IV. YOUNG AMERICA

The days passed; and one of them rang a bell in the soul of Cornelia Thornwell. She had kept her vow, she had won the wager with herself. For a whole year she had taken care of herself, asking no advice and no favors from any one. She had got a job as a manual worker, and held it for a year, and lived on her earnings, and had twenty-five dollars put away. Now she might go home if she wanted to.

Did she want to? It was hard to be sure; at one time she would find herself thinking about this one and that, and what had happened to them all this time. But then she would remember the desperate determination of everybody to dominate her life; all those highly disciplined and rigid people who knew what she ought to do at every moment of her life, and would never cease from telling her! Well, she would have a way to escape, a city of refuge!

She had made up her mind to tell no one where she had been; it would be a scandal, a mystery with which they might torment themselves for the rest of her life; a skeleton in the family closet--the bones of a runaway grandmother! The imp of mischief kicked up his heels in the depths of Cornelia’s soul; she thought of each person she knew, and what that person would make of the problem. The secret would be a club she would hold over their heads, to make them behave. “Let me alone, or I’ll disappear again!” Like her daughter Alice’s hysterics, which had developed at the age of three, in a lovely and much petted child who wanted to have her own way, and which continued in a social queen of forty, who had to have a platonic lover in addition to a husband.

Now Alice’s mother would also have a platonic romance! Cornelia, aged sixty-one, would have an adopted son, an Italian ditch-digger, aged twenty-eight--agnostic, anarchist, and “Dago Red!” She might be sure of its being safe and innocent, for she had watched him a year, and never seen him look at a woman, nor heard him voice such an idea. Also she had the word of Alfonsina: “He never t’ink woman, he joosta t’ink joostice.”

Such was Cornelia’s tangle of moods, when, on an evening in July she was coming home from work with another woman, and down the main street they saw, walking toward them, two girls of the leisure class. There was nothing unusual in this, for the summer-hotels were open, the “season” at Plymouth was in full swing. To be sure, the daughters of the rich did not prefer this part of the town for walking; their part lay to the south, where the shore-road was lined with villas and splendid estates. The workers would see them roaring by in fast motor-cars, radiant, exquisite, with veils floating; snatches of laughter and song would be wafted back, reminding you of the paradise of freedom and happiness you had lost by being born in the wrong half of Plymouth.

The two girls came on; one in pink chiffon, one in white, both lovely and gay, chatting, not heeding the swarm of tired laborers, drab and dusty. Cornelia saw them coming, and her eyes rested on them carelessly--until suddenly she started, and the blood leaped into her face. That one in pink, with the lovely little round face framed in soft brown hair and crowned with a pink chiffon hat with flowers--that was her grandchild, Betty Alvin! Little Betty, grown two or three inches taller, and miraculously blossomed into womanhood, rounded and ripe.

Cornelia was in a panic. What must she do? Look straight ahead--no, she must turn to the other woman and talk--about anything, the first words that came into her head--“That foreman is too bad-tempered, he’s not fit for such a job, there’ll be trouble in our wrapping-room if he stays, there ought to be some way we could make a protest--” and so on, while the girls came nearer. And suddenly--Cornelia must not look, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Betty stop and stare. The two working women passed by, and went on quickly, Cornelia chattering about anything, anything.

Betty had recognized her grandmother! Would she turn and follow? Cornelia ventured a swift glance behind, and saw that the two girls were going on. It was the Thornwell training; Betty, assuming she were sure of the recognition, would understand that Cornelia might not want to be recognized, might not want the truth to be known to Cornelia’s companion or to Betty’s. But what a tumult must be in the child’s young heart! Her long-lost and prayed-for “Grannie,” in the shape of a poor old working-woman in a faded calico dress, with a pitiful remnant of a black straw hat stuck on her head. No, it couldn’t be true! Yet it could not be doubted!

Betty would come back, Cornelia felt certain. She thought it over and decided to take the child into her secret. Betty was the one for whom she cared most; it would be like a visit home. So next evening Cornelia lingered on the way from work, and walked by herself; and presently here came Betty, in the same pink dress, but with no companion. Seeing her coming, Cornelia turned off the main street, up a more or less deserted lane, and presently she stopped, and turned and met her grand-daughter.

“Grannie! It’s you!” And then, “Oh, Grannie! How could you?” And then, “Grannie! What on earth have you been doing?”

“I’ve been taking care of myself, dear.”

“Oh, Grannie, but how!” And then, “Oh, you poor dear! Why, your shoulders are bowed! And your poor hands, your fingers! Who ever saw such things?” Betty became speechless; but the tears gushed into her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

“Don’t worry about me, dear. I’ve been having a very good time; and I’ve learned a lot.”

“What have you been doing?”

“I’ve been working for Mr. J. Lawrence Perry. Don’t you remember that nice old gentleman who comes to dinner?”

“Does he know it?”

“No, of course not; I’m just a cordage worker.”

“But, Grannie, what ever put such an idea into your head?”

“I wanted to know that I could take care of myself, and I wanted others to know it, so they would let me alone. I wanted to be independent.”

There came a flash of fire behind the rainclouds in Betty’s eyes. “Oh, Grannie, I know exactly how you feel! Sometimes I’ve thought I’d do the same thing! If I’d known where you were, I think I’d have come to you.”

Cornelia dodged that suggestion. “How is everybody at home, dear?”

“Why, they’re all right, I guess--the same as they always are. They’re very much worried about you, of course.”

“Are they really that, or do they just have to pretend it?”

“They have to pretend not to be; because it is supposed to be all right, you know.”

“Everything is always supposed to be all right,” said Cornelia. “What am I doing?”

“You went to California for the winter; and you’ve been ordered to a rest-cure.”

“I see. The neighbors will take that to mean that I’m in an asylum.”

“Well, Grannie, that wouldn’t shock them any more than this. Oh! I never heard of such a thing in my life. How do you stand it?”

“Well, it hasn’t always been easy, but it’s been good for me. I’ll be myself from now on, and not what any one else wants me to be.”

“How are you living?”

“I’m boarding with an Italian family, very good kind people. I’m comfortable there, and I’ve learned all sorts of things. I went through the strike last winter.”

“Grannie, how perfectly thrilling! I never heard anything so romantic!” The girl was aglow with excitement, and Cornelia would have liked to take her in her arms and hug her. But what would the neighbors think, seeing a working-woman on such terms of intimacy with a young lady of fashion? Even in North Plymouth, one must remember the neighbors!

“Betty, I’m taking you into my secret, and you must keep it for me. I’m not going to tell anybody where I have been.”

“Of course, Grannie, whatever you say. But are you going to live here always?”

“No, I shall come back; but I don’t think I’ll live with the family.” Then, after a moment: “What did they do about their quarrel?”

“You mean about the cradle and the rug? Well, you see, they forgot it when they found you had gone; they were so shocked, and ashamed of themselves. Now they don’t speak about it--in fact, they’ve persuaded themselves it didn’t happen. Aunt Alice took the Mayflower cradle out of the house because she knew that grandfather had left it to her in the will.”

“Did he really do that?”

“Yes, and he left the Shah of Persia’s rug to Mother; and so they didn’t have to have a row, and they didn’t; it’s the sort of thing that couldn’t happen in Boston, so it never did. If anybody mentioned it, they’d deny it--and they’d be very angry about the denial.”

Cornelia laughed. “You little monkey! Are they teaching you psychology at Miss Wilson’s?”

“No, but naturally I listen and think. They’ve got another quarrel now, that I’m not supposed to know about; but I can’t help hearing--and then Priscilla tells me a lot.”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s Aunt Alice; there’s a gentleman who admires her very much, and it’s all right, of course, only she drove somewhere with this gentleman, and somebody else saw them, and there was a lot of gossip about it, and mother had to lie for Aunt Alice at her Sewing Circle, and she vows she will never do it again. And Aunt Alice cried, and they haven’t been to each other’s house for several months.”

Cornelia thought for a space. “I don’t believe I’m ready to go home yet, Betty!”

III

They strolled to the edge of the woods, where they found a seat covered with pine-needles, and Betty told more gossip of the Thornwell clan. Aunt Clara had had another baby; that made eight, and Aunt Alice called it a positive indecency--if they were looking for scandals, there was a real one. And Great-uncle Abner had had a bad attack of the gout; and his son, Uncle Quincy--you must pronounce it as if it were another disease--had won a chess cup. And Uncle Henry Winters and Uncle James Scatterbridge had made no one could say how many millions buying ships and things and selling them to the allies; and Betty’s father had made a speech at a banquet of the bankers, declaring that the interests of civilization required that America should enter the war. “On which side?” asked Cornelia; and the girl looked at first puzzled and then shocked. “Oh, the allies, of course.”

So Cornelia told the decision which had been forming in her mind during her year of independence. She was a pacifist. She believed that the interests of civilization required that men should stop killing one another. When Betty said, “Oh, but if the Kaiser should win!” Cornelia answered that it didn’t matter who won, the interests of civilization would lose. She quoted one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to the effect that there never was a good war nor a bad peace.

This was a subject they might have discussed for quite a while; but Betty’s conscience began to trouble her. “It is time I was dressing for dinner, and I mustn’t be late. Mrs. Walker has to be so careful with me.”

“Mrs. Walker?” said Cornelia; and the other explained that she was spending a couple of weeks with the Jerry Walkers. Cornelia could hardly believe her ears. “How does that happen?”

“I know, it sounds funny; but you see, Lucile Walker, the oldest daughter, is at Miss Wilson’s, and I like her better than any other girl in the school--in fact we just adore each other. She really knows more than six of me, Grannie, and why does one always have to be thinking about family and ancestors? The way it seems to me, we Thornwells have got so much pride and money that we don’t really need to amount to anything or to know anything. Honestly, I get bored with it; and Lucile interests me, so why shouldn’t we be friends?”

“Certainly; only I’m surprised that Deborah would let you visit them.”

“Well, we had a time, of course. Mother says she simply cannot understand my vulgar tastes. She couldn’t figure out where I got them, but now she’s decided that it’s from you, Grannie!” And Cornelia spread out her knobby knuckles, and said that she had gone back to her ancestors; and Betty caught those knobby knuckles and cried over them, and they had a fine sentimental time.

Betty told more about the people she was visiting; she knew the whole shameful story from her mother--how Jerry Walker had been employed as an errand boy in St. Andrew’s hospital, of which Cornelia had been one of the supporters; and later he had worked as a felt-salesman, and Grandfather Thornwell had helped to put up the money so that he might buy his first plant. Now he owned about all the felt-plants there were in New England, and was getting to be as rich as anybody. But he could never be forgiven for being a nobody, and it was preposterous that his daughter should have been admitted to a fashionable school with the daughters of the Thornwells.

“You can see how it is,” said Betty. “If anything were to go wrong with me while I’m at Mrs. Walker’s, she would never be forgiven; so I mustn’t cause her any worry. If I could tell her about you, Grannie--but then I don’t know”--and again laughter lighted up the eager face of the girl--“I’m afraid maybe you are not respectable any more!”

Cornelia replied, “I’m lost forever. The people I’ve been living with are far worse than the Walkers. They are called Dago Reds.”

“Dago Red?” said Betty, puzzled. “I thought that was what the college boys call wine.”

“Yes, but this is another kind of Red, those who don’t believe in religion, or in government; they are anarchists, in short.”

This time Miss Betty was really shocked, and all the laughter died out of her eyes. “Oh, Grannie, but you’re joking!”

“No. But they’re really quite charming people. I’ll introduce you to them, maybe, and you can see. One of them is called Bart, and he is a saint.”

“A saint?” echoed Betty, still more puzzled. “But you said they didn’t believe in religion!”

“It appears that many saints don’t, any more,” was Cornelia’s reply. “There are what you might call secular saints.”

They walked towards Betty’s dinner, and on the way discussed the problem of how she was to meet these dangerous and thrilling friends of Grannie’s. Betty could not be absent from the Walkers’ without giving some excuse, and she did not want to tell any fibs to a hostess who carried such a grave responsibility. It would not do to tell Lucile, because secrets didn’t last long with her, and anyhow, she was not old enough to be a chaperon. Betty bethought herself of Miss Mehitabel Smith, the unmarried sister of Mrs. Walker. Miss Mehitabel was very, very upright; “almost as good as Mother,” said Betty. She did a great deal of visiting among the poor, and if Betty were to be seized with a desire to go visiting with her, that would be perfectly proper; Miss Mehitabel could visit her own poor, while Betty visited Betty’s--and it would be no fib, because anybody had only to look at that frightful get-up that Grannie wore--“How on earth do you stand it?”

It would be necessary to take Miss Mehitabel into the secret; but Betty was sure it would be safe, for no one could be more conscientious. Cornelia said all right, but of course Betty must not give any hint of the reason why Cornelia had left home; family quarrels were family skeletons, never taken out in public; and Betty said, “Oh, of course!” She would say that her grandmother was engaged in sociological research, and her secret must be kept because otherwise her conclusions would be invalidated. Miss Mehitabel would be thrilled to death by that, and it would be such a very, very little fib, it would hardly count at all. It was agreed that Betty was to pay a call in Suosso’s Lane on the following evening.

And meantime, what must the little mischief do but arrange with Miss Mehitabel to inspect the cordage plant! Miss Mehitabel was a stockholder in the company, so it was easy for her, and at 10 o’clock in the morning the two of them suddenly appeared in Cornelia’s wrapping-room. They did not speak, but stood for a long time and watched the work, and Cornelia stole glances at them out of the corner of her eyes. The other women workers did the same, the young ones especially; for Betty was as good as a fashionplate or a visit to the movies. As for Miss Mehitabel--well, Cornelia tried to imagine what an Italian or Portuguese worker would make of her solid Norfolk jacket fastened with a belt, and her plain tweed skirt without a pleat or fold, and her plain brown stockings and “ground gripper” shoes. Miss Mehitabel wore her hair short--this in the days when it was an act of heroism--and parted in the middle and covered by a Swiss guide hat with a small feather in it--the only ornamental thing in the whole costume.

Miss Mehitabel’s face was serious, even stern, and her eyes looked out through large horn-rimmed spectacles. In short, she was a perfect imitation of a certain very common type of Beacon Hill lady who has got through with nonsense once for all, especially the nonsense of men, and wishes to advertise the fact, especially to the men. In the case of Miss Mehitabel, who was a rank outsider, it was a very bold, even presumptuous thing to do; but that, of course, would be something beyond the comprehension of a cordage worker, who would take Miss Mehitabel to be the real thing, and have enough to do trying to imagine what that thing might be. After the two ladies had walked on, Cornelia heard the foreman of the department standing behind her seat, discussing the problem with the subforeman. “Now what do you suppose a woman gets herself up like that for?”

“Search me,” said the subforeman.

“Well, they tell you the reason there is so many old maids in New England, because the men goes west. But what I say is, if the women tried hard enough, they could get the men to come fetch them.” It was what is known as “Yankee humor.”

Cornelia had decided not to give the Brinis any explanation of Betty. She would just say that one of her grand-daughters was visiting in Plymouth, and wanted to meet them. There was a mystery anyhow, and the presence of a grand-daughter would neither add to it nor take away.

Betty put on her least fashionable costume for the occasion; but the gulf between the lowest of Betty’s and the highest of an Italian cordage worker’s was not to be bridged at one day’s notice. Alfonsina had barely time after supper to put clean clothes on the children, and to smooth her own hair and put on her necklace of beads. Papa Brini came in from the garden and washed his hands and put on his coat. As for poor old Bart, his clothes hung on him as if they had come from a pawnbroker’s, and he didn’t even know enough to trim his walrus mustaches when a young lady was coming to call.

But all the stiffness and embarrassment was soon forgotten; because Betty set out to be loved, and there was no resisting her. “Nonna?” she said, when she heard Cornelia’s name. “What does that mean?” When they told her it was the Italian word for grandma, she said, “Oh, how cute! Nonna. I’ll make it my pet name for her,” and she began to do it right away.

She got one arm about Trando, and said, “You will teach me lots of lovely Italian words. And Nonna tells me you are going to be a violinist. I play the piano a little, and you can come to see me and we’ll play duets; only you are going to be famous, and you won’t waste your time with me.” So then, of course, Alfonsina beamed, and Vincenzo was so touched that he got out one of the last of his precious bottles of “Dago Red,” and they all had a glass--even Bart drank a little when it was a matter of courtesy. They made the jokes about “Dago Red,” and the one about “divino da vino,” and explained it to Betty. And then she turned to Bart and said, “Mr. Vanzetti, Nonna tells me that you have made her into a pacifist.”

Now Bart, of course, had never seen anything so lovely as this in all his life; at least, never close at hand, and paying attention to him. He who would walk a whole afternoon in the woods searching for the first mayflower, now saw one come laughing and chatting into the parlor where he boarded. Of course he was awe-stricken; but even so, not for a moment must his proletarian conscience be drugged. “No, Meess Betty,” said he. “Nonna is very good lady, mooch lovely lady; but if she is made pacifista”--he pronounced it Italian fashion, “pachifeesta”--“if she is pachifeesta, it is not by me. I am never sooch t’ing.”

“Oh, then what are you, Mr. Vanzetti?”

“I am anarchista.”

“And what is the difference?”

“Moocha differenza, Meess Betty. Anarchista is fighting man. He will not fight in war for capitalista, for padrone, what you call master, but he will fight for worker, for joostice, for make freedom of slave.”

“Oh! So then you and Nonna don’t agree!”

“I t’ink it is maybe good for Nonna be pachifeesta, she is olda lady, no--cannot fight. She has got sooch kind heart--”

“But then you have a kind heart, too, Mr. Vanzetti. She told me how you would not let the sick kitten be killed.”

“Seeck kitten not do harm, I not like for kill helpless t’ing. But capitalista is not helpless, Meess Betty, he is fighting man, is most fighting man in whole world. If you study, you onderstand what is cause of great war. What for must million men go fight, be kill-èd, miseramente, cruel? It is for get market for rich capitalista; it is for get coal, iron--what you call it for burn in lamp?”

“Oil?”

“It is for sooch t’ing worker must die. It come go-vérnment, take you per forza, like slave, put in uniform, say go kill. If you say no--cannot kill, you go prigione--prison, you get torture, maybe shot. I say, what for talka pachifeesmo for soocha men? No, worker must fight, is never men get free wit’ out fight for freedom. Is it not trut’, Nonna?”

“I wonder,” said Cornelia. “The Negro slaves were freed without having to do much fighting--”

“Oh, but Grannie!” It was Betty who broke in. “Other people had to fight for them; and if they aren’t really free yet, maybe that is the reason, because they haven’t done their own fighting.”

So Cornelia confronted the problem of the younger generation. She sat back and listened, while small talk and efforts at charm were forgotten, and the idealist-dreamer set forth his vision of the better world to be. She realized that Betty had come there, with her mind made up to probe to the bottom this phenomenon of a “secular saint”; to know exactly what he thought, and judge it, not according to what Miss Wilson’s school was teaching, nor according to what the Back Bay would approve, but according to the facts. “You can understand, Mr. Vanzetti,” said she, “I don’t hear very much about these ideas, and they are strange to me. But I’d like to know all I can. Maybe you would let me come Saturday afternoon, and you and I and Nonna would take a long walk in the woods, and you could explain to me.”

Never in the year that Cornelia had known Bart had she seen him so happy as then! “Meess Betty,” said he, “is notting in whole world I like so much as for explain.”

It was a warm, still afternoon, and a hundred pleasure-boats made holiday upon Plymouth Bay. Motor launches chugged here and there, and fishermen drew their nets and set their lobster-pots; while on the top of Castle Hill Bartolomeo Vanzetti sat under a wind-beaten tree and with many gestures told the story of his life to Cornelia Thornwell and her grand-daughter.

He had been born in a peasant home in the village of Villafalletto, on the banks of the river Magra, in northern Italy. He had yearned for an education, but as fate would have it, his father read in a newspaper how forty-two lawyers had applied for a position in Turin which paid only seven dollars a month; and that ended the hope of culture for little Bart! At the age of thirteen he was put to work as a pastry cook’s apprentice, and slaved for fifteen hours a day, from seven in the morning till ten at night, seven days in the week, with the exception of three hours on Sunday. Thus passed six years of his pitiful youth, until at last his health broke under the strain, and he was brought back to his village home. Through those years he had been a devout Catholic, and had solaced himself with the faith that his sufferings were God’s will. “I make fist-fight for church,” said he, with a laugh. “Fellow he say somet’ing very bad, I make heem sorry.”

Then the will of God inflicted a still more dreadful sorrow upon him. His mother fell ill. He had loved her more than he could find words to tell, in either English or Italian. “It is why I so glad for have Nonna come here. Always it make me memory my modder. It is story I not tell her, sooch terrible story. She is so sick, sooch agonia, she screama, long time no--cannot sleep; I must go ask men on street for not sing, make noise. It is so bad, nobody in family can stand for see her, not osband, not daughter. It is me must help her--must hold her in arm, must--what you say, nurse--for two mont’ I not undress for sleep. One day she die in my arm, she suffer so, not know me, not my tears. It is me must put her in coffin, must walk to grave, must shovel dirt onto my modder. Sooch miseria! You know what is Dante say, Nonna--‘nessun maggior dolore’--it is no sooch greater grief in world as to remember happy time in miseria. But for me it is no sooch grief as to remember what my modder musta suffer. Always I see it, and each old lady in world is my modder.”

There was a pause, while the ditch-digger blinked a tear out of his eyes; then he went on. “Could no more be happy in home. No can ever laugh. My fadder, he get gray, very old. I no can--cannot work, must go walk in wood, stand by river on little bridge and look down in water, t’ink maybe I fall in, not have so mooch sufferance. So I t’ink maybe come America; is new country, great country, I start more life; is what you say in song, ‘sweet land of liberty’--Fay she sing in school. It is what you say, full dinner-pail. So I say, I come America, not for get rich, get little money, no work so hard, have time for read book. I joosta readed De Amicis, great writer, what you say ‘Cuore,’ it is story of his heart. I t’ink maybe I be socialist now, little bit socialist, sentimentale, genteel, good, ever’body be kind, make new world, ever’body be happy, maybe by vote. I come America for sooch pretty--what you say, dream.”

Vanzetti paused, and closed his eyes in pain. “Next to lose modder, next most badda t’ing in whole life is lose America. You ’Merican lady cannot onderstand, no never, not if talk all day. Hear about Statue Liberty--beautifool, wonderfool--paradiso. Come Ellis Island, all sudden knock on head, like badda dream, inferno--brutale, treat people lika beast--little ones cry, hide in modder’s dress. What for is reason for treat poor people sooch way? Why make sooch fear, sooch hate? I go on street, stand look, strange city, mooch automobile, big train upstair--bang, bang, make fright. I go look for home; no got one friend, ever’body try cheat, rob poor straniere--what you say, foreign. Must go sleep in room, twenty people, is filt’ ever’where; must hunt job, washa da deesh, must sleep wit’--you scusa me, Meess Betty, is not gooda story for tell sweet young lady--”

“Go on,” said Betty. “If it’s not too bad to happen, it’s not too bad to hear.”

“It is t’ing what bite in bed--it make you onhappy--cannot sleep. I live in room upstair, top of house, mooch people, very hot. I go for work restaurant--it is mooch famous place, you read about in book; all time go artist, writer, take lady for supper. I not know what is now, but eight year back I washa da deesh, mosta bad dirt, steam all time, grease on roof drop on food, on clean deesh; all slop on floor, drain get stop, you stand t’ree inch water all day washa deesh, like work in sewer. I talk many men, it is same plenty big restaurant, all for show, not care be clean. But worker he cannot tell story--who would hear heem?

“I work fourteen hour one day, twelve hour next day. I get five, six dollar week. Get food very bad, dirty, like dog. I no can stand, t’ink maybe get seeck, I stop, go country, look for work outdoor. But is very bad time--you know, Nonna, is what you call panic joost come, make very bad for job. Must go hungry, beg job, get food out of garbage-can maybe, someday starve, so weak cannot work more. It was farmer give little job--two week--he not need me, but he sorry for poor wop--it is first time I get kind word from any one American, I never forget that farmer.

“It is long story, Meess Betty, you no want hear heem all. I get work by brick furnace, shovel coal, it is job for kill man, sooch heat. But I near die hungry, so I stay, ten mont’ I shovel coal. I go Conecticut, get job by stone quarry, work a year. Is better so, meet plenty Italian, got home, see people dance, play violin evening. I no dance, but like see friend be happy. I read mooch book, I read paper, t’ink about worker, hees life, I see is not land of liberty, is all same, whole world is slavery for worker. It is few people own land, own factory, is capitalista, sooch people maka da profitt, it is for profitt musta be all industree. Worker is--I cannot say Eengleesh, is what you buy and sell, comodità--is not human, is joost somet’ing for be sold for profitt. You onderstand, Meess Betty.”

“Certainly.”

“It shock you, maybe--”

“Not at all. I’ve thought about it a lot. What do we do for all this money we have? We young people, especially--we can work if we want to, and that’s very kind of us; but if we prefer we can lie back and loaf the rest of our lives. No, Mr. Vanzetti, don’t be afraid to talk to me!”

“You must onderstand, I not have sooch idea when I come America, no what you call foreign red. I learn heem here, I see wit’ eye, I talk wit’ worker, I t’ink what is way for freedom. I am anarchista long time before to see anarchista paper, hear anarchista speaker. When I hear heem, I t’ink, it is olda story, it is my word from mout’ of odder man!”

And Betty, sitting with her eyes riveted upon him, remarked, “That is a little the way I find it, listening to you!”

VII

There was more to this talk; a discussion of Vanzetti’s ideas, and his answers to many questions. When it was over, Cornelia walked part of the way home with her grand-daughter, taking one of the back streets. “Oh, Grannie, what a wonderful man! Grannie, I never dreamed of such a thing--why don’t they tell us there are men like that among the working-people? Do you suppose there are many?”

“He says there are; but maybe he is being modest.”

“So polite and so kind--he really is a gentleman, Grannie, and without any family, or any one to teach him.”

“He is a gentleman if the word is worth using, dear.”

“And think what that man has read, stealing all the time from his sleep! Grannie, I was never so ashamed in my life! I’m going to get that book by Kropotkin--I’m going to read and understand for myself. I’ve known it was all wrong, I’ve been saying it to myself for a year or two. What am I doing--except to show how to wear clothes?”

“You’re supposed to be studying, dear. I thought you had to work hard at Miss Wilson’s.”

“Oh, yes, we’re Spartan enough, but it’s all so remote from reality, so academic and so tiresome. We listen to Miss Wilson talk a lot, and it’s not good form to ask questions, because she is deaf, and we don’t want to reveal the fact. I’m bored with it, Grannie--and I’m bored with society before I get in! Does that sound like a prig?”

“No, dear, of course not.”

“Well, you can’t imagine such idle boys! I suppose when I’m a deb, and meet older men, it won’t be so bad; but I was invited to one of the Brattle Hall dances--and you talk about the Dickie and who made it and who didn’t, and about football, and last year’s scores and this year’s prospects; and after that it’s time to stroll out into the moonlight and get sentimental. Down here you go sailing and you go to garden parties, and you never hear anything worthwhile. The one serious thing in Plymouth is the pulling and hauling between the descendants of the Pilgrims and the descendants of the Puritans. One claims social precedence, and the other won’t grant it, and they gossip dreadfully. Mrs. Walker doesn’t belong to either set, and she ought to be glad--but she isn’t.” They walked on, until suddenly the girl burst out, “Do you know what I’d really like to do, Grannie?”

“What, dear?”

“Stay right here the rest of the summer, and get a job in the cordage plant with you, and prove that I’m some use.”

“No, dear, you can’t do that, it would make your mother and father too unhappy. And besides, it would be giving away my secret.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But anyhow, I am going to do something worthwhile before I get through.”

“Where you going the rest of the summer?”

“Camp Putnam for August; and of course that’s exciting, in a way. Did they have Camp Putnam when you were a girl?”

“No, people didn’t go as far as the Adirondacks; and besides, I wasn’t a fashionable person.”

“Well, anyhow, they found some way to get you married off to an eligible man!” And Betty laughed. “Oh, yes, we know what Camp Putnam is for! The old people think they are being so sly, they get together and plan the list every summer, and rule out the least desirable ones--it’s as select as if it was God we were visiting. They even try to arrange the partners, but it doesn’t work out to oblige them. I know Mother wants to put me off on Ebenezer Cabot, but Grannie, he’s an out-and-out moron.”

“Don’t say that, dear!”

“But it’s true! You know perfectly well that most of us old families have feeble-minded ones, and regular lunatics, with keepers watching them, somewhere off in a remote wing of the house. Isn’t it true that Great-uncle Ahab was that way for years?”

“Yes, dear, but you mustn’t speak of it.”

“Only to you, Grannie. But I’m telling you there’ll be no Ebenezer in my young life. But I think before this summer’s over I’m going to have to deal with a proposal.”

“Who from?”

“Roger Lowell. He was there last year, and he almost did it, but it wouldn’t have been proper, because he was only a sophomore then, and they’re not supposed to be engaged; but this year he’s a junior, and so it’ll be all right.”

“Do you like him?”

“Well, I do and I don’t, Grannie. He’s a dear, in a way, and very good, but so awfully stiff and prim, so conscious of his great family, and what it’s correct for him to do. If I were to marry him, I think I’d be like you and Grandfather Thornwell, I’d hardly dare crack a smile the rest of my life. I’ve already shocked him by some of the things I’ve said. I told him a woman should promise to stay with a man so long as she loved him, not any more. He said she ought to promise to love him forever, but I said that would be silly, because how could you tell? Did you ever meet him, Grannie?”

“The first time I met him, he had his pink toes up in the air.”

“Oh, I’ll tell him that, and humiliate him to death! No Lowell should be seen in such a position!”

“And the second time he had a bib around his neck, and porridge running down it. The last time I met him, he was in evening dress, and his collar was stiff and his tie was puffy, and his sober round face looked over the top like a big pink chrysanthemum.”

“Oh, Grannie, that’s Roger exactly! And I’m his ideal of womanhood--if only I wouldn’t make jokes! Now I’m going to read Vanzetti’s books, and be really serious, but I’m not sure if he will like me as an anarchist. And Grannie, I’m supposed to go home to-morrow, but I hate to leave you like this--honestly, I’m ashamed of the food I eat.”

“I’m having a very happy time, dear.”

“How long do you plan to stay?”

“I’m not sure--I keep changing my mind. When I read in the paper about that speech your father made, trying to get us into the war--then all of a sudden I think I’ll come back and take up a pacifist campaign.”

“Oh, Grannie! How perfectly appalling! You’d be like old Mrs. Abigail Webster Adams--she made a speech at a socialist meeting, and Father said she ought to be locked up in an asylum.”

“No doubt he’ll say that about me,” said Cornelia. It was a prophecy.

VIII

Betty went away, and the rest of Cornelia’s stay was enlivened by letters, addressed to Mrs. Nonna Cornell--it was Betty’s little joke. They were highly confidential letters, full of family information. “Uncle Quincy has found the perfect chess player, a man who can foresee all possible combinations. Uncle James is building a whole new house on the back of ‘Hillview.’ And Father says the Boston banks have got a hundred million dollars of British and French bonds. They sold them to the public, but had to take them as collateral, and if the allies should lose, not a bank in Boston could keep open. So you had better come on up and make that pacifist speech.”

And then: “I have been to the book-store that Mr. Vanzetti told me about. It is kept by a nice dark-eyed young Russian who was eager to undertake my education. I have a number of books which I keep hidden in the bottom of a trunk, they are lots worse than the ‘Cosmo’ with Robert W. Chambers. One is called ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women,’ by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The preface says it is a hundred and twenty-five years old. The world has not caught up with her yet. I am very much excited about this book, because it is just what I had been thinking. But Roger will not like it.”

Then: “I am at Camp Putnam, ready to be paired off for life, with no possibility of its not being good family. It really is the loveliest country, and impossible not to have a good time. It is so nice to wear sensible camping clothes; how I wish that women might wear short skirts all the time. But if I were to walk down Tremont street this way, I suppose I’d have a crowd of boys hooting me. There is much in the world to be changed. I think the Mary Wollstonecraft book has made me into a suffragette. Would that shock you?

“I am going out now to climb a mountain. We shall all spend the night on top and see the sunrise, and come home to-morrow, and then we shall eat most tremendous quantities of cakes and syrup. We seem to be hungry all the time. Aunt Betty, who runs the camp and us, has put a big block of chocolate in the pantry, and a little hatchet with which we knock off pieces. Mother says it was exactly the same in her day--the same hatchet, but I don’t suppose the same block of chocolate. At least, we shall not leave much for our children.”

And then: “We have climbed many mountains, and are having our good time in a sober, conscientious way. We are really very serious young people. Did I tell you that we have a way of testing any newcomer? We have a funny story that we tell him; at least it is said to be funny, but really it has no point, and we watch to see if he laughs. If he does, we know that he is not sincere. It is very ingenious, but after you have watched the procedure two or three times it strikes you as a little self-conscious. I suppose it is our Puritan blood that makes it necessary for us to be always consciously and deliberately righteous.

“It would not be a very good test with Roger, for he might not laugh even if the joke did have a point. We have had some long talks and I thought I would break the news gently, so I said, ‘I have met several radicals, and am much interested in their ideas.’ Roger said, ‘That is all right, I am the same way, I had a prof last year who was quite terribly radical.’ I asked, ‘What did he say?’ and Roger answered, ‘Oh, all sorts of things. He kept talking about the “lost books of the Bible,” and he said that the substance of the ten commandments was found in earlier writings, and the story of the flood was derived from Babylonian sources.’ You might tell that to Mr. Vanzetti and shock him!”

The climax of the courtship: “Oh, Grannie dear, my dolly is stuffed with sawdust! Roger and I have had a heart to heart talk and a most terrible quarrel, and it is all over--my name is never going to be Lowell. I told him I had come to realize that marriage was a form of slavery for women; and he said he knew what I meant, it was the word obey in the ceremony, but there were some clergymen who would leave that out if you asked them to. And I said it wasn’t only that, it was the idea of a woman’s parting with her autonomy; that every woman ought to have the final say about the children she bore; she ought to be free--especially if she were willing to earn her own way, as I meant to do.

“So then he was much puzzled, and asked me what I thought we ought to do, and I said I believed in a free union, with our own promise to each other, to be true to our best selves, and to do our best to love each other, but not stay together if we couldn’t. And Roger said, ‘You mean--you mean you wouldn’t really--you wouldn’t get married at all?’ and he turned red to the tips of his ears, and I said, ‘You don’t understand my feelings.’ But he couldn’t talk about it any more--he said, ‘Betty Alvin, if I had made such a proposition to you, it would have been a deadly insult.’ And I said, ‘Maybe so, but I am making it to you, and that is something different.’ And he wanted to know where I had got such outrageous ideas, but when I tried to tell him he didn’t really want to know, and wouldn’t look at the book. He tried to talk to me about my soul, and I laughed at him, and so now we are most fearfully polite to each other when anybody else is present, because of course we don’t want to have a scandal in the camp. Oh, Grannie, I wish you would come back home, because I am going to be so lonely!”

The “Gruppo Autonomo di Plymouth” gave a “picanic” that fall, and from all the neighboring towns came swarms of Italians, by train and bus and second-hand automobile. And then it was announced that the “Circolo Drammatico Mario Papisardi” was going to give a play in Stoughton, a “shoe-town” some thirty miles away. They had quite a fine dramatic organization, and Bart laid off work for three days to travel round and place tickets for them. Illness kept the Brinis from going, but some neighbors, the Angelottis, invited Cornelia.

A young anarchist comrade called for them in his car; Mike Boda was his name, and he told Cornelia that he was a macaroni salesman, and raced about the country in his little Overland car, hopping in and out at Italian homes. He was a chipper little fellow, about five feet two inches high, and it was just as well that he was no heavier, because when you had Bart on the front seat with a boy on his knee, and Mr. and Mrs. Angelotti and Cornelia on the back seat, with another boy on the father’s lap and another on the mother’s, you had about as much weight as the springs of a low-priced car could be expected to stand.

But the roads were good, and they rolled along singing songs, and it was a gay party that swept into the shoe-town. The children had been to the movies, of course, and they had seen a play at school, but this was their first grown-up play, and they could hardly contain their excitement. They drove to the home of a comrade whom Vanzetti had recently met at one of the East Boston gatherings. Nicola Sacco was his name, and he lived in a fine cottage, which had formerly belonged to his boss. “Great feller, Nick,” explained Bart. “He work shoe-factory, is edge-trimmer, mooch skill work, he make so mooch fifty, sixty dollar week, that boy--smart feller, got lovely wife, you see.”

Their host ran out to the gate to meet them, a chap of twenty-five, with even, regular features and black hair and eyes; very active, like a cat, a figure all of steel springs. He had come from the ankle of the Italian boot, while his wife, Rosina, came from the north--young and dainty, with vivid auburn hair and an eager face full of sunshine and freckles. They had a little boy, about three years old. “Hello, Dante!” called Bart. “Someday we have nodder poet!” But the new poet was shy, and hid behind his mother’s skirts.

Nick and Rosina were to act in the play to-night, so the guests refused to go into the house and disturb them. The visitors had their supper all in a box, and would make a “picanic” on the Saccos’ front lawn. But nothing could prevent the host from showing them his garden; next to his family, it was the pride of his life, he worked at it every night till it was too dark to see. He led them down the rows of tomato plants, and lifted the branches and showed the big red globes underneath. He knew only a few words of English, but Cornelia did not need a translator, because for forty years she had seen her husband showing off his flowers to visitors, and she knew every expression and gesture that goes with the ceremony.

They went to the hall where the play was to be, and met most of the Italians of New England, it seemed. There were Nick and Rosina on the stage, magically transformed into peasants of the home country. Cornelia had one of the young Angelottis on each side, and they were supposed to whisper into her ear what was happening; but they became so enthralled that they forgot there was anybody in the world but the figures in the play. However, Cornelia knew many Italian words, and all possible Italian gestures; and the story was so simple, and so full of action, it was easy to follow.

Nick was a peasant, whose son had been taken from him and forced to fight the Arabs in Tripoli. Meantime the father was in dire straits--“Militarism and Misery” was the title of the drama. His wife was ill of a fever, and he had no money, and the cruel landlord threatened to turn them out. When Nick offered to work for the landlord, his plea was refused, because, as an anarchist, he would lead the other workers to revolt. A good doctor came to visit the wife, and he and Nick had a debate, in which Nick set forth the principles of his faith with most wonderful eloquence. His comrades brought him money, and threw out the landlord, calling him “affamatore” and “assassino”--starver and assassin: whereat the doctor was so much impressed that he declared himself a convert to anarchism. “The new comrade am I”--and the other comrades burst into cheers, and the audience was not slow to follow.

Then came the soldier-boy, home from the wars. He boasted of the Arab women and children he had slain, and his father, a true internationalist, threw his pay into his face and ordered him from the home. “Get out, get out of here, robber and assassin!”--a painful scene. In the next act, the soldier-boy sat in the barracks, brooding over his shame--to such good effect that when he discovered another soldier with a load of antimilitarist literature, he let the guilty one escape. And when in the last act he was ordered home, in charge of a file of troops, to shoot down the striking peasants, he refused, and went over to the side of his father, and died from a shot fired by the mayor. It was a tragic and sensational ending, and Nick as the revolutionary father rose to heights of eloquence. “Yes, to the barricades! Farewell, my son--victim of bourgeois imperialism, repose in peace! To-day is not the day to mourn the dead. It is the day of battle and vengeance. Let us hasten, comrades, where the struggle is more fierce, to avenge not only him, but all the obscure martyrs fallen through capitalist greed.” And as the comrades rushed out and the firing began off-stage, you would have thought you were in La Scala--such storms of applause, such tears and raptures, so many bouquets on the stage, so many “evvivas” and “bis!”

It was easy to smile at the naïveté of such a story. But when you saw how deeply it moved the audience, then you had to stop and think, and realize that it was the stuff of the lives of Italian peasants. If the drama and its emotions were simple, it was because the reality was the same. Even the conversion of the doctor might have happened--for, after all, there were anarchist doctors, well known in Italy. And the struggle against militarism--that was the religion and martyrdom of the peasant all over Europe. Everything in the drama was true, except the revolution--and what was needed to bring that, but the very fervor and impulse of this peasant audience?

The family discussed all this as they drove home. It was late and the children went sound asleep, but the grown-ups never wearied of talking, and explaining matters to Cornelia. Vanzetti told more about that wonderful fellow “Sacc’”--who was, in real life, exactly as he had been on the stage. “He come America same year like me. Was young feller, seventeen. Got brudder wit’, brudder no can stand, is too hard work, musta go home Italy. Nick, he work water-boy, carry water for gang all day. He work Hopedale, is beeg strike by foundry-shop--you read about heem maybe. Police is rough, mooch bad. Nick he is on picket-line, get hit plenty time. Is way for make red, make anarchista--you see, joosta like dramma. Nick is not speaker, but gooda man for organize. Work now by little shoe-factory, is good friend wit’ boss, do day-work, night watchman too, make plenty money. But never he change, stand always by worker. Some day it come odder beeg strike, Nonna, you see Nick Sacc’ be leader, he do joost what you see for make rivoluzione. He cannot fear, is brave--like what you say--leone--lion.”

And Bart went on to tell about something which had happened a month or two ago, when the young hero’s mettle had been tested. “He get arrest--he musta go jail for hold meeting. It is protest for beeg strike in copper country--you know maybe--Mesaba range--out West. Is plenty rich people in Boston own copper-mine not like for have worker hear how they beat people, t’row in jail. Try for stop meeting, shut-up Nick and not let him tell about it.”

Cornelia said nothing: but a procession of “bluebloods” began to move with stately dignity through her thoughts: the Paynes, the Shaws, the Agassizs--yes, she knew “coppers,” and the owners thereof. She remembered a scandal that had made awe-stricken whispers in the Sewing Circle--an old man had died, and it appeared that for twenty years or so he had been keeping eight thousand shares of his copper stocks hidden under a dummy name in New York, signing the name of this dummy. The executors of his estate failed to report these shares to the government, to avoid paying taxes on them; they had been caught, and some of the brightest legal lights of Boston were nearly disbarred. Nobody had gone to jail, of course--only “Nick Sacc’,” who had tried to tell the Italians of Massachusetts how the “copper kings” were beating and killing their Michigan miners.

The grapes on the Brini arbor had become dark purple globes, and had been harvested and converted into “Dago red.” The leaves had turned, first yellow and then brown, and had dropped off and been blown into the corners of the garden. The cabbage and turnips were stored in the cellar, and the tomato-vines grew mushy after frost, and then dry and hard. All that beautiful garden was a wreck, and the sun was going away on his long pilgrimage. Very soon Cornelia would be getting up by lamplight, and shivering while she dressed, and being pinned up in her shawl for the journey to the cordage-plant. Could she stand another of these winters?

Betty was back at Miss Wilson’s school, and begging her grandmother to come to Boston. Surely she ought to be taking part in the campaign to reëlect Woodrow Wilson, who had kept us out of war, and said we were too proud to fight. How Boston--the Boston of State Street and fashionable society--loathed that phrase, and how they jeered and raged in their Transcript! But there was another Boston, which had crossed the seas a generation ago to escape the potato famine; it had found an abundance of potatoes in New England, and had converted them into a crop of young Irish voters, pledged to the worship of the Virgin Mary and the extermination of the British lion. In vain did “Pro Bono Publico” and “Hundred Percent American” write letters to the Transcript, summoning the new world to the rescue of down-trodden Belgium. Irish-Catholic Boston did not read the Transcript, and it thronged to the polls and elected an Irish-Catholic mayor, who would see to it that Irish and Germans and pacifists might hold all the peace-meetings they wished, and parade through Park Street and spit when they passed the Union Club.

Wilson was reëlected; and it seemed that the war-danger was over. He would go on writing notes to the Germans, as he had been doing for a year or two, and the Germans would go on ignoring them. Cornelia decided that she would not be needed as a pacifist agitator, nor would Vanzetti have to take refuge in Mexico, as he had made up his mind to do in case America should enter the war. “Capitalist I will fight some day,” said Bart, “but never will I kill German worker, Austrian worker, for make good no banker bond.” Cornelia had not mentioned the highly confidential subject of Boston high finance and its commitments to the allied cause; but apparently the “reds” had their own sources of information, for the “Cronaca Sovversiva” was full of talk on the subject, and details of the intrigues of State Street and Wall Street.

XII

The first snow of the year was in the air, and Cornelia came hurrying home in the darkness, with half an inch of snow melting upon her shoulders. She was surprised to see a large limousine in front of the Brini door, its two long streams of light making day in Suosso’s Lane, and revealing the million-footed dance of the snowflakes. As she came nearer, the door of the car opened and a bulky man stepped out; Cornelia could not see his face, but his voice caused her to stop dead in her white tracks. “Is that you, Mother?” It was Rupert Alvin!

In a certain musical comedy it is set forth how the founder of Columbus Day landed in the new world, and the Indians came eagerly, inquiring, “Are you Christopher Columbus?” When he admitted his identity, they exclaimed, “At last we are discovered!” So now it was with Cornelia. The jig was up, she knew--and took but a moment to get herself together. “Hello, Rupert!” she said, with an air of nonchalance--there are times when the Thornwell training comes in handy! She accepted her son-in-law’s outstretched hand, and let him help her into the limousine, where sat her eldest daughter, Deborah.

“Oh, Mother! Mother! How could you?” Yes, even the stately Mrs. Rupert Alvin wept when she saw those bowed shoulders and that pitiful working-woman’s shawl covered with a load of snow. She had snapped on the light in the limousine; but Rupert snapped it off again quickly.

“Control yourself, Deborah,” he commanded--having in mind the chauffeur, who would overhear, in spite of the glass partition. “Mother, we want to have a private talk with you. Will you not please come home with us--at least for a day or two?”

“I can’t, Rupert. I have a job.”

“Can’t you get excused temporarily?”

“One does not get excused from jobs, one gets fired.”

“But Mother, you have a little income from the estate!” It was Deborah, breaking in.

“Wait, Deborah!” insisted the husband, again. “Mother, will you let us take you to some hotel here in Plymouth, where we can discuss matters quietly?”

“Certainly I will do that. But first I must tell my friends. They will be expecting me to supper and will worry.”

“I will see to that,” said the man, quickly, and he got his majestic bulk out of the car, and Cornelia wondered vaguely, was he afraid she might make her escape? Was she being kidnaped? Inside her something fluttered like a bird in a trap. “Don’t be caught! Don’t let them get you!”

“Oh, Mother, you are all wet!” Deborah was lamenting. “Take off that shawl!” She drew it off, and began to wrap Cornelia in a big fur robe. Cornelia submitted, because it was easier than to argue. Her mind was busy with another problem: how had they found her? Could it have been Miss Mehitabel? Impossible to believe that Betty had revealed the secret!

Rupert returned, and gave his orders to the chauffeur, and got into the car, which began to sway on luxurious springs down the unpaved and rutted lane. It turned onto the main street, and sped to a hotel, where they got out, and Rupert engaged a room, and Deborah hurried her mother through the lobby. Presently they were locked in a place where family secrets might be safe--after Rupert had stepped to the door once or twice and opened it, to make sure there were no eavesdroppers.

“I am perfectly all right,” said Cornelia, in answer to her daughter’s clamor that she was wet and that she was cold and that she was exhausted. “I have been very happy,” she declared, in answer to laments about the state of her shoulders and her hands. And when Deborah had got to the question of how her mother could have been so cruel as to treat them this way, Cornelia broke in with the demand, “How did you find me?” She had to repeat the question before Deborah answered, “We got your address from Betty.”

“You mean she told you? I can’t believe such a thing, Deborah!”

“I don’t mean that. She wrote you a letter, and we got it.”

“Oh, I see.” A great load was lifted from Cornelia’s heart. After a moment she said, “I would like to have the letter.” Seeing them hesitate and look at each other, she said, “Give me my letter, please.” So Rupert took from his pocket an envelope, which Cornelia could see at a glance was very bulky.

Balancing the letter in his hand, the great man began, in his most solemn tones, “Mother, I wish to explain that when we opened this letter we did not know it was to you. If we had known that, we should have brought it unopened. But you will see, it is addressed to Mrs. Nonna Cornell, and that meant nothing to us, except that our unhappy daughter was communicating secretly with some unknown woman. Only when we opened the letter, did we discover that it was to you.”

“Neither of us read it, Mother,” added Deborah. “It may be we had a right to, but we didn’t feel sure.”

“I will read it to you at once, my child.”

“I don’t think it will be necessary. We had a talk with Betty, and I think we know the situation.”

Cornelia held the letter in her hands. How pathetic seemed the little joke, “Mrs. Nonna!” She took the letter from the envelope, and saw why Deborah had suggested not hearing it--the last page was numbered forty! But Cornelia had to read only two sentences to know the whole story.

“Dear Grannie:

“I am in the most dreadful predicament you can imagine, because Roger Lowell, the tenth descendant of a line of theocrats, spent three months laboring with his conscience and finally made up his mind that he must save my soul by telling father of the indecent proposition I had made at Camp Putnam! So now here I am shut up in my room and forbidden to go out, until I have promised to reform--and so I am forced to smuggle this letter to you by one of the maids.”

XIII

The antagonists squared off for battle--two against one. It would be none the less deadly, because it would be carried on under the forms of courtesy, even of love.

The first thing was for Deborah to weep some more. This was not easy, for she was haughty, self-contained--the last word in aristocratic reticence. But there was that pitiful figure--gray-haired, bowed and bent, in wretched shapeless clothing wet with melted snow--that was her mother! And even though she told herself that her mother had become insane, it was none the less terrible. Also, impossible to forget that certain scenes which Deborah forbade herself to remember had had something to do with her mother’s mental disorder. So the tears streamed down Deborah’s cheeks--and she had one of those long, half-masculine faces, which are not improved by weeping.

In Cornelia’s own being the trapped bird was still fluttering. “Fight! Fight! Don’t let them get you!” She had had a year and a half to think matters over, and she knew all the devices of families to break people down. She remembered Cousin Amelia Quincy, who had sought to marry the wrong man, and how Cousin Amelia’s mother had fallen violently ill--a complete nervous breakdown--which had lasted until the wrong man had given up and married some other girl.

So now Cornelia made her voice stern, and said, “It is silly for you to behave that way, Deborah. There is nothing the matter with me, and I assure you my children are not going to get their way by tears.”

Then Deborah drew herself to her full height. “I will not annoy you any further. I have of course no right to object to your living your own life--”

“None whatever, my child.”

“But I have a right to object to your ruining the mind and character of my young and impressionable daughter.”

“I hope I have not done that.”

“Unless our daughter tells us what is not true, you introduced her to a band of anarchists and atheists--”

“Not atheists, Deborah, you have got the wrong word.”

“You mean that Italian man, whatever his name is, is not an atheist?”

“He has explained to me carefully his beliefs. He worships one God, the God of nature, of love and justice. He worships only one, so perhaps that constitutes him an infidel.”

Deborah declined this challenge to theological controversy. “And free-lovers!”

“That is still less accurate. I doubt very much if Vanzetti has ever been any kind of lover in his life. He is a saint who believes in free love.”

“Is that one of your jokes, Mother?”

“It sounds like it, I know, but you will have to learn that there are new ideas loose in the world, and it is not practicable to keep people from knowing about them--not even by shutting them up in their rooms and confiscating their mail.”

Rupert Alvin was silent, considering that free love is not a theme for mixed conversation; and anyhow, in family disputes the less an “in-law” has to say, the safer for him. When the two ladies began exchanging views upon the efficacy of a church ceremony as a purifier of lust, Rupert arose and went to the door and opened it and peered out. It was a delicate hint, and the ladies took it, and discussed anarchism. Or rather, Cornelia discussed anarchism, while Deborah discussed anarchy, and refused to recognize the difference. Cornelia asserted that she had lived among Italian anarchists for a year and a half, and had not seen a single bomb--except those which Brini described as “bombe di pistacchio.”

They were on the subject of foreigners and their alleged resemblance to pigs, when Rupert decided that it was time for a man to interpose his authority. “Mother,” he said--and went on, in spite of his wife’s angry signals--“we are not getting anywhere by arguing over subjects like this. The question is, what are we going to do. I know that our mutual esteem and affection will bring us to an understanding in the end; so what I am hoping is to persuade you to come home and stay with us a while. I know you will be able to induce Betty to--well, to moderate her expressions. That is all we ask, and I am sure you agree that we do not want an open scandal in our family.”

“Certainly not, Rupert.”

“Well, then, come with us, and in time we can work it all out happily.”

“That is easy to say, Rupert, but it seems to me you are taking a serious risk. Suppose that while I am your guest I should consider it my duty to appear on some public platform and say that the effort to bring America into the war is a crime against civilization, and that the motive power behind it is our big bankers, who have loaned so much money to England and France and Italy that they cannot face the prospect of losing their investments?”

To Rupert Alvin, president of the Pilgrim National Bank of Boston, and directing head of the most powerful financial group in State Street, it was as if his mother-in-law had taken a sharp rapier and brought the point of it close to one of his waistcoat buttons. The many large bulges which composed Rupert’s face and neck became still larger, the pink ones turning red, and the red ones purple. His large round eyes opened wide, and the hands which clutched his large round knees tightened until they showed the tendons. Either Rupert’s tongue refused to make a sound, or else Rupert’s brain did not know what sound to tell it to make.

XIV

“My children,” said Cornelia, “I want to be fair, and make myself understood if it can possibly be done. For forty years I did what I was told was my duty, and let other people guide my life. I was very unhappy--how unhappy I did not realize until Josiah was dead, and I had begun to do what I wanted to do. Now for the rest of my life I am going to be an individual, and not a cog in the family machine. And while that will seem terrible to you, you can comfort yourself with the fact that it is real ‘Boston’--‘old Boston,’ the very best there is. Everything that is glorious in our history has been made by people who have ‘come out,’ and fought some prevailing sentiment. I never realized that until I got alone and thought it over. Take Wendell Phillips--you cannot say anything against his ancestry, there was never any one more completely ‘Back Bay.’ Yet he turned into an abolitionist and labor agitator, the same as a pacifist and ‘red’ at the present time. It has always been that way, and the ones you honor now, the ones whom the rest of the world knows about--Samuel Adams and John Quincy Adams, Emerson and Thoreau and Phillips and Garrison and James Russell Lowell--yes, there was even a Lowell, Deborah--and Thomas Wentworth Higginson--even a Higginson, Rupert, tell that to State Street! Boston history has been made by the ‘saving minority.’ You must know that is true?”

“Yes, but Mother”--it was Deborah protesting--“that was all in the past!”

“And now the world is perfect, and we don’t need any more changes! Well, my dear, all I can tell you is, I have looked the world over and made up my mind that it has never been worse than right now--with some ten or twenty million men lined up on opposite sides, using all the machinery and brains of civilization to slaughter one another. No, I think we need changes, and there is going to be a Thornwell among the ‘come outers,’ and you will have to put up with the humiliation of it. I don’t think I shall be lonely--I’ve been able to recollect the names of a number of old ladies who have left their families and are living in apartments and hotels, interesting themselves in one queer cause or another. I never paid much attention, because Josiah wouldn’t have approved of my associating with them. But now I shall look them up--I suppose I shall join the Twentieth Century Club.”

“Oh, Mother! How horrible!”

“And the suffragettes, whatever they call their organization--there are two, I believe. And the socialists have a local--I am not an anarchist, Deborah, comfort yourself with that--and anyhow, the anarchists don’t have any organizations. I suppose the pacifists have one; I hear that Mrs. Abigail Webster Adams has come out for them, and that Rupert thinks she ought to be locked up in an asylum. Well, Rupert, that has been the idea of the comfortable people for a long way back--I remember they accused Socrates for corrupting the youth. But even though you put people in an asylum, their ideas get out--you cannot always be sure that the maid will turn their letters over to you.”

Cornelia paused; and then, seeing the look on her daughter’s face--“Yes, my dear, that was a mean one. But you must realize that Mother is going to fight from now on; Mother holds her convictions with just the same intensity that you hold yours, and something inside her compels utterance. It is that stern terrible thing we call our Puritan conscience. It is out of fashion at the moment, but it takes new forms, it has a rebirth, and does not rest until it has made some impression on the world--some change such as the independence of the colonies, or the abolition of slavery, or the outlawing of war, or the setting free of labor. And then the next generation forgets about the conflict, and says how famous Boston is, what great people it has produced! And their grandchildren become the aristocracy, and want everything to stay as it is!”

Cornelia had her own proposition, which she had been thinking over for several months. “I will come up to town at once and get a little apartment, and Betty can come live with me. That will be respectable--it will even tend to make your runaway grandmother all right. And I’m sure I can guide Betty and keep her from going to extremes. It is what she herself has been begging me to do, and I know she will be happy.”

“Thank you,” said Deborah, with a touch of sarcasm. “To make the children happy is the one duty of parents under the new dispensation. But some of us parents are old-fashioned, and think about our children’s souls.”

“Yes, my dear, and it may be that the saving of Betty’s soul depends upon her believing everything that is preached at Trinity--even though, as I suspect, the preacher does not believe it himself. But let us be practical about the matter. What will you do with the child? Ordinarily, when daughters threaten to run wild you send them off to Europe with an aunt, and they look at cathedrals and paintings for a year, and that is cultural. But now your war is in the way, so the only place to send her is out west, and she would see only rocks and rivers, which are not so cultural. Of course you can keep her shut up--make a prisoner of her by force--but that would only harden her spirit and drive her to extremes. Also, it would mean an open scandal, because your servants would know, and it would be all over the Back Bay in a night, and everybody would be certain the child had done something far worse than talk radicalism. Moreover, you can only keep her for a short while--then she will be of age, and you will lose your hold on her.”

“We can disinherit her.”

“Yes, of course; but she would have my property--”

“I think, Mother, you ought to be informed about that.” It was Rupert breaking in--since it was a banker’s affair. “You have no property, only an income of five thousand a year from the estate.”

“Well, Rupert, I have lived upon four hundred a year for the past year and a half--”

“Mother, you don’t mean it!” Impossible for the most reticent daughter to encounter such a statement with silence!

“What else have I had? I have lived on it, and even saved a little. And now if I come up to town and take my income of five thousand a year, with what has been accumulating, Betty and I will be rich.”

“You would not be able to pay for the child’s clothes!”

“Well, Deborah, maybe you know your daughter better than I, but my guess is Betty would learn to make her own clothes quite cheerfully. Will you give me a chance to ask her?”

“Most certainly not! In spite of your ridicule, I believe in my religion, and in a little decency and decorum. I shall not give up my daughter to become an anarchist and atheist--nor even a socialist and infidel--nor yet a saint who believes in free love.”

“Well put, Deborah--we are both of us developing what Broadway would call the ‘punch.’ But put yourself in my place just a moment. I served your father faithfully for forty years, and conscientiously refrained from doing any of the things which made him angry. I gave life to three of you girls, and helped to find you husbands of the sort I knew your father wanted you to have. If you have any complaint as to your share in husbands, you have been too proud to make it to me. Have you, Deborah?” Cornelia paused, and looked at the solemn Rupert with a twinkle in her eye. Then she continued, “You both have what you want. But I have very little; I am old and lonely, and an object of sympathy. There are eleven grandchildren--no one of whom would have been in the world except for me. I put it to your sense of justice--may I not ask for one of the eleven to keep me company in my old age?”

It was turning Deborah’s own weapons against her, and Deborah could not help being disturbed. “I think you would have shown better judgment if you had chosen one of Clara’s eight, rather than one of my two.”

“Perhaps that is so. But I did not choose Betty--she chose me; or rather, some fate did it, there is an affinity between us. I assure you, Deborah, upon my honor, I had no thought of causing this to happen. But it has happened, and we have to admit it.”

“Never!” cried Deborah. Her lips were set in that expression which Cornelia had seen ten thousand times upon the face of Josiah Quincy Thornwell. It was recorded for all time in the paintings of four governors in the music-room at “Hillview.”

Cornelia turned to her son-in-law. “Is that your decision also?”

Rupert hung on to that caution which is such an excellent thing in “in-laws.” “Mother, I hope you will not go to any extreme--”

Cornelia laughed. “First I have to make sure what you and Deborah plan to do to Betty.”

“We plan to do our duty as parents, to compel our child to behave herself!” It was Deborah, with great vehemence.

“Do you mean that she must believe what you believe--even though she doesn’t? Or do you mean that she must say that she believes what she doesn’t believe? Or will you be content if she agrees to say nothing about her beliefs?”

“That is what we commanded her to do, and she refused.”

“Are you sure you made the distinction? Are you sure you didn’t ask her to stop believing? I suspect you were so horrified and angry, you didn’t know exactly what you were demanding.” And Cornelia rose, saying, “I will try to supply a little wisdom and good temper for you. To-morrow I will go up to town and put up at a hotel, and get some clothes, so as not to disgrace you, and in the evening I will call at the house, and have a talk with my grandchild, and persuade her to be more fair than her parents.”

“You must not feel that way about us, Mother!” It was Rupert, still trying for a compromise.

“There is no sense in saying any more to-night, Rupert. We have argued too much, for Thornwells. It is because I am not really ‘Boston,’ that I do this vulgar thing of trying to talk things out. But I love Betty, and cannot bear to see her spirit bruised. I will do the best I can, and advise her to suppress her eager young ideas on marriage, and private property, and war, and whatever else you object to--until she is of age, and her own legal mistress.”

Cornelia took her shawl and started to put it on. “Mother! That thing is all wet! Let me give you my coat!”

“It is quite all right, there will be a good hot stove where I am going.”

“But Mother, you must have dinner with us!”

“My friends will give me something to eat when I get home. I could not eat now.”

She saw tears start in Deborah’s eyes again, and that was as it should be. When Rupert labored to persuade his mother-in-law to ride to Boston with them, she answered that she had reasons for preferring the train; then she started towards the door. “Good-by, my children.”

Rupert took up his coat and followed her. “At least you will let us drive you to where you are living, Mother.”

“Thank you, but I am able to walk.”

“But Mother, that is absurd--it is storming!”

“I have walked to my work for a year and a half, through every sort of storm--at six-thirty in the morning, and again in the evening--and have not yet missed a day.”

So Cornelia unlocked the door and went out; Rupert and Deborah both following, arguing and pleading with her in low, decorous tones, all the way to the street. But she set her lips tight, and when Rupert tried to take her hand and lead her to the car, she withheld it, saying once more, “Good-by, my children,” and hurrying away into the snow-haunted darkness.

XVI

The next evening, according to her promise, Cornelia called at the Alvin mansion on Commonwealth Avenue, dressed like a nice, quiet old lady of the social reform or “blue-stocking” type. She rang the bell with some trepidation, not quite certain whether she would be admitted; but she found an amazing situation--the family rows all settled, Betty out of prison and back at Miss Wilson’s, and the entire Thornwell clan assembled to welcome home the runaway grandmother! To overwhelm her with kindness, with beauty, tact and charm, to afford her a demonstration of respectability, and make her realize its advantages over anarchism, atheism and free love!

There was Clara, in the radiance of her eighth maternity, and her husband, James Scatterbridge, shining with the extra millions he had made; and Alice, never more elegant, never more gracious, with no trace of a scandal or a hysteric about her; her husband, Henry Winters, jewel upon the finger of the legal profession; Deborah and Rupert, all courtesy and smiles; Betty, a little pale after a cyclone of emotions, but none the less lovely for that; Betty’s older sister, Priscilla; Great-uncle Abner, and his son, Uncle Quincy--pronounced as if he were a disease of the throat. All of them in their most honorable costumes, all so amiable--not one hint of rebuke or complaint, not even a tactless slip--unless you count Great-uncle Abner, whose deaf man’s voice boomed through the drawing-room; “Well, well, Cornelia, they tell me you’ve been making money!”

They had learned their lesson, that was the long and short of it; they would return to dignity and reserve and good manners--to “old Boston”; and Cornelia would return with them, and Betty also. There would be no more quarrels, no more scenes, no more scandals and “talking out” of things, no more anarchism, atheism, or free love!

There was a buzz of conversation, family news, compliments and courtesies. When would Cornelia come to see her new grandson? Had she heard of the fine record Alice’s son had made at St. Mark’s? Would she hear about Uncle Quincy’s chess wonder? “How is your gout, Abner?” “How is the new wing coming on, James?” So many polite and pleasant things to talk about, that it was only near the end of the evening that she got a few words alone with Betty.

“Oh, Grannie, how on earth did you do it?”

“I don’t know, dear--what did I do?”

“You completely tamed Mother and Father. They came back this morning as nice as pie.”

“I guess they just had a little time to think things over, and realize how much they loved you.” Cornelia was going to be tactful too!

“Well, yesterday Mother wouldn’t hear to reason at all: I must promise to never believe anything she disapproved of, I must never talk about such things to anybody, and must never look at such a book! Of course I couldn’t promise all that, could I, Grannie? You can’t imagine how dreadful I felt, to have to tell Mother and Father that I wouldn’t obey them! So I thought I was going to have to stay in my room till I didn’t know when. But after they had talked with you, all they wanted was for me not to disgrace them publicly.”

Cornelia was tempted to say that Rupert and Deborah had found the older generation so much worse than the younger, that it had frightened them. But no, she was going to be tactful! “I plan to get a little apartment, dear, and you can come see me, and we’ll keep our thoughts to ourselves, and not give the family anything more to worry over.” Thus Cornelia Thornwell, in December, 1916, while the German government was preparing its new submarine policy, which was to rouse all the warlike elements in America, and force all the pacifist ladies of Boston to make public speeches, and break with their families, and be raided by mobs and arrested by the police! With the Bolshevik revolution less than a year in the future, and the “white terror” following close upon its heels!

V. THE SAVING MINORITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And that’s why we have to go in?”

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

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

“Jehoshaphat! Where did you get that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not, Henry?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who made the rules, Henry?”

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?”

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

“Of course not, Bart.”

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

“Bankrupt.”

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

“How will you get along, Bart?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Betty, don’t be vulgar!”

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

“What is it you want to do, child?”

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

“But you wanted to go to college!”

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

“Betty! What a silly thing to say!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, what things you do say!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear Nonna:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

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

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

“Could make trooble for ladies.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. WHITE TERROR

The day of glory, sung in the “Marseillaise,” had arrived; the American troops stopped the first German onslaught, and began their counter-advance which was to end the war. The whole country thrilled with it--all but a few perverse persons, so constructed that they could not think of glory, but only of boys crawling about in burning forests, dragging shattered limbs and protruded entrails. “Ah, but the broken bodies, that drip like honeycomb!”

Cornelia and her grand-daughter went to Plymouth to rest for a week, Betty staying with her friend, Lucile Walker, and Cornelia with the Brinis. The little room which had been Cornelia’s for a year and a half now belonged to Fay, but she was glad to vacate it. Vanzetti had a room with a neighbor, but came in for his meals, and stayed to do his studying in the evening. He was digging more ditches, and reading diligently the few radical papers he could get. There had been a revolt in the Italian armies; it had been suppressed, but more was coming, and he watched for every scrap of news.

Also he told Cornelia of his experiences in Mexico: what a fine fellow that Nick Sacc’ had proved to be, and how they had settled down with a colony of Italians, all draft-evaders, living upon a rough communistic system. Bart had helped to feed them, baking bread, and also he had fed them “anarchista propaganda”--bread for the spirit. There had been several in the group whom Cornelia knew: Boda, the little macaroni salesman who had driven them to see the drama; and Coacci and Orciani, two others whom she had met on that same occasion.

Nonna, like Christmas, came but once a year, so it was a holiday for everybody. Papa Brini showed his garden, and Cornelia recited the Italian names, and he tried to say the English names, and the children laughed at his blunders. They had their walk in the woods on Sunday, and gathered bunches of flowers, and Fay and Trando remembered things about nature which Bart had taught them, and were proud of it. Bart had resumed charge of the boy’s development, and would give him advice and help. One day Trando had a cold, and Bart said the way to cure it was to sweat; so he got down on his knees, which made him about a match for a nine-and-a-half-year-old boy, and the two of them had a wrestling match, in which the big man was floored several times, and the small boy whooped with delight. Pretty soon he was perspiring profusely, and Bart put him to bed with no supper but a drink of hot lemonade. In the morning he would be all right, said the amateur doctor.

Trando wanted a violin, and had worked all last summer to earn the money; but then he had had to spend it, because the family went down with “flu.” Cornelia wanted to give him a violin, but Bart said no, that would spoil it all; let the little fellow earn it, and then he would really value it; the achievement would give him courage, a sense of power. This was the time for berries, and there was nothing better for youngsters than to wander in the fields all day.

Trando’s relations with the boys of the neighborhood made a problem. They would not play with him, because the priest had warned them to have nothing to do with a bad boy who did not go to church: there was a place in hell for such as he. The other boys called him “socialist,” and when he went off and read a story-book, or played with his sister, they called him “sissy.” It was hard to please them. Bart told him to make of his persecution a source of strength. Many a great man had done that, and those who had spurned him in boyhood would see him leap above their heads when they were grown.

Vanzetti told him what was true about religion. There was a great and good God, the God of nature, whose laws we must understand if we would be happy. This God loved all human beings alike, and it was not His will that some should be slaves to others. We might pray to Him for courage and strength; but we did not need any priest to intervene for us. The priest was nothing but a man like other men; he might be good, or he might be bad, like Father O’Brien--but in any case he represented a system which helped to keep the poor in subjection to the rich, and so was a trap for their minds.

Then Trando wanted to know about how we got born, and how we got married. It is the custom of Italian parents to say they buy the babies; but Bart explained those things seriously to Trando; and he talked to Cornelia about it, and asked her to talk to Fay, because children ought to know the truth, and parents had a foolish shyness about talking to their own little ones. All the questions of children ought to be answered; they should connect the idea of shame only with actions that were harmful to themselves or to others. A wise man speaking, always; a man gentle, full of spiritual insight--yet turning into a lion at a moment’s notice when confronted with “injoostice.” Some of the bigger boys found that out when they undertook to torment the “sissy.”

Betty Alvin’s relations with the Walker family were peculiar. They were all extremely patriotic, and shocked beyond utterance by the opinions and behavior of Betty and her grandmother. But they were fond of Betty, and if she had come to Plymouth and not stayed with them, it would have been emphasizing an estrangement. Of course Betty’s mother put the worst construction on their invitation, saying that the Walkers would rather know a “red” blue-blood than none at all. But Betty would not believe that, and kept up the friendship with Lucile at Radcliffe and at home, carefully avoiding any utterance that would displease her hosts.

Mr. Walker appeared only once during the visit. He was in greater trouble than ever, and showed it in every line of his features--a really terrible example of what the fierce pace of business can do to its victims. Mrs. Walker was silent and preoccupied, and Lucile hesitated to say anything; but Betty got it out of her finally--Mr. Walker was convinced that there was a determination on the part of a Boston banking-group to put him out of business, and the man who was at the head of the campaign was Betty’s uncle, Henry Cabot Winters. This information was coming to Mr. Walker from many different sources: in all the troubles of the felt industry, it was Mr. Winters who stood behind the scenes and pulled the strings.

Just think of it, exclaimed Lucile--here were enterprises that had made a million and a quarter dollars in net profits last year, and were going even higher this year; yet the owner could not get half a million dollars’ credit from any bank in Boston or New York! They all stood together; if the banks where you had your accounts, your banks of deposit, as they were called, refused to “check your paper,” why, then no other bank would accept it. The felt-industry was peculiar, in that the sales were made early in the year, but payments were not made until the fall, which meant that the business was helpless without credit; the bankers knew that perfectly well, and Mr. Walker had always had the credit, year after year, as a matter of course. This year he had to have more, because of his war contracts, and the increased production; the wicked thing the bankers had done was to make promises, and lure him along from month to month, giving him no hint there was anything wrong until the last moment, when one or two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of notes came due, and suddenly he was told that he must “take them up.” There must be some reason for such things, said Lucile; and Mr. Walker was convinced that it was Henry Cabot Winters plotting to ruin him.

The bankers had put accountants on Mr. Walker’s books, and insisted that he would need three million dollars to carry him until the fall. They were going to make him pay twenty-seven per cent for the use of that money. He didn’t mind that so much--his profits could stand it; but he didn’t believe he was really going to get the three million. When the time came, there would be more excuses and delays, and he would be compelled to turn the stock of his companies over to the bankers. He had twenty big plants of one sort or another, all working day and night, employing more than eight thousand men; he was doing what was supposed to be patriotic war-work--but the government wouldn’t help him with a dollar, and wouldn’t protect him against these banking conspiracies.

Betty took that story to Cornelia. “Can it possibly be true, Grannie? Can Uncle Henry be doing such a thing?”

“I’m sorry to say, dear, he has that reputation.”

“But Grannie, he doesn’t seem that kind of man!”

“Men have different standards for their friends, and for outsiders. Uncle Henry has grown rich, and he has never produced anything that I know of.”

“But Grannie, that would be a wicked thing to do to Mr. Walker!”

“It’s the way of the business world. I watched it, and held my peace--for forty years. I used to hear things that Henry and James and your father would talk over with your grandfather. Josiah did it to others--and then at last somebody did it to him. He trusted the big bankers in New York--the Morgan crowd, because they had such a respectable name. He put everything he had into the securities of the New Haven Railroad, and those New York bankers simply gutted it, they stole every dollar, and the stock fell from two hundred and forty-six to sixteen, if I remember. I’ve heard your grandfather say, he had enough New Haven paper to fill up the music-room, but it wasn’t enough to pay his debts.”

“Is that why Uncle James has the mills and ‘Hillview’?”

“That’s the reason. There were tens of thousands of people left in worse plight, widows and children and old people. All this decline of New England industry that you hear about really dates from that time when we trusted the Morgan crowd; for they took something like five hundred million dollars away from this part of the country.”

“But Grannie, if Uncle Henry is doing that to Mr. Walker, it is really the same thing as banditry!”

“Yes, of course; but you mustn’t say it to your father or your uncles; they wouldn’t take it kindly from a twenty-year-old girl.”

“I’ll be older some day,” said Miss Betty.

III

The first thing when Cornelia got back to town, she went to call at her son-in-law’s office. “Henry, what is this I hear about you and Jerry Walker?”

“What do you hear, Mother?”

“That you are taking his plants away from him.”

“Has Jerry told you that?”

“No; but Betty has been visiting Lucile, and naturally hears about their troubles.”

“Jerry tells his wife, and she tells Lucile, and Lucile tells Betty, and Betty tells you, and you tell me!” Henry laughed.

“Is it true, Henry? Are you after him?”

“It is absolutely untrue, Mother.”

“You’re not interested in his affairs?”

“I didn’t say that. Jerry comes to certain bankers--including Rupert and John Quincy--and tries to borrow money. The bankers are my clients, and ask me to investigate, and draw up papers, and perform other legal services, which I do. Because the decisions of the bankers don’t please Jerry, he takes up the notion that I’m an arch-conspirator, plotting his ruin. But that’s all rubbish.”

“Henry, you have the reputation of not being a very gentle enemy.”

The other laughed again. “Well, Mother, have you come to convert me to pacifism? But seriously, I got through with Jerry Walker years ago. I was a stockholder in two of his felt-companies, and a director. I found that his way of doing business didn’t agree with mine, so I let him buy me out at a fair price, and washed my hands of him. But he’s been afraid of me ever since--because he knows I know too much about him.”

“Henry, I’ve always had an interest in Jerry, ever since he was an errand-boy at the hospital, a bright little fellow that I saw had a future. Josiah helped him to get a start, you know.”

“Yes, of course. But he’s grown up now, and learned many tricks, and he plays the business game pretty roughly.”

“I can’t pretend to know all about his affairs--”

“Naturally not, Mother; only an expert accountant could do that--and he’d have trouble, because Jerry has hidden some things cleverly. It’s a complicated matter, I assure you, and you make a mistake if you let the Walkers use you, or even worry you. Nobody can believe a word Jerry says.”

“I just want to ask you to give him a square deal, Henry. Give him what you give other business men.”

“Well, Mother, it’s up to the bankers, and you are talking to a lawyer. There are many bankers interested in the Jerry Walker problem, and they all agree that he wants much more than any other business man--he wants everything in sight. There’s only so much credit to go round--only about two per cent of what people holler for--and Jerry is getting more than his share, and using it without any sort of scruple.”

“He’s paying a high price for it, I understand.”

“He thinks so, naturally. It seems a simple matter to him, for the banks to check all the paper he can sign. He never figures on the risks the banks may be running.”

“Is it true he’s paying twenty-seven per cent, Henry?”

“That is a question you’ll have to ask the bankers, Mother. I can’t discuss my clients’ affairs. But I’ll say this as a general principle--two men seldom agree about the value of a horse, when one of them is selling and the other is buying.”

“Henry, I want to ask it straight. You’re not planning to take over Jerry’s business?”

“Absolutely not, Mother!”

“You’re telling me the truth?”

“When have I told you anything else?” And the telephone rang. Henry took down the receiver, listened, and said, “Yes, Rupert, I’ll be right over. I’m having a consultation on the matter with Mrs. Thornwell, and I’m telling her you are the banker, and the real villain in the case.”

So later in the day Cornelia went to call on this “real villain,” and found him, a large island completely surrounded by statistics and charts relating to the felt business. He was polite, but reluctant to give her his precious time. If she had come to ask about investing a thousand dollars of her own, he would have taken an hour off to advise her--he would do that any day for any member of the family, even the poorest fifth cousin. But when she came about Jerry Walker he told her frankly that she was letting herself be used by a family of adventurers. She was deceived if she thought that Rupert had anything more to do with the matter than a score of other bankers; it was a council of the financial leaders of Boston who were deciding the future of the felt industry, and even if Rupert were to go before them and say, “Gentlemen, I have promised my mother-in-law that out of my affection for her we will agree to let her former errand-boy have all the money he wants”--still the other bankers might refuse to assent. “And I don’t carry three million in my own wallet, Mother.”

Both Henry and Rupert had told Cornelia what was not true; and only two or three weeks later she found it out. Mrs. Jerry Walker came to Cornelia’s apartment, and broke down and wept, and told the terrible story of what was happening. Jerry Walker was being stripped of every dollar he owned in the world; and it was Rupert Alvin and Henry Cabot Winters who were driving the other bankers to the job, sometimes against their will, and even without their knowledge. The loan for three millions had been agreed upon, and Mr. Winters had been instructed to prepare the papers; but instead of doing so, he had got one of the big banks in New York to call a loan suddenly, and Mr. Alvin had brought up demands that the other bankers had not known about--in short, everything had been tied up for a month.

Finally, in order to get half a million dollars in a hurry, poor Jerry had had to turn over to the bankers all the stock of all his companies. It was supposed to be a trusteeship--he had the right to get the properties back any time within two years by paying a million and a quarter; but the very day they got the securities, the bankers, with Mr. Winters at their head, had set to work to plunder the properties. They put in their own directors, and barred Jerry Walker from access to the books, and even barred him physically from the plants. They were disposing of all the assets of the subsidiary companies, and loading them up with debts and claims--everywhere Jerry turned he found that some unknown lawyer had mysteriously appeared with liens and suits. Everything was tied up, so that the real owner of the properties could not get a dollar, and was going to have to sell his home to get money to live.

So that was that. The caribou was down, and his blood was being drunk. Cornelia might wring her hands, and be very sorry; she might shout at the wolves and scold them--whereat they would lift their bloody jaws for a moment and grin at her. “Of course, Mother,” said Henry, quite blandly and good-naturedly, when next she met him--“of course, I told you an untruth. What did you expect me to do?”

“I expected you to have a sense of family loyalty.”

“You have too good a mind to fool yourself with such an argument, Mother. I have plenty of Thornwell family loyalty, but not the least particle of Walker family loyalty. If you had come to me for the truth about affairs of your own, you would have had it; in case of need you might have had the last dollar I own in the world. But when you let yourself be used by Jerry Walker, to try to pull wires for him in the midst of a business crisis--then you haven’t the least reason in the world to expect me to give you any information to be carried back to him!--Yes, of course, you didn’t mean to carry it back, but I assure you Lucile expected to get it out of Betty, and Mrs. Walker expected to get it out of Lucile. They have been cultivating an intimacy with Betty for several years for exactly that purpose, and I didn’t intend to let them succeed. When I told Rupert and James about it, they agreed that I had done exactly right to stall you.”

“So you’re going to put Jerry Walker out of the felt business!”

“Not at all, Mother. He knows felt well, and if he wants a job as manager of one of the plants, we’ll pay him a good salary. What he doesn’t know is finance, and we’re going to fix him so he can’t lead the Boston banks into a smash.”

“He was making a lot of money, Henry.”

“A chimpanzee could make money right now, with the government buying everything at any price you ask. But the war will be over soon, and then will come the storm, and we’re going to have a safer man than Jerry Walker at the helm of the ship.”

So Cornelia went away, and watched the events of the next few months, and decided no longer to think of her son-in-law as a wolf. From now on she would see him as a large, black, witty, urbane and charming spider. He lurked in a hole and watched the business flies, and once in a while he made a pounce, and sunk his fangs into a victim, and wove him round and round with a ton or two of legal nets, until he could not move a finger; after which he would be sucked dry of his financial juices.

In the case of the too enthusiastic manufacturer of felt, what happened was that he struggled in the nets until his health broke down; his hands trembled so that he could not hold a cup of coffee, and he had to go to North Carolina for the winter and play golf. While he was gone, the bankers sat down with his lawyers, and convinced them that the victim stood not a chance in the world, so the lawyers advised him to sign a release, forgiving his enemies for all they had done to him, in consideration of the sum of six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. For this price he gave up properties which earned a million and three-quarters net profit that year, and were worth about ten millions on the market. The six hundred and twenty-five thousand paid a part of his debts, and he sold his home to pay more, and his family gave up their social ambitions and moved into a cottage, and his daughter quit going to Radcliffe and went to work.

“Isn’t it nice, Grannie?” said Betty. “When I get older, if I behave, I’ll get a lot of Lucile’s money, and I can hire her--perhaps to be a governess to my children. And Priscilla will have a share of it too, and can found a charity home to take care of Mr. and Mrs. Walker when they are old. And Cousin Josiah”--that was Henry Winters’ one son--“he’ll have a bigger share than any of us, to spend on women-chasing--I understand that’s what he’s doing now. Aunt Alice will be able to retain her adolescence--”

“My child! Don’t say things like that!”

“I’m talking in the family, Grannie. We members of the new generation are going to be what you call hard-boiled. They are raising us in war-time, and we’re getting used to plain language and messy sights. I read in the paper that Mrs. Henry Cabot Winters is planning a ‘little theater,’ in which her mystical poet’s works are to be shown to the world as soon as the war is over. If Aunt Alice wants to subsidize genius, why does she have to pick out literary lounge-lizards and music-box monkeys?”

Cornelia said, “Dear me, I am really getting old! The new generation shocks me!”

There came a day when every able-bodied person in America rushed out of his house, and fell on the necks of passersby and danced and laughed and shouted and sang. Men threw their hats into the air, or tied tin cans to the tails of automobiles and drove up and down the streets. Three days later they all turned out and did it again, because the first time had been a mistake, some news agency had been in too much of a hurry. But it was a big enough war to deserve two armistice days, and even in State Street one saw “blue-bloods” celebrating with bootblacks, and high-hatted bankers forgetting their dignity for the first time in their eighty years.

This was a celebration in which even the pacifists could join. The nation would have one or two hundred thousand cripples to take care of--but at least you didn’t have to think of new thousands being made every day! You could again expect people to listen to reason, and could work at stopping the next war without danger of arrest. The Kaiser had fled to Holland, and there seemed a real prospect of that newly-promised world. Such wonderful promises--a world fit for heroes, a world made safe for democracy, a world in which the last war had been won by the forces of justice! So we had been told in a golden glowing speech at least once a week for a year and a half; and now we were to see it made real. As a first step President Wilson packed up his typewriter and his fourteen points, and went over to Europe to oversee the making of a world charter. His packing appeared to be careless, for he lost one of the points in England--that providing for the “freedom of the seas”--and had only thirteen when he landed in France.

The American people had been told to trust him; he was the President, and had sources of information not open to the rest of us--so Deborah had assured her mother. But now it turned out that he hadn’t any sources of information, or if he had, he hadn’t used them. He had made no bargains whatever with the allies, he had not made them give up a single one of their greedy demands. And now, of course, it was too late; the danger was over, the allies were no longer afraid, and would do exactly what they pleased.

It was a disillusioning experience, and was to produce ten years of cynicism and corruption in every department of American life. The climax came when the President capitulated to the diplomatic ravens, and let them have their prey, and came home and told the public that that was what his fourteen points had meant. He did more than that--he went before a committee of the Senate, and stated that he had not known about the secret treaties until he went to Paris; which one had to take as Pascal took the doctrine of his church, and believe it because it was impossible.

There were a few groups in America whose demands did not depend upon the diplomats at Versailles; and among these were the women. France might grab the Rhine, Japan might grab Shantung--but what was to prevent American women from having their rights at home? Surely the men were not making such a success with their votes that they could spurn the help of wives and sisters! Let us have a world made fit for heroines! So the campaign of votes for women leaped into life in a score of cities. In Washington the ladies began besieging senators and congressmen, and elderly statesmen took to physical flight from urgent feminine tongues. The militant suffragists began carrying placards in front of the White House, and got themselves arrested over and over again. It was most embarrassing, because the jails in the national capital had been made for street-walkers and Negro drunks, and had no accommodations for ladies.

The suffragists were divided into two groups, the respectable ones, who made dignified speeches and circulated petitions and got an inch in the newspapers once a month; and the militants, who set themselves the goal of a front-page story twice a day, and made it most of the time. Each of these two groups was active in Boston--a city full of ladies who felt themselves competent to take charge, not only of America, but of the world. Each group laid siege to Cornelia Thornwell and her grand-daughter, and the militants won. Another scandal in the Sewing Circles, and another grief for a great family!

Cornelia’s oldest daughter, Betty’s mother, was a vigorous “anti.” Her enemies told a story about her, that one day when company was expected, and many duties were clamoring, she had locked herself in her study and made no response, and when subsequent complaint was made, the answer was that she had been writing an article on “Woman the Home-maker.” Jokes like that gave annoyance to the “antis,” because it was so obvious to them that nothing but the wicked activities of the suffragists were dragging them out from the homes they loved, and compelling them to become examples of the evil they feared. Yes, the “wild women” had that power, and rejoiced in it; when the “antis” hired a house on Park Street and opened up offices, what should they see but a group of women marching back and forth before their door, carrying a banner with a strange device:

_They say that home is woman’s sphere. What are the antis doing here?_

The true “anti” was Cornelia’s youngest daughter, Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge, who stayed at home with her eight babies, and loved them and petted them and scolded them and wept over them and saw that their various nurses and governesses kept their noses wiped. Clara had no idea what a vote looked like; but, alas, that didn’t get even an inch in the papers! Nor did it have any appreciable effect when Alice Thornwell Winters shrugged her beautiful white shoulders and lifted her haughty eyebrows in scorn at the idea of sacrificing her feminine charm. Neither did it help when she wrote more and larger checks to pay for the “little theater” which was to produce the plays of Chauncey Duvillier, dealing with ancient Erse legends about dusky-haired promiscuous queens. The productions came off, and were at once very “high-brow” and very “high-hat,” but they did not seem to reduce the attendance at suffrage meetings.

President Wilson had set his stern Presbyterian face against the program of national suffrage. It was a question for the individual states; thus spoke Sir Oracle, and when the female dogs barked, he said it again. But such a thing had been known as a great statesman changing his mind when made uncomfortable enough. It was a fact that the women out west had got the vote and were using it; Woodrow could not forget that it was California which had elected him the last time, and might defeat his party and his world policies the next time. A terrible thing to contemplate having women vote, but a still worse thing to contemplate having them vote Republican!

The President came back from Europe in February, and the suffragettes prepared a hearty welcome for him in New York. It was more than he could face, in his nervous condition, with that incredible statement he had to make to the Senate; so at the last moment the route of his ship was changed, and it landed at Boston. That put the burden onto the Boston suffragettes, who had to organize a demonstration almost overnight. They came rushing to Cornelia and Betty; would they help? Banners must be got ready, asking urgent witty questions, and these must be carried by ladies of absolutely indigo-colored blood; they must be carried as close to the President as the police would permit, and then a little closer; also the great man’s latest anti-suffrage speech was to be burned in effigy on Boston Common.

VII

“Old Boston” is a city which has been laid out by cows. They made tracks, and these became lanes, and the lanes have now become narrow canyons of concrete and steel, made immutable for all time by a court-house full of deeds with intricate specifications. You may still see on Beacon Hill a house which has a narrow archway built under one room--because in selling the land the owner specified that access must for all time be left for his cow to reach the Common. Now, instead of a cow, there was coming a high-powered automobile bearing a long-featured Presbyterian gentleman in frock coat and silk hat, under military escort, with all the trappings of glory, and that unending roar of applause which he had heard even from the billows in mid-ocean. Patriotism in Boston was to have its day of rapture; Democratic patriotism, taking in even the Irish-Catholics, and marred only by the antics of twenty-two contumacious females, who refused to accept a great statesman’s own definition of what he meant by democracy.

Among these twenty-two lady-pests was the widow of Josiah Quincy Thornwell, former governor of the Commonwealth; also Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin, daughter of the president of the Pilgrim National Bank. But the names of these two were not on the list furnished to the press; in that case the two would have been spotted by the police, and denied the honor they craved. They sallied forth with the other women, carrying placards aloft, in the route of the procession; and promptly they were snapped up, and hustled into a patrol wagon, and landed in Joy Street police-station--most beautifully named of public institutions in the home of the bean and the cod.

The police had them--and what was to be done with them? The police had no idea. The one thing desired was to keep them out of the newspapers; which was the one thing impossible to achieve. They spent the entire day sitting in a room in the police-station, with no food--save the knowledge that they would be on the front page of all the afternoon newspapers! In the evening they were taken to the “House of Detention” under the Court House, where they slept on board benches covered with black oil cloth. They rolled up their coats for pillows, and spread newspapers to cover the dirt--but alas, the worst part of the dirt had powers of locomotion. Cornelia, sitting up awake, watched Betty sleeping, and counted twenty-one round black objects on her newspapers, and in the morning some of the women’s ankles were so swollen that they could not get on their shoes. Also sleep was interfered with by the constant bringing in of drunken women, who howled in loud voices what appeared to be a popular song, “I love you as I never loved before.” In the morning they filed out to a rusty iron sink to wash, and everyone had to answer the question, “Are you a drunk or a suffragette?” But these woes vanished in a blaze of glory when they discovered that they had got a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of publicity on the front pages of the morning newspapers--while the respectable lady suffragists, who had presented a dignified petition, had got one inch in each paper!

Now they were going to be taken into court, and would refuse to employ lawyers, and would make twenty-two eloquent suffrage speeches. So they thought, but their captors thought otherwise. For these publicity-seekers the constitution of the Commonwealth was to be suspended, and trials were to be in secret in one of the rooms of the prison! When they learned this, there was a hasty consultation among the prisoners, and an agreement not to recognize such an illegal tribunal. Until they were in open court, no woman would say a word.

Their enemies had a still more dastardly scheme; they were going to deprive the little band of their most brightly shining star. A jailer came in and demanded, “Which is Elizabeth Alvin?”--and of course all the prisoners knew instantly what that meant. Papa Banker had got busy and pulled some political strings, and his daughter was to be bailed out, or spirited away, or something--a vile plot! Betty made no sound or sign, and neither did any one else; and presently came the young Irish policeman who had arrested and “booked” her. He had been ordered to pick her out of the bunch--and a fine mess he made of it!

It so happened that in the course of a year and a half, Betty was to be deeply concerned with the problem of identifications. To what extent was it possible for bystanders, witnesses of a crime, to describe the men who had committed the crime, and to recognize them some time later? Human lives have depended upon this problem, and not for the last time. Whenever Betty and her grandmother thought about the matter, the first thing that came to their minds was this experience in the Joy Street police-station. Here was a policeman who had arrested Elizabeth Alvin on the street, and marched her along for some distance, in the meantime having a considerable argument with her as to his right to destroy her banner, and his right to squeeze and hurt her arm. He had put her into a patrol-wagon, and sat opposite her during a ride of several blocks through crowded streets, meantime gazing at her and speculating, what kind of crazy loon was this that wanted a vote, when so many people that he knew were glad to sell theirs for two dollars. Arriving at the station-house, he had stood at the desk and booked her for sauntering, loitering, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest--enough offenses to keep her in jail until President Wilson’s successor had been elected.

And now, next morning, came this young policeman to pick that young person out of a group of twenty-two, most of whom could not possibly be the right one, because they were old like Cornelia, or large and matronly, or tall and masterful, or in some other obvious way not the young and sweet and lovely Betty. She was the youngest in the crowd, and there were not more than half a dozen others near her age. All she had done to make the policeman’s task harder was to take off her brown coat with beaver fur trimmings, and appear in a blue silk dress. What all the women did was to stand or sit, completely unaware of the policeman’s existence, while he wandered about, peering into one face and then into another, obviously perplexed. He had all the time he wanted, he had everything his own way--and he got the wrong woman!

He picked out a fashionable young matron, mother of two blossoming babes, and said, “That’s the one.” The jailer commanded, “Come with me, Miss”--and when the young matron remained unaware of his existence, he stooped in front of her, and put one sturdy arm about her knees, and lifted her over his shoulder, and carried her like a sack of meal, out of the room and upstairs into the presence of the secret judge. He arrived there, somewhat red and out of breath, and the young matron no less so. Set down upon her two feet, she stamped one of them, and glared at the judge and the jailer, and clenched her two fists. “I will say just this and no more--I am not Betty Alvin!”

VIII

The night that Betty and Cornelia spent in jail there was a gathering of the Thornwell clan: not summoned, but just happening, because every Thornwell who got the report knew instantly that it was his duty to repair to the Alvin home on Commonwealth Avenue to offer aid and counsel.

There was a general agreement that it would be useless to get the two renegades out of jail until the President was out of the city, because they would only get in again and make another scandal. There was also agreement as to what should be done with Betty; she must be shipped abroad by the very first steamer. The war was over now, and while passports were not being given for any but official purposes, it would be an easy matter for Rupert to get what he wanted, and Betty would be put in charge of some elderly respectable relative, and subjected to the refining influences of Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London and the National Gallery and the Nelson Column, and later on to the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, and would doubtless come back at the end of a year a lady like all the other ladies who lived on Commonwealth Avenue, home of the least common and most exclusive wealth in America.

About Cornelia there was a sharp difference of opinion. One group declared that the thing to do was to excommunicate her and ignore her existence; while the other group wanted to have her committed to an institution, where she would be treated with the utmost kindness and consideration, but prevented from bringing further disgrace upon an honorable family. The head of this group was Uncle Abner, whose deaf man’s voice would boom out in the drawing-room at intervals, “Lock her up!” The others would try to explain objections to this plan, but he would only say again, “Lock her up!” There are some advantages to being deaf, it is so much easier to keep your opinions unchanged.

Great-aunt Priscilla joined Abner’s group. She was tall and thin, and suffered from anchylosis of the spine, which made it painful for her to sit erect, but she never sat any other way in public. She had the long lean face of her dead brother, Josiah, and of Betty’s mother, Deborah; it sagged now, but the pouches disappeared as she set her jaw in anger and declared, “It is the proper thing to do in such cases. Everybody will agree that we are justified.”

“Not quite everybody, Aunt Priscilla,” said Henry Cabot Winters. “Surely not the suffragettes.”

“I am talking about people one mentions,” said the old lady.

“But the suffragettes would say it was persecution,” objected Deborah, “and they would make a great fuss.”

“We should have them picketing this house!” added Rupert.

That horrible idea silenced all of them but Abner. “Lock her up!” said he; and when his son Quincy shouted into his ear, “The suffragettes would object,” he answered, in good old Puritan style, “Lock ’em all up!”

There were many precedents that could be cited for this procedure, and the old people did not fail to cite them. All you had to do was to find a judge and a couple of doctors who sympathized with the family predicament--and it would be easy enough for Thornwells to do that. Great-uncle Ahab had become violent at one time, due to his disappointment in love, and had spent ten years alone in a wing of the Thornwell mansion, with a keeper by day and another by night; he still had spells of brooding, when similar action had to be contemplated. Such emergencies arose in all “blue-blood” families--it was one of the mysteries of the Lord’s mercy--and all physicians to the rich were accustomed to signing certificates, and judges to issuing commitments.

Some such action might have come of this conference, had it not been for Henry Cabot Winters, that witty, urbane and charming black spider. He was nothing but an “in-law,” and not really entitled to speak, but he did it none the less. “Cornelia is eccentric, but she is not insane, and we all know it; she has many friends who know it, and one of them is Morrow.”

“Morrow?” said Great-aunt Priscilla. “Who brought Morrow into it?”

“Well, Morrow as Cornelia’s physician would naturally expect to be consulted; and I’m pretty sure you’d have him against you.”

“What makes you think that?” It was James Scatterbridge, the great mill-owner, who had made some millions of yards of bandages for soldiers who were not going to be wounded, and was now very busy making clear to the government that he was not going to give up his profit on these contracts. He had postponed an important conference this evening, and if his mother-in-law was going to be locked up, he wanted it done quickly.

Said Henry, “Cornelia told me that Rupert dropped a hint of something of the sort to her, and she decided she would take the precaution to have a chat with Morrow, and tell him her story, and all her ideas. He was very much amused, of course--at least that is what Cornelia reported.”

“Oh, yes, it is most amusing!” snapped Great-aunt Priscilla. “The newspapers are finding it so, and no doubt their readers. But is that what we have been paying Morrow for--some fifty years, I believe?”

“Well,” said the lawyer, “you certainly can’t offer to pay him to declare Cornelia non compos; at least, I don’t think he would take the money. So it looks as if we’d have to forget our black sheep.”

“Well, at least let her take her own Irish name!” This parting shot of the old lady made Deborah and Alice wince--because, after all, the black sheep with the Irish name was their mother. That is the difficulty in these family councils--there are so many toes to be trod upon! It was safer to be deaf, like Great-uncle Abner, and go on saying, over and over, “Lock her up!”

Three days after this conference Great-uncle Ahab was walking home on a stormy night, and fell and struck his head. He lay in the snow for some time before he was found, and a few hours later he was ill with pneumonia, and next day was in a critical condition. The family came in haste--including his brother Abner, somewhat embarrassed after fifty-three years of estrangement. He tried to refer to the matter, but Ahab was in a delirium. That was “old Boston’s” idea of drama--an old man who could hear very little shouting to another old man who would never hear anything. They talked about it in the clubs for quite a while.

Also they talked about the funeral, which was an imposing affair, the same as Josiah’s--for after all, Thornwells were alike in the eyes of the Lord, even though in the eyes of the world one might be a governor and the other a manic depressive. The ceremony was held in the house which Ahab had sawed in half in order to get away from his brother; and all through the ceremony you heard the dead man’s half dozen hairless Chinese dogs howling their heads off in an upstairs room--it was most uncanny. When the will was read the family kept it secret--which of course put everybody on tiptoe with curiosity, and caused the newspapers to give it special prominence when it was filed for probate. One provision read, “I leave my beloved dogs to my sister Priscilla, whom they remind of newly born mice.” Another said, “I leave my half house to serve as a home for elderly gentlemen of good family who can prove that they have been robbed by their relatives.” Finally, his income from stocks and bonds of the Thornwell Mills Company was to be used to establish a chair at some New England theological seminary which would agree to have a course of lectures delivered every year under the auspices of “The Ahab Adams Thornwell Foundation for the Precise and Final Refutation of the Lyman Beecher Interpretation of the Doctrine of Infant Damnation as Expounded in Holy Writ.” Ahab had heard Lyman Beecher at the age of twenty-five, and had waited sixty years to have him precisely and finally refuted.

At family funerals the hardest hearts are softened and the fiercest prides are humbled. Betty remembered that Great-uncle Ahab had once given her a pony, riding it all the way to her home, with his long legs reaching to the ground. So it was a good time for her mother to plead with her. Yes, Betty would promise to engage in no further public disturbances until she had finished that year at Radcliffe; and thereafter she was willing to spend a year abroad and become cultured--could Grannie go with her? The little minx asked it quite soberly; and Deborah, equally without trace of a smile, explained that the family was under great obligations to Cousin Letitia Adams Quincy, who had nursed Betty once as a little girl, while Deborah herself had been in Europe.

Cousin Letitia was a third or fourth cousin--one of those who had arrived too early for the funeral of Josiah, and got out and walked about the estate for half an hour, in order not to make herself conspicuous. Because of such behavior she was known as a perfect lady, and now was to receive the poor relation’s ultimate reward. Deborah had interviewed her and ascertained that she had read nothing since “The Marble Faun”--except the “Sunday School Examiner’s Bulletin” and the religious and genealogical pages of the Transcript. She was judged immune to the contagion of redness, and the right person to chaperon Betty’s grand tour. The girl accepted her with a meekness which would have made Deborah suspicious, if the latter’s natural shrewdness had not been smothered under a heavy load of self-sufficiency.

It was high time to get excitable young rebels out of the country; the family realized that more and more clearly every day. For it appeared that the signing of the armistice was not going to mean peace; not even the signing of a treaty would mean it. Our troops were to stay in Germany; worse yet, they were to stay in Siberia and Archangel, and wage President Wilson’s private war upon the Russian people. The American army and navy were to serve as a world police-force for the capitalist system. Exactly what Cornelia had seen the Boston police do in Plymouth, the national police were going to do all over Europe and Asia, sometimes under our command, sometimes under British command. And any persons at home who objected to this program would be hit over the head with the so-called espionage act; a law enacted to punish enemy spies, and now serving to jail American citizens for protesting against attacks upon a friendly people without a declaration of war.

It was the White Terror. Conducted partly by mobs, and partly by police and government agents acting as mobs, it had for its aim the destruction of every means through which the American people might learn how their blood and treasure were being wasted. It stopped at no crime; the law-enforcers of city, state and nation became the leading criminals. In New York four Russian boys and a girl, all of them under age, attempting to distribute a circular protesting against the invasion of Russia, were seized by the police and tortured until one of them died; the rest were prosecuted in the federal courts and received sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment.

Such things were happening all over the country, and made trouble for well-meaning persons like Cornelia, who sought to argue for constitutional methods. How could she ask her friend Vanzetti to settle the grievances of the workers by political action, when again and again socialist candidates were thrown off the ballot, or, when elected, were denied their seats? How could she urge him to obey the law, when the law-makers and law-enforcers themselves defied it? A year or two ago Vanzetti had made to her the statement, “Capitalist is most fighting man in whole world”; and never did the capitalist work harder to prove that the anarchist was right.

The victims of this White Terror would strike back; and if they struck blindly, it was the way the lesson had been taught them. May Day was an occasion for celebration of the Russian revolution by all who believed in it; and on the day before May Day, a package arrived by mail at the home of a United States senator in Georgia, especially conspicuous for his “red-baiting.” The package was opened by a Negro maid, and exploded and blew her to pieces. That led to hurried searches, and the finding of a score or so of bombs in the New York post-office, addressed to various persons of prominence, and detained because they had not enough postage paid.

May Day came in Boston, with that terrible news upon the front page of the papers. The socialists had several meetings scheduled--and they were a legal party, not advocating violence in any form. But this was a distinction the newspapers and those who controlled them were anxious to conceal. When the audience emerged from one hall, and attempted to march down the street to another hall where there was another meeting, they were set upon by three hundred policemen and a mob of soldiers and sailors, thoroughly “americanized” by a year in Europe. The socialists, and many innocent passers-by who happened to look foreign, were chased through the streets, hunted out in stores where they sought refuge, and pummeled and clubbed into insensibility. The police loaded them into patrol-wagons, and then beat them over the heads while in the wagons; they loaded them into trucks, and permitted the soldiers and sailors to beat them--there were even cases of policemen lending their clubs to members of the mob who thought some victim insufficiently mishandled. They raided the second hall and beat up the audience; the fighting went on for two or three hours, until four persons were killed, and a hundred and sixteen dragged off to jail. Among them was a son of Boris Sidis, of Harvard, and H. W. L. Dana, a grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and of Richard Henry Dana.

So once more Cornelia heard the thud of hickory clubs on human flesh and bone. This time Betty heard it too, and both of them had to run for their lives. They got into a cab and drove home, both trembling so that they could hardly use their hands, both white and tearful, with a mixture of fear and rage. They spent hours of anguish together, telephoning to find out who had been killed and who had been hurt and who was in jail; then to get lawyers, and persons with property for bail-bonds--all the routine so familiar to the seasoned “radical,” and so startling to the newcomer who still believes in his country.

In the morning Cornelia would go to court, and perhaps serve as a witness. Betty could do nothing but return to college and keep quiet, and hope that no one would report her to her parents. She had not meant to break her promise--but how could one know that going to a socialist meeting was disorderly conduct?

Judge Hayden was the magistrate presiding at the trials, a majestic gentleman, as they all tried to be. But under the strain of his intense patriotism, he forgot his dignity, and broke loose and delivered tirades--and not at the police for lending their clubs to be used in beating socialists. He did not punish a single one of the assailants, but sent the victims to jail for varying terms. “The uneducated and the overeducated,” was one of his sneers--which sounded peculiar in Boston.

It was to be expected that when the next lot of bombs went off, one of them should tear out the front of Judge Hayden’s home. In Constantinople under the rule of the sultans it was said that the state of social discontent could be ascertained from the number of fires which occurred in the city; when the number increased unduly, some grafting officials would be strangled, and the fires would grow fewer. But Boston is not an easy-going place like old Turkey; Boston is a Puritan stronghold, and its rulers are stiff-necked. The more numerous the bombs, the more they would increase the causes of bombs. The answer of the authorities to the bombing of Judge Hayden was to put Galleani on a steamer and ship him back to Italy; also to plant several spies among the Boston anarchists.

This was while Betty was saying good-by to her friends, including these same anarchists. Without a word to the family, Betty and her grandmother stole away to visit a band of desperados who were at that time the theme of thousands of words in the files of the Department of Justice, the American Protective League, and the million-dollar detective agencies. They actually spent a night in an anarchist home in Plymouth, and listened to jokes about “bombe di pistacchio,” and heard Vanzetti’s story of old Galleani’s parting from his wife and four children.

This was one of the ingenious new methods of torture which the White Terror had devised. They would grab a man in the middle of the night and lock him up in a police cell, and badger him there until he admitted that he did not believe in government, or that he regarded government as an affair of violence--something they made it easy enough to admit! They would then present the confession to the immigration authorities, and a warrant of deportation would be signed, and the victim would be taken secretly on board a steamer--his wife and children left behind, with no money to follow him, and nothing but to beg or starve.

Vanzetti had given up his “picka shov’.” His friends had urged that the work was too hard for him, and he had invested his savings in a fish business belonging to an Italian who was going home. “Fish-business” sounded most impressive--until you learned that it consisted of a hand-cart, a pair of scales, and a route. Twice a week he got a barrel or two of fish, either from the docks or by express from Boston, and shoved his hand-cart about, ringing a bell and calling, “Pay-shee! Pay-shee!” He had had this same kind of business once before, said Alfonsina, but had not been successful, because he let everybody owe him money. This time he had promised to run it on a strictly cash basis. Vanzetti grinned, and said that it was a “mosta good business,” because he met all the Italian women and children in Plymouth, and they got to know him and feel friendly, and he would say a few words about “joostice,” and when there was to be a meeting or a “picanic,” no one could “distriboot” circulars or sell tickets so well as he.

Trando had saved up his money and bought himself a three-quarter size violin for ten dollars, and a bow for two and a half, and had had several lessons and learned to play a tune. Of course he was made to exhibit this accomplishment, with Bart serving as master, keeping the time with an erect forefinger, cocking his head on one side and judging critically the pitch of the notes, which were apt to vary slightly from the normal. It was “Old Black Joe,” a very sad tune, and there were tears in Alfonsina’s eyes at the finish--though perhaps they were tears of pride, that this marvelous thing should be coming from her precious little boy. Through the years that were to come Trando was to play that tune many times for Bart, under circumstances that would bring tears into the eyes of all who heard it.

XII

They climbed Castle Hill, and picked a few of the wild flowers, and watched the sail-boats on the bay. It was a parting for Betty and Bart, and both of them were moved, though Bart said, “Maybe I come see you in Europe pretty soon. I think I not be let in this countree mooch time; get shoore catched and sended home. Pretty soon it come trooble in Italy, maybe rivoluzione--make American afraid for have Italian here.”

“Well, you won’t mind going back to Italy.” It was Betty speaking.

“Shoore not, get free tickets, mooch pleas-èd. I glad for be lonely man, no family for suffer. I fraid for man like Vincenzo, like Nick Sacc’--they catch heem, send away--mooch trooble for family. Come mooch spy--come spy in cloob in East Boston--all time spy watch. But he not tell true story, tell bombe, make people hate anarchista.”

Vanzetti paused, and watched the sail-boats for a while. “Sooch a lovely place, is hard to t’ink so ugly thing can be in the world. You meet Yankee man, he is a good feller; you laugh, you make joke, he is please, he think wop is all right, pretty good. But next day he take you, put you in jail, beat you with rubber hose, hang you up by finger, torture you terrible. Is hard to believe, but it happens all time, plenty fellers in cloob can tell. I say, I not give up, not stand sooch thing, I fight. I keep gun all the time now.” And Bart patted his hip, where a large lump was evident.

“Have you shot that gun off yet?” inquired Betty.

“Shoore, I take it in wood, I practice, he shoot pretty good.”

“Well, it’s not only the gun, it’s the gunner. You need a lot of practice, Bart, if you’re going to shoot it out with the police.” It was Betty again, and her grandmother was dismayed. Where on earth did she pick up slang--“shoot it out!” And where had she acquired that matter-of-fact smile, discussing the mad idea of resisting arrest? Truly, the new generation was traveling fast, and their elders had to “keep on the jump.”

Cornelia knew that if you objected to what the new generation did or said, it would refrain from arguing with you, but would relegate you to the storeroom of the “has-beens,” and forbear to take you in its confidence. But in her own head she pondered and worried. Betty’s pacifist convictions had apparently not been able to stand the strain of that “May Day riot” in Boston.

One of the children came up to report that there were men at the house to see Bart. There were two Italians with a motorcycle and a side-car. Cornelia recollected their faces, from the night of the dramatic performance in Stoughton. She was introduced to them again, Coacci and Orciani, workingmen and anarchist propagandists. The former had just recently been arrested for deportation, and was now under a thousand-dollar bond. They talked in Italian, and then drove off, and Bart brought in from another room a package which the two had left; he laughed and told Betty and Cornelia that it was a bomb, and these two had advised him not to let the strange Yankee ladies into the secret, because, after all, who could say they might not be spies?

The package was big enough for a bomb, to blow up a whole cordage-plant. It was heavy; and when Bart cut the string and opened it, they saw what his joke meant--it contained what he liked to call “mental dinnameet.” There were a dozen copies of a book, bound in red paper covers, brilliant enough to send a man to jail for ten years in Massachusetts. Bart handled the books with loving pride, because they were published by the “Gruppo Autonomo di East Boston,” and he had helped raise the money to make the enterprise possible. “Faccia à Faccia col Nemico” was the title, “Face to Face with the Enemy.” It was a series of biographies of the anarchist martyrs, with their pictures. It was needed in this crisis, to remind the comrades how the heroes of past times had been able to withstand torture and persecution, almost as bad as the White Terror in America. Bart had taken orders for this book among the Plymouth comrades, and now he said, “I take heem queeck, I get him distriboot, never let policeman catch heem, giammai!”

XIII

Cornelia went back to Boston to raise funds for the families of the May Day victims; while Betty and Cousin Letitia went to New York, accompanied by Deborah, and with a proper amount of tears and handkerchief-waving were started on their grand tour. The Thornwell clan breathed a sigh of relief when the young madcap was actually at sea.

For the first month it seemed all right. Betty was in London. “And Mother,” she wrote, “it is quite like Boston; New England is really Old England. I look out of my hotel window and see thousands of brick buildings stained with smoke, and chimney-pots and dormer-windows through a haze--I might be looking north from Beacon Hill. I really do not see that one has to leave Boston to get culture, but I am doing what you wish. We are going to-night to study the British labor party at a big mass-meeting in Albert Hall. I am assured that the police will not club the audience as it comes out. It was kind of you not to tell Aunt Letitia too much about my ‘redness’; she is so gentle and innocent, everything is educational to her. I am going to learn a lot, and only hope you and father won’t mind if I study live people instead of dead ones.”

That was a hint of trouble; but it was nothing to what came a week later from Cousin Letitia. “Dear Cousin Deborah: We are having a most delightful time in London--I will never be able to find words to express my gratitude to you and Cousin Rupert for affording me this greatest and undreamed of opportunity--for such it was, I assure you--though perhaps in some secret corner of my soul I did cherish the dream. Betty is the dearest child, and most companionable, and tractable in every way. To add to the perfection of our happiness, who should turn up in London yesterday but dear Aunt Cornelia Thornwell! It was Betty who saw her, in the lobby of our hotel. ‘It is Grannie!’ she exclaimed; and at first I could hardly believe my eye-sight. Imagine such a coincidence--here in far-off London! Truly the world is getting smaller. She was called over here unexpectedly upon business. We have decided to go to Paris, and put off seeing London Bridge and the Tower until later.”

And then, a week after that, another letter from Betty. “I hope you and Father will not be too much annoyed by Grannie’s following us to Europe. She says she just got too lonesome and couldn’t stand it. The older generation is very stubborn, I find, and difficult to control. I will try hard to keep her out of trouble. She has letters of introduction to leading statesmen, but we are going to see the Eiffel Tower first, so as to be regular tourists. It was very good of you to leave our itinerary to our own choice, and we are availing ourselves of this freedom. Next week we leave for Buda-Pesth. There are some officials whom Grannie wishes to meet, and they may not be there long, because governments change swiftly in Europe nowadays. Cousin Letitia has read that there are very fine gypsy orchestras in Hungary, and this thrills her repressed Puritan soul. I hope you and Father will not blame this poor dear lady for anything that may go wrong with our tour, because she is really as good as gold, though too naïve to cope with the present world situation. She is invited to lunch with a prominent editor or member of the house of deputies, and it does not occur to her to ask whether he is royalist or communist. She says, ‘I suppose it is not the custom for these European men to trim their beards or their finger-nails.’ But do not worry about us, because we are learning a great deal.”

That letter alarmed Deborah, but it seemed worse yet when Rupert came home that evening and read it and told her about Hungary. There had been a Bolshevik revolution in that country, and the “officials” whom Cornelia and Betty were going to meet were no doubt some blood-thirsty “commissars,” Jews and ex-convicts who were slaughtering the men and nationalizing the women of several empires. Rupert knew all about it, because he had before him a proposition for financing the overthrow of these “officials” in the interest of European stability; he had that very day been investigating the prospects for having the bonds of a new counter-revolutionary government absorbed by the Hungarian population of New England. He had lunched with a man who had explained the details of the plan, and had prepared a schedule of the subsidies required to obtain the support of the Hungarian-American press. The world was growing more and more complicated, and the tasks of a leader of high finance made him sit up nights and study geography.

“My God,” said the tormented father, “I suppose there’s only one thing left--they’ll be going to Russia!” Which showed what a great mind he had. For two weeks later came another communication from Mistress Betty, as follows:

“I suppose you poor dears are going to be truly shocked by this news, and I am sorry, but there is no helping it. Grannie and I are leaving to-morrow for Saratov, which is in Southern Russia. It is the place where that crazy yarn about the nationalizing of women got its start, and we are going to see for ourselves. We had the extraordinary good fortune to run into a man whose head Grannie bandaged up after it was broken by the police in the Plymouth cordage strike. Now he is to take charge of the railroads in a province as big as the whole of New England, and says he has an underground way to get through the allied lines without danger. It is just like Boston here, you can do anything if you have money. It is going to be a most educational experience, and you must not worry about us. The world is changing rapidly, and nothing could be more important than to watch the new political forms in the act of evolving. When these changes come to America, somebody will have to understand them.

“Please do not worry about Cousin Letitia, who is perfectly safe and happy in Buda-Pesth. We have taken the precaution to introduce her to influential people on both sides, so she will be all right whichever comes out on top. Meantime she is handing out half loaves of bread to the starving children of war-refugees. That is charity, and she understands it. In the evenings she hears a gypsy orchestra, in company with an elderly Hungarian playwright who speaks fluent English, and has become completely absorbed in the maiden-lady from Boston. I think she is the first one he ever met, and he has the idea she will be wonderful in a play; the only trouble is that European audiences would consider it a fairy-tale. I do hope you will not blame Cousin Letitia because of Grannie. She could not possibly have the idea there is anything wrong about a grandmother. When she was in school, she was taught to admire the revolutionary leaders of New England, and now that she meets those in Europe, she finds them highly educated men.

“We only plan to stay in Russia one or two months. Grannie has promised to return in the fall, to teach a course in the causes of modern war at the labor college which will be opened in Boston if the police do not smash it. I expect to come back to Buda-Pesth and take a job with some relief organization--any one that will accept a person who has been in Russia. At present the Interallied Food Mission is refusing all aid to the starving children of Red Hungary. That is Mr. Herbert Hoover’s amiable method of bringing back the Whites, and it should earn him everlasting infamy in American and Hungarian history.

“I hope you won’t mind if I find some way to earn my own keep; there is a hard time in the relation between parents and children, when the parents have to realize that their little ones are grown up. I will continue to let Father send me money if he wants to; I will not refuse a dollar that will keep some child alive for a month. The suffering in all Eastern Europe is atrocious--I have seen sights that would make any darling of luxury grow up in a hurry. Be patient with Grannie and me, and realize that we love you all, in spite of not doing what you want; we are acting according to the dictates of our consciences, and where would New England be in history if some people had not done that?

“Affectionately your daughter, “Elizabeth.”

IV. YOUNG AMERICA…

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IV. YOUNG AMERICA

V. THE SAVING MINORITY

VI. WHITE TERROR