ashamed of what she was doing--she would not let them put her on the defensive--her love was just as true as if it had been blessed by a clergyman. But all the same, no man likes to be made to blush!

Henry Cabot Winters behaved with the extreme of gallantry. “Permit me to offer my congratulations,” he said, and held out his hand to the bridegroom. The family solidarity was going to be preserved, in spite of everything!

Cornelia had her Bolshevik granddaughter in her arms, and was weeping on her shoulder in orthodox family fashion. Betty too had tears shining in her eyes--a reaction from the strain they had just been under. Women, who have been but a short time emancipated, do not defy and insult the mighty males of their clan without terrific inner disturbances. They wouldn’t admit it, of course; they would pretend they were crying over the end of a trial marriage! “There, there, Grannie!” said the trial bride. “Our scandal is over, and it wasn’t half as bad as you imagined. Joe and I have had all our domestic quarrels in advance, so we can have the fun of a wedding without any of the grief.”

XII

The marriage of Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin to Joseph Jefferson Randall did not take place in Trinity Church in the City of Boston, and there were no little flower-girls strewing roses in the aisles, nor bridesmaids with large drooping hats, companioned by stern-faced ushers from Harvard. Not all the influence of the Thornwells could have persuaded the rector of Trinity to marry a man who had allowed his former wife to divorce him without that scandal which Episcopal Church ordinances require; neither would the rebel Betty have consented to be made into what she called a “holy show.”

The event took place in what was known as the “Community Church,” a gathering place of eccentric persons who worshiped the ideal of brotherhood embodied in the personality of “Comrade Jesus.” As this ancient Hebrew agitator had been born in a stable, his followers had purchased an old garage on Beacon Hill, and made it over with whitewash and lively red and blue paint, with stairs going up the side, and a gallery running all the way round, leading to offices from which spiritual dynamite was mailed out to the indignant respectability of the Back Bay. The pastor was a new style Christian with a sense of humor, willing to marry a young couple whose scandals did not conform to canon law.

So, on a warm afternoon of early autumn there appeared several automobiles in front of Number 6 Byron Street, and there entered Betty and Joe and Cornelia, with half a dozen other rebels old and young, and as many wide-awake and observant young men, who came to make certain that a member of their profession did not marry the daughter of the most powerful banker in town without a proper front page send-off. Some of them carried black boxes, and the “Red” bride and groom were lined up with the “Pink” pastor in the center, and there was a clicking of shutters, and a cry of “Once more, please!” A distressing scene to relatives of the bride, who had come in a vain effort to confer respectability upon the occasion.