Opening…

Preface

The decision to write this novel was taken at nine-thirty P.M. (Pacific Coast time), August 22nd, 1927: the occasion being the receipt of a telephone message from a newspaper, to the effect that Sacco and Vanzetti were dead. It seemed to the writer that the world would want to know the truth about this case; and his judgment proved correct, because there began a flood of cablegrams and letters from five continents, asking him to do the very thing he had decided upon.

A “contemporary historical novel” is an unusual art-form, and may call for explanation. So far as concerns the two individuals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, this book is not fiction, but an effort at history; everything they are represented as doing they actually did, and their words have been taken from their letters, or from the dictation of friends and enemies. All others who played important parts in this drama likewise appear as they were, and under their own names.

Paralleling the Sacco-Vanzetti case throughout the book is a story of business and high finance which will be recognized as a famous law case recently carried to the United States Supreme Court. I have used the incidents of this case as material for my fiction; but the characters which I have invented to enact this story are wholly fictitious, and bear no relation whatever to the real persons in the case, who are entirely unknown to me. There is one simple rule for guidance in reading the novel: the characters who are real persons bear real names, while those who bear fictitious names are fictitious characters.

The writer has been visiting Boston off and on for twenty-five years. The first visits had to do with the novel “Manassas,” and involved meetings with the city’s old-time heroes, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, Julia Ward Howe. The later visits, having to do with “The Brass Check,” “The Goose-step” and “Oil!”, involved a change of view-point not without its interest to students of our history. Nevertheless, it should be said at the outset that what is great in Boston finds due recognition in this story. Those who have made the city’s glory have never been its rulers, but always a “saving minority,” and that minority is there to-day, and it is active.

The task has not been approached in a spirit of grudge; on the contrary, the writer regards with a mixture of gratitude and amusement those Boston officials who provided for “Oil!” an advertisement which went around the world several times. To them he owes the fact that he is almost out of debt to his printer, for the first time in twenty-five years as publisher of his own writings. An honest effort has here been made to portray a complex community exactly as it is. The story has no hero but the truth, and its heroines are two women, one old and the other young, who are ardently seeking the truth.

The complete legal record of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is soon to be published in six volumes. I would have checked by this record every statement having to do with legal proceedings, but unfortunately a few documents were not accessible at the time of writing. I had the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony, but the Plymouth trial testimony, of which only one copy existed, was withheld from me. I have checked my narrative by many documents derived from the record, and had the manuscript read by a dozen persons who have made an eight-year study of the case. I have omitted every statement concerning which doubt has been voiced, and the story contains no errors of any real significance. It so happens that the important thing in connection with the Sacco-Vanzetti case is to know, not what a certain witness testified, but how he came to testify at all. Those who read my story attentively will get the meaning of this remark.

I wish to make clear that I have not written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. I have tried to be a historian. What I think I know, I have told the reader. What is uncertain, I have so portrayed--and have let the partisans of both sides voice their feelings and beliefs. My book will not satisfy either side completely; both have already expressed dissent--which I take to mean that I have done my job.

I desire to acknowledge my great indebtedness to James Fuchs and Floyd Dell for valuable literary criticism, and to many Bostonians and ex-Bostonians for advice and help. So many of these prefer to have their thanks in private that I confine myself to this general acknowledgment. Also I owe apology to persons active in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, whose letters and adventures I have purloined and assigned to my fictitious characters. Extraordinary adventures--let no one say that romance is gone from the world! Also, let no fiction-writer imagine that his powers of invention can rival those of the Great Novelist who makes up history!

I think I should add that “Cornelia,” the heroine of this story, is a lady eighty-six years of age, an old friend of mine, who ran away from her family at the age of sixty as I have described. But this lady never had anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and my character, “Cornelia,” bears no relation to any of the ladies who interested themselves in that case.

I. THE RUNAWAY GRANDMOTHER

I

It was the parlor-maid who found Old Josiah in the morning, seated at his desk, his head fallen forward upon his arms. He might have been asleep, but his dinner-coat told her that he had not been to bed. She stood in the door-way, whispering his name feebly; then she fled to Addicks, the butler, who was privileged to make intrusions. He touched his master’s hand and found that it was cold. So Cornelia Thornwell was awakened and told of her release.

She had had a right to expect it many years ago. Now that it had come, it seemed too late. Fright seized her, an indescribable sense of loneliness. What would life be like, without a husband to direct it? How would her grandchildren know what to do, without Josiah to incarnate the Thornwell tradition?

But she must not show emotion to servants. She slipped into her dressing-gown and came down to her husband’s study. “Call Dr. Morrow,” she said to the man. “And then notify Mr. James or Miss Clara.” Her youngest daughter, wife of James Scatterbridge, lived upon the estate, in a house just visible through the distant trees. At this hour Clara would be getting her brood of seven started on the day, and James would be dressing for his work at the mills. Both would drop everything and hurry over to relieve Cornelia of care.

The daughter arrived in three or four minutes; very emotional, as always--it seemed as if she had come to be one more of the large brood she was raising. She was growing continually in bulk, as they did; she was chattering as eagerly as they, and her mind, like theirs, would fly from one small topic to the next. But she had a strong sense of what was proper, and was shocked to discover no tears in her mother’s eyes.

James Scatterbridge came with her. He ordered the body taken upstairs and called up his two brothers-in-law and gave the news; then he came to Cornelia. “Now, Mother, you are not to worry about the practical details. We’ll attend to it all.” James was solidly made, both in body and mind; a plain-looking and plain-thinking business man, with nothing of what he called “frills.” He ran the great cotton-mills in the valley below them, and a little thing like a funeral presented no difficulties to his mind. “I’ll notify Hobson, the undertakers; also, there will be the press to see to.” He moved away; and Clara, drying her tears, started off upon the subject of a dressmaker for her mother’s mourning costume and her own.

Such things had to be attended to, Cornelia realized. “But, Clara, I’m not going to wear a veil.”

“Oh, Mother! Whoever heard of such a thing!” Clara’s large china-blue eyes grew even larger and rounder with dismay.

“I am not going to be a Hindoo widow and jump on the funeral pyre.”

“Mother, don’t start making jokes! You of all people cannot afford to be eccentric.”

“Why, my dear?”

“Because everybody knows you weren’t happy with Father--you didn’t really love him.”

“Because I didn’t really love him, must I pretend that I did?”

“But Mother, we don’t want to set everybody talking! Surely you owe him one last tribute!”

The telephone rang in Cornelia’s room. It was her oldest daughter, Deborah. “Mother, Henry and I will be right over. We’ll be there in an hour, and meantime I want to make sure nothing is done about practical arrangements.”

“How do you mean, dear?”

“I mean the funeral.”

“James said he would notify Hobson’s.”

“Oh, Mother, how perfectly atrocious! Don’t you know that nobody has Hobson’s?”

“I don’t know anything about it, Deborah.”

“Well, I do think we ought to be allowed to manage our own father’s funeral without having our in-laws take everything out of our hands! Clara has no more taste than a sack of potatoes, and she lets James run her, and put the stamp of his commonness on everything in our lives. Won’t you please see to it that those undertakers don’t get into the house?”

“My dear,” said Cornelia, “I shall follow my usual policy of letting my children do their own disputing.” And she hung up the receiver.

It was not merely a matter of the social standing of undertakers, she realized; it was a deep-seated, bitter quarrel among her children, never to be assuaged. Deborah and Alice, the two oldest, considered that the husband of Clara had robbed them of their patrimony, and that Clara had compounded the felony by failing to make his life miserable. Originally the Thornwell mills had been Thornwell; established by Josiah’s father and extended by the son, with James Scatterbridge an employee of low standing. But James had forced his way to the front, and after the panic of 1907, when a reorganization had been necessary, it had been he who possessed the confidence of the directors and bankers. So now a great block of shares, instead of being a family inheritance, were tucked away in James’s safety-vaults.

Nor had the ex-employee helped matters by marrying the youngest daughter; that was a scandal, which the world would never forget. Three generations from now, you would hear whisperings at Boston dinner-tables: “Oh, but, my dear, don’t you know that story? The original Scatterbridge was a clerk in the plant and he got all the stock away from them, and they had to marry him to get it back!”

It was not as if the other two sons-in-law had needed the money. Rupert Alvin was a banker who counted the year a failure if he had not added a million to his fortune; and Cornelia had heard Henry Cabot Winters boast that his law firm never had less than twenty-five millions in litigation. But apparently this money game was one in which it was not possible to be satisfied. Rupert and Henry, who composed a team, would have liked to take in Jerry Walker’s felt-plants and the Thornwell cotton-mills, each in one bite. They had their “lines” on so many other properties that Cornelia could not keep track of them; the names were to her like those of ancient battles, famous in story, but which she had never looked up on a map.

II

Dr. Morrow came; the pink of fashion, rosy-faced and silver-haired, with sharply trimmed, dapper white mustaches. His manner reminded you that good breeding asserts superiority to every weakness of mortality. He went to the big four-poster bed, felt the cold hands, listened for the non-existent heart-beats, and then turned to the widow. “Well, Cornelia, old Josiah had fourteen years more than the Bible promised him. So we can’t complain.” He knew there had been no love between them.

Hearing the verdict, the efficient James instructed Josiah’s secretary to notify the papers. Some went to press early, and would need time to handle this important story. The secretary would begin with the Transcript, the family organ of all the families that “count” in Massachusetts. The mischievously-minded assert that mortality records show a great increase upon Fridays, due to desire of the socially elect to appear in Saturday’s obituary columns.

Meantime the efficient James was closeted in Josiah’s study with the efficient head of the Hobson undertaking establishment, and these two were learning to understand each other. It was to be a great funeral, a matter of state, which would mean prestige and advertising to the concern which secured the contract. The family was wealthy, and would pay for the best, but there must be a distinct understanding that they were to get what they paid for. Mr. Hobson listened politely and replied that he understood Mr. Scatterbridge’s position perfectly. There was no reason why a funeral should not be dealt with as any other matter of business; and certainly his firm appreciated the importance of social prestige and would be prepared to adjust its price accordingly. After which he produced a portfolio about caskets, revealing that there were art-modeled items of burnished bronze for which it was possible to pay from twenty-five thousand up. James Scatterbridge gulped once and composed his features, and did not reveal his plebeian astonishment.

Meantime Deborah Thornwell Alvin was descending from her limousine, tall and stiff, always ready for a funeral, because she dressed in black, with only a touch of white at the neck and a double necklace of white pearls. She had her father’s lean and stern features, and had served as his deputy in keeping the family traditions in effect. As soon as she was in the house she began objecting in decorous whispers; and presently there arrived her sister, Alice, her ally in war on the Scatterbridge clan. Who had given James authority to bring those vulgar Hobson people into the case? Who had taken the responsibility to rush the family into print, from who could tell what cheap and sensational angle?

“Mother,” said Deborah, “do you know anything about Father’s will?”

“Nothing, my child; he never spoke of it to me in his life.”

“We’re going to find, of course, that James has got this house and the land. You know he took a mortgage on it when Father lost his money in the New Haven jam.”

“Let me remind you, Mother,” put in Alice. “Father promised me my pick of the old furniture. He knew I was the only one that appreciated it--he told me that again and again.”

“Yes, my dear. I hope he put it into the will.”

“I can only say this, if James and Clara get that Mayflower cradle that I was rocked in, they may bury me in it.” Alice Thornwell Winters’s fair blonde features were set in a look which her beauty-specialists would have deplored, because it made sharp lines on each side of her mouth. Alice was the adventurous one of the family, going in for costly culture, inviting poets and artists and people of that dubious sort to her home. She had been painted several times and hung in exhibitions, and had learned to regard herself as a work of art, a feature of the social landscape. The fact that she could appreciate the old treasures of the family was a moral reason for a family quarrel: something which Boston quarrels require.

III

If Cornelia had realized the previous night that she was hearing her husband’s last words, no doubt she would have paid more attention. There is a certain importance attaching to finality as such, even when it applies to the words of a man who has been your husband for forty years, and whose every mental reaction is known to you in advance.

Cornelia had been reading about the destruction of the Rheims cathedral; there was an engraving of it among the works of art she had brought back from her honeymoon, and she had gone into her husband’s study, and seated herself upon a hassock, and begun rummaging in the drawers of a chest which had belonged to Great-grandfather Thornwell, holding the records of his ships in the East India trade. In a drawer bearing in faded gold letters the label, “Sylph of the Sea,” she had found the portfolio of engravings and sat turning them over for an hour or two.

And meantime Josiah was conversing with Rupert Alvin,--oldest of his sons-in-law. They paid no more attention to Cornelia than if she had been a mouse. They were talking about Jerry Walker and his felt-business; and Cornelia, even while thinking about cathedrals, could not help catching the drift of their remarks. Jerry Walker had been an errand boy in an institution of which Cornelia had been a patroness; and now it appeared that he was on the way to monopolizing the felt-business of New England. Rupert Alvin, who ran the Pilgrim National Bank, objected to monopolies in the hands of other people, and was of the opinion that Jerry was dangerously impulsive--he had paid over a million dollars for the Atlas hat-works, while Rupert was in the midst of making up his mind whether the concern was good for a small loan.

Cornelia glanced at her son-in-law, who sat very straight, as he always did, in the big leather armchair; his dinner-coat bulging, his tucked shirt-front puffed out, so that he looked like a black and white pouter-pigeon. Rupert’s face ran to bulges: his forehead a great pink bulge, with two minor ones over the eyes, his cheeks half a dozen rosy-red bulges, and his neck and chins a number of bigger and redder ones. To Cornelia there was something comical in his indignation that some one else had dared to think more quickly than he. But that was the kind of thought she had spent forty years learning to keep to herself.

Josiah gave his decision, in his old man’s voice that was beginning to crack. Jerry Walker might break himself some day, but not now; these were the days to buy anything at any price; hats were necessary to armies and felt slippers were worn in hospitals. That led them to the subject which all men of affairs were discussing in this summer of 1915. Josiah repeated his well-known opinion that it would be a long war and that it was the part of wisdom to buy and buy. Cornelia sat thinking of human lives while they were thinking of money.

Rupert was of the opinion that the war couldn’t last over the year, because the warring nations were heading for bankruptcy. But Josiah told him not to worry; we would lend them the money, provided they spent it for our goods. How would we get the money back? And Josiah said we wouldn’t have to get it back--it would be like Jerry Walker’s felt-business. “When Jerry can’t pay what he owes us we’ll take over his plants.”

Cornelia got up, carrying her engraving. “Good-night,” she said, and they answered in a perfunctory way; and that would have been the end of it if she had been the right sort of a wife. But she could not resist the impulse to stop in front of her son-in-law and remark, “It’ll be fine, Rupert, when we can bring Europe up to date.” Rupert, a practical-minded man, assented; and Cornelia held up the picture of the cathedral. “We can widen out this Angel Tower and make it the branch office of Jerry Walker’s felt-plants.”

For forty years, even during the two that Josiah Quincy Thornwell had been governor of the Commonwealth, Cornelia had been saying things like this, and some people had found it roguish. But never Josiah; always he would frown, and remark, as now, “Your sense of humor is untimely, Cornelia.” She put her hand lightly on the top of his white wig and said, “Some day, my husband, you will tell me the proper time for my sense of humor.”

So she tripped out, the little old lady who had seen so much that was funny in this big household that the wrinkles around her eyes had got set in a pattern of laughter. Not even the destruction of the Rheims cathedral, not even the thought of the peasant-boys in the trenches, could wipe out her amusement at the moral impulse of Boston, which was driving Rupert Alvin to take charge of Jerry Walker’s felt-business, and likewise of the geography and finance of Europe. Her last thought was “He’ll do both those things.” And, in his own time and at his own convenience, he did.

IV

In the offices of half a dozen evening papers the “rewrite” men had dug out a column or two of copy which had waited for thirty years, being brought up to date every year or two. They inserted at the top the information that Josiah Quincy Thornwell, twice governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, leading manufacturer and philanthropist, for twenty years a member of the Republican State Committee, had been found that morning dead at his desk in the family home in the town of Thornwell, the probable cause being heart failure. The more sensational papers added how the body had been found by a parlor-maid; the sort of thing for which Deborah would hold James Scatterbridge responsible. Also they said that the funeral services would be held at Trinity Church, Boston--whereas Deborah and Alice were determined that they should be at the family home, so that the undesirables might be excluded.

Upstairs in the ex-governor’s apartments Mr. Hobson’s shirt-sleeved assistants were spreading their rubber-sheets and placing two tables end to end, at the same time listening to their employer set forth his conviction, that “ninety percent of this business is psychology. You meet a hard-boiled guy like that one downstairs and you have to let him talk himself out, and then he’s ashamed of himself and you can do what you want with him. After all, what does he know about funerals and how a swell one ought to be conducted?”

And at the same time in Cornelia’s sitting-room Deborah and Alice had brought up the subject of the Shah of Persia’s rug. “It really is my property,” Deborah was saying. “I only left it in the house because I knew Father liked to have the heirlooms all together. For years I have seen to the cleaning of it every spring and sent a servant to make sure it was safe. You know that is true.”

“Yes, of course,” said Alice.

“And now if James and Clara think they are going to move in and let their children trample it--”

Cornelia went downstairs and met Great-uncle Abner, Josiah’s youngest brother; Abner Quincy Thornwell, burly and slow-moving, stoop-shouldered and very deaf. Like many thus afflicted, he considered it necessary to hear his own voice. “Well, Cornelia,” he boomed, “well, well--so it has come at last! A hard day for you, I know! We’ll stand back of you, my dear. Anything I can do?” There was a look of concern on his bland and rosy countenance--something that happened rarely, for he gave most of his time to chess and would sit for hours lost in a problem.

Clara appeared, and greeted her uncle. When he asked her what he could do, she shouted into his ear, “Make Mother wear a veil.”

“Veil?” said Abner. “Of course she’ll wear a veil! Aren’t veils made for widows?”

“Mother doesn’t care, she wants to advertise to the world that she isn’t grieving. I don’t believe she has shed a single tear.”

Said Cornelia, “I have read that moving picture actresses make tears out of glycerine. Perhaps I may do that for the funeral.”

“Oh, Mother, how can you say such horrid things?” Clara began wiping real tears from her nose and her uncle peered from one to the other, with the uneasiness of the deaf. “Glycerine?” said he. “I hear it cures cancer, but I don’t know if it’s true. What did Josiah die of?”

“Dr. Morrow called it heart failure.”

“Heart failure, hey? Well, that’s respectable enough. Where is he, up in his room? Poor old boy! But he had a long life, and he got what he wanted.”

He ambled off, and Cornelia found herself escorted into the library for a formal conference with James Scatterbridge. This son-in-law did not possess the worldly art of concealing his purposes, but had to come directly to the point, like a business man. “Mother, I suppose you haven’t had time to think what you are going to do, but I want to be the first to tell you that you’ll be welcome to live with Clara and me. Nothing will give us greater pleasure, and we’ll do everything we can to make it the same as your own home. Things will stay just as the governor loved to have them.”

The meaning of that was plain enough: Deborah and Alice were right in their fears! “I suppose, James,” she said, “this house will come to you?”

“It is already mine, Mother. The governor gave me a deed several years ago. You know how his New Haven stock went all to pieces; and the money I advanced to him was more than the place was worth. The governor felt a little nearer to me because I had so much to do with managing the mills.”

“Yes, of course, James. But the girls are going to be vexed. Does the deed include the furnishings?”

“Yes, Mother; but Clara and I will do our best to satisfy the others. What I want to make clear to you is, it will be your home just the same. You need never know that anything has been changed.”

“That is kind of you, James.” She said this with her lips, but at the same time her mind was flying on. Clara would bring her brood of seven to this stately old house and they would possess it; she could hear their shouts resounding through the halls, their heels clattering on the stairs; she could see them sliding on the polished floors, using the Shah of Persia’s rug to play marbles on. Against the wall of the library in front of her was a bookcase some ten feet tall and seven feet wide, of French walnut, hand-carved over every inch of its surface with rose-vines and blossoms; the morning sun streamed upon it, and a thousand facets shone like burnished gold. There was a companion-piece farther down the wall and Cornelia knew that the last dealer who had inspected her husband’s treasures had mentioned eight thousand as a price for that pair.

“There are some valuable things in this house, James.”

“I know, Mother, and don’t you worry. We’ll add a wing back of the conservatory and keep the children there till they’ve learned manners. I haven’t been used to fine things, but Clara has and she’s the boss of this family. You stay and help her.”

“I don’t know, James. I am sixty years old, and all that time I have done what other people have told me. Now I might want to please myself.”

A troubled look appeared behind the large round spectacles of James Scatterbridge. He had a literal mind, adjusted to the production of seventy million yards of low-priced cotton goods per annum; this production was the real religion of his life, and, for the rest, he left everything to his wife, satisfied that he had done the best possible in the matrimonial line. And now here was this little old lady with the laughing eyes, bearing the sacred name of Thornwell, hinting at the revolutionary idea of pleasing herself. In his heart James was afraid of this great family, with its implacable pride and dignified cruelty; they were sons of pirates and privateersmen, while James was a farmer-boy, whose ancestors had worked and produced.

V

He had no chance to question Cornelia. The bell rang and through the wide double doors of the library he saw Addicks in conference with several well-dressed youngish men. Presently the servant came with a message which, repeated from one dinner table to another, became a standard jest of the inner circles of Boston. Addicks had been with the family more than fifty years and understood all possible social relationships. Now, after due meditation, he came to his master with a formula precisely adjusted: “Mr. James, there are three reporters and a gentleman from the Transcript.”

James went out, took the three reporters and the gentleman into the privacy of the governor’s study, and proceeded to enjoy the fruits of his own distinguished marriage. He reminded them that the Thornwell line went back to the Mayflower; there was in the mansion a cradle which had been brought over in that greatest of ships. He reminded them that there had been two colonial governors in the line, and two governors of the Commonwealth. He reminded them of the deeds which Josiah had performed in office, how he had sent the public thieves to jail. He verified the names of the ex-governor’s children and gave the names of the grandchildren, not forgetting the seven of James, all of whom carried the blessed name: Josiah Thornwell Scatterbridge, Cornelia Thornwell Scatterbridge, James Thornwell Scatterbridge, Quincy Thornwell Scatterbridge--and so on. He was in the midst of telling them how the Thornwell mills were to be closed for a half day during the funeral, when a tap was heard on the door of the study, and there entered in full majesty Mrs. Rupert Alvin, née Deborah Quincy Thornwell.

“James, do I understand that these are representatives of the press? Good morning, gentlemen, I am Mrs. Alvin, the governor’s oldest daughter. You will wish to know that I have been in communication over the telephone with the Reverend Doctor Wolverhampton, rector of St. Luke’s Church here in Thornwell, which the governor built and endowed. He has agreed to officiate at the funeral services, which will be held in the family home. I understand that some of the papers have a report that the funeral will be held in Trinity Church, Boston, but that is a mistake; they will take place in this house on Friday afternoon at two o’clock, and be sure you get it correct so that our friends will be under no misapprehension. Yes, the name is pronounced Woolton, but spelled W-o-l-v-e-r-h-a-m-p-t-o-n--the Reverend Doctor James Lowell Wolverhampton, rector of St. Luke’s Church, Thornwell. He will be assisted by the Reverend Mr. Quincy Adams Thornwell, a cousin of the governor’s. The interment will be in the family vault at St. Alston’s Cemetery.”

After which Mrs. Rupert Alvin, née Deborah Quincy Thornwell, seated herself firmly upon the sofa, knowing that so long as she was there not even her plebeian brother-in-law would dare to contravene her. It was a legend of the family that in one of Deborah’s disputes with her own husband she had said: “Take me into the closet and spit on me if you will, but when we are in public show me the respect that is due to my station.”

The three reporters and one gentleman took their departure in a taxi-cab which they had hired jointly and were whirled down to the village, where each annexed himself to a telephone receiver and spelled out these details, which were first rushed out on a typewriter and then upon a linotype machine and then upon a printing-press. So in less than an hour after James had spoken and Deborah had revised him, the newsboys were crying the second edition of the afternoon papers, with all possible particulars about the life and death and impending funeral of the ex-governor of the Commonwealth. They had a generous-sized picture of him on the front page; a lean face with thin, tight-shut lips and a long thin nose tapering to a point; a face that had reappeared continuously in the course of three centuries. In panels on the walls of his music-room were four oil paintings, life-size, of four different governors, in four different costumes, but unchanged in soul; personally incapable of wrong-doing and merciless to all wrong-doers. Statesman, manufacturer, philanthropist, said the newspapers in their editorials: a model to posterity, an exemplar of all things dignified and worthy of emulation--

And meantime, up in the big room with the four-poster bed and the windows shrouded with dark curtains, Hobson, the psychologist, was remarking to one of his assistants, “If you don’t stop pumping on that carotid you’ll have this old gent’s face discolored and have to paint him.”

VI

Rupert Alvin arrived, having stopped at the Pilgrim National Bank just long enough to glance at his mail and order his engagements postponed. Now he emerged from his purring limousine, drew himself up to his full height of six feet, composed all the bulges of his face, straightened his waistcoat and went in. He listened with politeness to James’s account of the arrangements made, and then, in a room apart, he listened to his wife’s emphatic opinions of Hobson, and rugs, and the determination of James to become the Thornwell family.

Finally he sought out Cornelia. “Mother. I want to tell you that Deborah and I will be more than glad to have you make your home with us and will do everything in human power to make you happy.”

“Thank you, Rupert. I really can’t say yet; I haven’t had time to get myself together.”

But her mind was quick, and was busy picturing life with Rupert and Deborah. They had a big house on Commonwealth Avenue, where they lived three months of the year; the rest of the time they occupied a castle on the rocks of the North Shore. Deborah had the lean face and thin nose of her father and held herself in the same stiff manner; for her that variety of chair is made, of which the backs go up in a straight vertical. She would be her father’s successor in understanding and preserving the Thornwell traditions. She was very devout, and gave her spare time to the management of charities--certain special ones; she did not like other people to make contributions to them, because they would then expect to meddle with her administration. It was her complaint that there was no such thing as an efficient subordinate to be hired; impossible to delegate any responsibility, so she managed everything.

As for Rupert, he was running a great banking industry which carried a general supervision of other industries and the gradual taking over of many of them. In between times he would advise about his wife’s charities and their religious affairs. His hobby was church architecture; the rectors of parishes in eastern Massachusetts would come to him for advice about the proper proportions of an apse. Cornelia realized that if she went to live with them she would indeed feel “at home”; she would be told what to do, exactly as if Josiah were there.

Rupert was summoned to help his wife revise the list of the guests to be notified of the funeral; and Cornelia wandered into the music-room, where the services would be held. But she could not stand those four life-size governors, each with the same lean face and tightly shut lips and nose tapering to a point. She went into the conservatory, where there were beautiful plants and flowers, and benches for young lovers listening to music--even in the suburbs of Boston they did that. Cornelia’s children had been young here and now her grandchildren were at the age of love, yet she had never felt at ease in the house; she had never been able to have her way, it always had to be the Thornwell way. A public career had not been enough for Josiah; he had insisted upon managing his household and had had the support of brothers and sisters, a whole phalanx of righteous people. Great-aunt Deborah had lived in the home until her death, quite recently, and had been the real mistress of the family, with the duty of teaching the daughters what Thornwell daughters ought to know and think.

For Cornelia there had been a little music and a little painting, a rose garden and some books, a few friends, a play now and then and symphony concerts. Gradually the family got used to the fact that they could expect no more of her than this--that she should conceal from them the fact that she found any element of fun in their sober traditions. They did not understand her smile, and it never occurred to them to want to understand it; what made them “Boston” was the fact that never by any possibility would it cross their minds that they had anything to learn from what was “not Boston.” Cornelia’s father had been a professor in a small college, which was decent enough, but his father had been a common immigrant; and three generations from now at Boston dinner-tables people would still be whispering to their neighbors, “Oh, yes, but, my dear, her grandfather came over in the steerage; they say he was a bog-trotter--the name was Irish, anyhow.”

Nor had there been any fun in being the wife of a governor. Let those who wanted fame and prominence help themselves to Cornelia’s share! It had meant long speeches to listen to, bores to talk to, indigestible dinners to eat. It had meant never speaking a natural word, never laughing a merry laugh; everything calculated, everything a matter of policy, to enhance a career which loyalty required a wife to believe in. Cornelia put her hands to her ears to drown out the roaring of crowds shouting victory on election night. She could hear a nasal, drawling voice pledging zeal for the public interest. “Fellow-citizens of the Commonwealth, upon this solemn occasion when you have summoned me by your suffrages--” and so on. Nowhere any charm, or humor, or touch of simplicity! Nothing but heavy pageantry and play-acting, from the cradle to the coffin!

Even now, when in the darkened bedroom the psychological Mr. Hobson had charge of Josiah’s affairs. Said the assistant, “How shall I get this old buster’s wig to stay in place? Can I ask one of the servants for some glue?” Said the psychologist, “No, you can’t ask for glue in a house like this--what would they think? Look on that bureau for a couple of safety-pins.”

VII

The news had spread, the telephone was ringing, messages of condolence were arriving--a constant coming and going and whispering in the house of death. The dressmaker to consult Cornelia about her costume; also the old lady who sold bonnets in the town and was patronized as a matter of charity. Cornelia was willing to be charitable--but Clara was using this old lady to persuade Cornelia to don a veil. A dozen other questions: who was to provide the flowers, and what kind? What was to be the music, and who was to play it? Should the mill-hands be given an opportunity to look upon the features of their employer and just how was that to be managed? Two keys of the organ failed to sound and must be seen to. Such details served to break the monotony of mourning.

Also there were relatives arriving: Quincy Thornwell, Great-uncle Abner’s son, a clubman of fifty or so, prematurely white-haired, his wizened face full of gossip; he had the reputation of a ladies’ man, in a decorous Boston way, and Cornelia liked him because he was not so proper as the others and would tell her funny stories about the city. Quincy had grown rich by using the family information on the stock-market. He spent his days in board rooms, watching the prices of stocks chalked upon a wall; and in the evening, when he was not visiting the ladies, he was playing chess with his deaf old father. They talked about poor Josiah for a while, and then Abner could not keep off his hobby. He tried unsuccessfully to whisper: “The fellow that won the last round is a Jew, but they say he’s French--kind of funny, ain’t it?”

And then Priscilla and Elizabeth, the daughters of Deborah. Priscilla, the elder, was a perfect replica of her mother and planning at the age of twenty-one to devote herself to settlement work. Betty, the younger one, gave Cornelia thrills; a little round face, a nose trying its best to turn up, soft brown eyes that shone with tenderness, and little puckers when she laughed. She sat in the councils of the women, demure and silent, as became a miss of seventeen, whose right of entrance might be challenged. Later, when Cornelia left the room, she followed. “Oh, Grannie, I wish they didn’t have to quarrel so!”

“So do I, Betty.”

“Sister is just beside herself over that old Shah of Persia’s rug. Of course it’s interesting to know that your grandfather traveled in Persia and had the Shah give him presents; but after all, there are plenty of rugs you can buy. But Mother says if Aunt Clara doesn’t let us have it, she’ll never speak to her again. Do you suppose she means that?”

“Such things have happened, dear. Your Great-uncle Abner has not spoken to your Great-uncle Ahab for fifty years.”

“Oh, Grannie! What extraordinary things in a family! Will Great-uncle Ahab come to the funeral?”

“Of course.”

“And he won’t speak to Great-uncle Abner?”

“In public he will, but not otherwise. Abner married the girl that Ahab was engaged to, so Ahab has stayed a bachelor all his life. Don’t you remember that big house down at the shore that they sawed in half?”

“Oh, was that it?”

“They quarreled and divided it exactly, and Ahab moved his half to another part of the town.”

Said Betty, “I’m so glad you’re not going to cover yourself with a horrid black veil. It wouldn’t become you a bit. And I’m glad you’re not crying when you don’t feel like it. I say for you to do what you want to.”

“Thank you, Betty dear.”

“It’s a fact that Grandfather never felt the need of personal affection--or at least he never showed it--so why should other people show it?” Betty stopped for a moment, and then caught the old lady’s hand. “Oh, Grannie, you’re crying now! I’ve hurt your feelings!”

“No, dear, not that! It’s just that I was thinking how much unhappiness I’d have saved if it had been the fashion for people to say what they mean.”

“Well, Mother is cross with me; she says I’m an unnatural child, and she can’t understand me. Do you find me so?”

“No, dear.” And Cornelia smiled through her tears. “Don’t mind me, I was really looking for a chance to cry. It’s a great strain when you break the habits of forty years, no matter what they are.”

“Oh, Grannie dear. I wish you’d come and live with us, and wake up the family. I wish Mother wasn’t so terribly strict with me. I wish I had a car of my own. Dear me,” said Miss Betty, “what a lot of things I wish!”

VIII

There came Henry Winters, husband of Alice; later than the others, because he had had to appear in court. It is not customary to adjourn court for the death of fathers-in-law, but when it was Governor Thornwell the case was different. Henry had been conscious of doing a distinguished thing when he asked for adjournment and the judge of doing a distinguished thing when he granted it, with a gracious little tribute to the eminent departed.

As Alice Thornwell Winters was a model of social elegance, so Henry Cabot Winters was a model of legal insouciance; a lawyer who was also a man of the world and of fashion. Four years in Harvard and three in the law-school had not sufficed to suppress his sense of humor and for this reason he was the nearest to Cornelia of her sons-in-law. He was a slender and rather dark man, fastidious, dressed in the pink of fashion, his graying hair combed in a picturesque wave. He commanded enormous fees for his inside knowledge of the financial affairs of New England; and after business hours he became the man of pleasure, yachtsman, fox-hunter, favorite in the ballrooms. He knew the right people and brought in the business; and left it for his partners to do the tiresome work of looking up the law and winning cases.

Henry now had need of all his urbanity. First he had to listen to his wife raging in whispers on the subject of the Mayflower cradle; and immediately afterwards he was trapped in the drawing-room by his sister-in-law, Deborah. “Henry, there is something that some member of the family simply has to speak to you about. I hope you understand that I have no wish to intrude upon your private affairs, but I have spoken to Alice and it seems that I can accomplish nothing--she absolutely insists that she will let Joyce Edgerton attend the funeral if he wishes.”

“Why shouldn’t she, Deborah?”

“Henry, the way you and your wife work out your marital problems is no affair of mine--”

“Exactly, Deborah!”

“--until it threatens to become a public scandal. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not casting any doubts upon my sister’s virtue--she assures me that her relationship to Joyce Edgerton is innocent and maybe it is--but there is a limit to what you can expect the world to believe--and when Alice continues to have some young man tagging after her everywhere she goes--and when she changes them so frequently--and they all go to the devil afterwards--you know what I mean, Henry! And of course it may be true that Joyce Edgerton is a great poet--or that he is going to be some day, and all that--nevertheless it seems to me that this is one time when the family has some rights and when the sacredness of our grief ought to be respected--and I really think we have a right to ask you to use your authority and see to it that Joyce Edgerton finds some other way to amuse himself on Friday afternoon--surely he can find an unmarried woman to go somewhere with him--just this one day, that’s all I am asking--”

And so on; until Henry Cabot Winters got up and excused himself and went up to his mother-in-law’s sunny rooms, where none of the curtains had been drawn, and he could sink into an easy chair and laugh. Cornelia knew about it, of course; Deborah had not failed to put the problem up to her. They discussed it for a while and Henry remarked that Alice deserved much more admiration than any one man could supply. Later on he made the same little speech as the others, offering Cornelia a home and assuring her that everything they had would be at her disposal. The Winters had a great deal: a town house and a suburban estate and a camp on a lake up in New Hampshire. They had only one son, a lad who was preparing to enter St. Mark’s school, so there would be plenty of space and freedom for Cornelia. She could laugh about life with Henry; but what would she do about Joyce Edgerton and about the young man who had preceded him and the one who would follow him?

Alice had her side, of course; it was pretty generally known that Henry was keeping a woman in an apartment in the Fenway. Also, Alice was “virtuous”--meaning that she never gave herself to any of her adorers. But living in the house with Alice meant that you had to know the details of these emotional entanglements; just what the new young genius found in the soul of Alice that was so especially wonderful and why he preferred it to what he found in any of the available unopened buds who had not been beaten upon by the storms of experience. You had to know whether these young geniuses were happy or unhappy, whether they were coming or going; and after they were gone, you had to know just why they had been so disappointing to Alice, so unworthy of the high faith she had placed in them.

“Henry,” said Cornelia, “I suppose I’m going to have a little money left me out of the wreck of Josiah’s fortune?”

“I hope so.”

“I suppose James will tell me about it in due time. If it’s enough, maybe you’ll advise me about renting an apartment in the Fenway, where I understand things don’t have to be so proper.” And Henry laughed--he couldn’t help laughing, of course; but at the same time he was somewhat shocked. How much did his mother-in-law know about such matters? How much should he admit to her that he knew that she knew? He had an impulse to glance behind him at the open door.

“Henry,” said Cornelia, suddenly, “I am ashamed of the way this family is behaving. But, you know, the Thornwells have not been exactly what you call ‘nice’ people.”

“No,” said Henry, “they have been ‘great’ people.”

“Which means,” countered the woman, “they have been greedy--and with a streak of insanity.”

IX

The heavens, regardful of the dignity and standing of the late governor of the Commonwealth, sent rain on the night before the funeral to wash the air and make every blade of grass to shine. They sent the sun especially early to chase away the clouds, all but a few fleecy ones, setting off the deep blue of the sky. The expanses of lawn that stretched out on every side from “Hillview” were smoother and cleaner and brighter than any rug that a Shah of Persia ever trod. Under the great dark oaks a flock of sheep were feeding, and behind a steel fence a herd of deer. On the opposite slope in the distance were the white columns of the Scatterbridge home, and at one side the cottages of the tenants who worked the thousand acres of farmland. To the east, underneath the newly risen sun, were glimpses of the great mills, red brick stained with coal smoke; also of the river through the trees, and day and night came the music of water pouring over the dams.

The mansion had tall columns in front, going up over the second story, covering both the veranda and the graveled driveway. The house was painted white, the paint, like everything else, being decently old. Wings had been added on each side, and in the rear the music-room, and beyond that the conservatory: nothing regular, because the architects had had to adjust themselves to the elm trees which bowered the structure.

All morning there was the sound of wheels on the driveway, and delivery men and chauffeurs in uniform ringing the bell, bringing wreaths and floral designs. “Say it with flowers,” ran the formula; and every saying had a card attached, to identify the sayer: the Governor of the Commonwealth and his lady, the Bishop of the Diocese and his wife, the members of the Republican State Committee, the Society of the Sons of St. Andrew, the Society of Colonial Dames, the Class of ’58 of Harvard University, the employees of the Pilgrim National Bank, the executives and managers of the Thornwell Mills Company, the Chamber of Commerce of Boston, the Board of Trade of Thornwell--so on through a long list. Addicks, the perfect family servant, received each offering with grave thanks, deposited the cards on a silver tray and handed the flowers to the footman, who took them to the music-room and placed them under Deborah’s direction.

The room had been made into a church, the “highest” possible. There was an altar with a large cross made of white roses and at each side a seven-branched candle-stick, with tall candles burning. The casket was in place, holding the lean body of Josiah, his face upturned to the light for his last few hours, the long thin nose seeming longer and thinner than ever could have been possible in life. The skin was a pale waxy color, tinted with great skill--since Mr. Hobson was not merely a psychologist but a “cosmetologist” also. In his advertisements he said “Every funeral is my funeral”; which was why Deborah considered him so vulgar. Boston--the real Boston--does not wish its advertisements “peppy.”

The three reporters and the gentleman from the Transcript came again; and this time there had been an understanding between James and his sister-in-law. It was like the case of the man who said that he and his wife had worked out a solution of the domestic problem; on all major issues he was to have his way and on minor issues she was to have hers; and so far, no major issues had arisen. The three reporters and the gentleman were received by James and Deborah, and James got the cards from the silver tray and dictated the names of those who had sent floral tributes; while every now and then Deborah would say, quietly, “Omit that name, if you please.” Not every one was entitled to send tributes to a Thornwell funeral!

The organist from St. Luke’s Church arrived, and Addicks knew exactly what to say to him. “This way, if you please, sir. The choir will robe itself in the little room back of the governor’s study. The ceremony will begin promptly at two.” Attired in a flowing white day-gown, the visitor proceeded to test the organ, and mysterious vibrations crept up and down the timbers of the building. “Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to thy bosom fly,” whispered walls and ceilings; and at the same moment Deborah Thornwell Alvin was standing with her two hands clenched, addressing Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge: “I wish to say once for all, I consider one-third of the family heirlooms are my property; and if they are taken from me because of any mortgage I shall regard the taker as a pawnbroker for the rest of my days.”

X

Members of the family arriving. The ladies went upstairs to put their hair and complexions in order, while the men stood about, exchanging phrases in soft whispers: a beautiful day, yes, ideal for the occasion, most fortunate; a fine editorial in the Transcript, the press had been dignified; a great man was gone, we don’t have that kind any more; a very convincing tribute from the party, yes, they would find it hard to replace him; looked as if the Germans might get to the channel; amazing the way the market continued to boom.

There came John Quincy Thornwell, another son of Abner, with his father’s heavy frame and his uncle’s long nose; soft-voiced, semi-bald, president of the Fifth National Bank. And Grandfather Porter Alvin, father of Rupert, and Andrew Alvin, his younger son, a polo player and sport, tanned as brown as a Kanaka, with a puffy checked necktie and every shiny strand of his black hair in exactly the right position. He stood in the library, listening to Great-uncle Abner shouting “Who will read Josiah’s books now?” Andrew ran his eyes over the shelves of heavy works on political science and history and economics and law, and knew that he was not the one.

Two automobiles deposited six pairs of choir boys, subdued in voice but eager of eye; they were herded into the robing room by the Reverend Mr. Quincy Adams Thornwell, the cousin who was to assist in the ceremony; tall, flat-footed, with large bunion shoes and black suit and flat black hat like an English curate--its ugliness excused for the reason that it had ritual significance. Also came the rector and his lady; the Reverend Dr. James Lowell Wolverhampton, pronounced Woolton, physically and phonetically equipped to become a bishop; he gathered up the letter “rs” which the Boston Brahmins all drop, and saved them and rolled them out two or three at a time in his sermons.

He received the final advice from Deborah: “The family will descend at one-fifty-five.” After which he retired into Josiah’s study, to instruct his assistant concerning the service. “First I recite, ‘Lord, let me know mine end,’ and you make the responses. The choir sings, ‘Lord, Thou hast been our refuge,’ and then, before the Lesson from the Epistle of St. Paul, we intone the anthem--”

“Then I will need both books?” broke in the Reverend Mr. Thornwell.

“No, no! You don’t understand.” And with Christian patience the rector said it all over again, but more slowly, pointing out the passages. He would have added the word “Dunce!” but that would not have been a Christian thing to say to a cousin of a governor.

XI

The guests arriving. They stepped onto the veranda and the chauffeurs parked the cars in a long line down the driveway. There were three policemen in blue uniforms stationed in front of the house, but in this well-trained community they had only to confer dignity. The guests did not chat, merely murmured a few greetings, after which they went to the music-room, which most of them knew well; walking softly, on padded feet, and not permitting their eyes to show signs of animation. They were old people for the most part; gentlemen with white heads or gray, flesh-colored or rosy; they wore black broadcloth, some with black stripes of braid down the side of the trousers. The ladies were in black, with now and then a touch of white at the collar and cuffs; many of them wore black-dotted veils and fur neckpieces even in summer weather. They were much wrinkled and the older ones had hanging mouths; they let themselves carefully down the three polished steps into the music-room and took their seats, seeing only what it was possible to see without moving the eyes.

The place was open and airy, full of sunshine; divided into four sections by an aisle down the center and a cross aisle with open doors at each side. It had white Doric columns set in the walls, and panels with the stern ancestors painted. There were tall windows, with dark red curtains at the side, and seats upholstered in red velvet to match. The front of the room had a bower of flowers and in the center, where the two aisles crossed, stood the casket with the body of the great man, white carnations at his head and white roses at his feet; if you looked down through the glass, as a few did, you saw his thin nose of pale waxen color, and his white wig, resting securely in position with no trace of safety-pins.

Across the aisle was stretched a purple ribbon, marking the seats reserved for the family and the family servants; in this solemn hour class distinctions were abolished, there was only Thornwell or not-Thornwell. The governor of the Commonwealth--the living one--came in with his lady, but no one did them special honor; they seated themselves among the guests. So with the lieutenant-governor and his lady, and the senator who represented the Commonwealth in Washington; a “scholar in politics” with a very famous name, a dapper little gentleman with sharply trimmed mustaches and beard. If you knew the “blue-bloods” of this community, you would recognize great bankers and lawyers, the presidents of two universities and several scholars of fame. You would not know the timid old ladies dressed in rusty black, who had got out of cars some distance down the driveway and walked about for a while so as not to get there too early; poor relations, who had been in receipt of pensions from Josiah, and were trembling with anxiety until the will should be read.

Through the side door you saw a throng of humble people; the employees of the mills, which were shut down for the afternoon. They came streaming up the path from the road below, dressed in their pathetic best; they would stand patiently for an hour or two, listening to the strains of the organ and waiting their time to file through the room. A rare occasion for them; one might work in the mills another generation and gaze up at the white-painted castle amid its sheltering elm trees and never climb the path to glimpse the splendor. The rest of the village, which did not work in the mills, was clustered along the roadside to stare at the shining limousines and their stately occupants. It was feudalism in frock-coats.

The grandfather’s clock at the head of the stairs pointed to one-fifty-four, and the organ was pealing a magnificent heavy tune. Every person in the room knew the words, and beheld the same magnificent picture--

_Ten thousand times ten thousand In sparkling raiment bright, The armies of the ransomed saints Stream up the steeps of light: ’Tis finished, all is finished, Their fight with death and sin: Fling open wide the golden gates And let the victors in._

At which sublime moment, with all heaven thundering in her ears, Alice Thornwell Winters, black of dress and white of face, was confronting Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge, demanding, “Once more and for the last time, do you admit that the Mayflower cradle is my property?”

Said Clara: “I think this a most unsuitable moment--”

Said Alice: “There could be no moment more suitable. It marks the break-up of our family, if you so decree. That Mayflower cradle has been the cradle of our destiny, and the symbol of our position. I was rocked in its arms, and the generations before me. I bore the first man-child--”

Said Clara: “Well, I have borne five boys and two girls, even though a little bit late.”

Said Alice: “I have Father’s pledge and I stand on that. Give me your answer!”

Said Clara: “It is a matter about which James must be consulted--”

Said Alice: “You have had opportunity to consult James, and you have done so. If you do not answer my question, I understand that your answer is no.”

The clock had moved one minute, and Cornelia came, saying, “It is time to descend. I hope my children are not going to advertise our family shame to the world.”

XII

The procession of men and women and children was formed in the proper order, and down the stairs, two by two, they went: Cornelia first, with no veil over her features and no tears in her soft brown eyes; her gray hair was smoothed flat, and her little round face was solemn, her little nose facing straight ahead, her gaze fixed upon nothingness. One hand rested upon the arm of Great-uncle Abner; and behind her came Great-uncle Ahab, escorting Great-aunt Priscilla. Then Deborah, the oldest daughter, with her husband, Rupert Alvin; then Alice, the second daughter, with her husband, Henry Cabot Winters; then Clara, with her husband, James Scatterbridge; then the son of Alice, and the two daughters of Deborah and the seven children of Clara tapering to a small pair with a governess between them. The miscellaneous uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces and cousins had already been seated inside the magic purple ribbon, so the procession ended with the personal servants; Addicks, with his venerable black suit showing slightly green in the bright sunlight; the governor’s private secretary, and his Negro valet, and Cornelia’s Negro maid, and the handy man, and the gardener, and the cook--all persons who had been with the family so long that they alone knew the dates.

The six pairs of white-robed choir boys came down the center aisle, their cherub voices proclaiming, “Now the laborer’s task is o’er; Now the battle day is past.” The last and tallest bore a high jeweled cross and behind it strode the two clergymen, robed in white and black. All found their proper places, and the rector lifted his hands and pronounced, “Peace be upon this house.” And, truly, whatever spells he might command were in order at this moment, with Clara Scatterbridge sitting with her teeth clenched on the thought, “They are ours and we shall keep them!” And Alice Winters glaring before her at the sentence, “They got it by a mortgage, like pawnbrokers!” And Priscilla Alvin, elder daughter of Deborah, shutting her fists tight upon the conviction, “When it comes to a show down, Mother will give up, but I will never give up!”

“I am the r-r-r-esur-r-ection and the life!” proclaimed the Reverend Dr. Wolverhampton; and then, exactly as if he had known about Mayflower cradles and Shah of Persia’s rugs, he added, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” The choir chanted, “Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another”; and then the clergyman began to read the extract from the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians. It is very long and somewhat involved, so there was no matter for surprise if here and there a member of the congregation found his attention straying. Rupert Alvin had seen, as he came down the aisle, the face of Jerry Walker gazing from one of the side seats; thus it was inevitable that Rupert should be thinking about the felt-plants and the hat-works which Jerry had bought, and would he be able to meet his notes, and how far should the Pilgrim National Bank lead him on? And Great-uncle Abner, who in the next match was to meet the French Jew, and could not help wondering about the fellow’s tricks. And young Josiah Thornwell Winters, the infinitely precious son of Alice, who had a date with a girl and wondered how soon he would get off. And Betty Alvin, who sat behind her grandmother, thinking, “If only she’d come stay with us and liven things up!”

The voice of the rector was wrestling with the complicated Pauline metaphysics. “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.” Cornelia was thinking “Can all that really be true? Shall I really ever see Josiah again? Is he alive somewhere now, and does he know what I am thinking? If he does, am I really free?”

In the casket, within three feet of her, lay what St. Paul called the “natural body” of her husband. For three days it had been preserved by formaldehyde solutions; but an hour or two more and it would be shoved into a vault, and there would begin a process extremely unpleasant to think about. Cornelia had been reading Fabre, and had come upon the details, which now forced themselves upon her shuddering thoughts. St. Paul, thinking the same thoughts, had said, “This corruptible must put on incorruption.”

XIII

The clergyman was praying; and Cornelia, down upon her knees, said a prayer of her own, “Oh, Lord, let my children stop quarreling!” Then she was back in her seat, listening to a eulogy of the great departed. “When the state was in peril, he was as a rock of refuge ... to every need, public or private, he gave freely ... the greatest of his generation ... we of the new time call in vain for his like--” and so on, a discourse that was Boston in every tone and accent. But Cornelia’s mind was occupied with the realities of this household, to whom the glory of Josiah was not a crown to be worn but a carcass to be rended. For years she had prayed “O Lord, take worldliness out of their hearts.” But something must have been wrong with her technique of prayer; it had failed entirely of effect.

“The services will be continued at the place of interment,” said the rector; and the six pairs of choir boys marched out, singing “The church’s one foundation,” and the guests moved slowly into the library and the drawing-room, or to the front lawn, to await while the mill-hands filed across the room. The executives of the company were in charge of this, but Cornelia considered it her duty to remain, and her daughters, not to be outdone in ceremony, stood by her side.

The workers came in single file, slowly and hesitatingly: men and women, old and young, foreigners for the most part, pathetic figures, the more so because of their efforts to look proper. It was not often, under this system of feudalism in frock-coats, that the two kinds of people met in the same place; but here they were, the masters, tall and elegant, and the toilers, stunted in form and scarred in features, with shoulders bowed and limbs crooked and hands knotted and calloused. They had stood upon weary feet for hours in order to see this splendor, but now they were too timid to look at it; all but a few of the young ones kept their eyes straight ahead. A few saw Cornelia--persons whom she had visited in sickness--and these made faint signs of recognition, which she acknowledged.

Then came the pall-bearers; the honorary ones, whose names were in the papers, walking honorably alongside. The casket was slid into the hearse; the relatives entered their cars and so did those guests who cared to follow, and the long line of vehicles set out, with two motorcycle officers at the head and all traffic waiting respectfully. So they came to the family mausoleum, with the costly bronze receptacle waiting for its tenant. The group stood about with heads bowed, and again the choir sang and the Reverend Dr. Wolverhampton lifted up his rolling voice. “Man that is born of woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.” The casket was set in place and sealed, and the doors of the vault were shut and locked; the blessings of the Lord were conferred upon those present; and all was over. The hearse went back to its garage to await the morrow’s passenger and the guests scattered to their homes; the members of the family returned to “Hillview” for a ceremony which concerned them alone--the reading of Josiah Thornwell’s will.

XIV

Behold them waiting in the library: every one, from the highest to the lowest, the richest to the poorest--even the older servants, who were certain of being remembered. Every one--save two. Clara, looking about, missed her sister Alice and, becoming suddenly suspicious, went into the entrance hall. There, coming down the broad staircase, was a sight the like of which had never been seen by any Thornwell since the days--well, a long time ago, when the ancestors had been privateersmen. Alice was marching, her cultivated features set in grim defiance and her deep-souled eyes staring before her; behind her a French maid, and between them a piece of furniture of brown varnished wood, much scarred and scratched.

Clara stood, all but paralyzed. “Alice Thornwell! What are you doing?”--as if it were not evident enough! Then, seeing Alice go straight by without a word: “If you take that cradle out of this house, I will never speak to you while I live!” And then, “I will denounce you for a thief to the world!” And when even this most dreadful of maledictions failed of effect, Clara could only stand with fingernails dug into the palms of her hands and face white with fury, whispering over and over, “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

They went through the front door and Clara rushed into the library, whispering to her mother “Alice is stealing the cradle!” Cornelia hurried outside in time to see the heirloom being loaded onto the Winters limousine. It would not go through the door, but the two women set it on the running-board on the right-hand side, away from the chauffeur; the maid sat on the front seat and held it through the front window and Alice sat on the rear seat and held it through the rear window; and the car rolled away down the drive, leaving the Thornwell family like a nest of ants which has been stepped on.

And even that was not the end! A dreadful idea flashed through the mind of Clara, and she rushed into the rear reception room, which the ladies of the family used for their tea-parties. In the center of this room, upon the seldom-trodden floor, had reposed the Shah of Persia’s rug; and now it was gone! Clara gave one glance, and fled back to her older sister. “Deborah Thornwell, you have stolen my rug!”

Deborah drew herself up to her utmost height of amazement. “I have not touched my rug!”

“But it’s gone!”

“It has not been taken by me.” Still whispering, of course.

Clara looked, and saw that Deborah’s elder daughter, Priscilla, was missing. She asked no more but turned to Addicks, the perfect servant, who never in his fifty years of devotion had encountered an emergency like this, nor in his maddest nightmare had dreamed it. “Addicks, Miss Priscilla has taken the Shah of Persia’s rug. Search for it and bring it to me. Run!”

In the two hundred and eighty-five years of Boston’s history, no such un-Bostonian thing had ever been known to happen, so there could be no Bostonian way of dealing with it. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge became an ordinary woman in a rage. With tears in her china-blue eyes she appealed to her husband, to her mother, even to her older children and the governess. Ignoring her husband’s efforts to restrain her, she ran from room to room, flinging open doors and looking into cupboards and behind sofas. As it occurred to her to look outside, she rushed through the doorway, breathless, red of face, forgetting her stoutness, her laboring heart, her varicose veins, forgetting even that institution which through so many generations had stood inviolate, the Thornwell dignity. A civilization in ruins!

The mystery was solved at last. Word spreading among the servants, a chauffeur reported that he had seen Miss Priscilla with the rug in her arms, going towards the apple-orchard. So across the fields marched Clara, followed by Deborah, at Clara’s insistence. The other members of the family, suddenly realizing that this was a scene which must not be admitted, ordered the lawyer to begin the reading of the will.

Out under an old apple-tree, in the exact geographical center of the priceless Persian rug, sat the new generation, “young Boston,” which was going to think and act for itself--and bring back the days of the pirates and privateersmen.

“Priscilla!” commanded Clara. “Get up!” And then: “Priscilla, you hear me speak to you! Get up off that rug!”

Silence. And Clara turned to her sister. “Deborah, will you order your child to obey?”

Would she? There was a pause, while history hung in the balance. “Priscilla, I disapprove of what you are doing. Please get up.”

And so the rug-sitting sphinx revealed a voice. “Mother, I am the person who will inherit this rug and I have made up my mind what to do. I shall sit here until Grandfather’s will has been read. If he gives it to us, as he promised, all right. If not, Aunt Clara may call the police to remove me from it.”

“Priscilla! You defy your mother?” Clara’s voice was trembling. “Deborah, make her obey you!”

“Priscilla, obey me,” said the mother. Was it possible that the voice lacked just a little of its usual firmness? Anyhow, Priscilla Alvin continued to sit, her eyes fixed on space.

“Obey your mother!” commanded Clara.

“Priscilla, obey me!” echoed Deborah.

“Mother,” said the rug-sitter, “I was twenty-one years of age last week and I have taken legal advice and learned that I am no longer compelled to obey any one but the law. I am here and I shall stay here, and I serve notice now that if any one but a policeman removes me I shall get a warrant for the person’s arrest.”

“Oh!” cried Clara. “What is this new generation coming to?”

“Aunt Clara,” said the rug-sitter, “you will save time if you go back and hear the will, because you won’t accomplish anything meantime. Do not worry, I shall stay right here till the question is decided. I could have gone farther if I had wanted to, but I like this orchard, which you got away from us.”

XV

And meantime Cornelia had gone to her rooms and locked the door behind her; and then into her bedroom and shut that door, to make doubly certain. She was pacing up and down, beset by a storm of emotion. As they say a drowning man lives over the experiences of his whole life, so she was living the repressions of forty years. All the rages she had felt and never voiced! All the disappointments, the despairs! The experiences she had longed for, and never dared to have, and now could never have, because it was too late! She had been caught, a wild young thing in a trap; she had lived, a prisoner in a cell. She had had dreams, and seen them suffocated; she had had children, and seen them taken from her, and made into strangers. Forced into the mold of this family--this solid phalanx of iron people--with iron souls, iron wills which broke you!

This crowning indignity, this outbreak in the very presence of death--this was an accident, Cornelia told herself. They had never done anything like this before, nothing so open, so undignified. They would repudiate it themselves, they would be ashamed of it to-morrow. This was not “Boston”! But to Cornelia, who had been on the inside of “Boston,” it seemed an outbreak of reality, a revelation of hidden natures. Petty jealousy, petty greed, masked with dignity, and wearing the solemn costumes of historical tradition! Other people, living people, would quarrel over real things; the Thornwells quarreled over the dead rags and relics of their ancestors!

Once there had been real people in this family! Once there had been men and women who had acted, who had dared to think for themselves--and to care about something else than rags and relics! Memories surged into Cornelia’s mind, of the old days when the Thornwells had been smugglers and privateers--not thinking about the proprieties then! There had been revolutionary leaders among them--men who had gone into the “pot-houses” and incited mobs! There had even been women who had dared to think, and to act, instead of obeying the men! Didn’t they worship the memory of a Great-great-aunt Deborah, who had been one of the anti-slavery pioneers? Not frightened by the horrible name of “Black Abolitionist”--no indeed, she had made her home one of the stations in the “underground railway” which had carried fugitive slaves to Canada! She had taught Negroes to read and write--not only black women, but black men! Such was the tradition they thought they worshiped; but really they only worshiped the rags and relics of it!

Suddenly this storm of emotion culminated, and Cornelia, who had been pacing back and forth in her room, suddenly stopped still. What was the reason women were always bound by fear? Because they were afraid! Why were they obedient? Because they obeyed! When they wanted to act, they did not know enough; and when they knew enough, then they were too old! But who could say you were too old to act, if you acted?

Cornelia, trembling with excitement, but at the same time calm inside, went to her desk and sat down, and took pen and ink and began to write.

“My dear Children:

“For forty years I have been doing what other people wanted me to do, and I have never had any fun. Now I think I have done everything I can for you, and that you can get along without me. I hope that I am old enough to take care of myself. I am going away for a while, to remain until I choose to return, if ever. I am not taking any property, because there has been too much of it in my life, and I believe I shall be happier without it. I am going to prove to myself, for my own satisfaction, that I can take care of myself, without any advice or assistance from any one. I have only one request, that you will waste no time or money in efforts to find me. It will only irritate me and do no good whatever, because I shall continue to do exactly what I please. I have heard of runaway children; I am going to be the runaway grandmother.

“With best wishes, “Mother.

“P.S. I enclose a respectable letter which you may show to our friends.”

And the second letter:

“My Dear Children:

“Your father’s sudden death has shocked me deeply, and after the strain of the funeral I realize that I am run down and in need of rest. I have received a telephone call from an old school friend who is starting on a camping trip and begs me go along. I think such a complete change will help me, so I am taking a night train, and write this to explain and leave you my dearest love and wishes for a happy summer.

“Affectionately, “Mother.”

Having sealed these two letters in one envelope and marked it “For Deborah, Alice and Clara,” Cornelia laid it in the middle of her bed. She then changed her mourning garb for an ordinary street-dress, and took her handbag with some ready money in it, and unlocked the two doors, and slipped down a back stairway, and out by a rear door, and down the path which led to the main road. There was a trolley stop, and a car labeled “Boston,” and she stepped aboard.

II. PLYMOUTH ROCK

I

The “jitney bus” from Boston came speeding down the highway, and when it got into North Plymouth it stopped in front of the cordage company’s plant. There climbed out a little old lady, carrying a straw suitcase, and dressed in humble working-woman’s clothing, with a worn gray shawl over her head. From beneath the shawl peered a pair of twinkling brown eyes, and these remained, taking in the landscape, after the bus had rolled on its way.

There was a two-story brick building, seeming to extend forever along the bay-front; built in the fashion of a fortress, with a steel fence in front, and a pond which had been turned into a moat in medieval style. High up in the blue sky floated an American flag, to let you know that this was not a Rhine castle of the middle ages, but a center of industry in the land of the Pilgrim’s pride. The old lady stood wondering what to do next. Finally she approached the steel gates and inquired of the keeper, “Please, Mister, where I go for job?”

The man pointed to a building on the other side of the highway. “There’s the employment office,” he said. “But you’re too late; we’re closing in five minutes. Come to-morrow.”

The old lady looked at the red brick walls and the blue sky and the white clouds and the starry flag, all made to go upon a picture postcard. The windows of the long factory were open, and she heard the roar of spinning-machinery, and saw the figures of men and women moving about. Suddenly a siren boomed; and as if by magic, the various buildings began to belch human figures. Apparently they had been lined up just inside the doors, like runners at the start of a race; they behaved as if the building were on fire, or full of poison gas. More and more dense grew the throngs of escapers, until the roadway was gray and blue with the shirts of men and the multi-colored dresses of girls. For the most part they were foreigners, Italians, Portuguese, and other dark peoples. They were small and stunted, the older ones bent with toil, walking mechanically, looking neither to right nor to left. The younger ones chatted in twos and threes, and some had a friendly smile for the little old lady with the brown eyes peering from under the shawl.

Two thousand or more came through the gates, and then gradually the procession thinned out, and the old lady turned back to the highway and along the tree-shaded street. Smaller streets went off it, lined with the homes of workers, four-family wooden tenements, square and plain, with dingy worn paint or none at all. The old lady found herself walking beside an Italian boy, seven or eight years old, a slender child with bright black eyes; he whistled cheerfully, and was reasonably clean. So the old lady said, “Hello, little boy; what is your name?”

“My name is Beltrando.” He spoke in good English.

“Do you know anybody who would like to take a boarder?”

The boy thought, and then said, “Come see my mamma.” He led her down a street labeled “Suosso’s Lane” to a two-story house of unpainted shingles. They went in by the rear door, and Cornelia Thornwell found herself in the kitchen of Mrs. Vincenzo Brini.

“I come from Boston,” she said. “I look for job in cordage plant. You know anybody got room for boarder?”

Alfonsina Brini was a young woman, small but strongly made, with kind motherly face and quick intelligent eyes. She examined her visitor with some curiosity, and said, “You Yankee lady?”

“Why, yes,” said Cornelia Thornwell--her pitiful effort at concealment collapsing at once.

“Why you talka lika foreign?”

“Well, I thought maybe you understand better.” Her smile was friendly and disarming, and won the other’s heart.

“Me no onderstanda good,” said Mrs. Brini. “Trando, here, he talka like Merican boy, he tella me.” Mrs. Brini was in working clothes, and had not yet taken off her hat. “Me joosta get home,” she said. “Me worka by woolen mill. You gotta job by cordage?”

“I want to ask for one,” said Cornelia. “Do you think I can get it?”

“Shoore, plenty jobba now. Plenty shippa get--how you say, Trando, afondato--shippa sunk, maka new rope, plenty cordage job. But harda work, you very olda lady for cordage job.”

“Oh, I won’t mind hard work,” said Cornelia, with the serenity of complete ignorance. “What will I get?”

“You no skilla work, you getta six dollar week. Some day you learn skilla work, you getta maybe eight, nine dollar week. My osband he work by cordage, getta twelve dollar half.”

“And what will I pay for board?”

“You boarda maybe two dollar half, maybe t’ree dollar. You boarda by me, you go in room wit’ my big girl, I make it two dollar quarter. You take little rooma for self, I maka two dollar half.”

“I think I’d like to have room to myself,” said Cornelia, timidly.

Mrs. Brini escorted her into the parlor. It was perhaps twelve feet square, with one of those plush-upholstered sets of furniture which are advertised at special bargains--$38.50, and you sign a blank on the dotted line, and once a month the agent collects three dollars, with interest on the unpaid portion. Also there was a phonograph, bought in the same way; and before Cornelia had been in the house half an hour, Beltrando had produced the big red record which had cost a week of Cornelia’s board, and took the place of an icon or shrine in this family. “You listen to Caroos’,” said the little boy; and Mrs. Brini stopped washing the vegetables for the salad and stood with hands wet and rapture in her eyes, while a mighty voice spread its wings and bore her soul to Italy.

II

The room assigned to Cornelia was five feet by eight, and held a wire cot and a chest of drawers. Her straw suitcase would go under the bed, and her clothing would hang on hooks behind the door. There was a window with home-made curtains in front of it, and on the chest of drawers a hand-woven lace cover, held in place by two figures in tinted glass, one a shepherd, the other his sweetheart, in Italian costumes. “This is lovely,” the boarder said, gallantly; “it will seem like home.”

And now, with the door shut, Cornelia Thornwell stood in the midst of her empire, trying to grasp what her new life would be like. She wanted to bathe her hands and face, and realized with dismay that she would have to use a bathroom in common with half a dozen other persons. No doubt she could replace the Italian shepherd and his love with a tin washbasin and pitcher. But would she be able to afford such luxuries on six dollars a week? And especially when she had not yet earned the six dollars, nor even the chance to earn them!

She put the contents of her straw suitcase away in the drawers and started to shove the suitcase under the bed, but discovered that the way was blocked by a couple of boxes containing books. This surprised her, and she sat on the bed and examined them. “Manzoni,” was the first name, and she had heard it somewhere; but the title “I Promessi Sposi,” told her nothing. The next was “A. O. Olivetti: Azione Diretta e Mediazione”; and that told her nothing either. The next was “Le Scuole Clericali,” and she judged that must be a religious book; the next, “G. Most: La Peste Religiosa,” must be the same. These people would probably be devout, and would they expect a “Yankee lady” to go to church with them? The next was “Ernesto Renan: La Vita di Gesu.” She had heard of that, but had the impression that it was an agnostic book; surely her rector had spoken of it as taking Jesus for a man pure and simple. However, these people would not expect her to know about their authors.

She went outside to enjoy the evening. There was a vegetable garden in back of the house, all green and shiny after recent rains. A man was working here, with his coat off; a big fellow, with long arms flying vigorously as he threw the dirt. Cornelia was pleased by his diligence, because it promised fresh food for the table. She walked down the path and said, “Good evening,” and he stopped his labors. She had given her name as “Mrs. Cornell,” and now he greeted her as “Miz’ Cornella.” Just as the London working-classes drop the “h” where it belongs and put it where it does not belong, so these Italians did with vowels; they would say, “You lika da spagett’?”

“I am Mist’ Brini,” said the gardener; and Cornelia said, “I am glad to know you”--which was true enough, for she had been timid on the subject of foreign men, and this one, her future landlord, was reassuring. He was of middle age, and sometimes his face would be puzzled, and sometimes it would be amused, but always it was honest. His arms were hairy, and his large head set on a long neck. “Plenty gooda vegetable,” said he. “You lika da minestrone?” He waved his arm with a gesture which seemed to sweep the whole garden into a pot, and offer it for her evening meal. Cornelia was to observe, as time passed, that Vincenzo Brini would never lose a chance to make a gesture; he would invent a whole pantomime to convey the meaning of a single word, and there was no trouble too great to be taken in these demonstrations.

“You lika da cipolla?” he inquired, pointing to another row.

“Onions?” inquired the other.

“You teacha da Eengleesh, I teach Italian.” Brini grinned like a boy, and pointed to another row. “Ravanelli.”

“Radishes,” said Cornelia.

“Bietola,” said Brini.

“Beets,” said Cornelia.

This educational game went on until it was interrupted by the appearance of another man; a laborer arriving from his day’s toil, with his coat over his sweat-stained arms, and a dinner-pail in his hand. Brini forgot his rows of vegetables and called, “Hello, Bart!” He added a torrent of words in Italian, evidently explaining the strange lady. “You meeta my frienda, Bart, he boarda by us, long time board.”

The newcomer was a tall and somewhat stooped man; Cornelia was puzzled, because he seemed to be young, yet his face had many lines of care. He wore a brown mustache, which was left to nature, and drooped to a long point on each side of his mouth, giving him the appearance of a grave and amiable walrus. He was a dignified person, and did not indulge in the Brini fervors. “I pleased to meet you, lady,” he said. “My Eengleesh ver’ bad, I shame for heem.”

“She teacha da Eengleesh!” put in Brini. “You teacha heem plenty, Miz’ Cornella, he learna queeck, a bigga studént, got plenty book, read all time.”

“Oh! Those must be your books under my bed!” said Cornelia.

“I taka heem out, lady,” said the newcomer, at once, and started towards the house. Cornelia, with her woman’s intuition, noted that this young laborer thought about others before he thought about himself.

“Fermati!” exclaimed Brini. “You no go in lady’s room, you waita!” He grinned, and explained to Cornelia, “He no onderstand politess, he reada da book, molto studioso, all day. Getta da job, maka da little mon’, give up job, reada book. He greata man, my frienda Bart--” and Brini’s hairy arm went around the other’s shoulders in a hug--“he gooda man--besta man--you ask all Italian in Plye-moot’--dey tella you--never soocha gooda man in all state Massachusett like my frienda Bartolomeo Vanzett’.”

III

The family sat down to supper. It was not a big kitchen and they were crowded, with elbows touching: Papa Brini at the head of the table, Mamma at the foot, the three children on one side and Cornelia and her fellow-boarder on the other. She had been wondering what she would eat among these foreign people; she found a big bowl of salad with plenty of oil and vinegar, a chunk of parmigiano cheese, a loaf of bread in Italian fashion, shaped like a letter H, and finally a bottle of red wine, of which the children had a little and the women had one glass; the men were supposed to finish the rest. But she learned that Vanzetti would take no wine; out of the books he had got ideas about health and was a vegetarian most of the time. He explained to the new guest in his struggling English: “Poor people molto fortunato--how you say, lucky--no can buy richa food. You eata simple t’ing, you keepa da healt’ all lifa long.” After which ensued an argument with Papa Brini, who made it clear both by words and action that he looked upon the wine when it was any color whatever. He laughed gayly and explained to Cornelia the most elementary of Italian puns, “divino da vino.”

It is customary in Italian gatherings for the women, and especially old women, to keep in the background; but these humble people were showing especial honor to their guest, including her in the conversation and making her feel at home. They had to struggle with strange words and call upon the children; and Cornelia was interested to observe these latter and their behavior. The oldest was about ten, small, dark-eyed, quiet and pretty; her name Lafevre, which they shortened to “Fay.” She was going to public school, as was her brother Beltrando, and it was curious how completely Americanized they were, with the quiet reserve of the New Englander and even the broad “a” and the murdered “r.” Boston was having its way with them!

“Fay” served as the dictionary for their conversation; an abridged one, needless to say. She was teaching Vanzetti English, he explained, and he was teaching her Italian--that is the Tuscan dialect, the Italian of literature. The Brinis came from the neighborhood of Bologna and spoke the dialect of that region; Vanzetti spoke as a Piedmontese, but since he had begun to educate himself he had learned the classical language and wanted Fay to know it too. It would be a poor exchange for a child to acquire American newspapers and magazines and give up Dante.

Cornelia had come among these foreign people with no little trepidation. It was the common phrase among her social set that the Italians, or “wops,” as they were called, “lived like pigs.” She had been prepared for dirt, degeneracy, brutality, even crime. Would she be able to stand it? Would she be physically safe in the midst of it? And now she sat, nibbling a clean salad and good bread and butter and cheese, and sipping an acceptable claret, listening to an Italian ditch-digger, who had washed at least his hands and face and put on a clean dry shirt in her honor, and now was holding forth upon the subject of the “Divina Commedia”!

Cornelia stated that she had read the poem--in Longfellow’s translation; and from that moment he and she were friends. “Oh, da greata poet, da greata man! You reada heem, you know Italia, you lova da people! He was frienda da people, Miz’ Cornella, he was--what you say it--ribello.” He turned to little Fay, but she did not know long words, and he had to explain a “ribello” by frowning and shaking his fist. “De reecha men drive heem out, he live long time esilio, he suffer, he speaka da trut’. I no read heem till I come America. I younga man, worka by cloobba New York--great reecha cloobba, I washa da deesh. And such filt’ I see, it maka you seek; you no eata da suppa if I tell it you what I see in soocha place. Beeg dining room, granda--marmoreo, how you say it? All reecha, much light, bigga men all dressa beeg shirt”--the speaker made signs to indicate an open shirt-front, and puffed himself out so that Cornelia decided her son-in-law, Rupert Alvin, must have been to dinner in that “cloobba”!

“Evening dress,” said she, helping him along.

“Joosta so--aristocratico, eccelso! And in pantry, in place for washa da deesh, soocha filt’! I gotta little room, alto, high up, povero. Come home, I moocha tired, go sleepa queeck. But I come by Italian book-store, I see Dante, ver’ cheap for poor man. I say, greata poet, for shame I be sooch--what you say it--ignoranza. So I take heem home, I read, forgetta da sleep, forgetta da greata reecha cloob, da padrone maledirante--I live wit’ da greata soul in olda time, I fighta da priest, clericali, I see heem in da hella--scusa me, lady--we say it in Italia more polito, l’inferno.”

The speaker paused long enough to gulp a mouthful of bread and cheese; then he began again: “I say Fay, I say Trando, not forgetta greata poet of old country. You reada heem, you have greata soul, you be strong, never ’fraid, you bear it--what you say it--infortunio, calamita. I go by Italian book-store, I say, You give me ever’ting Dante, I read heem all. I reada book--not poem, how you say?”

“Prose?”

“‘Il Convito.’ That is, you sitta down for suppa, lika dis, but gooda suppa--plenty friend come--maka feast.”

“The Banquet?” said Cornelia.

“So,” said Vanzetti, and he recited a passage, and then, with many gestures, and mixing of Italian words with English, he conveyed to the Yankee lady what his great teacher had to say on the subject of riches. The widow of Josiah Quincy Thornwell, mother of three millionaires’ wives, now learned upon authority of one of the world’s great seers that it is the amassing of wealth which imperils and slays cities and nations; that riches do not come to the good man, because his mind is upon weightier matters; that the man of right appetite and true knowledge never loves them.

“You learn little bit,” said Vanzetti, “I maka you onderstand heem Italian. No can make Eengleesh, spoil beautifool sound. You hear heem--listen, Miz’ Cornella.” He began to recite, lingering over every syllable, sounding all the vowels broad and long, as the Italians do:

_Per me si va nella città dolente; Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore; Per me si va tra la perduta gente. Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore._

“He sadda man,” said Vanzetti; “never soocha sorrowful man live on eart’. He call it l’inferno--lika you say American, ‘hella,’ but not for curse-word, Miz’ Cornella, you know what da priesta teach, da place for punish badda men.”

“I understand.”

“But you no believa da priest, it is all same hella here, what badda men maka for poor man, killa da people in war. You reada Dante, you no t’ink l’inferno, you t’ink Italia, you t’ink America, here, now. So he say”--and the speaker repeated the verses, and painfully worked out their English equivalent:

_By me you go into da sadda city; By me you go into da endless sorrow; By me you go among da losta people. Joostice it mov-èd him, my greata maker._

It is a fact that much great poetry has been written in the dialects of the poor and humble; it is a fact that Dante’s own dialect was that, until he made it a world-language. But Cornelia did not know this, and did not realize that the Italian ditch-digger was making good poetry of his own. She only knew that she was managing to understand what his teacher meant to him: “Perduta gente, Miz’ Cornella--it is not people what have deny da priest and go hella, it is people what is poor and no got friend, go for be shot, and kill-èd in bigga war. Dat is perduta gente, losta people; for soocha people it maka me tears in da heart.”

IV

The family was stirring early. Brini did an hour’s work in the garden before he went to his job, and his friend Bart insisted upon helping. Mrs. Brini made the coffee and “frittata” for breakfast and would not let Cornelia help, but instead made her listen to good advice. “You no try be foreign woman, dey glad for have Yankee lady worka by cordage. You tella heem osband die, you harda luck, musta get job. But you no be ’fraid, plenty coraggio, plenty odder job. You say got to have day work, no letta heem give nighta job. Wartime maka plenty job, you no be ’fraid.”

Vanzetti was working for the cordage company, “--worka picka shov,” was the way he phrased it; digging a ditch for a pipe-line they were laying. So he walked with Cornelia, and gave her more advice. “You have harda time, Miz’ Cornella, olda lady, no giovane, molta affaticata--harda work. You go easy, no be scare of boss, he no die hungry if you no killa self for heem. You worka slow, taka time. You losa job, we help, no let gooda lady hungry.”

So Cornelia went boldly into the employment office and looked the clerk in the eye and said, “I would like employment.”

It was the first time she had offered herself for sale, and it was a new sensation to be looked over from the market point of view. “Ever worked at cordage?”

“No, sir.”

“What have you done?”

“I taught school. Then I married. Now I am a widow, and must support myself.”

“This work is pretty hard for an old lady.”

“I’m not afraid of hard work. I’ll take care of that. But I want a daytime job.”

“You might do wrapping,” said the clerk. He consulted a chart. “We have no vacancy, but we might move somebody on.”

“Thank you,” said Cornelia. “Arrange that, if you please.” She was trying a little “psychology” on him, and it appeared to work. He asked her questions and entered her replies on a card; and presently she found herself in charge of a messenger, passing through the high steel gates.

It was a long walk to her destination; this greatest cordage plant in the world extended three-quarters of a mile along the bay-front, with a covered dock to which the ships came to unload their cargoes of sisal, and railroad tracks and switch-yards for the cars which carried away rope and binder twine. The roar of machinery was everywhere, and men hurrying about like busy ants. Cornelia stayed close to her guide, who knew his way through the labyrinth of labor, and would deliver her safely to her little niche.

The ceiling of the wrapping-room was low--no space was wasted. The coils of rope came through upon an endless platform and a row of women sat sewing burlap covers with long needles and hempen thread. Cornelia’s escort spoke to the foreman, who took another woman off the job, gave her seat to Cornelia and showed her the work. She had to turn the coil of rope a certain distance, take up a threaded needle, turn in the edges of the burlap cover and sew a certain number of stitches; all this within a calculated time, before the motion of the platform took the coil of rope out of her reach and brought a new one to her.

It took an intelligent person above five minutes to learn all there was to the job; after that it was just the same motions over and over. At first it was agreeable; Cornelia’s problem was solved, and she could take glimpses at the other women in the line and at the room and the machinery. But after an hour or two the unaccustomed muscles and nerves began to make protest; she was tired and her hands were trembling. The hempen thread was long and so was the motion of her arm; if you think it is not tiresome to wave your arm for several hours--try it! She began to feel dizzy, and the coil of rope which had at first moved normally, now seemed to be glued to the platform and refused to turn. She had no way to tell the time; she was at the mercy of this enormous machine which had run wild and forgotten the clock, and would go on until the row of arm-waving women were paralyzed!

But at last the siren sounded; and then Cornelia understood, without any sociological discussion, why it was that the workers leaped up in a flash and hurried outdoors. For herself, she did not move; all she wanted was to lie back against the wall and close her trembling eyelids and let her tired hands drop. She had brought lunch in a little box, but she did not want it; she only wanted to be still. She answered faintly the other women who sat near and expressed their sympathy. They knew how it was at first and sought to reassure her; it would be easier by and by, her fingers and back would get used to it. But she was an old lady, to be tackling a job like this.

Yes, Cornelia was old; she had never felt so old in her life before. She had been foolish to attempt such a thing; she might have known she couldn’t see it through. But then she shut her tired fists and clenched her teeth. She had made up her mind to get a job and stick to that job, whatever it turned out to be. Now this was it, and it was do or die. People in New England did things like that--strange, eccentric, and terrible things, because their consciences drove them to it, or just because they had said they would, and were too stubborn to change.

V

The siren sounded again and the great machine started to rumble. Cornelia picked up the threaded needle with her shaking fingers, and began making the motions against which her being rebelled. She saw her future stretching out to infinity; every morning from seven until twelve she would sit and make these motions; then she would rest an hour and make them again from one until six. And those ten hours would be ten hours, and no nonsense about them, no fine sentiment. Cornelia recalled her reason for selecting the Plymouth Cordage Company as her first employer. Old Mr. Perry--J. Lawrence Perry, a director of the company--was such a kindly old gentleman; she had heard him talk so much about the “welfare work” they were doing and what a beautiful plant it was and how happy and contented the workers were. It had sounded quite idyllic and Cornelia had swallowed it whole. Mr. Perry gave money to various charities, and also gave time to running them, and everybody admired him so. But now it came to Cornelia in a flash that she didn’t care in the least what he did with the money he got by selling these coils of rope; what she wanted was for his machinery to stop for a few minutes! All the love and fine sentiment in the world didn’t matter a particle, so long as you had to sit here ten hours out of twenty-four making the same motions over and over!

Nor did it matter that rope was clean and even romantic, having to do with ships! Cornelia had pleased herself by that vain imagining; but now she realized that she wasn’t going to see any ships, nor have anything to do with the rope, except to take eighteen or twenty stitches around the edges. She wasn’t going to know what became of the product after it left her fingers; she wasn’t even going to know, except by hearsay, how it came to be what it was. The dear, gentle, white-haired old Mr. Perry hadn’t provided any system for escorting his employees through the plant and showing them the process. Each one went to his own appointed spot and was standing there when the siren blew and stayed there until it blew again five hours later. One job was the same as the next--except for one difference, the amount of money in the pay envelope when it was torn open. Some day Cornelia would point that out to dear old Mr. Perry and see the shocked look on his placid face. The idea gave her satisfaction, helping to drive from her consciousness the clamor of aching muscles and nerves.

When at last the siren blew again, one of the other women had to help Cornelia from her seat. She was the last to escape from the building, and the last to reach the gates. Brini and Vanzetti were waiting for her and they ran quickly and put their strong arms under her feeble, trembling ones--and what dear, good, honest, kind Italian laborers they seemed! They could read in her face how exhausted she was and they half carried her along the street. All the way, Vanzetti was murmuring, “Poor Miz’ Cornella! Too harda job for olda lady! You no keep so harda job!”

And when they had got home and she said that she did not want any supper, but just to lie down on the bed, it was the disciple of Dante who brought her a glass of milk and forced her to drink it, whether or no. While he watched her, he said, “Miz’ Cornella, you no go back for cordage jobba. You do little housework, you helpa da seeck little bit, no try mill work, you too olda lady, no usèd so harda work! I got little money in bank, I helpa you little bit, we all help, you get little job wit’ Yankee family--”

But Cornelia said “I’ll be all right in the morning. I’m not going to give up my place.”

VI

Cornelia had hoped to find it easier the next day, but was disappointed. She slept badly and woke up with every muscle in her back and arms and fingers sore. It was a continual effort of the will to make these aching muscles do their work, and each hour of labor was a new ordeal. It was many days before these pains began to diminish and she paid for the effort by a sensitiveness in the shoulders and back for the rest of her life. The doctors called it “articular rheumatism” and were satisfied when they had given it such an impressive name. The patient was expected to be equally satisfied with the achievement.

Cornelia ought to have been flattered by her social success in Suosso’s Lane. Each morning she had two able-bodied men to escort her to work, and the same two and a small boy to bring her home in the evening. The whole family would baby her, putting her to bed, insisting upon bringing her supper, and refusing to let her do any sort of work. She could eat lying back on a pillow, and they could talk to her from the kitchen where they ate. They made a regular function of it, with no end of fun and laughter.

Why did they do it? Was it the innate kindness of the poor? Would any Italian family have done the same for an elderly woman who was in trouble? Cornelia hoped it was true; but she began to suspect that there were special factors in her case. She was a “Yankee lady” and these people knew themselves for “wops” to the rulers of a strange rich land. It must have been evident to them that this mysterious elderly person with the slight frame and soft muscles, the gentle voice and sensitive feelings had been used to a different kind of life. She had come out into the cold world at the age of sixty, alone and friendless, to fight her own way. And why? She told them she had been left a widow, and their imaginations had done the rest. She had been thrown into destitution; cruel relatives had deprived her of her inheritance! Some such simple and naïve story they had made up for her and so she stood for romance to them.

Vanzetti insisted upon heating a glass of milk hot for Cornelia because it was nice and soothing that way and easy for a tired lady to digest. Later, when he went outdoors, Mrs. Brini remarked, “He so kinda heart, no can let anybody hurt. One time we got baby cat--how you say, kitten--poor little kitten getta seeck. He molto seeck, my osband he say, no good for suffer, he sure die, I keela heem. So he taka kitten by neck, for go outside and hitta heem on head. And Bart, he near go crazy. ‘No, by Godda, you no keela kitten?’ ‘Buttalo giu!’ say my man. ‘What you t’ink, I gotta time for seecka kitten all time?’ ‘You giva heem me, I got plenty time,’ say Bart, and he taka da kitten, he maka little box, he put heem in wit’ grass for soft, he maka heem bed, and joosta soon he come homa night, he feeda da kitten wit’ warm milk.”

Cornelia laughed. “So that is where he learned it! I am his sick kitten!” And when Vanzetti came back, she called herself that and it gave great glee to Fay and Trando, who told her the Italian word, “gattina,” and it would have become her nickname, only their mother made them stop because it was not dignified.

To help them out, Cornelia told them that at home she had gone by the name of “Grannie,” and they told her the Italian equivalent, which was “Nonna,” and began to call her that. Everybody had nicknames in this family and wanted Cornelia to call them by these, so that she would really belong. Alfonsina Brini was “Cicadet,” the meaning of which was not clear. The youngest child was called “Dolly,” because of the rag-doll she was never without. Vanzetti had a special name for Beltrando, a high-strung little fellow, who frequently did not get along with the boys outside; he would come in crying, and Vanzetti, to tease him out of it, would call him “Magoon,” the Bolognese word for “sorry.”

Papa Brini did not understand his sensitive child very well, so the boarder had taken over the task of his moral guidance; Vanzetti would sometimes romp with him and sometimes scold him, and sometimes explain life to him in serious discourses. The boy adored him and would follow him about, watching his every move. Vanzetti liked to go for long walks after his supper, to lose himself in thought; when it was stormy, he would walk back and forth in the kitchen, four steps of his long legs one way, and then four steps the other, completely oblivious to everything in the house. Perhaps because of the shortness of the space he would now and then take little steps, as if he were dancing; and Trando would follow behind him, back and forth, doing his best to reproduce each motion. The others would smile, but Vanzetti never seemed to know about it. What was he thinking at these times? What were the guiding ideas of this unusual Italian ditch-digger?

VII

One evening Cornelia sat on the steps of the porch, drinking in the soft breeze, watching the fire-flies and listening to the crickets. In the garden of the next house a woman was working and she came to the fence and said, with a substantial Irish brogue, “Good evenin’, mum.”

“Good evening,” said Cornelia, politely; then to her surprise the woman said, “Would ye come over here, mum? I have somethin’ to say.” So Cornelia moved her stiff joints and limped over to the fence. “My name is Mrs. O’Dowd,” said the neighbor, and Cornelia said, “I am Mrs. Cornell.”

“Pleased to meet ye, Mrs. Cornell.” She lowered her voice as she went on: “I have been watchin’, and ’tis evident to me yez are an American lady, and perhaps ye do not know these Eyetalians. So, no offense, but I thought it might be good to give a bit of warnin’.”

“Of what, Mrs. O’Dowd?”

“Likely ye did not know these Brinis before ye come to board with them--is that so?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Sure, and I knowed it; says I to me man, ‘She’s picked them up on the street or somethin’’.”

“I met the little boy on the street.”

“Sure I was of it. ’Tis a good lad he is, I’ve nothin’ agin him, barrin’ that now and then his ball will bounce into me garden. Well, Mrs. Cornell, ye’d ought to know that ye have fell into a bunch of dangerous people--the worst there is in this town or many another--arnychists, the lot of them.”

“Arnychists?” said Cornelia, puzzled.

“The very bad kind, mum, the Eyetalian kind, the murderin’ and bomb-throwin’ arnychists.”

“Oh, Mrs. O’Dowd! You really think they do that?”

“I’ve never saw them do it, mum, but ’tis what the neighbors say, and the priest he is forever preachin’ agin them, warnin’ us that we shall not speak to them for any reason. For, ye see, ’tis not only the bombs, but ’tis atheists they are; they do not go to any church at all, mum, and their childer have never been baptized, they are lost souls the lot of them.”

“Lost souls,” said Cornelia, “how terrible!” And in the back of her consciousness was an echo of a melodious phrase--“Per me si va tra la perduta gente!”

“Mrs. O’Dowd,” she said, “you surprise me. They have been so kind to me!”

“Yes, mum, but a lot of us would be that if we had a chance. ’Tis easy to know a lady when ye see one, and when she’s in trouble, and tryin’ to make her own way, ’twould be no great thing to give her a helpin’ hand. But we would do it in the Blessed Name, mum, so it would count for somethin’.”

“Well, I thank you very much,” said Cornelia. “I am glad to know, of course.”

“I hope ye will not say that ’twas me that told about it, because I have childer of me own, and I’d not like to find meself blown out of bed by no bombs.”

“I’ll surely not mention it,” said Cornelia. “I’ll need time to think what to do. It may be the kindest thing would be for me to stay with them and help convert them from their bad ways.”

“’Twould be a blessin’ for fair,” said Mrs. O’Dowd, “for ’tis a sore disgrace to Suosso’s Lane to be havin’ such a family in it. But be careful, mum, while ye argue, for ye might be the one to be converted yeself.”

“Are they as dangerous as all that?”

“Well, Mrs. Cornell, ’tis somethin’ I do not know of meself, because I don’t know a word of their lingo and never hope to. But Father O’Brien says they have the divil in their hearts, and that makes them hard to deal with, so ye had best take warnin’ and be careful.”

“I will, Mrs. O’Dowd, and you may pray for me if you don’t mind.” So Cornelia went back to her seat on the porch.

After a while she went inside, and there was Brini, with a twinkle in his eyes and a wide grin on his good-natured face. “You talka wit’ Miz’ O’Dowda--what she tella you? She say, no live wit’ anarchista, badda people, maka di bombe, t’rowa heem in da church”--and Brini made a violent upward motion with his hands--“blow uppa da Sancta Trinita and Benedetta Vergine!” Then he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Molto secreto--no tella heem--he putta di bombe nella mia casa, he blow bambini alla hella!”

Seeing from the expression of Cornelia’s face that his guess was correct, Brini burst into uproarious laughter. “Ho, ho, ho! You tella Miz’ O’Dowda, Vanzett’ he moocha badda man--diavolo--furfante--maka di bombe, molte bombe, sicuramente! Bombe di zucchero”--and Brini made motions of sucking his fingers and finding delight in the sweet taste--“bombe di pistachio--di crema--bombi di gelati--What you say it?--ice crema--di pasticceria--in Italia he what you call pastry-cook--granda gooda pastry-cook!”

VIII

The end of the week came; and very surely Cornelia did not fail to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. It was a day of rest--and for remembering the old hymn about every day being Sunday by-and-by.

But then came Vanzetti. “Very gooda day, beautifool sunshine, Miz’ Cornella. You come wit’ me, see somet’ing molta bella.”

“I’m too tired to walk, I’m afraid.”

“No walka far--little way, I help. Show bella campagna, maka happy, gooda sentimento. You come, I carry.”

At the foot of Suosso’s Lane was a round knoll, blocking the view; Castle Hill, it was called, and beyond it, Cornelia realized, must lie the bay. They stooped under a fence and there was a little path and Vanzetti put his strong arm under her weak one and half lifted her up the slope. Bushes and a few pine trees grew upon it, but not enough to interfere with the view when you got over the rise. “Oh, lovely!” she exclaimed, and Vanzetti was delighted. “Shoore, moocha pretty!”

The bay was sparkling blue in bright sunshine; bounded by a long sand-spit, and a couple of rocky islands. In the distance ran the low misty line of Cape Cod and close at hand on both sides was the town, white-painted houses in a setting of green. One shore-line was occupied by the long brick buildings of the cordage plant, with tall chimneys out-towering the hill. Cornelia did not care for that, so they seated themselves on the other side, facing the monuments of Plymouth.

“Somewhere on that shore is Plymouth Rock,” said she.

“I show you!” said Vanzetti, and pointed out the landmarks. “I worka one time by heem, bringa feesh from boat. Plenty people come for see all time. He looka same like any rock.”

“You know what happened there?”

“Shoore, I read in schoola-book, Fay got heem. People come in ship for liva here, maka state Massachusett.”

“That was nearly three hundred years ago; not so long ago as your Dante, but it seems long to us.”

“Plenty long for make istoria,” said Vanzetti. “Sometime I t’ink it mistake for teach istoria. People study tempo passato, make conservativo, timido--you onderstand?”

“Yes; but it depends on how you study it. The Pilgrim fathers were really quite wonderful. They came in little boats--so little you could hardly believe it. Perhaps you’ve seen the bones of that old boat in Pilgrim Hall.”

“Shoore, I see ever’t’ing.”

“There was nothing here but a wilderness, full of wild Indians, savages. A stern and rock-bound coast, the poet described it; and winter coming, they had to hurry and build huts for shelter. They had poor food--only what little grain they had brought and the game they could kill, and the fish. That first winter was frightful, half of them died; yet they stayed on--when the next ship came, the following summer, not one of the survivors would go back to England. That showed the kind of people they were.”

“Shoore,” said Vanzetti, “greata people--ribelli--fighta priest, fighta king--come for joostice, come for liberty. But get liberty for self, no give for odder. I say liberty for all.”

“Of course,” replied Cornelia; “but that is not so easy. How can everybody have liberty, when maybe there are some who won’t play fair?”

“Is no soocha people, signora.”

“You don’t think there are bad people?”

“Some badda, sure, seecka people, must helpa soocha people, teach, put in--what you say--ospedale, ’ospital for seecka men. But mosta people be good, wanta joostice, you give heem chance. No, no, Miz’ Cornella--” the speaker became eager, the Italian in him came to life, he began to make gestures and raise his voice--“what is trouble wit’ people is not badda heart, it is badda teach’, badda sistema--it is power, it is go-vernment”--he accented this word on the second syllable. “It is priesta, king, capitalista, padrone--taka men, maka fight, maka war for profit.”

“You think that explains the war in Europe?”

“No t’ink--I know, signora. I live Europe, I see come dissa war, I come America for evitare--how you say--get away. It is war for padrone, for master--for bigga capitalista!”

“You don’t think the people’s hearts are in it?”

“Shoore, some--but why? Is it not teach in school? Who maka da school? Who maka giornale, da newspaper? Always padrone, he teacha da war, he wanta da profit, he maka da people for slave, for machine--what he care for worker life? What he care for poor lady here by cordage? You liva wit’ worker, you see heem! You t’inka for self, you reada book I geeva you!”

And suddenly Cornelia remembered Mrs. O’Dowd and her warning! “Be careful, mum, while ye argue, for ye might be the one to be converted yeself.”

IX

White sail-boats dotted the bay in front of them, and majestic clouds sailed overhead, making slow sweeping shadows on the water. Church-bells sounded and little birds sang in the trees about them and wild flowers bloomed; so much peace and beauty--yet Cornelia had to remember that men were slaughtering one another by the thousands, using hideous machines they had spent years in building and generations in learning to build. She closed her eyes and whispered, “Let’s be happy for a few minutes!”

The controversy died out of the other’s voice. “I know, signora! I say, be happy, I no t’ink war no more, no t’ink rivoluzione, politica laida! I go picka flower. Soocha sweet flower grow here--you know heem? Mayflower--it is not only ship, it is flower. I learn time of year, I looka for heem. I taka Fay, Trando, odder piccoli, go looka flower, getta moocha bigga--what you say--gobba--bunch. I taka heem home, give Alfonsina, she happy, make home so nice, pretty. I say, get gooda book--roman--what you say, lova story--reada nice, be happy. I come here, Sunday morning, quiet, church-bell--gooda place for read, nobody here. I come holiday, all day; somatime I got no job--no needa so moocha work, so moocha money, no got family--I what you say lonely man. Alla right, I reada book, look outa for self. I healt’y man, stronga man, plenty time, gooda life--I laugha, say, war no get America--I no care Italian, let heem look outa for self. You onderstand?”

“I understand. Most men take it that way.”

“I say, No be crazy, Vanzett’, you no maka da world, no can changa heem. I say, You no maka da war, Vanzett’, you no stoppa heem. But Miz’ Cornella, no can t’ink, no can forget. T’ink alla time fossi--what you say it--digga place in ground for fight war.”

“Trenches?”

“Joosta so, I see alla time trench, see men killa brodder, see men die orribile, wounda, scream, agonia. I say, Vanzett’, you no do somet’ing, you traditore, you--how you say, betray somet’ing?”

“Traitor.”

“Trait’! I say, Vanzett’, you no be trait’, you speaka da trut’, you maka da protest, da propagand’, you getta da meeting, you calla da men, getta da speaker. No can speak self, Miz’ Cornella, joosta lavorante, workman, molta ignoranza, povero. But we got speaker for denounca da war, Italian speaker, he come--Galleani--you know heem?”

“I never heard of him.”

“All Italian man know heem--olda man, granda man, he speaka for poor man, maka da propagand’. One time I helpa heem for speech in Plye-moot’. He come, bigga meeting, molto popolo. My boss--I worka for contractor--he no like, he say ‘Abbastanza for anarchista propaganda, no more jobba for you, getta da hella!’ So I looka for new job, but I feela moocha good, I helpa da cause.”

“What is it you expect to do?”

“Teacha da people! Maka heem no fighta da war, no fighta for padrone, for capitalista! Say people, fight real nemico, fighta capitalista! He maka war for heemself, for hees money, bigga money--alla right, let heem fighta hees war, workman no fighta hees war, giammai, never! When capitalista no can maka fight workmen, so queeck you see stoppa da war, signora, is it not so?”

“I don’t know,” said Cornelia, sadly. “Sometimes I think men like to hate, they get a thrill out of it. The capitalists send their own sons to the war and they get killed, a lot of them.”

“And de women--you t’ink dey lika war?”

“Some of them do--they cheer for it, and hate--even worse than the fighting men. There are women in Boston who want to get America in this war the worst kind of way.”

“It is propagand’, Miz’ Cornella--capitalista propagand’. Why for could we not live happy in dis bigga countree--why for moosta we go fight odder countree? You go Italia, you hear say, countree too moocha people, moosta have rooma, more land, taka from odder people. You t’ink, too moocha people, too moocha bambini--alla righta, no hava so many bambini--what you say it, baby. Scusa me, signora, you olda lady, I talka plain for you--you know what I mean, no have so moocha baby?”

“We call it birth control,” said Cornelia, smiling.

“Shoore, birt’ control, alla right. Now, you say birt’ control Italian woman, no have so moocha baby. Butta come priesta, he say, diavolo, inferno, moosta have baby, you no have baby you go to hella! He no letta you teacha da people, he driva you out, putta jail, maka propagand’, calla name, scare people, no listen. For why? Priesta say he talka for God. God, he say moosta have baby, maka beega popolazione! Den God he say, no got rooma for popolazione, moosta taka land, moosta maka war! You onderstand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Sooch imbecillità! Follia! Moosta have war for maka room, moosta have baby for filla room! More war for maka more room for more baby! E la donna, woman, what for is woman? Animal for maka more baby for war-man, militarista, kill. Keepa da woman for slave, for ignoranza, for priesta, for superstizione--for maka da plenty baby for soldier! Soocha countree is Europe, signora, and soocha like America if capitalista have way. But anarchista say, No have way! Anarchista say, No die for soldier, fighta for worker, for self! Anarchista say to woman, Stand up, no be fraid da priesta, he no can hurt! Is no soocha god lika priesta preach, is gooda God, lova da people, lova da baby, no wanta heem kill-èd in war! Is it not trut’, signora? Is it not joostice?”

And Cornelia realized how wise had been the warning of Mrs. O’Dowd, concerning the subtlety of the devil, and the perils of entering into contest with him! For here the devil was managing to present what appeared to Cornelia a quite reasonable argument; nor did his propagandist appear at all devilish, but rather a dreamer of dreams, so simple of mind as to have no conception of the odds against him, the forces of colossal cruelty that would sweep him away as a leaf before a hurricane.

X

Time passed, and Cornelia became a completely established member of the Brini family; also a completely disciplined worker for the Plymouth Cordage Company. Now and then she lifted her eyes from the task of needle and thread and got to know the people about her--their faces, their names, their nationalities and modes of speech. She would chat with them during the noon hour and hear the gossip of their lives, the hopes which moved them and the fears which held them back.

Also she became aware of the plant, the gigantic complex of labor which surrounded her. She learned the names of different buildings and picked up an idea of what went on inside them; the “hackling,” the “cleaning,” the making of the “sliver,” the spinning of the yarn, the “forming” and “laying” of rope. Technical terms began to take on the shadow of a meaning; she got glimpses through door ways of “spinning-rooms” with hundreds of “flyers,” as far as the eye could see down a vista, and of powerful “laying-machines” which took a hundred threads of yarn and wrought them into a heavy four-strand rope at a single process. Little by little there soaked into her mind a realization of the technical complexity of an industry whereby trainloads of hemp from the Philippines and shiploads of sisal from Yucatan evolved into cordage of every size from wrapping and binder-twine to towing-lines and sixteen-inch cables for battleships.

The human cogs who made up this machine were--at least in the lower ranks with Cornelia--very slow of wit; they labored under a load of handicaps--poverty, ignorance, a foreign language, new and bewildering customs. There were agencies supposed to lift them up, such as public schools and night schools, but it seemed to Cornelia these were countered by forces far stronger, interested to hold them down. Landlords and loan-sharks, peddlers of shoddy goods, fake patent medicines and adulterated foods, smooth-tongued agents inducing them to put their savings into non-existent gold-mines and oil-wells--there were few among these workers who managed to escape such plunderers.

And chief among the agencies of exploitation was, of course, the great rich concern under the administration of the benevolent Mr. J. Lawrence Perry. The company owned most of the houses in which the workers had to live; it owned most of the land about, and was, of course, not entirely without influence upon the government of the town. It paid six dollars a week to its unskilled women workers and nine to the men, and manifestly a family could not be supported on such a wage; the tacit assumption was that the women of the family would work, and the children as soon as they could pretend to be old enough. The home would be kept by the old people and the young children and the invalids and cripples. It would not be a well-kept home, nor very attractive; and the ladies and gentlemen whose incomes came from cordage stocks and bonds would remark, some with pity, some with contempt, “Dagos, wops, hunkies--they live like pigs!”

XI

Now something more than ordinarily maleficent was befalling these humble wage-workers. It was happening all over the world, but they did not know that--they only knew Plymouth. The cost of everything they bought was going up day by day. Because of the war in Europe, the allied nations were borrowing money in America, and spending it for American goods. Exactly as Josiah Quincy Thornwell had foretold on the night of his death, it was making enormous and incredible prosperity for American manufacturers and stock-speculators; but also it was making higher and higher prices for the poor. And there was no corresponding increase in the wage, so close to the border-line of want; there was no authority charged with the task of calculating living costs, and adjusting earnings to them. The great industries which owned and rented tenements to their workers would raise the rents a dollar or two a month and tell the tenants that this was necessary; but they would overlook what might be necessary to the tenants.

The cordage-workers were slow of wit, yet they did know whether they had any money in their pocket-books at the end of the week. Pay-day was Thursday and when the money ran out on Tuesday night instead of Wednesday night they grumbled to one another and speculated about it; and gradually an understanding spread, a kind of crude mass-consciousness, a thing as it were separate from the individual minds, with a life of its own. These workers were entirely unorganized; cordage was one of the “open shop” industries, having the sacred “American plan” in its full and ideal perfection. The fact that the workers had no way to voice a grievance was a matter without significance, because in a land so great and prosperous it was impossible for a grievance to arise. Any one who went to the foreman and complained was obviously a “sorehead,” and the foreman would tell him to take his troubles somewhere else. That would be the end of him for the cordage industry; whatever skill he might have acquired he could throw into Plymouth Bay.

Cornelia knew little about labor matters, but the elementary thought came to her that these ill-paid workers ought to have a union. She said it to the Brini family and greatly to her surprise discovered that her words gave distress to Vanzetti. “No say sooch a t’ing!” he cried. “Organizazione is trappa for worker, make heem slave! Union is joosta same as go-vernment! Bigga, reech offeesh’, putta feet on desk, smoka bigga cigar, tella worker go hella!”

Now Cornelia knew that Vanzetti had helped to unload fish and in her efforts to understand his torrent of words she had a vision of a “feesh” which had feet and put them on desks and smoked cigars. She asked an explanation, and the family burst into laughter and with Fay’s help it was made clear that Bart was talking about not “a feesh,” but “offeesh,” the officials of labor unions. There were hordes of them in New England and they paid themselves good salaries and did nothing for the workers, so Vanzetti declared; therefore the workers not yet organized must be saved from their snares.

“But then what are you going to do?” asked Cornelia, greatly perplexed.

“Moosta teacha worker--t’ink for self--no need offeesh’ t’ink for heem. Can all stand togedder, all lika one, but no offeesh’, no salary, no graft.”

Cornelia had thought that a labor union was an elementary idea, upon which every kind of radical would agree. She asked and it was explained to her, with the translation of long words, that Vanzetti’s kind of anarchistas did not permit organization. There were other kinds, who called themselves “comunisti anarchici,” and would support revolutionary unions like the I. W. W., and even back the old-line unions in time of strikes. But Vanzetti called himself “anarchico individualista,” and would have no kind of organization, except a purely temporary kind to manage a strike--a “comity,” as he pronounced it, to represent the strikers, and not be paid any salary, and be changed at any time the strikers saw fit.

Moreover, it was apparent that he was distressed because his friend, whose education he had taken so earnestly in hand, was dallying with the evil thought of a union. “Who talka soocha t’ing wit’ you?” he demanded; and when she assured him that the notion had come of itself, he was not comforted. Cornelia laughed--it seemed to her deliciously funny; she told him he was just like “Mrs. O’Dowda,” afraid she might imperil her soul by taking up with dangerous new ideas!

Censorship of course exercised upon Cornelia’s mind its customary effect of awakening curiosity. She pressed her teacher for more facts, and so learned of the existence of obnoxious characters known as “riformistas”; persons who believed it possible to improve the present social system, or to change it little by little. This kind of thinking was a trap for the wage-slaves, because it led them into politics. “Politica ĕ un perditempo!” declared Vanzetti, and the way he said the word and the expression on his face made clear that it was something very bad. “Riformista is traditore,” he went on, and repeated the English word which Cornelia had taught him, “Riformista is trait’!”

“Traitor,” corrected Cornelia, and Vanzetti said, “Shoore, trait.’ He is trait’, because he get elect’ butta no do notting, he is offeesh’, he got salary, he liva by graft, he maka da promessi, he tella da bigga lie, he keepa da capitalismo. No, no, mia frienda, have notting do wit’ riformista, wit’ socialista, he is giallo--how you say it, color of flower--not red, not blue, what you call heem, golden-rod--yes, yellow! Socialista is yellow, he is badda frienda for worker.”

XII

Soon afterwards Cornelia made actual contact with one of these dangerous characters. On Saturday evening there came a caller: a short, solidly-built young Italian, marble-cutter by trade, introduced as “Compagno” Culla. He had come to see the two men upon a matter of business and they discussed it in their own language, while Cornelia and Alfonsina sat placidly sewing. Cornelia caught several times the word “picanic,” but did not realize that this was an English word, until Mrs. Brini whispered that this Culla was one of the socialistas of Plyemoot’, and that they were getting up a picanic. Cornelia saw that the talk was becoming more and more animated; the three men were gesticulating and raising their voices, and presently she heard a familiar word, that wicked word “riformista.” Vanzetti pronounced it in a tone of scorn and lest Compagno Culla should fail to understand to whom it was applied, the speaker pointed at him, and exclaimed, “Riformista e giallo e traditore--”

Now Compagno Culla had a newspaper in his hand, partly opened; he lifted it and with sudden vehemence hurled it to the floor. In the course of the journey it came all the way open and made a great racket. “Eh via, puh!” he exclaimed. “Parlate sfacciatamente!”

Whereupon Vanzetti started to his feet, with a sweep of his arms embracing the surrounding atmosphere. “Riformista e traditore!” he shouted.

“Diffamazione!” protested Compagno Culla.

“Traditore di lavoratori!” persisted Vanzetti. They began pouring out two torrents of vehement Italian, which met in the middle and formed a whirlpool of words, with four waving arms in the vortex thereof. The arms were coming nearer and nearer and must inevitably have met, had not Brini stepped between, shouting louder than both the orators put together. At the same time Mrs. Brini sprang up and caught Vanzetti by the sleeve, saying something which contained the word “Nonna!” Cornelia had got out of her chair with a frightened look on her face--not being used to Mediterranean methods of conducting political discussion. Vanzetti glanced at her and then turned sharply on his heel and walked into the kitchen; while Brini and Culla exchanged a few laughing words and the latter went away.

Vanzetti came back and sat down, looking not a little embarrassed. “I shame-èd for bad temper, Nonna,” said he--he was calling her now by the children’s pet name, and she was calling him Bart. “I try for not getta so angree, but riformista is soocha badda fellow.”

He explained what it was that Compagno Culla had wanted--the list of names of the anarchistas of the vicinity, so that they could be invited to the socialista picanic. Some time ago the anarchistas had given a picanic with an anarchista speaker and all the socialistas had been invited and many of them had come; now they thought the favor ought to be reciprocated--quite overlooking the difference in the situation. For the socialistas, being riformistas and gialli, were let alone by the polizia; but the anarchistas, being real and true rivoluzionarii, were always fearing trouble with the polizia and naturally could not give the names of their friends and supporters to any gialli riformisti. So now Compagno Culla was angry and thought his party was not getting a square deal.

The discussion that followed brought out a further point--that the socialistas of Plymouth had a great advantage over the anarchistas, because they believed in organizations and had a good and lively one, with perhaps fifty members; whereas the anarchistas, not believing in organizations, had a weak one, in fact little more than a list of names. Therefore the socialistas could do things which the anarchistas could not do, they were distributing their literature regularly every week and seducing members away from the anarchistas. Vanzetti said this without seeing anything humorous in it and was perplexed when Cornelia began to tease him, suggesting that it sounded like an admission that organization was sometimes useful. Her teacher would laugh and joke about all other matters except his doctrine; that was sacred, that was a way of escape from slavery, war and horror for the workers, and about it he was fanatical, implacable--he who was so gentle and soft-hearted in all other relations of life!

That was a Saturday evening; and next morning Cornelia and her teacher went for a walk in the woods and coming out met a group of four children who had been gathering flowers. Each had a bunch which they offered for sale--two cents apiece. Vanzetti bought all four and the children went off happy. Then he said, “Too many flower, I giva you one bunch, taka one for Cicadet, no wanta more.” He threw two bunches into the bushes. “Why did you buy them all?” asked Cornelia, interested in his reaction; and he was a little shocked by her lack of perception. “No could buy joosta two, make odder children onhappy, dey worka so hard, da money is like so moocha more for dem.”

XIII

The bright days of summer passed quickly, and the bracing days of autumn, and then came the first threats of winter. It is nothing to joke about on this stern and rock-bound coast, where icy gales blow in from the ocean and snow piles up and blocks the streets, and the temperature goes to considerably below zero. Cornelia found that she had to take every cent of her savings to buy herself a warm coat, and then it was not so warm; she learned to live in it all day while she worked in the factory, a good part of the time in the home, and at night she made it into a bed-cover.

There came days when the trip to her work and back again were infernal experiences, recalling those regions of Dante where the lost souls are frozen solid in ice. But in the great poet’s story it is possible to see the damned, while here they stumbled through pitch darkness, at half past six in the morning and the same hour in the evening. Cornelia would get her coat buttoned tight over a sweater and the family would pin her shawl fast over her head and ears, leaving just a peep-hole for the eyes and nose. Then with her hands in mittens, and these tucked under the shawl, she would start the long journey, with Brini’s big hand grasping her under the arm. They would go staggering through snow-drifts, sliding on the ice and packed sleet; her hands would be half frozen, yet she would have to jerk them out to catch Brini and keep from breaking her bones. The pitiless winds would howl and buffet her and stab through her flimsy garments: the whirling snow would blind her--yet there was not much danger of getting lost, there being a stream of bundled figures plodding to the same goal. It was January of 1916, and out across the storm-lashed ocean the ships were being sunk, so there must be more cordage to keep the world at war. Any woman who failed to complete the journey twelve times per week would not have her pay-envelope with the six dollars on Thursday night; and how then would she pay for food and bed and shawls and coats and mittens and rubber shoes and cough medicines and dentistry and surgical operations and opera-tickets?

Cornelia was changing not merely her ideas but her appearance and personal habits. She no longer took a bath every morning before she dressed. Getting up at a quarter before six, by the light of an oil-lamp and in rooms where she could see her breath, she found that her one thought was to get into the warmest clothes she had, and as many of them as possible; her second thought was to get two cups of the hot boiled chicory which serves for coffee in the homes of the poor. Thereafter she had no impulse to take off her clothes until she got into bed--and not all of them then, because her bed-covers were made of cotton, and even with all her clothing piled on top there were nights when she could not sleep for the cold. And now and then she would remember the formula she had heard the prosperous ladies repeat--that at least the poor might keep clean!

Another principle of hygiene which had been taught to her was plenty of fresh air at night. It was easy for the doctors to say it, sleeping in rooms with heat, and layers of woolen blankets and eider-down quilts. But now Cornelia adopted the custom of the poor, to seal up windows at the beginning of winter and breathe such air as happened to get into the house. If this, combined with a poor diet, brought tuberculosis, it would be called the will of God. In Cornelia’s case it would be the stubbornness of a woman who had made up her mind and would not admit defeat. She had signed a declaration of independence--and here was her Valley Forge!

The cordage workers lived in their dark holes, forgotten by the world except on rent day. They grumbled and complained, because the cost of living kept on going up and in winter it was so much worse--there were no gardens with fresh vegetables, nor trees with apples and pears on them, nor berries which the children could gather in the woods. Now everything had to be bought in stores and the housewives picked over the meager supplies; and when they could no longer make ends meet, what were they to do?

Some voiced their complaints to their bosses and were told to go elsewhere; and every time that happened the pot of anger boiled faster. Brini and Vanzetti came home at night, voluble and gesticulating; sometimes they would hurry off after supper--“meeting by Giuseppi,” they would say, or whatever name it might be. Several times Cornelia went to such meetings, and a mass of people packed themselves into a little parlor, with overflow into the kitchen, and complained and argued and gestured for an hour or two. Such was Vanzetti’s solution of the labor problem, the workers to gather in little groups--“gruppi autonomi,” was his phrase; each of these gruppi would decide what it wanted and appoint a representative to meet with others from the Portuguese, the French-Canadians, the Germans, the Irish.

The believers in politics and organization, the socialistas, held a meeting in a hall, with more than a thousand workers, and a speaker in English, one in Italian and one in Portuguese; those who did not understand any of these languages understood the excitement of the rest. Also came the I. W. W. with their speakers, and their program of “direct action,” the taking over of the industries by the “one big union.” They were strong among these New England mill-workers, having the prestige of a great victory in the woollen mills of Lawrence three or four years ago.

And of course that stirred Vanzetti and his anarchistas. They too must have a meeting and summon their leader, Galleani, to point out to the workers the dangers of organization, and how it was possible to win freedom from both capitalistas and labor union “offeesh’.” There was a gathering of the “gruppo autonomo di Plyemoot’,” and money was subscribed to pay for the hall and for what Vanzetti called the “expensit.” He contributed ten dollars himself, and explained to Cornelia that his share was greater for the reason that he was a “lonely man.”

XIV

That was a Tuesday night; and next day, preceding pay-day, there appeared mysteriously at the cordage plant a force of two hundred and fifty “private police” to guard the property. Where did they come from, this hired army of capitalism, and where were they kept when they were not working? Did they travel about the country, putting down labor troubles? Had the masters got trouble so systematized that they could count upon a regular supply of it to keep this army at work? Nobody knew; but here they were, big husky fellows, bundled in overcoats and arctics and fur-topped gloves, with clubs in their hands and revolvers in holsters at their belts--in plain sight, where nobody could miss their meaning. They paced before the gates and the doors of buildings, and to make them comfortable when they were off duty the town’s most fashionable summer hotel sprang into activity.

The various “gruppi” had agreed upon their demands, eight dollars a week for unskilled women and twelve for the men. They appointed a committee to present the demands to the company, and the meeting took place, and the company explained that such an increase, twenty-five percent, would bankrupt it, and then no one would have any job. The company offered a raise of five percent, and the committee rejected this; there were more meetings, and crowds of people standing about stamping their feet in the snow, and the guards commanding them to move on, and getting surly answers. There were workers who said that if the company would pay the cost of these guards in wages it would help quite a little; they were even ungrateful enough to suggest that old Mr. Perry’s “welfare work” be stopped, so that the people could have the money for food.

As usual, this big magazine was fired by a little spark. On Thursday morning, pay-day, one of the men in number three spinning-room got into a dispute with his foreman; the foreman told him to take his coat and hat and get out, and instead of obeying, the man turned and started yelling to his comrades. The foreman took him by the shoulder to put him out, and others came rushing to his help, and there was a tumult, and above it rose the word, “Strike!” It spread like wildfire down the long spinning-room; what had been at one moment an industry became in the next a mob. “Sciopero!” yelled the Italians. “Folga!” echoed the Portuguese. “Grève!” shrieked the French-Canadians. “Streik!” bellowed the Germans. And “Strike! Strike! Strike!” roared Americans and English and Irish and Welsh, and all others who had learned the word. A hundred Paul Reveres set out in every direction, spreading the wildfire from room to room. The openers of the bales threw down their knives, and the feeders turned from the “breakers,” and the spinners deserted their “flyers,” and the engineers shut off the power, and the wheels stopped turning, and two thousand workers grabbed their clothing and tumbled outside, pouring into a few minutes’ clamor the pent-up anger and misery of many silent years.

The storm reached Cornelia’s wrapping-room, and the women had to quit whether they wanted to or not, because the platform stopped moving. She got her things and streamed out with the rest. The crowds were milling about, the frightened guards shouting, “Move along, keep moving there!” In various places impromptu meetings started, and the stream would be blocked. Cornelia saw a man leap upon the corner of a loading platform--a man in a worn blue “reefer,” with a storm hat pulled over his ears, and a pair of brown walrus mustaches hiding half his face. “Compagni! Lavoratori! L’ora della riscossa è scoccata! Essa darà la libertá agli oppressi”--whereupon another man climbed upon the platform and gave the orator a shove which sent him flying. “Get out, you blankety-blank, and don’t show your face in here again!” And the company detective sought out one of the foremen, inquiring, “Who is that wop they call Bart--the one with long mustaches like a walrus? We’ll have to keep our eye on him, he’s one of the trouble-makers.”

III. DAGO RED

I

Snow in the air, whirled here and there by unpurposed winds; snow on the ground, thrown back from sidewalks and turning them into trenches. Guards and policemen, pacing in front of the cordage company gates, making long puffs of steam as they breathed; and workers, huddled on the other side of the road, stamping their feet and dancing about, blowing on their fingers or tucking them under their arms. Sky lowering and light dim--it seemed a good time to be indoors, yet nobody went. In leather arm-chairs in the Union Club of Boston were comfortable old gentlemen who had agreed to pay the guards five dollars a day and board at the hotel, to stand in the cold and drive strikers back from the gates; while the strikers had the hope that by standing in sufficient numbers and with sufficient menace they might get a dollar more in their pay envelopes every Thursday; also the certainty that if they gave up and went away, some yet hungrier wretches would sneak in and take their jobs. So the two groups confronted each other, the living presence of the class struggle. “Get back there! Move along now!” “What’s the matter? Ain’t I got a right to walk on the street?” So it went, the ceaseless wrangling of the picket-line; the most perfect of all civilizations engaged in dividing the product of its industry.

Two thousand had gone out, men and women, a huddled mass, speaking a dozen different languages, and without guidance. Whoever had an impulse towards leadership, a theory as to how labor might be aided, now found his chance; the unorganized mass began to grow organs--a miracle of mutation while you watched. The socialists had a meeting-place in North Plymouth, Rispicci Hall, and this was thrown open, and was swarming with strikers. Impromptu meetings were held, and committees named, and speeches made. In the evening came the sympathizers and propagandists, summoned hastily from Boston; Felice Guadagni, a journalist, orator of the socialists, and Paul Blanshard, a very young assistant clergyman from a Congregational church. There was a bigger meeting-place, Humberto Ferrari Hall, and this was packed to the doors, and the eager audience learned in several languages the meaning of solidarity, and the details of how to conduct a strike.

First of all they must get up a circular and mail it out to lists of names, and raise funds for support. The greater number of these workers lived close to the border-line of want, and their money would soon be gone. Those who had savings would contribute, and more would come from the labor movement outside. On the first day a hundred strikers put up five dollars each; which would pay for rent and telephone calls and telegrams, stamps and typewriters. The socialists and anarchists and I. W. W. brought their mailing-lists, and a feeble little machine of working-class publicity began to function.

Next day there was a parade; eighteen hundred workers marching the whole length of the main street of Plymouth, passing the cordage company’s plant, despite all the guards and the “cops.” Three days later came another parade, twice as big, with women and children carrying poles from which dangled clams and mussels, with the sign, “We are tired of living on these all the time!” That amused the newspaper reporters, and brought good publicity.

Organizers came: one representing the American Federation of Labor, the conservative union, which was ready to help them get shorter hours and higher wages; also one from the Industrial Workers of the World, which would help them to take over the cordage industry. The strikers listened to both, and were pulled and hauled between them; their minds being still further confused by the anarchists, who clamored that both organizations were traps for the workers, contrived by shrewd officials who wanted to live without working. Let the workers run their own strike, and let those who sympathized be content to raise funds and feed the children.

So thought and spoke Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In this crisis he forgot his timidity and humility, and developed into a full-fledged orator. So did many another worker, who found himself making a speech before he knew it. You would get into an argument with some one, and others would gather to listen, and soon there would be a crowd. When the cops drove you off the picket-line, you would stop at the next street-corner and voice your indignation, and when they moved you on, you would stop at the corner beyond that. There were always plenty willing to listen; it was the process by which the workers got their education, and developed their solidarity. You would learn more in one day of idleness than in a month of labor. In this crisis realities were unveiled, and you saw them in their nakedness. If there was anything you could not understand, there were others willing to explain. In the day by day consulting among the workers, it was surprising how clear everything became.

II

Not so many years ago, though it now seemed ages to Cornelia Thornwell, there had been a strike in the Thornwell Mills, and it had been broken in the usual way. But Cornelia’s husband had sent her away to the country-place of their daughter Deborah on the North Shore; so she had not heard the shouts of the mob and the crack of revolvers, nor seen the guards patrolling the family mansion on the hilltop. All she knew were newspaper accounts, and the pictures, drawn by Josiah and his son-in-law James Scatterbridge, of the desperate unreason of the strikers. One cause of her evolving into a runaway grandmother had been a lurking suspicion that their way of breaking a strike had not been entirely ethical.

And now here she was, in position to see with her own eyes; if she needed theories, here were A. F. of L. and I. W. W., socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, right and left wingers, even a few single-taxers and vegetarians. In the strike headquarters she met the young clergyman, Paul Blanshard; a new kind of clergyman, with a religion meant to work here and now. He was barely out of his teens, yet he saw the whole struggle so clearly that Cornelia felt herself his junior. He had got his training through the Intercollegiate Socialist Society; and as she watched the effect of his leadership upon the inert mass, a new vision dawned upon her. The idea of the workers taking over industry and running it for themselves had seemed a fanatic’s dream; but now she began to wonder, might it not after all be possible--some day in the far-off future?

To her friend Vanzetti it was a cause of grief that she was seen to be talking with this young clergyman. Vanzetti had taken her for his pupil and favorite, this unusual Yankee lady who was willing to learn from an Italian; and here she was falling into the snares of the “riformistas”! Again and again he explained to her what a waste of time it was to deal with “politeesh.” He struggled with long polysyllables, half way between Italian and English. “Twenty year, t’irty year, worker go politica, elect deputati for parliament--get elect’, do notting, traditor’, sell out! Sama t’ing wit’ union, worka hard, maka bigga union, grande, potente--never do notting--joosta graft! All rispettabilità, onorevole--you onderstanda me? Worker, he work joosta same--all time. Politeesh, he no work, liva good, dressa genteelman! He is like--I no can say Eengleesh, it is somet’ing in ocean, he get on ship, on shell of crab--” and Vanzetti resorted to his dictionary for the word “barnacool,” so that he might apply it to the rosy-cheeked young Congregational clergyman. Yes, the Reverend Blanshard would find a place on the backs of the workers, and stay there like the rest! “You see, Nonna, he joosta sama priest--new kinda talk, but all sama for worker. Riformista is--what you call it--trait’!”

“Traitor,” said Cornelia.

“Shoore, trait’,” replied Vanzetti.

The State Board of Arbitration and Conciliation took up the grievances of the cordage workers, proposing to adjust them. And here was the trap in action--to lure the workers into the hands of “politeesh” and “offeesh.” The more conservative strike leaders insisted upon presenting their case before this board, and Vanzetti opposed them with all his energies. He rushed about from one gathering to another, arguing, protesting; when he saw that the proposition was going to carry, he became frantic, and there was another row between him and Compagno Culla.

The socialist was trying to explain the wishes of the Italians to the English-speaking workers, when Vanzetti climbed onto the platform and thrust the speaker away. “Worker, have notting do wit’ commish! It is trap! It is for breaka strike! It is for maka slave! It is for bringa you, for bringa wife, bambini, for be slave for cordage companee! Why musta worker get politeesh for settle strike? Why musta get go-vérnment for settle strike? Why musta have owtoritee? Always owtoritee for worker! But let worker settle strika for self. Soocha man lika dis--” and Vanzetti pointed an enraged finger at Culla--“soocha man is trait’ for worker--he is more bad as capitalista--”

There was a storm of controversy, some shouting on one side, some on the other. But the majority did not want to listen to anarchist propaganda just then; they called for Compagno Culla, and he got the floor again, and shook his fist at his rival and demanded: “Why for he talk owtoritee? Anarchista no like owtoritee, he tella you; but I tella you anarchista is heemself owtoritee! He taka da platform, he maka da speech, he musta have hisa way or he maka da vee-ólence! Is it not so, comradda?”

III

The great rich company, the biggest cordage company in the world, which now in the second year of the great war was doing more business and making more money than ever in its history before, sent its officials before the state board to argue that wages of six dollars a week for unskilled women and nine dollars for unskilled men were abundant and generous. It proved that this meant an average wage of twenty-five dollars a week per family, by the simple device of having fathers and mothers and half-grown children all at work--which was the best thing for them, because it kept them from idleness and dissipation. The strikers countered by putting on the witness-stand the head of one of these families, John Corsini, who had a wife and nine children, the oldest fourteen years of age; John was paid nine dollars a week, and the interpreter quoted: “He says they sometimes make a meal that would not be fit for a pig to eat. He is heavily in debt. Goes in debt about five dollars a week. Friends bring in food and stockings now and then to help out, otherwise the children couldn’t go out in the street.”

It was shown that in nineteen years past, the company had raised wages three times, each time only five per cent; while in ten years the cost of living had gone up more than fifty per cent. This moved the company, out of the generosity of its corporate heart, to risk another five per cent increase; more than this would mean inevitable ruin. Its highly paid lawyers argued, and their eloquence was reproduced in the newspapers; smooth-tongued agents came among the workers repeating the arguments, and promising many sorts of favors to leaders who would be tractable. The most expensive secret-service agency in the world was at work. Dissension and doubt and fear spread among the pitiful bewildered masses. The company gave out the announcement that unless its terms were accepted at once, strike-breakers would be brought in. At the same time there appeared a number of head-breakers, the state police, who rode ruthlessly into the crowds.

Also there came autobuses from Boston and other places, with loads of ordinary policemen; they stood three ranks deep in front of the gates, and could have joined hands along the three-quarter mile of steel fence. Any time they saw a crowd gather, they would come at double-quick. “Move along there now--step lively!” If you tried to argue as to the rights of people to the use of the streets, they would not argue back, but jab their clubs into your stomachs or your backs and run you along. If you failed to run fast enough, you would get a thump; and next day in the police-court you would be sentenced as a rioter, and newspapers would tell how the mob was getting out of hand, and the company was requesting the governor to call out the militia.

But the strikers stood firm; they would not accept five per cent advance, and, urged on by the radicals, they requested the state board to withdraw its intervention. The company was worried, because the agents of other cordage concerns were in Plymouth, hiring away their best workers. Something must be done; so one or two hundred “scabs” were got into the plant, around the fence by the seashore, and an effort was made to start one department. The struggle became more tense; the picket-lines drew closer, and the rate of Cornelia Thornwell’s education was speeded up.

A picket-line was no place for an old lady--so her Italian friends argued and pleaded; but she had come in search of experience, and insisted upon getting it. The first time she saw an unarmed worker struck down by a policeman’s club, she gave voice to her indignation: “Oh, you brute! How dare you!” And when he turned and came at her, there was a moment before she realized that she was no longer a lady, able to give orders to a policeman. Only when he thrust his club into the abdomen of a woman in front of her, and sent the woman reeling into a snow-bank, did Cornelia realize her danger, and turn and run. Yes, she, the widow of an ex-governor of the Commonwealth--she who had lived for forty years in a palace, and been waited upon by servants and honored by all the world--she ran! And in good earnest, as fast as she knew how, because the “brute” had heard her cry, and meant to get her if he could. That she escaped was only because her friend Brini and others crowded in and took the blows. Incidentally they took the club from the policeman, and got away with it, and were very proud of the souvenir!

But that did not comfort Cornelia. The ignominy of her experience had brought tears of rage into her eyes; she would never forget it, and for the rest of her life she would be an illustration of the fact, well-known in the labor movement, that members of the leisure class who take an interest in the cause are apt to become more radical than the workers themselves. Of two thousand participants in the Plymouth cordage strike, only one had ever thought of a policeman as a servant to whom she might give orders.

Cornelia had been born in Massachusetts, and had lived all her life there. She had really believed about her state, or commonwealth, as it prefers to call itself, all the fine things its leaders and rulers had told her. She had listened to orations about Pilgrim fathers and New England town-meetings, the cradle of liberty and the hub of the universe and all the rest. Here she was only forty miles from Boston, for practical purposes in its suburbs; within sight of Plymouth rock, a shrine so sacred that it had a miniature temple built over it; and to her consternation she found herself with no rights that any policeman or private detective was bound to respect. Unless, of course, she chose to declare herself, to cease to be a cordage worker on strike, and become a member of the ruling caste! She went to a police-court, and heard workers testify as to unprovoked assaults, and heard a judge give the police a mild rebuke for their conduct; and then she went back to the picket-line, and saw the same thing going on, precisely as if no judges or courts existed.

And here was the significant thing--out of several thousand people, she was the only one who was surprised! The rest, no matter how angry and excited they became, always mentioned that much worse had happened at Lawrence and Lowell and Fall River and Milford and a string of other places! “My gosh, what you t’ink?” said Alfonsina Brini. “You t’ink dey let worker win strike if can help?” And when Cornelia wanted to know if the police belonged to the cordage company, her landlady’s response was, “Who else is it for belong?”

IV

Cornelia, of course, had been on the inside of her city’s affairs, and she knew the history of the Boston police force. The Irish-Catholics had carried an election and captured the city; whereupon the old New England element had passed a state law, taking control of the police away from Boston, and vesting it in the governor of the Commonwealth, who was still an Anglo-Saxon gentleman. It was the practice to rent out this force to neighboring towns; and they had developed a strike-breaking department, subject to call by all manufacturers and mill-owners. The force worked hand in glove with the private detective agencies, exchanging records and information. So had been evolved a complete technique of labor-smashing; and all in darkness--the newspapers proceeding upon the principle that what the public didn’t know wouldn’t hurt it.

Cornelia Thornwell, watching this system in operation, found herself crying out in bewilderment. How could the rich, her kind of people, be so blind? How could they overlook the consequences of teaching the workers such contempt for law? What was the use of talking about Americanization, when, in a time of crisis, you denied every right of citizens, and even of human beings? You herded them like cattle, you beat them like dogs--and then you were surprised and shocked if they turned and bit you in the back of the leg! Before this month’s strike was over, Cornelia had come to feel that she would never blame these working people for anything they might do.

The case of Vanzetti was before her day by day. This dreamer-idealist was so built that he suffered more with other people’s pains than with his own. When he half-carried a shuddering body off the picket-line, and washed a torn and bloody scalp with a basin of water and a rag, the tears ran down his cheeks, and his hands shook. And then, that evening, he turned up at the Brini home with a gun! He, the apostle of brotherhood--the tender-hearted one who had refused to let a sick kitten be killed--he was getting ready to kill policemen! To be sure it was not a very efficient weapon, a five-chambered revolver of an old type, much rusted; and Cornelia could see from the way her friend handled it that he hardly knew which end was which. When she tried to dissuade him from his course, Mrs. Brini laughed and told her not to worry, Bart would not shoot anybody; he had once gone hunting with another young fellow, who had shot a bird, and Bart had been so affected by the sight of the dying creature that he had been unhappy for days, and had never gone hunting again.

“But if he’s not going to use it, why carry it?” protested Cornelia. “If they catch him with it, they’ll send him to jail surely.”

To which Vanzetti made answer, “When I go jail for worker, I helpa cause.” Which seemed to Cornelia a dark and obscure saying. How could it help the cause of the workers, for a poor Italian ditch-digger, whom nobody had ever heard of, to be sent to jail?

V

The real meaning of the gun was the coming of Galleani. The anarchists were determined that the fallacious arguments of the “riformistas” must be answered, and they had summoned their great leader and teacher to state their side. There was opposition to this among the other strike-leaders, and at first they refused to have the Galleani meeting in their hall; they were trying to avoid provocation, not wanting the newspapers to portray them as extremists. It was only after Galleani had promised to tone down his utterances and to avoid incitement to violence that they agreed to let him be heard.

He came to the Brini home the afternoon of the meeting, so Cornelia got a good look at him: a benevolent and paternal figure, who might have been dressed up for Santa Claus; broad-shouldered and stout, dressed in a long frock coat like a clergyman, with an “alderman” in front, and bushy white whiskers spread above it. He was at once hero and granddaddy to the Italian workers; they would gaze at him in awe and call him “Maestro,” and then they would feed him on cakes and wine, and pat him on the sleeve, and call him “Nonno.” He was their thinker, their great student, who read everything and knew everything, and told them about it once a week in their paper, “La Cronaca Sovversiva,” the “Revolutionary Chronicle,” which had a circulation of ten thousand, the fighting organ of the Italians of New England. Its elderly editor lived in honorable poverty, supporting a wife and four children upon a salary of eight dollars a week, eked out by gifts from those who had more. His overcoat was frayed, and fastened at the neck with a large safety-pin, but that did not keep him from being a very dignified gentleman.

In his train came a bodyguard of a score or so of Italian workers, some of them not yet out of their teens, but all in grim earnest. There were rumors that the police meant to break up the meeting and arrest the orator, and these young fellows were here to see about it--every one with a gun in his overcoat pocket, and some with two, and a dirk for good measure. Among them was a Jewish lad out of the slums of New York, at that time employed on a Boston newspaper, and later to be known as Michael Gold. He saw a dingy New England town, with dirty snow trodden underfoot and gray clouds overhead turning soon to night, and--so it seemed to the visitor--not less than a million of policemen. The little band of rebels came like Daniel into the lion’s den; they were determined to fight, rather than let their leader be taken. Fortunately no trouble occurred--else America might have exchanged a proletarian playwright, a very scarce article, for a revolutionary martyr, of whom it has had far too many.

Cornelia went with her Italian friends to the meeting. She could not understand what the orator was saying, but she enjoyed the powerful vibrant voice, and shared the thrill of the audience; afterwards her friends would tell her what had been said, for as long as she cared to listen. Luigi Galleani advised them to build up their moral forces, opposing to the brutality of the police their iron will to brotherhood and solidarity. He told them that they were the sole creators of wealth, and that some day, not so far away, they would take possession of their own. He told them to beware of self-styled leaders, persons who set themselves over the masses and presumed to control them. He told them to free their minds from superstition, reverence for gods and priests and judges and policemen; for they themselves were their own gods, their own judges, and the enforcers of their law; that was right which their conscience and sense of brotherhood justified to them. Once as a girl in Boston Cornelia had attended a lecture by a certain well-known Mr. Emerson; she had heard about a queer New England recluse, Mr. Thoreau, author of a pamphlet entitled, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” So there was nothing strange to her in these high-sounding ideas; the only trouble was, that the higher they sounded, the more difficult it was to bring them down to earth. One and all, the leaders in this strike preached solidarity, but they were not able to achieve it among themselves, and so their followers were scattered and their energies wasted.

VI

The state board was pleading with the workers to accept a ten per cent raise; and some wanted to say yes, and others no, and some said it was a trap, because the company had not offered ten and surely the offer should come before the acceptance! There was more wrangling in the meetings, and Vanzetti would leap upon the table and shout, “Traditore! Trait’!” and others would outshout him and drag him down. He would come home, heartsick, declaring that the spokesman for the Portuguese had sold out to the companee, and all the sufferings of the strikers were going for nought.

The strike had lasted a full month, and the workers’ money was exhausted, and some were sneaking back to work, and the rest were desperate with fear. The police had come and broken up their meetings and closed their hall, and what more could they do? The Italians met secretly, here and there, to decide whether they should trust the board. All but a few extremists wanted to give up, and it was plain that these few could never get jobs with the cordage company anyhow.

Cornelia, exhausted by the long ordeal, went home and crept into bed, and was just falling asleep, when she was disturbed by loud voices in the house. It was Vanzetti and Culla, with Brini trying to pacify them. Cornelia was going to sleep in spite of the noise; but suddenly she heard Vanzetti shout, “Spee-a! Spee-a!” Culla yelled something in reply, and there was a scuffle and a crash, and Cornelia leaped out of bed and rushed into the little parlor, to see Vanzetti lying on the floor, making desperate efforts to get up, but in vain, because the mighty Brini was on top of him, holding him down. All that could be seen of Compagno Culla was a pair of coattails disappearing speedily through a doorway.

Vanzetti promised to behave, and was let up. He was too angry this time to make apologies to Cornelia. But he told her volubly what that abbominevole Culla had done; after voting to deliver the workers back into slavery, he had had the insolence to come here to the house, to ask for some fifty dollars of relief money, which Vanzetti had collected from the anarchistas of a neighboring town, and which Culla, as a member of the strike committee, was supposed to take over. Vanzetti had refused to give the money up; never would he trust anything to gialli socialistas, riformistas and traditori of the working class! He would take the money back to those who had contributed it, or he would turn it over for the use of some other strikers. Culla, very angry, had threatened to brand Vanzetti for malversazione, embezzlement of the workers’ funds; and thereupon Vanzetti shouted, “Spee-a! Spee-a!”--which is to say, “Spy,” the most dreadful of all accusations.

Such was the ending of Cornelia’s career as a striker. Next morning she got up at a quarter to six, and was duly pinned up in her shawl, and stumbled through the darkness to her place in the wrapping-room of the cordage plant. The bosses were very polite--good morning, glad to see you--it was almost like a social function, an extraordinary change. The workers had shown that they had some power after all, and the lesson would not be soon forgotten. And the State Board of Arbitration and Conciliation set to work, and after two months of deliberation it succeeded in finding a formula which would save the face of the company officials, enabling them to do what they had declared was impossible. Cornelia would find more money in her pay-envelope thereafter, and it seemed quite wonderful--until she stopped and figured that it would take nearly half a year for the increase to make up what she had lost during her weeks of idleness. It was the most perfect of social systems.

VII

There was no more work for Vanzetti in or near the cordage plant; his reckless agitation had cost the company a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in extra wages, and so he was stopped when he tried to pass the gates. Some one set detectives to follow him everywhere he went. He managed to find himself a job cutting ice: a safe, outdoor activity, where he was in plain sight, and there was no harm he could do. So he remarked to Cornelia, with a twinkle in his eye, “I putta bombe da dinnameet under da ice, he freeze again nexta night queek!”

Ten hours a day he pushed a long saw on an ice-pond, and slid heavy blocks onto wagons. He liked the work because it was picturesque and lively, and gave him a chance to look about. He would come home exhausted, but with adventures to tell. He got himself a pair of rubber boots; they were expensive, and he was proud of them, and so was Trando, who could almost get into one of them, and was a comical spectacle staggering about the room in two. But three days later Vanzetti came back without these treasures, and at supper-table he said, “I must get nodder two boot.”

“What’s the matter?” Everybody asked at once. “You lost them?”

“No losta,” said Vanzetti, “butta no got. I take heem off for go wit’ wagon. I come back, see feller, Pietro, you know heem--Guasti, I t’ink he name.”

“I know heem,” said Brini. “No gooda feller.”

“He poor feller. He got wife, four bambini. No can live soocha familee for what you get cutta da ice. I see he got my boota, putta heem on for work. I t’ink I go heem say, ‘You giva me boot, you worka no boot.’ But I senta shame for do it. I t’ink, Vanzett’, you lonely man, no gotta bambini for buy suppa, you worka little bit more, get nodder boot.”

Later on, towards spring, came another incident that Cornelia never forgot. The ice was gone now, and Vanzetti was back at “picka shov’,” and one day he reported that he had lost his purse on the street. How much did he have in it? Not sure, but he thought maybe thirteen dollars. That was a whole week of hard labor, and everybody was concerned. The family discussed it all through supper. Vanzetti said that he was sure there was plenty honest people in Plymouth, maybe one of them had picked up the purse; he would put up signs, the way they did in Italy. So Cornelia helped him to phrase a notice, “Lost, small purse,” with his name and address; he went out that evening with a hammer and some tacks, and put up the notices on telegraph poles along his route.

This was while he was still being watched by detectives--in fact they did not entirely let up until eighteen months after the strike. So everybody was startled when, next evening after supper, there came a blue-uniformed policeman. “You advertised a purse?”

“Shoore,” said Vanzetti; a little uneasy, as the poor always are in the presence of the law. Might this method of advertising be illegal among these strange Yankees?

“What kind of purse?”

“He is rounda blacka purse, not very moocha beeg.”

“What did you have in it?”

“I t’ink I got t’irteen dollar, notta more.”

“Is this your purse?” The policeman held it out.

“I t’ink it is heem, looka like heem.”

“But it’s got eighteen dollars in it.”

Vanzetti hesitated. “No t’ink had eighteen dollars. Shoore no got so moocha mon’. Musta be odder purse.”

The members of the Brini family had crowded to the door to listen, and now broke into protest. “What you say, Bart?” cried Alfonsina. “You no can tella ah mooch you got?” And to the policeman, “He no can tella ah mooch mon’ he got! He giva da mon’ all time. He giva da mon’ to little one, children all time--he buy somet’ing, giva present all time, never t’ink for keepa da mon’. My osband here, he tella you, Mister Polissman. Tella heem, Vincenzo!”

“Shoore,” said Brini, “He bigga fool for money. He giva me for keep, forgetta, never know ah mooch he got.”

“Me know his purse,” persisted the woman. “Me see alla time in room, me fixa room. Could taka half his mon’ all da time, he not know it. It is hee’s purse, Mr. Polissman.”

They discussed the time and place where the purse had been found, and everything fitted. So the policeman said, “I guess you better take it. Nobody else has claimed it.” But Vanzetti was stubborn, he was quite sure he couldn’t have had so much as eighteen dollars in his possession. He would not take it, and the policeman went off, much puzzled at this singular kind of “wop.”

Also there were further developments of the affair Culla, curious and touching to the Yankee observer. Compagno Culla had been blacklisted by the cordage company--despite the fact that he was one of the moderates. He was doing some kind of sedentary work, and complained that he was suffering from indigestion. Vanzetti, enthusiast for the back-to-nature way of life, advised him that it was because of sitting still all day. Said Bart, telling Cornelia about it, “Come wit’ me, worka picka shov’, you maka you self new man.” And sure enough, Compagno Culla gave up his indoor work, and went to digging ditches, and after he had got used to it, he found that his indigestion was better. He mentioned it once at the Brinis, and Bart patted him on the shoulder, proud and benevolent.

After the visitor had gone, Cornelia said, “You don’t want to kill him any more!” And Vanzetti grinned, as he had learned to do when “Nonna” was teasing him. “Wanta kill so long he try for be offeesh’, maka union, be secretary da union, maka jobba for self. When he come lika me, worka picka shov’, maka fight capitalista, padrone, den he is compagno, comradda, gooda feller, I lika heem.” So, little by little, Cornelia came to understand the type of idealist-fanatic, which could be gentle as a child in all personal relationships, but fierce and dangerous when roused by social wrong.

VIII

Springtime! You dressed by the light of dawn, and the good old sun was shining over the sea as you went to your day’s work. As if ashamed for the suffering his absence had caused you, he gave double measure, and the snows melted, and little rivers ran from every hillside, and in sheltered corners you saw green things sticking their timid heads from the ground. Brini hurried home from the factory and tore off his coat and seized his spade and went to work, a man possessed by the common or garden variety of frenzy. Even Vanzetti, after ten hours “picka shov’,” could not escape the disease, and joined in with the rake. So must the Pilgrim fathers have behaved after that first long winter, when so many had perished upon inadequate rations, and they dreamed the miracle of green things growing from this strange new soil.

One lovely brown bed after another was leveled and raked smooth, and laid out with strings by the eager children. They could hardly wait for their father to get home in the afternoon to start planting. They set up labels on little stakes--it was a miniature graveyard of seeds, and everybody cherishing the religious hope--“Resurgam!” The children would come hurrying home from school, and there were the tiny green threads of onions, and little green points that would be radishes, and pink-tinged ones that would be beets! When, a couple of weeks later, there were some big enough to be pulled and washed and made into a baby salad, that was a regular religious ceremony, a Dago thanksgiving.

Out in the woods you could find tiny flowers of fragile and unearthly beauty, such as ravish the souls of children, and of prophets and dreamers and fanatics. On Sunday mornings Vanzetti and Cornelia and Fay and Trando would set out, and if it had been left to the man they would never have stopped wandering the whole day long, and by night time they would have been lost. The woods were his temple, full of infinite mysteries. He would point out signs of nature’s cunning; he would speculate about things he did not understand, and ask Cornelia if she knew; if nobody knew, perhaps they could watch and find out. He would get down on his knees over an ant’s nest, and be happy for an hour with the frenzied labors of these tiny bundles of energy. Then he would spring up and start walking again; come on, it was almost time for mayflowers, perhaps they would find some in the next little valley.

And the seashore! So many strange things that you had never seen before! The children would scramble about on slippery rocks at low tide, and gather more treasures than their hands could hold. Better leave them where they were, said Bart, and carry off knowledge about them. They would sit on the high rocks to rest, and watch the sailboats and the ships, and speculate about where they came from and what they brought. Bart was curious as to other parts of the world, and how men lived there. When he discovered that Cornelia had read books about such things, he would ask her questions, pretending that it was for the education of the children--but it was like the father who enjoys the circus more than the children do!

The mayflowers came, and you could gather bunches of them, and turn the humblest worker’s home into a bower. The vegetable rows were shining now, and the salads on the supper-table were explosions of green, and the soups were steaming symphonies in red and green and white and yellow. The rising sun ran you a race in the morning, and the evenings were so bright and lovely that you hated to go to bed. It was what you had been waiting for, through the black and bitter winter; Cornelia quoted the one-eyed Kalandar of the Arabian Nights: “This indeed is life! Pity ’tis ’tis fleeting!”

In the house across the street lived Signor Prezzolini, who earned his living by teaching the violin. When he gave lessons to his young pupils it was not so pleasant, but sometimes he practiced for himself, and in warm weather he would have his windows open, and what could be more wonderful than to sit on your front porch in the twilight, and gaze up at far-off mysterious stars, and listen to strains of ravishing beauty? In those hours the little Brini boy’s life-destiny was determined; he was only eight and a half years old, but he made up his mind one evening, and announced it gravely, “I am going to be a violinist.”

Cornelia was moved to tell him something out of her own childhood. She had lived next to the home of rich people, who gave many balls and parties, and would have an orchestra to play. Cornelia’s mother would put her to bed, and the child would creep to the window and listen. Then a bold idea occurred to her, and she took a blanket and stole downstairs, and into the neighbor’s garden, and crawled under a bush, where she was safe from discovery; there she lay for hours, wrapped in the blanket, listening in such ecstasy that even now she would shiver as she remembered it.

Little Trando nestled closer to her, and put his sensitive hand into hers. In between the playing, he begged for more stories about her girlhood. She told him how she had believed in fairies, and would run out into the garden in the early dawn, and hunt under the prettiest flowers, trembling with the delicious hope that a fairy might be hiding there, and what would she say if she met one. But here Bart, the serious one, intervened; he did not approve of fairy-stories. “No should tella children what is not true, Nonna. It plenty lovely t’ing what is real, plenty miraculosa--how you say it, wonderfool. When you teach somet’ing true, is usefool too, but fairy is lika diavolo, like angioli, superstizione, no gooda for teach.”

IX

Cornelia had by now got hardened to her job. Her hands were skinny, with whipcords standing out on the backs; her fingers were knobby at the joints, and covered with tough calluses. Her shoulders were bowed to meet the coils of rope upon which she sewed, and one shoulder sagged lower than the other. But they did not ache, and she could work peacefully, and have time for a bit of gossip with her neighbors, and for long thoughts about the life she was living, and the people she had come to know.

The circle of her acquaintance had been greatly widened by the strike, which had the effect of bringing the workers together and breaking down barriers of language and creed. Mrs. O’Dowd, Cornelia’s pious neighbor, had been on strike, with her husband and several relatives, and they had learned that the “wops” next door were also capable of loyalty, and that their jabber of sounds might mean something of importance to Irish aristocrats. Cornelia served as go-between, and got so well acquainted that she ventured to hint perhaps the heavenly powers might find some way to accept good works as a partial substitute for good doctrine. That was contrary to Father O’Brien, of course, but even so, one might think about it, and one might pray for the lost souls.

That was actually being done, Cornelia learned; it was Mrs. Lavatelli, the neighbor on the other side, who was so much distressed by the sight of three bambini who had never been baptized, that she made it a practice to burn a candle before the image of the virgin every night before she went to bed. And Cornelia said, surely that ought to be enough. God was being properly reminded, and it must be assumed that He, in His infinite wisdom, would take whatever steps were necessary.

There was naturally a great deal of curiosity among the neighbors as to this mysterious Yankee lady who had lost her husband and home under circumstances to which she never referred. They would come and call, or avail themselves of opportunities to gossip over the back fence while hanging out clothes or working at the vegetables. And Cornelia would make use of her social training to divert the conversation, so that presently the neighbors would be talking about their affairs, and Cornelia would be learning something of the things for which she had come here.

What struck her most frequently--and always on the funny-bone--was the complete identity of spirit between these ladies of the back fence and those of the “Back Bay.” If Cornelia had imagined that by evolving into a runaway grandmother she was going to find freedom from conventions, from the petty restrictions of collective femininity, then she had made a great mistake, and wasted the sixty-first year of her life. For these working women and wives of working men had their very strict notions of what was proper, and they had the same system of government by gossip. The only difference which Cornelia noticed between them and the “Sewing Circle,” the body which had ruled the social destiny of Boston for two generations, was that the ladies of the back fence did not lower their voices when they came to the worst part of their stories; they had not cultivated the use of the shoulders and the eyebrows as substitutes for words in the circulation of slander.

The ladies of the back fence did not have so much money as the ladies of the Back Bay, but they made up for it by having more children, and they used these for conversational purposes in the same way. They would tell the charming things the little ones had said, and just as in Boston, it never occurred to them that this might bore the listener. Also they would tell about the children’s ailments, and what the doctor said, and whether or not the doctor knew what he was talking about. Apparently the unsatisfactoriness of doctors, at the present stage of their development, had been discovered by the poor as by the rich. There was the same experimenting with unorthodox remedies, and the same talk about results--Cornelia might as well have been back in the nursery with her daughter Clara Scatterbridge.

And then clothes. There were fashion magazines passed from hand to hand, and when Mrs. O’Dowd’s younger sister made herself a party dress, she cut it upon a pattern you would have seen at the Friday evening dances of the socially elect. The material here was sleazy, but that did not enter into the conversation, because nobody knew it was so.

And then ancestors! Strange as it might seem, the ladies of the back fence talked about family, and who was who, and why. To be sure, they could not go so far back; they had no family-trees and colleges of heraldry, no pages of genealogy in the Evening Transcript every Wednesday. But there were so many more families, that it made an equal supply of conversational material. Strange as it might seem, there was the same amount of hostility and the same amount of pride in the family talk. Cornelia never met any woman so low that she could not find some other women to look down on; she never found any woman so high that she was not eager to know a Yankee lady, and to repeat to her neighbors what the Yankee lady had said.

X

Also Cornelia got to know Vanzetti, with the intimacy inevitable in the crowded homes of the poor. She knew him standing in front of a little cracked mirror, tying his cravat and singing songs of his old home. She knew him teaching songs to the children, and learning American songs they brought home from school. She knew him keeping watch in the kitchen, to make sure that Alfonsina did not have to carry coal or wood. She knew him sitting up long after the rest had gone to bed, reading by the light of an oil lamp, his brow furrowed in thought. At such times he would be lost to her and to all the world; she, who had always taken comfort for granted, was awed by the spectacle of a man who robbed himself of sleep to get knowledge.

He taught her some Italian, and she taught him English. She explained that mystery, so difficult of comprehension to an Italian, that it is possible for certain consonants to follow each other without a vowel between. One said “a great big house”; one did not have to say “a greata bigga house.” She explained the simple idioms, one after another. One did not say, “I no can”; one said, “I cannot.” Vanzetti wrote this down, and presently had made such progress that he would stop in the middle: “I no--cannot.” She labored to teach him the mystery of the sound “th”; showing him how the tongue was placed, stuck out a little, and pressed against the lower part of the upper teeth. The children were fascinated by that; they had learned to make the sound, but without knowing how they did it. They would watch Bart’s efforts; he got so that he would stick his tongue out, but alas, he could not always time it right, and he would stick it out and then pull it in and make the wrong sound! The children laughed merrily--such pleasure it gave them, to find themselves superior to the grown-ups! But that was all right with Bart--it was his dream that the children would be superior in all things.

Once or twice a month he would disappear for a day or two. The irregular character of his work made this possible--and anyhow, there was no job that could hold him when it was announced in “La Cronaca Sovversiva” that Galleani was going to lecture on the effects of the war upon the revolutionary movement in Italy, or Carlo Tresca upon syndicalist versus individualist anarchism. Vanzetti would come back brimming over with arguments, and news from the “Gruppo Autonomo di East Boston,” as the Galleani followers called themselves. He and Brini would have vociferous arguments, and later Vanzetti would explain to Cornelia what it was about. Or perhaps there would be a “picanic” in a neighboring town, and Vanzetti would get a bundle of literature to “distriboot.” Or there would be a strike in the shoe factories of Lynn, and he would compose an appeal, and take it round among the anarchistas, and collect fifty cents from one and a quarter from the next, and in a couple of days would have twenty dollars to be forwarded by postal order.

Little by little Cornelia was coming to understand his doctrine. He would pick out passages from the paper and explain them to her, and answer her questions and objections. It was one of those high perfectionist doctrines, which assume in human beings a quantity of virtue which few as yet possess. Those who succeed in living up to this doctrine are sublime; but those who fail may break their necks. Might there not be persons using Vanzetti’s lofty phrases as a pretext for evading duties, or as a means of preying upon their fellows? So Cornelia asked, and the other answered that this might happen, but there could be no progress without some risk, and neither men nor women could learn to swim unless they entered the water.

He was determined to read English, and from one of his trips he brought back a book called “The Conquest of Bread,” by P. Kropotkin. Cornelia, with her woman’s wit, did not fail to divine that there were two people going to be educated out of that book! Curiously enough, it was not until later that she connected its author with a very famous scientist from Russia, whose visit to Boston had made a great stir in intellectual circles some eight years previously. A high-up nobleman escaped from exile in Siberia, Kropotkin had been a social lion. A Harvard professor who was in the next year to become president of the university--than which there is no higher station in the world--had introduced him for a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute. How could it have occurred to Cornelia that this learned foreigner with the bushy gray whiskers whom she had met among the most exalted of the Brahmins, could be the author of a tract recommending the overthrow of government by mass insurrection of the proletariat? How could she have imagined that Mr. Lowell would have consented to further the propaganda of anarcho-syndicalism? How could she have imagined it--or, for that matter, how could he?

XI

There was a good-sized grape-arbor behind the house, and it came slowly into leaf, and then into blossom, and spread upon the air a marvelous sweet perfume; you could stand and drink it, almost as if it were the reality of autumn instead of the promise of spring. “Divino da vino!” said Vincenzo Brini; it was in the days before prohibition, of course. “Gooda redda wine,” he said, pointing to the blossoms. “You calla heem ‘Dago Red.’” And then with his good-natured grin he pointed to himself. “Nodder kind Dago Red!” He pointed to Vanzetti. “More Dago Red!”

It was a joke to which they were much accustomed. The children would hear it called after them when they went to school: “Dago Red! Dago Red!” Even Father O’Brien had taken it up, and in one of his sermons had advised his flock to avoid any and all kinds of “Dago Reds.” “What you t’ink of dat?” said Alfonsina, outraged; and Cornelia answered. “Tell him what they did to Jesus. He too had a nickname, ‘King of the Jews.’ They wrote it on the cross--‘I.N.R.I.’--Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.”

“I know,” said Vanzetti. “I read heem. He was not what priest say, he was worker, same like me and you, ribello, rivoluzionario! Da priest in his time want him kill-èd--say he make trouble. I no--cannot say it Eengleesh--”

“‘And they were the more fierce, saying, he stirreth up the people.’”

“Joosta so! He was gooda man, povero. I sorry when he die. I make tears for heem. I say compagno--Comradda Gesu, die for make joostice for worker.”

So it was when you were talking with Bart. You would begin by smelling the grape blossoms and making jokes about the wine you were going to drink; and you would end by making tears for Comradda Gesu.

“Summer is y-comen in!” sang the pair of wrens on top of the grape-arbor; putting in an extra vowel, just as if they had been Dagoes! It was a time for coming outdoors, a time for beauty and joy. But alas, the hideous slaughter in Europe was mounting to frenzy, becoming an extermination of the human race. The exploiters and imperialists whose greed had dragged Italy into the conflict were sending propagandists over here, to lure the Italian youth back into the slaughter-pit.

And so there was a bugle call in the soul of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He heard it all the time, he could never cease talking about it. He must not spend the warm summer days lying on Castle Hill, reading Dante and Manzoni; he must help to organize meetings in one town or another; he must go the day before and distribute handbills from house to house, and beg the people to come; he must be on hand to take up a collection and forward it to Galleani, so that more papers might be printed, to hold the demon of militarism at bay, and expose the lies of piety and patriotism. That was his duty, his martyrdom--his way of following the example of Comradda Gesu!