Chapter V: The Saving Minority

I

Cornelia declined three invitations, to live in three different mansions, and got herself an apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill, where the poor live near enough to the rich to come as servants, and to be visited as objects of charity. She had three rooms and a tiny kitchen and bath; one room being planned for her grand-daughter, in the hoped-for course of events. Cornelia did not mention this, but announced that she was going to live alone, to the great dismay of her family. Betty was in the secret, and helped fix up the little room, which was a great joke, because it had perhaps the twentieth part of the floor-space she enjoyed at home. But what is floor-space, compared with adventure, romance, the tasting of forbidden fruit? “Oh Grannie, it’s so cute! And it’s going to be such fun! Do you suppose they will really ever let me come?”

“I don’t know, dear; if we’re both very good and proper--if you don’t have any more love-affairs--”

“Oh, Grannie, I am off for life! That horrible little monster of propriety, Roger Lowell--it makes me blush just to think of him!”

“The same effect that you had upon him,” said Cornelia.

They discussed the technique of self-suppression, so fundamental to life in Boston. For forty years Cornelia had gone about her daily affairs, thinking her own thoughts, and seldom even venturing to make jokes about what the others did. Now Betty must learn the art. She must say, “Yes, Mother,” and “Certainly, Father,” and let it go at that. In an extreme case she might say, “I think, Mother, it would be wiser if we did not discuss that question.” She might be firm and say, “I really think, Mother, you ought to excuse me from saying any more.” If she would do that, politely but persistently, her family would have a great respect for her; and some day, she might remark casually, “Mother, I think I will invite Grannie to go to the symphony to-morrow afternoon.” Later she might phone and say, “Mother, I’m having supper with Grannie, and spending the evening with her.” It would be hard for a mother to say, “No, you must come home at once”; or even to ask, “Are there going to be any anarchists present?”

Of course it all depended upon Cornelia’s “behaving herself.” But alas, the imperial German government announced its new policy--the submarines were going to sink passenger vessels without warning; and forthwith the Back Bay declared war on Germany, while South Boston, the Irish quarter, declared war on Britain. There was a symbolical insurrection when the Irish paraded down Beacon Street; the Back Bay shut up its houses and drew the blinds, but the cooks and dining-room girls and parlors-maids and chambermaids threw wide open the basement doors and windows, and stood in the area-ways and cheered themselves hoarse. For a generation it had been one of the diversions of the “Sewing Circle,” to whisper harrowing stories of the conduct of these Irish maids with Irish policemen in the kitchen; but now it was even worse--the policemen were replaced by German spies, and nobody was safe any more!

Among the activities of the Kaiser and his agents was to persuade deluded sentimentalists into organizing groups with high-falutin names to preach pacifism. There was a “Fellowship of Reconciliation,” and a “Women’s League for Peace and Freedom,” and a “People’s Council for Peace and Democracy,” and a “Jackasses’ Association for Flubdub and Buncombe”--so Rupert Alvin described it in one of his purple-faced rages. The _Transcript_ had been publishing atrocity stories in twelve editions every week for a hundred and twenty weeks, and the Back Bay had believed every word it read; so now imagine the sensation when one of these organizations of long-haired men and short-haired women listed among its abettors a former “first lady” of the Commonwealth!

And Mrs. Josiah Quincy Thornwell was going to make a public speech in favor of America’s taking it lying down! When that announcement appeared, the entire family came, one at a time or in groups, to argue and plead and scold. Clara wept, in the name of her whole precious brood; if the Germans took Boston, they would cut off all sixteen of those sweet chubby hands. Alice used the arts which she had practiced for forty years, ever since she had made the discovery that her beautiful face would cause others to yield their will to hers. Deborah had never had a beautiful face, so she had gone in for character, and now declared that she must consider her duty to her children, and protect Betty from the contagion of German and anarchist propaganda.

II

Also Henry Cabot Winters gave his mother-in-law an entire evening of his socially precious time. She was pleased at that, because Henry had a sense of fun, and would talk about realities. She got in a Negro maid, and prepared him a good dinner, and he came in full regalia, with his gray hair composed in a graceful wave and held there by a cylinder of stiff and shiny black silk. And while she fed him, she told him her adventures as a runaway grandmother, her work in the Plymouth cordage plant, and how she had lived on six dollars a week, and about the Italian anarchists who made bombs of pistacchio, and the rebel saint who had been the cause of Betty Alvin’s reading Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on the rights of women. Impossible to imagine a more diverting story--and especially the climax, which had come only last week--Cornelia’s meeting with Mr. J. Lawrence Perry, and telling that elderly philanthropist how it felt to be an unskilled worker in his mighty plant, and be chased off the picket-line by his special policemen!

And later on, when dinner was over and the maid dismissed, the great lawyer settled himself in an easy chair with an ash-holder on the arm, and with the utmost tactfulness steered the conversation onto the subject of German propaganda; with the result that his mother-in-law put him on the griddle. “Tell me, Henry, how much do the Boston banks stand to lose if the Germans win?”

“Is this for publication, Mother?” The cloud of cigarette smoke did not obscure the twinkle in Henry’s fine dark eyes.

“Your name is not for publication, Henry. I’m told it’s a hundred million dollars.”

“Round figures are generally exaggerated. As a matter of fact it would be everything the Boston banks have, because when a panic like that got started, nobody could say where it would stop.”

“And that’s why we have to go in?”

“We live under a system, Mother. Maybe you know how to change it, I don’t.”

“And what’s this I hear about you and Rupert taking over the Haupt electric works?”

“Jehoshaphat! Where did you get that?”

“Well, I have sources of information. I suppose that is the system too--our leading bankers getting back the cost of their war-propaganda!”

“Well, Mother, we can’t expect the Germans to pay it for us; and if we do go in, we surely can’t leave the manufacture of our war-supplies to the enemy!”

“The fact that you and Rupert and James are getting your lines on Haupt Electric means we really are going in, then?”

“Of course, Mother, we’re going in; that is what I want to tell you--it is unwise of you to waste your strength and happiness trying the impossible. You know, I don’t fret about appearances like the rest of the family; but I’m fond of you--we used to have jolly little chats, and I missed them when you ran off. I thought maybe, if you wanted to blow off steam, you might blow it at me, instead of at an audience. Believe me, public life is wearing--not all the millions of all the Boston banks could get me into it! I imagine you’ve found that out, since you put your name on a letter-head, and set yourself up as a target for all the cranks in New England. How many begging letters have you received this week? How many associations have you joined to reform our spelling and put a stop to vaccination and vivisection?”

That was Henry Cabot Winters, genial, shrewd, playfully cynical. But do not let his social charm fool you; underneath the “Harvard manner” there was a wolf. He would nose among the banking secrets of Boston--he called the biggest bankers in the city by such names as “Ted” and “Winnie” and “Jimmie”; he had been to college with them, and met their wives and daughters in the evenings; he had access to their records, he could call up on the telephone and ask how much so-and-so was borrowing, and what were his assets and connections; and presently he would catch a scent of blood, and put himself upon the trail of a wounded caribou, and track him down--for years, maybe, never resting till he had drunk the last drop of blood from his veins. Both bankers and industrialists dreaded him, yet they could not get along without him; there was vigorous competition between two big banking groups in New England, and Henry’s crowd needed his cunning, at any price he chose to ask. His fee was seven hundred dollars a day, but that was merely for overhead; his real reward was part of the carcass of each caribou.

Now he lounged in a faded Morris chair out of a second-hand shop, and lighted one cigarette after another and gazed at the feeble art-effects which Cornelia had been able to produce without spending money. He sounded like a schoolboy as he said, “Gee, Mother, I wish I could get off by myself and live the simple life!”

“Why not, Henry?”

“Well, I’ve got a costly wife, and a son to put through the education mill--”

“Rubbish, Henry, you know you laugh at Alice and her elegance, and your money will probably ruin your boy. There is some real reason.”

“Well, I guess it’s a game, Mother; you have to do something. When I rowed on the Harvard eight--it wasn’t really so important, but we’d have broken a heart-valve to keep six inches ahead of the Yale boat. Life is like that. If you stop to ask for a reason, you spoil the fun, so you just shut your eyes and pull the stroke.”

“So that’s how we’re going into the war, and kill one or two million of our boys--to win a game we don’t really believe in!”

“No, Mother, it’s different there. Some fellows won’t play the game according to the rules, and we’re going to put them out.”

“Who made the rules, Henry?”

The great lawyer laughed. “You ought to come into my office, and learn to cross-examine witnesses. That would be a new stunt for a runaway grandmother--to become a lawyer at the age of--what would it be, about sixty-five!”

“But answer my question--who made the rules of the game?”

Henry laughed again. “England, I suppose; she has made the rules of all the games, hasn’t she?”

III

Mrs. Josiah Quincy Thornwell sat at a long table, running lengthwise across the head of a room, and raised up a foot or so like a dais. The seat at the center was occupied by an elderly gentleman, with Cornelia at his right, and at his left a Chinese lady with slit eyes and coppery skin. The rest of the table was occupied by a dozen persons of prominence in Boston intellectual life. The great room was filled with tables, running at right angles to the head-table, and occupied by four or five hundred members of the Twentieth Century Club.

Luncheon was in progress, with colored waitresses hurrying here and there, amid a rattle of knives and forks and a subdued murmur of conversation. But every now and then each of the four or five hundred pairs of eyes would steal a glance at the head-table, and particularly at Cornelia. As a matter of mathematics, it is obvious that this meant a number of eyes upon her all the time, and she was aware of it, and her answers to the president’s remarks were absent-minded, and her efforts to consume a proper quantity of lamb chop, peas and potatoes were intermittent.

It is a bad thing to eat solid food when you are excited, but Cornelia had not yet learned that lesson so important to orators. As “first lady” of the Commonwealth she had now and then been compelled to say a few words of thanks to the lady chairmen of visiting delegations; but this was the first time she had been a “headliner,” her début as pacifist and rebel. The story of her adventure had of course been whispered all over by this time; and not ten generations’ training in austerity and reticence could keep the four or five hundred pairs of eyes from manifesting interest. There was not a vacant seat at any table; after the dessert and coffee had been served, and the tables piled back out of the way in a corner, there were not folding chairs enough for the throng, and all the doorways were packed with standers.

The lady with the slit eyes and the coppery skin was a native graduate of a Chinese mission school supported by Boston money. She was introduced, and told them about life in this school--employing a pure and perfect Bostonese, with the broadest possible “a” and no “r” at all; she even referred to “that cradle of liberty, Funnel Hall”--just as if her name were Cabot or Lowell, instead of being Wang-Sin-She! American school-histories tell about a place called “Fanueil Hall,” and you know how it looks, but unless you visit “old Boston,” you don’t know how it sounds.

Every Saturday through the fall and winter the Twentieth Century Club held these luncheons, and you would hear the head of a Negro school in Mississippi or maybe in Liberia; a woman who had been studying the opium trade in the Orient, or white slavery in the Argentine; a physician who had been curing the Eskimos of trachoma, or a strike-leader who had been jailed in Colorado. It did not matter where you came from or what you had, so long as it had to do with making the world better. This was the only organization of elderly liberals in the whole world; they were always ready to join something new, and if you were persuasive enough they would write you checks. Nowhere else in the world were appearances more deceptive; nowhere did fine feathers so fail to make fine birds. The old lady in front of you, dressed in rusty black silk and carrying an umbrella frayed at the edges, might be the owner of a mountain of copper in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan, or of six city blocks of tenements in East Boston.

Cornelia saw many persons whom she knew, and others whose faces were familiar--perhaps because they were types. The very same kind of old ladies made up the “Sewing Circle”; but there they had made long yellow flannel petticoats for the poor, while here they remade the world. Old ladies with little round faces, like Cornelia herself; old ladies with long faces; dimply faces, wrinkly faces with mouths drawn down at the corners; little bustling ladies, large ample ladies, timid shy ladies, grim determined ladies--row after row of them, with eyes fixed upon the copper-colored speaker. It would not have been polite for Cornelia to look at any one of them too long, so her eyes moved from one face to the next. She saw hair drawn up in tight little topknots, hair pitifully thin, with pink scalps showing through; hair in curls, hair in waves, hair neatly plastered down at the sides. An old lady with a benevolent boy’s face, and one with bulgy rosy cheeks; one with deeply graven mouth and double lines at the side, one with wide outstanding ears, one with round white forehead, one shiny in new silk and ropes of pearls, one tinkling with chains and medallions.

And scattered in between, old gentlemen! Bald ones whose scalps were pink, and bald ones whose scalps were white; some with thin white hair, some with bushy gray hair; some with neatly trimmed military mustaches, with droopy mustaches, with grandfatherly beards, with chin-whiskers, round like a quarter-moon, relics of old New England. Old gentlemen with saggy cheeks, or portly, like bishops, or military and erect; rosy clubmen; earnest, ascetic preachers with clerical collars; one with a red nose; one very fashionable, with glasses hanging from a black silk cord; one famous scholar with no hair on top of his head, but covering his collar in back. These, no more than the ladies, could be judged by appearances; the poorest-looking might be the richest, the mildest-looking might hold the most revolutionary opinions. One thing alone was certain--you could never voice an idea too strange, a course of action too dangerous, for some of these elderly idealists to applaud! There would even be one or two ready to follow you, to act upon their convictions, even to the death. It was “old Boston”!

IV

Cornelia made her little speech; very gently and quietly, even humbly. She found many who were with her; and many, of course, furiously opposed to her--though etiquette forbade them to show it except by looking stern and grim. Next morning the newspapers reported the event, briefly but with dignity; yes, even the most rabidly patriotic were respectful--it was the right she had acquired on the day she became a Thornwell. Nothing she could do, short of murder, would forfeit that immunity. If she became a maniac, and had to be shut up in an asylum, the papers would decorously cease to mention her; but no opinion held or expressed would ever cause them to insult a sacred Brahmin.

And curiously enough, the rest of the clan were proud of that fact; in a perverse kind of way they gloried in the eccentric old lady who had told the world to go to the devil. Much as they hated her ideas, they would have been ready to stamp their heels hard on any miserable shrimp of a journalist who dared to deal impolitely with her. The fact that no such shrimp appeared, helped to reconcile them to what had happened; they realized, as families frequently do, that the reality was not so bad as the anticipation. So, after a week or two, Betty was permitted to take her grandmother to a symphony concert.

But Cornelia did not succeed in preventing the war. The great machine rolled on, flattening out all opposition. The Irish of Boston might parade and spit, they might hold meetings that turned into riots, they might make the city a scandal throughout the nation--but the great machine would flatten them out in the end, their mayor, their police force, and their cardinal. It would do the same with socialists and anarchists, pacifists, sentimentalists, all other varieties of cranks. Clear the way for Juggernaut!

And meantime Rupert Alvin, Henry Cabot Winters and their “crowd” were busy taking possession of the electrical manufacturing plant of Haupt. All this “crowd” were active Republicans, and this was a Democratic administration; its promise to be non-partisan and patriotic was a kind of chaff that would not catch old birds like Rupert and Henry. They got hold of a prominent Democratic statesman, close to the administration, and took him in with them, on the basis of a ten per cent “cut”; and he had a nephew whom he installed in the office of the “Alien Property Custodian,” who had charge of robbing the enemies of America at home.

So Rupert and Henry got possession of the great property for one-twentieth of its market value, and turned out the German-American executives, and put in some younger sons of the “blue-bloods,” and were ready to manufacture war supplies and sell them to the government at the highest possible prices. And the government was ready to buy with patriotic fervor. If the business men of the country made big profits, they could pay high wages, and enlarge the plants, and increase the product, and there would be prosperity for every one except the Kaiser.

Billions of money and millions of men--such was the slogan. Congress passed a conscription act, ordering all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft: soon after which there was a ring at Cornelia’s doorbell, and when she answered, she saw her friend, the maker of pistacchio bombs. She had sent him her address, but not telling him of her change of name. Sooner or later he would find out who she was, but meantime she would put both names on the door of her apartment, and let her Italian friends go on using the name they had learned.

So there stood Bartolomeo Vanzetti, hesitating a little, not sure if she would want to see him, since she had given up being a working-woman. “I come for say good by, Nonna.”

“Where are you going?”

He came in. “Anybody here for hear me?” Then he told her, “I go Mexico for keep out from war. I go wit’ Nick--you know, young feller you see in dramma one time, Nick Sacc’. Is good feller, we go Mexico togedder for not get draft. Never will fight for capitalista, Nonna.”

“Of course not, Bart.”

“You no t’ink I am coward for run away, Nonna! You see me and Nick, we fight when time come, but is not yet. You see worker get in war, he get his eye open, he learn what is capitalismo. You see great t’ing come when dissa war is done, Nonna. Come greata change, come rivoluzione. I know, you cannot believe, joosta wait, you see what I tell. Come bad time, come unemploy-èd, come big strike, lika war. Maybe it come great richa countree, like Britain, maybe it come poor countree like Russia--go what you say--cannot pay debt--bancarotta--”

“Bankrupt.”

“Maybe come Russia, you see tsar get kill-èd, grand duke run away. Maybe come Italy, plenty chance for Italian anarchista make fight. I go Mexico, wait soocha time.”

“How will you get along, Bart?”

“I get along, all time. Got two good arm, good back, worka picka shov’, make living. Some odder Italian come, we not get lonely. I write letter some time, maybe get book, learn write Eengleesh, get educate, shoore! I never forget you, Nonna, besta friend, good lady, help workingman--onderstand heem. It is best t’ing of all, Nonna, it is better for onderstand as if you give million dollar. It is t’ing what come from heart. I want you know”--and here the maker of pistacchio bombs laid his hand gently on her shoulder--“I want you know, Nonna, I have for you the sentiment. I not know to say Eengleesh--is Italian word, sentimento--mean kinda feeling.”

“I understand, Bart.” There were tears in Cornelia’s eyes. “I shall think of you often. You have taught me more than you realize--perhaps more than I realize myself.”

A curious circumstance, that neither Vanzetti nor Sacco needed to run away to Mexico. As Italian subjects, they were not liable to the draft. But they believed they were--and so did Cornelia. They became draft-dodgers in thought, which to New England, home of Transcendentalism, was exactly the same thing as draft-dodgers in reality.

They went; and a few days later Cornelia picked up her morning paper, and there on the front page was a startling story: a revolution in Russia, the tsar a prisoner, and a democratic, popular party in control! An amazing, an incredible event; making it possible once more to have hopes, to believe that changes were possible, that evil systems, entrenched for generations, might at last be broken down. Also, it raised Bartolomeo Vanzetti from the status of a dreamer to that of a prophet. Cornelia had listened to his phrases, and smiled gently at his peasant simplicity of mind; but here suddenly his ideas became reality, made known upon the front pages of every newspaper in the world!

V

The pacifists had failed to keep America out of the war, but there was still the question of peace terms, upon which depended the duration of the fighting. So the agitation in Boston went on--until July, when the marines at the navy yard took matters out of the hands of the Irish mayor. There was a parade organized by the socialists, in support of their program of no conquests and no indemnities; the police had given the necessary permit, but all the same, the marines raided the parade and broke it up, tearing the banners away from the marchers. They finished by raiding the socialist headquarters, and dumping its contents into the street. Cornelia was in this parade, and once more encountered violence; but now she was panoplied in her dignity as a “blue-blood,” and did not have to run.

Also--most dreadful circumstance--Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin, daughter of the president of the Pilgrim National Bank, was in that riot! She did not get into the papers, and it was a couple of days before some thoughtful friend brought the news to her father. There were more scenes, and Betty, in spite of all tears and protestations, was again forbidden to visit her runaway grandparent. A program was proposed to keep her in remote country places during the summer; but she vowed that she would not go to that foolish Camp Putnam. “You might as well give up, Mother; there’s no chance in this world of my marrying one of those dull young men!”

“Betty, don’t be vulgar!”

“I am being honest, Mother. You know what Camp Putnam is for. But you’ll have to realize once for all--my opinions make it impossible for me to be a social success--there, or anywhere else.”

“What is it you want to do, child?”

“I want to go stay with Grannie--all the time.”

“But you wanted to go to college!”

“I’ve changed my mind. I realize that you don’t learn anything at college.”

“Betty! What a silly thing to say!”

“Well, you don’t learn the things I want to learn. I got more from being in that one parade than I did in a whole year at Miss Wilson’s.”

“So you want to study to be a leader of street-mobs!”

“Grannie is trying to find out the causes of modern war, and found a society to teach them. It’s too late this time, she says, but next time perhaps we can avoid being caught. And Mother, you must know that is important--just as much so as the feminine endings in Shakespeare’s plays, and whatever else you learn in college. And it’s the right kind of thing for Boston people to do. When you’ve succeeded, then people recognize it, and build a monument to you.”

“Oh! So you’re going to have a monument in Boston!”

“Not for myself--but for Grannie, yes indeed! Look at that Shaw Memorial, Mother--people come from all over the United States to see it. Those Negro troops are dead and turned to bronze, so they are safe and respectable; but when they were live Negro troops, and Colonel Shaw marched them down Beacon Street, the members of the Somerset Club pulled down the shades. That was how the Union Club came to be founded--some of the people on Beacon Hill were loyal to the Union cause, and Grandfather Thornwell was one of them. That is history, Mother; but I didn’t learn it at Miss Wilson’s, and I wouldn’t learn it at Radcliffe. The Union Club is top-hole now, and it pulls down the shades on us. But we shall have a ‘Peace Club,’ or something like that, and fifty years from now we’ll be the highest high-hat in town, and there’ll be an oil painting of Grannie in the lobby, and the family will be proud as Punch!”

Thus Betty, citing precedents, according to precedent. It all seemed so reasonable to her--and to her mother raving nonsense. Was it not obvious that Colonel Shaw had upheld the hands of Abraham Lincoln--the president, even though nothing but a vulgar rail-splitter! Now here was Woodrow Wilson--a gentleman and a scholar, even though he did come from the wrong university--here he was fighting for civilization, and Cornelia and Betty were trying to stab him in the back.

“Yes, Mother”--for Betty had not yet learned Cornelia’s technique of self-suppression. “It all depends on what history decides about this war. Did we have to get in? Or could we have brought the nations to better terms if we had stayed out?”

So they wrangled, until the tempers of both were frayed, and Deborah exclaimed, “Your Father has lost all patience with you! You run a grave risk that he will cut you off!”

“But, Mother, do you seriously think I should spend my life sitting round waiting for you and father to die?”

“Oh, what things you do say!”

“But that’s what _you_ said! I’m not to do any thinking of my own until you are dead and I’ve got the money. But what good would it be to me then? I wouldn’t know any better to do with it than to make yellow flannel petticoats for the poor--so ugly that the poor can’t be persuaded to wear them!”

That was a dreadful utterance--a jeer at the most sacred institution of feminine Boston, the “Sewing Circle”: a group of ladies of the highest social rank, who met for luncheon at one another’s homes, and afterwards sewed for the poor and gossiped for the rich. A fresh layer was recruited every year out of the débutante set, and they constituted the basis of selection for all other social activities; if you didn’t get into the Sewing Circle, you never got into anything. And it was really true that up to quite recently they had made yellow flannel petticoats for the poor, and had stopped because it was no longer possible to find any one to wear their product. Mrs. Rupert Alvin was indignant at the presumption and ingratitude of the inhabitants of East Boston and South Boston slums, and had favored going on making the petticoats according to tradition, and sending them to Europe, where the lower classes knew their place in life.

VI

Betty went to Plymouth, to spend a couple of weeks with her friend Lucile Walker. She wrote, begging Grannie to come, and Mrs. Walker added a formal invitation. But Cornelia did not want to visit rich people; to her Plymouth meant Italians and the simple life. She wrote to the Brinis, and found they had no boarder, so she went down for a few days. A strange sensation, reëntering that so different world! She would keep it as a place of refuge, a stimulus to the imagination, a cure for the mental diseases of affluence. Here people said what they meant, and it was possible to understand what they were doing. When Vincenzo Brini got up at dawn and shoveled and raked and grubbed in the dirt, he did not have to tell you, like Henry Cabot Winters, that life was a game, and you must play it without thinking; no, Vincenzo would say, “Moocha gooda vegetable!”--and escort you from row to row of his treasures, and tell you the Italian names, and remember the English names--after you had reminded him! Alfonsina wanted a wash-tub, for perfectly sound economic reasons. Beltrando wanted a violin, and some one to teach him to play it, and was going to earn the money by picking berries.

The boys were playing baseball on top of Castle Hill, and the birds sang, and the sun sparkled on the bay, and the pleasure-boats made diverging tracks on the water. There were flowers in the woods again--but alas, no Vanzetti to explain them and explore nature’s mysteries. Incessantly they talked about him, the things he had said and the things he had liked. He had gone away without saying good-by to Trando and Fay, afraid lest their children’s prattle might reveal his secret. Their mother had explained matters later--but it was hard for them to be reconciled to his lack of trust.

Alfonsina had got a letter. Both Sacco and Vanzetti were in Mexico, and the latter had found work as a baker. The Mexicans came to America for jobs, and the Italians took what they left behind. Then came a letter for Cornelia, and the family sat round the table and read and discussed it. “I have obtained book for English education. I shall be greatly cultured. Each word as I investigate in dictionary I secure in mind.” They could picture him, sitting in a laborer’s hut, patiently looking up long words by the light of a candle, and putting them together, not always in the right order.

“It is primitive country, much hospitality of people, much to approve, but not developed industrial. The great America has depraved us, we feel in nature’s wildness lonely. I will be glad for receiving English books for education reading, it is great limitation to obtain Italian reading. Nick and me endeavor for improvement our companions of exile. It is necessary for information of world developments. You have seen Russian rivoluzion, but is necessary for explanazion that such is lacking in true rivoluzionairy significance. It is of bourgeois nature, for making country like capitalistic America. It is not of workers or peasants, but Kerensky is tool of business men, and you will see that the desires of Russia for acquirement of Constantinople will not be abandoned, and the participating of Russia in the war will have this significance. I will not proceed in this discussing because is possible for letter to be censured, but will say that all nation in most cruel conflict have imperialist ambition which will not abandon for beautiful sentiments. I have long walk for obtaining stamp for letter so will conclusion with expressing of sincere esteem, your Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”

VII

Cornelia went to call on the Jerry Walkers--she could not fail to do so, being no longer in hiding. They lived in a big remodeled house on a hilltop looking over the bay, and you would have thought them very fashionable, if you had not known the dreadful fact that Mrs. Walker was the daughter of a Pittsburgh steel manufacturer. Startling to realize how one could have all this comfort, and even elegance, and yet be totally non-existent from the social point of view. Mrs. Walker was a fair, buxom lady, her manner to Cornelia a curious mixture of deference due to a “blue-blood,” modified by the need of not seeming too eager for social promotion. A strange world, in which a motor-ride of six minutes brought you from Suosso’s Lane, where things were simple and natural, to this hilltop mansion from which simplicity and naturalness had been banished as by an enchanter’s spell.

But, a spell for ladies only! Jerry Walker, who had begun life as an errand-boy, liked to talk with Cornelia about those days; and how the Governor had helped him to a start. He liked to talk about his enormous business, which he was organizing upon a new system. Not content with owning all the felt-plants of New England, he had got a chain of establishments to manufacture the things that were made of felt--shoes, hats, hospital supplies; he had a jobbing business to distribute them, and was not going to stop until he had retail stores, and even the sheep to make the wool. He was eager about all this--a bouncing little man with bristly yellow hair, standing up like a bull-dog’s. He was extremely self-confident, a great business organizer, who knew it, and frequently said it, adding prophecies. A highly dangerous state of mind in New England, where all is secrecy, and instinctive repugnance toward anyone who talks. Cornelia remembered that last discussion she had heard between her husband and Rupert Alvin, when Jerry Walker and his felt-plants had been the subject. It was easy to understand why Rupert was so antagonistic to this talkative outsider, and resented his control of a great New England industry, accusing him of all crimes in the business list.

Just now Jerry Walker needed to expand his business for war purposes, and needed to buy stocks of raw material for government contracts. He ought to buy quickly, because the price of wool was leaping day by day; but he could not get the banking credit. Everybody else was getting it, all along the line, but from him the bankers demanded practically the taking over of his business.

It was the working out of a situation which Cornelia understood clearly; but she did not have the right to talk about it, not even to Betty. The latter had learned of Mr. Walker’s troubles from Lucile, and was embarrassed, because among those who held the whip-hand were her own father and her uncle, John Quincy Thornwell, president of the Fifth National Bank. “Grannie, I don’t know much about banking, and I don’t suppose you do, but I can’t help thinking it seems to go by favor. Mr. Walker never wore the hat-band of a Harvard club, and his wife isn’t in the Sewing Circle! Do you suppose that is why they say such bad things about him?”

Cornelia answered, “I once heard Great-uncle Abner say that banking is the private preserve of the blue-bloods, a feeding-crib for the sons and nephews and cousins.”

“But, Grannie, that isn’t fair! There’s Father and Uncle John, who can get all the money they need from their own banks--”

“No, dear, they can’t do that--it would be against the law.”

“It wouldn’t be against the law for them to lend to each other, would it? Or to Uncle James, or other members of the family? Certainly you never hear of the Thornwell mills having to scuffle for credit. And Mr. Walker is a capable man, who has built up his business by hard work and not by family favors. I would talk to Father about it, if I thought it would help.”

“No, dear, you’d better not meddle. Your parents would say the Walkers were trying to use you.”

“I suppose that’s why they hate to have me come here. I must only know the people who come to our dinner-table.”

Cornelia laughed. “Dear child, it is embarrassing to know those who are coming to your dinner-table on a platter!”

VIII

The fall of 1917. All about Cornelia a gigantic stir of war preparation, but very little intellectual preparation to match it. She did not have to go far in her studies to learn that the various peoples of Europe had been fighting among themselves for centuries, and in this fighting had frequently shifted partners. Whatever enemy they had at the time, they hated that enemy just as heartily, and accused him of atrocities, and did not hesitate to have priests and bishops invoke the aid of God to overcome him. Always the real cause of the war was a desire to take land from the other nation; plus the fear that the other nation would reverse the procedure--as indeed it would.

Could the same situation exist in this greatest and most cruel of all conflicts? To have that question answered, Cornelia had to get in the Negro maid, and invite Quincy Thornwell to dinner. Do not confuse Quincy with his older brother, John Quincy, for these two sons of Great-uncle Abner were very different beings. John, the banker, had the reputation of being the closest-mouthed person in Boston, which was like being the tallest mountain in the Himalayas. But Quincy lived by gossip, quite literally; for twenty years he had listened to the talk of his family and friends, and turned their advance knowledge into a comfortable fortune on the stock-market. His wizened features were set in mockery, and if you were in the family he would tell you most outrageous and delightful anecdotes.

Quincy went everywhere, and met everybody. He could tell you what the British ambassador had said to Major Higginson last week. The evening before last he had dined at Fenway Court, the palace of the eccentric but brilliant Mrs. “Jack” Gardner, and had there met Sir Leslie Buttock, the latest of the procession of British propagandists who were coming to fascinate and thrill the American plutocracy. Sir Leslie was making the transcontinental tour, and after he had praised the champagne of a Minneapolis banker, or the cigars of a Seattle ship-builder, each of these provincials was an insider and social equal for the rest of his life, and the price was five--ten--twenty billions--no one knew just how much--to be used in doubling the area of the British empire.

A generation or more ago “Mrs. Jack” had set out to cut a swath through Boston society with the millions of a big department store. A vivid little creature, with the continental standard of manners and morals, she had horrified the Back Bay beyond utterance; when she lost her temper, she would break into cursing like any British aristocrat. But she went abroad and hobnobbed with royalty, and was cabled back home; she bought famous paintings, and built herself a palace in what was then the suburbs of the Fenway, and thumbed her nose at the prudes. Now she was an old lady, with decades of notoriety behind her, the acknowledged leader of the smart set.

A British diplomat once gave the official definition of a lie--a falsehood told to a person who has a right to the truth. All diplomats and propagandists who came to Boston did “Mrs. Jack” the honor of admitting her into the inner circle. At her dinner-parties you took off your propaganda-coat, so to speak, and lounged in your military shirt-sleeves. So Quincy Thornwell could tell his aunt exactly why the war was lasting so long. The price of Italy’s repudiating her alliance with Austria and Germany had been the Trentino and Trieste, which meant the mastery of the Adriatic. Japan’s price was Shantung from China. Russia was to have Constantinople. France was to have Alsace-Lorraine, and if possible the Rhine. Britain was to have all the German colonies, an empire in themselves. When you talked to Quincy about any of these powers giving up their spoils because of the beautiful speeches of Woodrow Wilson, he showed his good manners by pretending it was your idea of being humorous.

And yet there were a hundred million or so of good Americans who really believed that their President was somehow going to achieve that miracle! Deborah, for example, and her serious elder daughter, Priscilla, who was going in for Red Cross work of the higher, administrative kind. When you talked to them about peace terms, you discovered that they were trusting the country entirely to a man who was a Democrat, and came from the wrong university! If you mentioned the secret treaties, they would say that these matters were too delicate for public discussion; the President of course had sources of information that were not open to us--

“But why not?” cried Cornelia, and could get no convincing answer. Either the allies were going to give up their predatory aims or they were not. If they were, why not publish the fact? Such declaration would save millions of lives and billions of treasure--for manifestly, one reason for enemy resistance was fear of the consequences of defeat. But if you tried to point this out, you were called pro-German, and people turned their backs on you. They had adopted a slogan, “Win the war!”--which meant that they found it easier to fight than to think. And Cornelia, who had gone out into public life, now had the duty of laboring with them, and suffering because of their blindness. No more could she be content with the troubles of three daughters--their diseases in childhood, their moral training, their love-affairs and marriages, their fourteen pregnancies and eleven children. Now she had a million sons in France, and must agonize with them all--even when they were wayward sons and spurned their foster-mother’s care!

IX

Betty was going to Radcliffe. It was a compromise that had worked itself out with her parents; provided she would put herself under respectable instructors, and read the sound and wholesome books they would indicate to her, she might go and live in the apartment with her grandmother, and meet anarchists and socialists and atheists and pacifists and German agents in her off hours. It had been a losing fight for Deborah and Rupert, because they had other things they must think about, while Betty had nothing but the determination to get with Grannie. After all, what could be more respectable than a grandmother? What more laudable desire for a young girl than to comfort an elderly widow, alone and poverty-stricken? It was really a scandal to balk such an impulse; it was advertising to the world that Cornelia was a shady character!

So Betty installed a few of her books and her clothes in the little room, and the pair of them were as happy as honeymooners--they gave each other a hug every time they met. The Negro maid came every day--because the Alvins insisted on Betty’s paying half the household expenses. Betty’s runabout was in a garage nearby, and any time it was raining or snowing, a man from the garage would bring it over, and Betty would drive Grannie to anarchist or socialist or atheist or pacifist or pro-German meetings. Or they would sit at home in the evenings and study subversive books with red bindings, of which there were now a hundred or so on Grannie’s shelves--Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Emerson and Dr. Holmes having been relegated to a box under the bed. Betty would give her college studies “a lick and a promise,” and then take up Bertrand Russell on world imperialism. Most convenient to have a respectable aristocrat, brother of an earl, to quote against Sir Leslie Buttock and Sir Syphon Scotch!

It was well that this idyllic menage had got definitely under way before the second, or Bolshevik, revolution in Russia. Possession is nine points out of ten in family affairs, as in revolutions, and it was no more possible to get Betty out of Grannie’s apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill than it was to get Lenin and Trotsky out of the Kremlin. But what agony of soul for the Alvin family, and for the Winters and the Scatterbridges, and the whole Thornwell clan! The face of the war changed in ten hideous days! The eastern front gone all to pieces, and a million or two of Germans set free to overwhelm the western front! Russia out of the war, and no one but America to take her place! And red revolution on the rampage over a sixth of the surface of the globe! Insolent, low-down workingmen daring to take possession of a great government, and calling on their fellows in other lands to follow suit!

Every property interest throughout the civilized world rallied against that peril, and the greatest machine of propaganda in history went into action. To meet the immediate emergency, Lenin and Trotsky must be German agents; so a mass of documents were forged, endorsed by the state department, and spread upon the front pages of the newspapers. Then came the atrocities--for which little Belgium had been a dress rehearsal. Bureaus for the construction of horrors were set up in every border city from Helsingfors to Vladivostok, and the cruelty and bloodshed inevitable to a great revolution were magnified a thousand fold. It was St. Bartholomew’s Eve in Russia every time an American newspaper went to press. The Soviet government collapsed once a week, and Lenin jailed Trotsky, or was murdered by Trotsky, in alternating afternoon editions. The “free love” element became the basis of the most obscene hoax of the ages, and fifty million women were “nationalized” in one colossal orgy. Every decent woman in America believed it--and so it was possible for President Wilson to begin his private war upon the Russian people, in defiance of the Constitution which he had spent his life in expounding.

From that time on the advocacy of reasonable peace-terms ceased to be a society function, a diversion of after-luncheon orators, and became a criminal conspiracy, conducted by little groups in upstairs rooms with the shades drawn and admission by pass-word. It became, in short, “Bolshevik plotting.” Did not the Bolsheviks prove it by proceeding themselves to make peace with Germany, an act of treason to democracy and liberty? Did they not make matters worse by ransacking the archives of the tsar, and publishing the secret treaties whereby the allies had agreed to divide large sections of the earth, without any democracy or liberty for the inhabitants thereof? There is a story of a Kentucky colonel who was asked why he had knocked a certain man down. “Did he call you a liar?” “Worse than that, he proved it.”

With one exception the American newspapers ignored these treaties, and to Cornelia and the pacifists that seemed treason to the national welfare. But what could the pacifists do? For any group to circulate them meant to have offices raided and property destroyed; for individuals to agitate them meant to be mobbed, to be jailed and held “incommunicado,” tarred and feathered, beaten with blacksnake whips, in a few cases strung up to telegraph-poles.

Nor was it protection that you lived within sight of Bunker Hill monument and “Funnel” Hall. The grandsons of that “broadcloth mob” that had dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets with a rope about his waist were now out to preserve their French and British bonds. Nor was it any longer of avail that your city had an Irish-Catholic vote; the Catholic church was one of the property interests which had rallied against “Bolshevism.” City policemen, federal secret agents, and an army of spies and informers in the pay of wealthy patriots, would break into offices and homes at any hour of the day or night, and spirit people away and hold them for as long as they saw fit; in short they would commit all the crimes they were trying to prevent, and destroy beyond repair the Constitution they professed to worship.

X

Into this valley of midnight shadow walked Cornelia Thornwell and her grand-daughter, clasping each other’s trembling hands. They were in no personal danger, as it turned out; the patrioteers would seldom trouble rich people, especially those who had “family” behind them. Seen from the outside this “white terror” appeared a mad frenzy, and it was hard at first to understand that there were cunning brains guiding it, that mob-outbreaks were planned by shrewd gentlemen in swivel-chairs. These gentlemen would be glad to scare the widow of Governor Thornwell and make her shut up; but failing in that they would not advertise her treason by arresting her. The reason was that the decision rested with Henry Cabot Winters and Rupert Alvin, who were contributing large sums to the defense societies, and sat in at the councils where lists were gone over and policies determined.

No, what would happen to Cornelia was that her janitress would be instructed to preserve the contents of her trash-basket every night; and one of her old-time friends of the Sewing Circle would turn up and announce herself as a convert to pacifism, and join all the societies to which Cornelia belonged, and go to meetings with her, and get on the executive committees, and turn in a detailed report of everything that went on there, with lists of the members and subscribers, and manuscript copies of what was being considered for publication. Included in this mass of information appeared the fact that Mrs. Josiah Quincy Thornwell was in touch with Italian anarchists of Plymouth, and exchanged letters with one of the group, a draft-dodger--though so far there was no evidence that she had helped him to get away. He wrote to her under the code name of “Nonna,” and a letter she had received from him, entered in the secret service files under the index number of 1842T36, read as follows:

“Dear Nonna:

“It will be great rivilation for you to see the coming of my
prophecy, the real rivoluzion prevail in Russia. This is greatest
event of history and is to be recognize for beginning of epoch.
It is first opportunity for liberty for worker and peasant of
world. It is hope which can be very brief to endure, and will
depend entirely what shall happen in other country. If will come
rivoluzion in Germany, Austria, Italia, France, England, then will
be possible for building worker society without exploitation; but
if is impossible for achievement rivoluzion in other country, is
little hope for freedom for Russia, and you will see ending of
worker’s control. When Russia must defend self in war, it will
be militarismo, and is impossible for liberty with militarismo.
It will then become Russia government of force like all other
gouvernment, and rivoluzion will be perished. Whatever you can do
for rivoluzion of American worker, that is only way for assistance
of proletarian power in Russia. In Mexico is not much activity, for
lack of language speaking, so Nick and me will make secret return
for propaganda. With sincere esteem and fraternal greetings, Your
friend, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”

XI

It was in the spring of 1918, with the last German drive in France under way, that this stolen letter was placed in the hands of Rupert Alvin. It caused great mental disturbance in a loyal citizen, and he came to the apartment and, standing in the middle of the floor, announced that Cornelia stood in great danger of a term in state’s prison for persistent and contumacious disloyalty; also that Betty would bundle up her things and accompany her father to his car immediately. Whereupon occurred one of those scenes which are so essentially un-Boston that all Bostonians deny they ever happen. Perhaps they would not have happened, had not old Josiah married a bog-trotter’s grand-daughter, and thus introduced an element of hysterics into the family.

Betty declared that she would not, could not desert her Grannie. The more sternly she was commanded to obey her father, the louder she wept and the tighter she clung; even when Grannie herself advised her gently to go, she relaxed her grip no particle, but sobbed, how could they demand such a thing of her? The greater the peril in which Grannie stood, the less possibility that she, Betty, would desert her! So it appeared that Rupert had overspoken himself, and he hemmed and hawed and admitted that the danger of arrest and imprisonment was not immediate, his influence had been able to avert the calamity; whereupon Betty said that if that was the case, what was the reason for her going? And what can a man do in the face of logic like that?

What Rupert did was worthy of his Puritan ancestors, and proved that the old stock was still sound. He adjudged his daughter guilty of domestic sedition, and pulled out his watch and gave her three minutes in which to capitulate; at the end of that time he would go home and write a will in which she would have no share, and would be forever forbidden entrance to his home. For three minutes he held the watch, and Betty clung to her grandmother with such frenzy that not a finger could be pulled loose. Rupert snapped to the watch--it was the old-fashioned kind with a gold case and a lid on a hinge--and stalked out of the room without a word. And Betty wept for an hour or two, fully convinced that her father meant every one of those cruel words, and that she was forever an outcast.

Until the doorbell rang again, and there came Deborah, and behind her, silent and somewhat sheepish, the ponderous and impressive president of the Pilgrim National Bank. From which it appeared that the old stock was degenerating in spots! Rupert could rule a board of directors with an iron rod, but he could not rule the tongue or spirit of his wife. She declared that he would not do the cruel thing he had threatened; his sense of patriotic loyalty had caused him to forget the love they all bore for one another. What Deborah would do was to throw herself upon the mercy of her mother and her child, and implore them to spare the family the horror of having either go to jail. So, of course, there was more weeping--still that Irish blood. Betty cried, what was the use of trying to talk about it, when they didn’t know what they were supposed to have done? How could they promise not to do it, until they knew what? So Rupert had to give hints which nearly betrayed the secret; he told them they were known to be consorting with anarchists and draft-dodgers.

So it was a question of their giving up Vanzetti! But they did not agree with Vanzetti’s ideas, and Vanzetti knew they did not, they had tried to argue with him, to persuade him to a more American point of view! Was that treason? Were they forbidden to try to reform the anarchists, or even to know what anarchists thought? If so, who was to answer their arguments? Rupert snapped out that the way to answer such dogs was to string them up to lamp-posts; and then, of course, the fat was in the fire. What was the use of a Constitution if it didn’t work in war-time? What was the use of free speech if it applied only to the things you wanted said? If public questions were to be settled by stringing people up to lamp-posts, who was to be strung, and who was to string--how could you decide? Betty cried, and Cornelia cried, and Deborah cried. Ideas are extremely trying things, devastating in their effect upon the female nervous organism; there is something to be said for the point of view of the Clara Scatterbridges, who have nothing to do with ideas, but stay at home and have eight babies.

Betty and Cornelia laid down their joint program. They had never advocated violence and never would; but neither would they support a war. They would advocate the ending of this present war upon terms of justice to all parties, which included the rights of those peoples whose lands were going to be handed over as spoils of battle. If it had become a crime in America to advocate such ideas, then there would be an old Thornwell lady and a young one in prison. Rupert and Deborah took their departure, as solemn as if it were an execution they had attended; and five minutes after they left, the doorbell rang again, and there stood a humble Italian laborer, wearing a worn suit of clothes two sizes too big for him, and droopy walrus mustaches equally out of proportion. That very anarchist draft-dodger who had been the cause of the family scene!

XII

He stood embarrassed. “I not know if should come--”

“Of course you should come!” and they drew him in.

“Could make trooble for ladies.”

“We are not afraid of trouble,” said Cornelia; and Betty chimed in, “You are a sight for sore eyes!”--that was the way the new generation was learning to talk, in spite of Radcliffe.

Vanzetti’s face lighted up--so glad he was to see them, so pathetically eager for friendship. He was haggard from his wanderings, more somber than ever with the pressure of the war upon his spirit. His age at this time was thirty years, but unconsciously Betty took him for old enough to be her father, while Cornelia took him for her equal. At the same time he was a little of the child to them--the way of every woman with a poet and a dreamer, who cannot get himself adjusted to a harsh world.

He had been a wanderer for a year, and had not liked it. He was going to make propaganda, and take whatever came to him; going back to Plymouth, to live near the Brinis--not in his old room, because the children were growing up and would need it. One could not be sure, but he thought he would not be arrested; the government had plenty of soldiers, but needed laborers for war construction.

They discussed the world situation. The propaganda for intervention to put down the Russian revolution was on the point of success. A shameful thing, said Cornelia. But to her surprise she found that Bart had already given up interest in Russia; the revolution there was lost, he said. “Is joost like I write, Nonna--is militarismo, is one more go-vèrnment for rule worker. Maybe you do not read what soviet have done for anarchista in Russia? They stop propaganda, shoot heem, put heem in jail--is joost like capitalista--is what you say--tirannia--make worker obey, make work, make fight in army--”

“But, Comrade Vanzetti, aren’t the soviets to defend themselves?” It was Betty breaking in.

“Must defend, Comradda Betty, but defend like free men. If man not want fight, nobody got right for make heem fight. Nobody got right for make heem slave, for stop hees mind, hees right for speak.”

“Wouldn’t it be hard to keep an army going on that basis?”

“If you got joostice, will find plenty men for fight, plenty free men. You wait, Comradda Betty, you see Italy, you see somet’ing happen! Is poor countree, Italy, if war stop, will be much bad time, much trooble--will come rivoluzion, I t’ink shoore. Italian is not so easy man for control, like Russian peasant, he is man will fight for right, will be free man. You see different kind revoluzion, different sistema for manage countree. It is our job now, make money in America, make all money we can, send home Italy for anarchista propaganda.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have trouble,” said Cornelia. “They have spies, they know what everybody is doing, and they get rougher every day. I fear you’ll be arrested.”

“Is no matter, Nonna, no worry for me. Is business of anarchista make propaganda, musta make, wherever go. You get putted in army, all right, make propaganda wit’ soldier. You get putted in jail, make propaganda wit’ jailer, wit’ prisoner--is all same, is men, like me, like you. Sometime he come out, is always some way for new idea spread--is no way for stop, not jail, not bullet! In whole world is notting can stop--is biggest, most strong dinnameet.”

He sat in his chair, half out of it, with the eagerness of his emotion. His face wore a strained look, and his eyes had that light of stubborn fanaticism which Cornelia had come to know. He turned to Betty, the younger one, guardian of the future. “Wit’ anarchista is lika dis, Comradda. He say: Capitalismo is injoostice, I will not stand heem! Say, I will break heem, will fight heem, will never stop--never what you say, surrender. I will speak--will say strong word--shock person, make heem t’ink. Will speak all time, everywhere--make men hear--even when he not want hear!”

Suddenly Vanzetti stopped, a little embarrassed. Even an anarchist must be a gentleman! And perhaps so much vehemence was not in order in a lady’s drawing-room. “It maybe seem like crazy talk?” he asked.

Cornelia said, “Wait.” She went to the bookcase, to a shelf which contained a few old books, not yet stowed under the bed. She took one out. “I will read you something, Bart. We had a young New Englander, of old Puritan stock, who took up the notion that chattel slavery was wrong, and set out to preach it, and very nearly got lynched in Boston. His name was William Lloyd Garrison--learn it, Bart, a good name to quote in this part of the world. He started a paper called the ‘Liberator’--that was in 1831, eighty-seven years ago. In the first issue he stated his program. Listen.” And she read:

“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.
On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with
moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a
moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the
hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her
babe from the fire into which it has fallen--but urge me not to
use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I
will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a
single inch--and I will be heard. The apathy of the people is
enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the
resurrection of the dead.”

Said Vanzetti: “What is name?” He said it over, so as to remember it--William Lloyd Garrisoon. “I never hear heem before, but I feel heem brudder; am joosta sooch man like heem!”