VII. DEPORTATION DAYS

Rupert Alvin would have worried more about his runaway daughter, if he had not had so many troubles at home to keep him occupied. It seemed as if all the devils in Puritan New England broke loose that summer of 1919. There were a couple of million soldier boys turned out of the training camps, and flotilla loads returning from France, and no jobs to go round. They took to crime, to bootlegging, to striking, to demanding bonuses, to all kinds of behavior which kept bankers lying awake at night. The war-orders, the great prop of prosperity, had been pulled from underneath, and business was like a man waking up on the morning after a celebration.

The cost of living had been going up all through the war, but now it went faster than ever; there was a shortage of everything, and nobody could live on his salary. Out in Seattle there was a general strike, almost a revolution; while close at home, in Lawrence, a strike of the mill-workers had to be put down by kidnaping the leaders and beating them insensible with brass “knucks” and blackjacks. And then, in Boston, the most incredible event of all--a strike of policemen! Of the safest “cops” in the whole of civilization, Irish-Catholics trained in humility and obedience in parochial schools especially established for the purpose! Truly, it seemed the end of Rupert Alvin’s world.

The policemen had been grumbling about their wages all through the year. Some were getting as low as ninety-two dollars a month, and how could a man keep a family on that? They grumbled about the way they were housed--many of them in that old Joy Street station, which had been built before the Civil War, and was dirty and verminous. They went on grumbling, and the authorities went on putting them off--for if you paid living wages to policemen, what would be left for politicians? In August the grumblers formed a union, and joined the American Federation of Labor. Treason and red rebellion under the very shadow of Bunker Hill monument, on the very steps of “Funnel” Hall!

There were at this time two great banking groups competing for the mastery of Boston’s affairs; like the wars of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in ancient Florence. Parker, Jones and Company, one of these concerns, stood in with the city administration, and their Democratic mayor appointed them as a committee to sit down with the leaders of the union and work out a settlement. The policemen were to get their “raise,” and everything would be polite. But they had omitted to consult Rupert Alvin and the Pilgrim National crowd; and Rupert was incensed that his dignity should thus be flouted. Also, he had religious convictions on the subject of labor unions. For policemen to organize and wring concessions by threats was a challenge to the very being of the state. If a Democratic mayor were allowed to bargain with Democratic Irish-Catholic labor leaders, and pay out the city’s money under duress, the Republican Rupert might as well retire from his job of running Massachusetts and Europe.

He consulted first with Henry Cabot Winters, as was his custom; then he got his associates together and told them his plan. Never would there be another such opportunity to teach a lesson to the forces of disorder. The policemen’s union must be broken, its leaders driven from the force, and not a man who went on strike should ever again be employed by the city. Rupert carried his point, and the heads of the Chamber of Commerce were called in and won over, and the police commissioner was summoned and told of the decision. Fortunate indeed that this official was appointed by the governor and not by the mayor, and so was a “blue-blood” and not a demagogue!

The business men of the city had rallied to defend their property. The president of Harvard had offered a thousand students, and all these volunteers were ready to go on patrol-duty the moment they were called. The policemen had given ample notice; they would strike at five forty-five o’clock on the afternoon of September ninth; and moreover they left four hundred of the old men to protect property. But it was Rupert’s plan to teach the city, and indeed the whole country, a lesson by a demonstration of what it meant for policemen to form a labor union. To that end the old policemen were kept shut up in headquarters, and the volunteers were not summoned until nine o’clock the next morning. For one whole night Boston was to be without any police protection whatever; and to make assurance doubly sure, one of the big detective agencies supplied a few men to throw bricks through the windows of department-stores and start things moving. That the plotters had actually done this was never proved, but you would meet many “blue-bloods,” familiar with the gossip of the clubs, who were certain that it had been done; and several years later, when Boston saw its leading bankers on the witness-stand in the case of Jerry Walker, and heard them lying about how they had got possession of the felt-industry of New England--then Boston was ready to believe anything about bankers!

Whoever started it, the windows were smashed, and men and boys jumped through the holes and helped themselves to what they wanted; you saw women sitting on the curb-stones, fitting themselves with expensive shoes. There were many hold-ups that night, and some rape; more horrifying yet, there were crap-games going on the Common--on the very steps of the State House with its golden dome. It is characteristic of Boston that this breach of decorum was the thing which stamped itself upon the public mind, and stands out in unwritten history. Three hundred crap-games in broad daylight--that shows you what the mob is like, and what would happen if there were no hickory clubs to hold it down!

The merchants of the city were in a panic, putting up barricades in front of their shops, arming their clerks and spending the night in a state of siege. The picture of Boston in the hands of its criminal element had gone all over the country; Boston papers had made a fearful panic, and the faithful press agencies had spread it; so Rupert’s lesson had been taught, and it was time for the city to be saved. The mayor called out some of the state militia--under an old law he had the right to call the part which belonged to Boston. He wanted to call the rest, but for this an order from the governor was needed; and here came an unexpected hitch in the program of “law and order.”

The representative of Anglo-Saxon superiority in the State House happened to be a gentleman by the name of Calvin Coolidge, whose story is one of the oddest ever invented by that Great Novelist who makes up history. A thin-lipped, tight little man, a petty lawyer and bill-collector from the western part of the state, “Cal” had got elected to the legislature, and attracted the attention of the Republican boss because he always did exactly what he was told, and never said a word that could be left unsaid. If a politician has an opinion he is bound to offend somebody; so, obviously, the wise course is to have no opinion on any subject. Strange, that no one ever thought of it before “Cautious Cal”!

The man who ran the Republican state machine through this period was a multimillionaire senator by the name of Murray Crane. He had established for his good political boys what was known as the “escalator system,” or the “Massachusetts ladder.” So long as they took orders, and kept themselves presentable to the voters, he would promote them regularly, step by step. It was a slow process, and you were old when you got to the top, but Massachusetts liked that, it is old itself. In this case, however, there developed a phenomenon known as “Coolidge luck”; as if the fates were amusing themselves by boosting this feeblest man in the state machine. Among the legislators aspiring to the state senate there existed a “rotation agreement”; there was never any competition at the primaries, each town took its turn. But the man ahead of Coolidge died, and he jumped into the place. Then, as a state senator who had never made a speech, he learned that the man in line for president of the senate had attacked woman suffrage. When the suffragists asked the views of Calvin, he shut the tightest and thinnest pair of lips in Massachusetts. The women attacked the other man and beat him at the polls, and Calvin presented his claims to the boss, and became president of the senate. Clear the way!

Next it happened that the man who was scheduled to become lieutenant-governor made the mistake of speaking in favor of prohibition. Again Calvin kept his masterly silence, and the liquor interests switched to him, and he was nominated. He served two terms as lieutenant-governor, at a time when everybody was sick of politics, and was pleased with a man who said nothing and did nothing. As a reward they made him governor; and now here was a crisis, and two big groups of bankers pulling him this way and that! There was nothing for him but physical flight, and for twenty-four hours no one connected with the government knew where the governor was to be found.

At last Rupert dug him out, on the farm of Murray Crane, who had pushed him up the escalator. They had a night session, and Calvin heard such things as never will be printed in any history-book. When the time came to call out the state guard, he did what he was told; the machine-guns went into action on Boston Common, and fired a whole volley of shots heard round the world.

As for Calvin, he waited several days, until it was evident that Rupert’s strategy had been successful; public sentiment had turned against the strikers. Then Calvin rushed forward, waving in his hand a telegram to Samuel Gompers, proclaiming in clarion tones: “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, at any time!” That was, of course, what the capitalist press wanted at the moment; the governor’s proclamation took the front page all the way from Boston to Seattle--where there had been a rival strike and a rival hero. One of these two masterful men was destined to become vice-president and then president of the United States on the basis of his heroism; while the other was destined to become a super salesman of real estate, unloading ten thousand subdivision lots upon admiring “come-ons.” Which hero was to be which was a matter of a toss-up in a hotel-room, at the tail end of a long-drawnout political convention. It may have been “Coolidge luck”--and again, it may have been the fact that the Massachusetts leaders were able to certify that here was a man who had never once expressed an opinion in twenty years of public life, and had never once questioned an order from Murray Crane, who had pushed him up the escalator.

III

This police strike cost the community three million dollars; nor did the community make it up out of policemen’s wages, because it granted to the new men more than it had refused to the old. But that was all right to Rupert Alvin. In the first place, it wasn’t his money; and in the second place, it was not a question of money, but of what he called “principle”--meaning the bankers’ right to have their way. The “mob” really had learned a lesson; there would be no more crap-shooting on the Common, and no more labor unions among public servants.

Neither Rupert nor any of his crowd reckoned the dumb resentment smoldering in the hearts of fourteen hundred men, who had thought themselves guardians of law and order, and now discovered that they were pawns in a game of power. These men had been pleading for a living for themselves and their families; they had been polite enough, humble enough--until they saw these qualities unheeded. They had served the city faithfully--some for twenty or thirty years; even the Back Bay admitted the virtues of those whom it knew. You would hear ladies of the Sewing Circle exclaim, “What do you suppose has become of that lovely policeman who used to help us across Boylston Street in front of Trinity Church? The one that got books from the library, and asked for something about the Æneid!” That story, told by the librarian, had been a tradition of the Back Bay forever after. So appropriate to Boston, to have a policeman who got books from the library, and actually appreciated the Æneid!

Cornelia Thornwell came back from Russia to find her city in a grim mood, with armed soldiers patrolling all the streets. The time for nonsense was past, the Bolshevik menace was going to be put down. The word “nonsense” included the fact that an elderly woman, once of high respectability, but now badly “cracked,” had run away from her family and spent two months in Soviet Russia. Cornelia found that no newspaper in Boston manifested interest in what she had done; none desired to tell its readers about the condition of women in that city of Saratov where the “nationalization” story had started. No, the Boston papers wanted highly flavored horrors, invented by tsarist refugees in Riga and Helsingfors and Warsaw and Bucharest and Constantinople; they would pay the tolls to have such inventions cabled, but they wanted no facts which could be got by sending a reporter to an apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill.

Privately, of course, some of the “blue-bloods” got a tremendous “kick” out of Cornelia’s story. Henry Cabot Winters came to dinner and spent a most interesting evening. Quincy Thornwell came, and loaded up with stories to tell to the guests at Mrs. Jack Gardner’s. That was gossip, and gossip has always been the privilege of good society. But when it came to public utterances--to a newspaper interview, or a speech at some meeting--that was a different matter; that was Bolshevik propaganda, undermining the bases of American civilization. The word Bolshevism had become the worst of all terms of abuse, and covered everything in the modern world you did not like. The Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce issued a pronouncement to the effect that the new prohibition amendment was a Bolshevik conspiracy!

Rupert Alvin declined to meet his mother-in-law. He might have got from her first-hand information as to the outcome of his enterprise to overthrow the communist régime in Hungary, but he would not sacrifice his dignity by admitting that Cornelia’s crazy jaunt could have even that much use. Rupert proposed to handle his mother-in-law and his daughter as he had handled the policemen’s strike. The time for nonsense was past.

Deborah came to see her mother, and listened with painful reserve while Cornelia assured her that Betty was perfectly all right, and there was no need to worry. Betty was turning into a very fine woman, the best of the lot of them; she was doing a useful work in Buda-Pesth, and was justified in ignoring her father’s cablegrams. Nor would she suffer because Rupert had cut off her funds. Her salary of thirty dollars a week was quite regal for any part of Central Europe. As for Cousin Letitia, she might become the wife of the elderly Hungarian playwright, Hubay, if the family would put up one or two thousand dollars for a “dot.” Cornelia herself had had a most instructive experience; the world was changing, and her children would have to learn, as she had learned, to adjust their minds to new ideas.

Deborah pressed her tight lips together--for she had come with a stern resolve not to wrangle with her poor distracted mother. “We have done considerable adjusting of our minds this fall,” she said. “We have seen crap-games on the Common, and machine-guns also. We have known what it feels like to lie awake all night in fear of the murderous mob.” And that was true--for Rupert had not been able to convince his wife of his complete mastery of the situation. Not even four private policemen guarding her home had sufficed. Like most of the ladies on Commonwealth Avenue, Deborah had looked under all the beds that night, and had visions of her treasures being looted and her dignified person “nationalized.”

But if the capitalist press did not care to hear about the adventures of Mrs. Josiah Quincy Thornwell in Russia, rest assured that there were plenty of socialists, communists and anarchists who did. Cornelia was besought to come and talk to this group and that; she was urged to write down what she had seen, and let it be printed in a pamphlet; and when she consented, it meant that she had definitely committed herself as a “Red,” and was listed in the card-files of the Department of Justice as an active Bolshevist. In the month of November “red headquarters” in Boston was raided, with much uproar, and everybody in it arrested and “held for deportation.” Among the truckloads of literature confiscated were some of Cornelia’s; and although Rupert was able to keep it out of the papers, he brought the story home to the horrified family, and Deborah conveyed to her mother the warning that she stood within the shadow of arrest, and that her family’s influence would not again be used in her behalf.

Vanzetti spent an evening in the little apartment, and heard all that Cornelia had to tell, and asked a hundred questions, and carried her answers to the “gruppo” in Plymouth and the “clooba” in East Boston. There were fierce debates going on among the anarchists as to the attitude they should take to the rapidly spreading soviet movement. Some were disposed to weaken in their anti-state principles. Government was a bad thing, so long as it was an instrument for suppressing workers; but when it became an instrument for suppressing counter-revolution, then it was no longer so easy to decide. But “individualistas” like Vanzetti stood immovable, and as a result, many of them were in trouble in Russia; some had been shot, and others were in jail. So Vanzetti hated the Russian government as much as he hated the American, and was grieved by any good word that Cornelia had to say about it.

A very confusing situation! However, Cornelia had been watching the radical movement for four years now, and could talk the language of the different groups, and understand their reactions. That was more than the capitalist press could do, or the police, or the department of justice agents, or the courts, or any others who had the public ear in this crisis.

The job of “mopping up” the Reds was on in earnest. Congress had appropriated a couple of million dollars--which is the way to make things happen in America. All the big detective agencies were feeding at the trough, and the card-file of suspects now counted a total of two hundred thousand names--so the Attorney-General told a committee of Congress. This gentleman, oddly enough, was a Quaker, and under the combined banners of William Penn and Jesus Christ was instituting a campaign of wholesale terror, the like of which had not been known in America since the Iroquois Indians had been routed from upper New York state.

The prisoners taken in the November raids, together with a number of anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were loaded onto an old government transport, the “Buford,” and on the twenty-first of December this vessel, known to the newspapers as the “Soviet Ark,” set forth for Russia. It was a beginning of the program recommended by all patriotic orators, “If they don’t like this country, let them go back where they came from.” Here and there you found one even more ardent--such as the statesman who said that he “would send them in a ship of stone with sails of lead”! Such was the “Christmas spirit,” as manifested in America a year after the ending of the war to end war!

“Dear Nonna,” wrote Vanzetti from Plymouth, “come to see us little bit for Christmas. All Italian anarchista is unhappy and fear will come truble for us after finish Russian. Is no more Cronaca, and no leader in New England since Galleani is deport. Would be good have you come for letting us know one American lady understand worker and is not afraid for speaking. Vincenzo got bottle good Dago Red in cellar, it is not prohibitioned, for was there before. Trando has learn new melody by violin, it is ‘When you and I were young, Maggie.’ Fay is putting corns on string for decorate, it is word not in book, but is white corns which produces noise on stove. Alfonsina is working now by cordage and I have expection of much business for Christmas, it is time for all Italian eating eel and I have order for barrel of living to be deliver from Boston. Your esteeming friend, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.”

Christmas Day was on Friday, and Cornelia wrote that she could not come on that day, but would come Saturday morning and stay over Sunday. Not all the witch-hunts in New England could keep the Thornwell family from inviting her on Christmas Day, and from having their feelings hurt if she failed to appear. Clara, who had a monopoly on young children, was naturally the hostess, and “Hillview” the place. It was one of those great family reunions, when the clan say by their presence those things which are never said in words. Three faces were missing since last Christmas. Ahab would never be seen again; the spine of Great-aunt Priscilla had become solidified to such an extent that not all the pride in New England could bring her to a Christmas party; and Betty was in Buda-Pesth, handing out loaves of bread to the children of war-refugees.

“Hillview” was much changed from the day, now four and a half years past, when Cornelia had run away from it. James had kept his promise to leave the old part intact, but he had put on a monstrous new building in the rear, for the eight young ones and their numerous nurses and governesses and servants, as well as for guests--it was a luxurious hotel. The children were all over the place, racing about, shouting, bumping their heads on the hardwood floors, tramping nuts and raisins into priceless rugs, smearing chocolate candy on white brocaded upholstery. Christmas came but once a year, and one must not find fault; one must exchange sticky kisses, and admire a tree so tall that it went up to the second story, standing in the curve of the winding stairway. It shone with a myriad little lights, red, blue, green and yellow, and was piled around with enormous quantities of expensive toys, really marvels of ingenuity and workmanship, all of which would be broken and thrown on the junk-pile, or forgotten in the attic a month from now.

Also there were the grown-ups to be greeted: Clara, rounder than ever, lamenting that no arts of any specialist helped to reduce her; James, solid and matter-of-fact, expanding with his vast prosperity, and with the importance of himself as host. Not for a million dollars would he have said it in words, but his manner made clear that “Hillview” was no longer “Thornwell,” it was “Scatterbridge.” Deborah, stately in a creation of purple velvet; Rupert, with complexion to match his wife’s dress, and a manner of impeccable cordiality to Cornelia, as if such a thing as a quarrel with a mother-in-law had never been heard of in Boston. Alice Thornwell Winters, whose elegance and grace paid no tribute to the passing years; Henry Cabot Winters, dapper and genial; their son, Josiah, still growing length ways, and pale--perhaps from overstudy, as his fond mother said, perhaps from what the savage Betty described as “woman-chasing.” Also there was Deborah’s older daughter, Priscilla, tall and dignified; it had been four years and more since she had raped the rug, and the crime was forgotten.

Not a word about Betty, nor anything else to humiliate Cornelia, or to remind her of her fall from grace. Unless you count Great-uncle Abner, poring over the Transcript, and commenting on a wireless dispatch from the “Soviet Ark,” now four days at sea. “Says it’s stormy, and the passengers are seasick.” The deaf man’s voice of Abner boomed from the library and filled all downstairs. “Well, I’d cure their seasickness if I had my way!”

“They say there’s no cure for it known!” shouted Abner’s son, Quincy.

“No cure?” Abner’s voice broke into a hoot. “I can tell them a cure--dump the two hundred and forty-nine beggars overboard, and they’ll be cured in a couple of minutes!”

There was a pause while the old man turned over the paper. When he broke loose again, it was the “crime wave,” unfailing topic at all New England gatherings. “Country going clean to the dogs! See that story about the holdup in Bridgewater yesterday? Coming to a fine pass when a shoe-company can’t bring its payroll from the bank without having shot-gun battles in the middle of the street! Read that?”

“Yes, I read it,” said Quincy.

“Right out in the middle of Broad Street, corner of Hale--you know the place?”

“I know it.”

“Big wide street, trees on both sides, trolley-car down the middle. And, by jingo, if two bandits in an automobile don’t pop out and open fire on the pay-truck, just after daylight, half-past seven yesterday morning! Transcript says the police have no clew to the bandits. Wonder what police are for!”

“To go on strike, father.”

“It’s these foreigners!” And Uncle Abner leaned closer to his son’s ear, which was not in the least deaf. “Infernal foreigners we’ve let come in and ruin the country! Sixty years I kept telling it to Josiah--ought to have stopped them. First Irish, then Jews, then Dagoes, then Hunkies, then God knows what. They’ve taken the country from us--the old stock might as well move out, they steal everything we’ve got. Ought to take every steamer that brought ’em over and make ’em take ’em back free, that’s what I say!”

Did Uncle Abner know that Cornelia was in the music-room with the children, and hearing every word he shouted? Maybe so, for he was a shrewd old rascal, and you’re only supposed to be polite when you know it. “Ought to ship ’em back where they came from, and all those sentimentalists that encourage ’em go along!”

Cornelia left the palace of Thornwell-Scatterbridge, and went to the humble tenement in North Plymouth. Here too was Christmas, but on a minor scale. The tree was not quite up to Cornelia’s shoulder, and the decorations were half a dozen red and yellow baubles, two for five cents at the grocery-store, a few strands of tinsel, some red ribbon off a package Cornelia had sent, and finally, long strings of snow-white “corns,” with three pairs of small-sized but ravenous jaws waiting until Cornelia should have seen the spectacle before commencing the work of destruction. The presents, ranged under the tree for her inspection, were few and cheap--with the single exception of three fine story-books which had come from Boston. They were now set up conspicuously, and three children clamored their happy thanks.

The Brinis had long ago found out who Cornelia was; they knew that she came from a great rich family; yet not all the cruel “class consciousness” in the world could weaken their trust in her. It seemed to Cornelia that this offered some hint of how to avoid the stresses of the war between capital and labor; also for the bitter strife between the old Yankees and the new foreigners, and for the “crime wave,” and many other troubles of the time. But when she told that theory to her friends of the great world, they called it “sentimental,” and went on with their wiser and more practical plan of jailing and deporting and killing. Also most of the so-called “class-conscious” revolutionists would have agreed that Cornelia’s program was “sentimental”; so apparently the jailing and deporting and killing had to continue.

They had a grand supper that Saturday night. Alfonsina had made bean-soup, which Vanzetti was “crazy about”--he admitted it; and budino, a kind of custard pudding, and tortellini, a dish of meat cooked in noodles. Vanzetti was a vegetarian on principle, because he thought it wicked to kill animals for food; but once in a while he fell from grace, and the occasion was apt to be tortellini. The animal was already dead, said Trando; but Bart would not permit that sophistry--when we ate meat, he said, we caused another animal somewhere to be killed, it was the law of supply and demand. He spoke of animals as his “fellow creatures,” and this gave the children great glee; they would bring home a crab, or perhaps a big spider, and refer to it as “Bart’s fellow creature.” But that did not trouble the philosopher; he made it the occasion for a lecture on the wonders of nature. All these strange beings did really have a life like us, at least the beginnings of it; each one knew all the things it needed to know in order to take care of itself--and many a man was not so wise.

Vincenzo had given his wife a tiny glass bowl with three gold-fish for a Christmas present; and this stood now on a table in the little parlor, by the window, where the light shone through it. Bart was fascinated by these creatures, he would stand watching them literally for an hour at a time. He was wondering what it was like to be a gold-fish. If you dropped a bit of food into the bowl, the fish would know it and take it into their mouths; if it was not the right food, they would spit it out again. What told them that? What had taught them not to flee from a man’s hand--though fish in the wild state would do so? Did the fish know that man existed, and what did they think about him? Strange questions one could ask about life!

Trando got out his violin, and played “When you and I were young, Maggie.” So many sweet songs made you sad! The little boy played it several times, and Bart hummed the words which the children had taught him. A wonderful act of creation, making a melody out of the chaos of all the scratchings that were possible on four violin strings! The Brinis were so proud, something fine was coming out of their lives, something better than “working by cordage” all your life, better than “living like pigs,” as the Yankees phrased it.

“Some day maybe we get piano,” said Bart. “Fay she learn play, we have grand music.”

“Oh, yes, we’ll get a piano!” said Trando, and added, in school-boy dialect, “I don’t think!” He was twelve years old now, and America was teaching him to be a little “fresh” at times. “It’ll be like that horse you were going to get me!” He explained to Cornelia, “He promised me a horse to drive the day before Christmas. He had a barrel of eels to deliver, and I was to help him, and for two weeks he was telling me I’d have a horse and wagon, and I didn’t think about nothing else all the time. But when the day come it was the same old push-cart.”

“It is baker got horse and wagon,” explained Bart. “He promise for rent heem one day, but then he cannot, so must pusha da cart. Trando he see--what you call it, visione--heemself sit in seat, make noise with whip, ‘Gittup!’--granda gentleman, all little Italian girl come look, say what is this, something wonderfool! But instead to crack whip, he musta carry basket with package eel. He is little scare, for eel he is live and make move--what you say?”

“Wiggle,” put in Fay.

“Mooch wiggle!” said Bart. “Little boy tink maybe he come out from paper, make bite!”

“No, I wasn’t scared,” said Trando, “but I knew they were my fellow creatures and I didn’t like to have them killed.” They all laughed--even Vincenzo, who did not understand jokes in English. Bart, with his vegetarian scruples, was hard put to it to justify his conduct in having a barrel of his living fellow creatures shipped to him by express, and turning them over to the murderous fury of two score Italian housewives, who had skinned them alive and put them in salt for the next day’s feast, as much a tradition with the Italians as turkey in all Yankee homes.

VII

Sunday morning they went for a walk--on the street, because the woods were full of snow. Coming home, Vanzetti bought a Boston newspaper, because he wanted to know what was happening in Italy. Cornelia read him a brief item, how the Italian workers were forming shop-councils, preparing to take over industry from the capitalists. They talked about this, and how it would happen in different countries. Vanzetti had made a speech in a hall in Plymouth. “I force-èd be spikker,” he explained, because the man who was supposed to be “spikker” had such wrong ideas. Bart knew that any one who discussed anarchist ideals in public in these critical days ran risk of arrest, and of deportation or worse. But he would not be silenced, and Cornelia knew that he would not, and did not even suggest it. “Anarchista musta make propaganda!”

The children had got hold of the comic supplement, and were devouring it, laughing over the jokes and explaining them to their mother. This humor dealt with incipient young criminals, who perpetrated every indignity upon their elders. And meantime the elders were reading about the product of a previous decade of comic papers--the “crime wave” and its latest manifestations. There was more news about the Bridgewater hold-up, which Cornelia had heard Abner Thornwell discussing. Bridgewater was only twenty-two miles from Plymouth, and in the same county, so the attempted robbery had been much talked about. Now the shoe-company was offering a thousand dollars’ reward for the bandits, and Vanzetti remarked, “You offer plenty money, you catch plenty feller. Is always polissmen, witness, for swear poor feller in jail.”

He went on to say, how stupid for people to be surprised by the crime wave. “You send million feller to Europe, you put heem in army, give gun, teach heem keell; you bring heem back, he go home, find some odder feller got his job, got his girl; he look for job, cannot find, he is hungry--you think he don’t steal? Is foolish for not onderstand, is people do not want onderstand.”

“You think the cause of crime is always economic?”

“Shoore, Nonna, I not think all men alike. Some men is strong, is got what you call--carattere--”

“Character.”

“He will not do crime, he will die before do crime. But nodder man, he is weak, is too much tempt, he sees friend do crime, get plenty money, he try sometime, maybe get caught, he go jail. Is worst place for make criminal, is jail, is like school, learn how to do it. You go like me, Nonna, you work one job, work nodder job, meet onderd, meet thousand worker, you meet plenty young criminal, young feller vanaglorioso for what he do, think he is smart feller; I hear heem talk, I know what is make crime wave. Is great reech men, spend beeg money--automobile, gooda dress, fine lady--what you say, lusso--luxury. Poor feller, he look, he like to live sooch life, have plenty money, plenty girl. He say, ‘How come it reech man he get it, how come in bég-ginnin’”--Bart accented the word on the first syllable--“how come in bég-ginnin’ he make the money? Is reecha man honest? Is it sistema honest? He see everywhere beeg thief get plenty money, not ever punish. He see, you steal thousand dollar, you call-èd bandit, you steal million dollar, you call-èd banker. Is it not true, Nonna?”

Cornelia thought of Jerry Walker and his felt-plants. “It is sometimes true, Bart.”

“All right, is injoostice. So long you have injoostice, is crime; more injoostice, more crime. Is like something you make in chimica--it come all time the same way. But reech man he not like to hear sooch thing, is better for heem call bad name, make polissman, put heem in blue clothe, give heem big cloob, send heem out to hit poor feller on head, put heem in jail. Big crime come, all right, get more polissman, make thousand dollar what you call it--reward--get plenty stool-pigeon, you onderstand?”

“Yes, I know what you mean.”

“Is always rotten feller, swear anything for money, send somebody to jail. All polissman want is catch somebody, all newspaper want is catch somebody, fill up jail, so reecha man is happy, is what you call law and order. You wait, Nonna, you see--thousand dollar will make sure--catch plenty Bridgewater bandit!”

Strange and awful are the fates that dispose of mortals--leading us blindfolded through curtains of black fog. How could it happen that Bart could speak such words, and no shaft of lightning split the fog, no warning finger pierce the curtain, no voice shout in thunder-tones, “You! You! You!” They sat chatting casually, criticizing each other’s theories; the children laughed, bringing them pictures of the Goofy Googles; Alfonsina washed the dinner dishes, and Vincenzo, not being able to share in the argument, fell asleep in his chair; the gold-fish wiggled their silken-filmy tails, and the Powers that sent the universe on its course, benevolent or heedless, omniscient or omninescient, sent no smallest hint of the fact that Bartolomeo Vanzetti was himself that “poor feller” whom the thousand-dollar reward was to bring down for the Bridgewater crime!

VIII

Cornelia went back to Boston, and found a letter from Betty:

“I have been having so many adventures, I hardly know where to start telling. I have been experiencing very eloquent and romantic love-making from one of the sons of ‘Archie.’ That is our nickname for the Austrian arch-duke who came in with the Roumanian armies and put himself on the throne, to the great dismay of the allies. This son is tall and somber and splendidly-idle. I can understand how it is that American husbands are found unsatisfactory. I try to imagine Father or Uncle James making such speeches! He pays endless compliments in carefully perfected English; but the trouble is he doesn’t really know me at all. He is content that I am the daughter of a rich American banker; he doesn’t guess my political opinions, and I dare not tell him, because I might lose my job! But it will be a good thing for His Highness to have his self-assurance reduced. He says that American girls are made of marble, and I smile and tell him it is his first contact with a social equal. Then I have to explain about the Back Bay!

“Also there is an undersecretary at the legation who is eating his heart out over me. He is quite different, rather tongue-tied, but serious, I fear. He comes from the middle west, and doesn’t really know me either--though of course it is possible for him to understand how I can be virtuous though unchaperoned. I am also causing misery to a young lady of our mission, who is in love with the undersecretary. Apparently not all the troubles in Europe are enough to keep people from entanglements of the heart. I think it is rather the contrary, the general disorganization upsets everybody, and leaves the fancy roaming.

“While I am on the subject, I might mention that I was violently besieged by one of the Bolshevik agents before he took flight to Switzerland disguised as a chauffeur. He told me I was not truly a free woman at all, but a wretched little Puritan that would dry up and blow away at an early age. I showed him Cousin Letitia, who is still capable of being thrilled, but not of being seduced, even by the elderly playwright Hubay. There is something inside our marrow-bones, deeper than we realize, and stronger than our ideas. Roger Lowell would be surprised to hear that about me! Anyhow, I am sure there will be no love-affairs for me until I get back to America; it would be like a romance in a morgue.

“The suffering here is dreadful beyond words. I suppose you get news in the papers, but probably not true, because everything is propaganda for somebody or something. It really was the charitable Mr. Hoover who overthrew the Reds here in Hungary. I don’t know if it is published at home, but here all his aides are proud of it, and tell the details and boast. We are managed by a California lawyer, one of Herbert’s intimate friends, and they not merely blockaded and boycotted Red Hungary, but they bought some of the labor leaders to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

“It has been like a kaleidescope; you never know when you wake up in the morning who is governing you--till you get to the office and hear what happened during the night. The Reds went out, and then came the Roumanian army with ‘Archie,’ and we had to drive him out and get a White régime--which is rapidly turning into a dictatorship. Those poor fool labor-leaders who let themselves be used to turn out the Reds have mostly been shot or had their skulls cracked, and I wonder what our noble-minded Herbert thinks about it. There ought to be some way to make the White gentlemen come sit in the pools of blood, as we relief-workers have to do.

“It has taught me my lesson; ‘law and order’ talk will never fool me again. It really seems as if our master-minds want to teach labor that there can be no middle course, and no honesty or decency in the class struggle. The Reds here fell because they were too gentle, and let their enemies plot against them. The Russians made a clean sweep, so they survive. And don’t let any one fool you about the amount of killing they did; don’t let any one frighten you with talk about the ‘mob.’ From this time on I take the dear ‘mob’ to my heart; I am only afraid of dashing young gentlemen in gaudy uniforms, and elderly diplomats and business men in dinner-jackets. There isn’t a country in Central Europe where the Whites haven’t killed ten for every one the Reds have killed, and in many cases it has been a hundred for one.

“And the worst is, Grannie, these White dictatorships are all American-made--with guns and uniforms from our army and dollars from our bankers. They have got an American loan here in Hungary, and I am wondering if father is in on it. He probably won’t tell you, but ask Uncle Quincy--he knows. If it’s true, I’ll never take another dollar from Father--and I’ll tell him so.

“Dear Grannie, do please take care of yourself, because if anything were to happen to you, what would I do, with not a soul to understand me? Sometimes I get frightened, and get alone in my room and have a good cry; because, after all, it is absurd to think that a girl not yet twenty-one should know more than all her family put together. You know what Great-aunt Priscilla says, so very calmly: ‘You will be wiser when you are older.’

“Maybe the ‘antis’ were right, Grannie--women are not meant to meddle in politics! Maybe we ought to stay at home and look after the babies, like Aunt Clara. But when we get the babies raised, the old men step in and send them off to the battle-field, so what’s the use? I go over and over it in my mind, and the only conclusion is that this generation of girls must go on strike, and refuse to have babies until the men stop killing. So I shall stick it out, and when I come back the family will find me worse than ever. I suppose you are having troubles enough at home; tell me all, but write as if I did not agree with your ideas. I have a way of getting this letter smuggled out, but your letters to me may be opened, and I don’t want to lose my job quite yet.”

Yes, Cornelia had her troubles. The day after New Year’s there burst upon Boston and the whole country a storm known as the deportations delirium. To the Quaker Attorney-General had come a brilliant idea; he would win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, upon the basis of his heroic services in deporting the Reds. The two million dollars which Congress had voted him would be turned into a campaign fund for the glory of Jesus Christ and William Penn.

The ingenious Quaker arranged to lure his victims into public meetings, and have the police appear suddenly and bar the doors, and sort out all the foreign ones, and load them into patrol wagons. The problem of getting the Reds all over the country to come to meetings on the same night was comparatively simple, because the government had put so many spies into the radical organizations that they had elected themselves to office, and were in position to call meetings whenever they pleased. Also they had been able to vote resolutions and adopt manifestos of such violence as to make the deportations legally possible. As Federal Judge Anderson of Boston said when the facts came out in his court: “It is perfectly clear on the evidence before me that the Government owned and operated a part, at least, of the Communist Party.” It was one time when all business men believed in government ownership!

The raids were scheduled for the night of January second, 1920, and netted some four thousand prisoners. Twenty cities and towns in New England contributed a thousand--including thirty-nine who had met for the purpose of organizing a cooperative bakery. The prisoners were lined up against the walls of police-stations, searched and beaten by detectives, denied counsel, denied reliable translators, and sentenced on the spot by officials of the Department of Immigration. They were loaded into vans and taken to the immigration station in Boston, and thence to Deer Island prison. In order to make the utmost possible amount of campaign material for the Quaker Attorney-General, the victims were chained together in pairs, and paraded down State Street, past the old State House, and over the rings of cobble-stones that mark the site of the Boston Massacre. Such a novelty brought newspaper photographers in swarms, and the story stayed on the front page for several days. Never such advertising for a presidential candidate.

Also the Department of Justice agents saw to it that good reading matter was supplied for the pictures. Four bombs had been found at one meeting, said the report; they were taken to a police station and put into a pail of water--and apparently dissolved in the water, for they were never heard of in court. Among the organizations raided was an amateur dramatic society, which had rented some old guns for use in a play; so the newspapers reported a “red arsenal.” Apart from stage properties, the police acquired a total of four firearms: this by a search of four thousand persons, and raiding their homes and breaking into their trunks. Apparently they had selected for deportation the least military group of individuals in America.

Here were the troubles for Cornelia Thornwell. Four hundred men and women jammed into cells in Deer Island prison, with broken window-panes in the midst of New England winter, with no blankets, no mattresses, and no adequate toilet facilities. Husbands torn from wives, mothers separated from their babies--and all held according to the genial Spanish custom known as “incommunicado,” denied lawyers, denied any information as to their fate. One woman, attending a meeting with her little girl, had been dragged to jail, and the child left to wander alone through the streets of Boston all that January night. One man flung himself over a railing five stories above the ground, and dashed out his brains in sight of the rest of the prisoners. Another went insane, and several others were on the verge. And concerning all this mass of misery no mention in the newspapers, and vilification for any one who dared to protest.

So Cornelia must sit at the telephone for hours, and argue and plead with her friends, and rush off to committee meetings, and get a stenographer and dictate letters, and pay for long telegrams to congressmen and senators and officials in Washington and New York. She must besiege club-women, and plead for opportunities to speak. She must meet newspaper reporters and give long interviews which never saw the light. She must haunt the doors of officials, and waylay them on the street when they would not see her. She must start a subscription list, and go round like a Salvation Army “lassie,” irritating bankers and lawyers and merchants, and their wives and daughters in the Sewing Circle, abusing her social position in shameless fashion to get at people, and tell them such harrowing stories that they would put up good Brahmin money to buy blankets for Bolsheviks, and milk for starving babies whose mothers and fathers had committed the crime of belonging to political parties owned and operated by the Department of Justice.

And this no job of a few days, but of months. The Quaker presidential candidate was slow to realize that he could not produce evidence against eighty per cent of all those he had seized. In Boston, through an unfortunate oversight, there was a Federal judge who believed that law-enforcers ought to obey the laws they enforced. He declared from the bench that a mob was a mob, even when it was made up of Department of Justice agents. He would issue writs for one prisoner after another, and when the prisoner was able to prove that he was an American citizen, or that he hadn’t actually joined the Department of Justice party, the victim would be turned loose. But all that took time--and meanwhile there were a thousand or two children to be fed, and as many falsehoods to be refuted, and only a small group of rebel ladies to do it.

Almost every Sunday during that winter Vanzetti came up to Boston. He was doing well with his fish-peddling, and in between times shoveling snow or cutting ice, so he had money for the trip and for propaganda. In the midst of all this repression he had made up his mind that the anarchistas must have a paper, and he was raising the seven hundred and fifty dollars needed to buy a linotype machine; he had even written a couple of articles to appear in the new paper, and was working hard to “culture himself,” studying both Italian and English. He came to have supper with Cornelia one evening, and when she ventured to point out the dangers of his course, he answered that you could never accomplish anything if you quit in times of danger. The times of accomplishment were bound to be times of danger--trust the capitalistas for that.

Many of the Galleani group had been deported; Coacci had been arrested--one of those two men who had brought a package of books to Bart--Cornelia had met him. The gruppo had raised a thousand dollars’ bail for him, and now he was under sentence of deportation. Also Nick Sacco was making his plans to take his family back to Italy. Great events were coming this next summer--perhaps the real revolution--and Nick as a man of action wanted to be there.

Yes, it would not be bad to be sent to Italy just now; but alas, you didn’t always get there! Bart told the terrible story of Compagno Marucco, who had been put on a steamer and never heard of again. All the anarchistas believed he had been pushed overboard on the way, because he had detected some of the government spies working among the group. Another man had hanged himself in his cell; had he really done that, or had somebody done it for him? You needed nerves of steel to go on with propaganda in the midst of events like that!

Bart talked about the spies. One had been exposed by Carlo Tresca in New York: Ravarini, who had posed as an anarchista for many months, one of the violent kind, a follower of Ravachol. One of his plans had been to revive “La Cronaco Sovversiva”; he had offered to get the money, and had suggested Bart for editor. But Bart had been too modest, he did not consider himself a well enough educated man.

This Ravarini had been seeking to fasten the bombings onto the Galleani group; for the government agents had apparently convinced themselves that this group was guilty. Bart discussed the idea, and he said there was no such great nonsense in the whole world. He pointed out what had happened--the police had arrested hundreds of anarchistas, and searched their homes, and had never found a bomb, nor anything having to do with a bomb. Some day the truth would come out--the guilt lay with detective agents, “feller get rich by hunting anarchista.”

“You think they would kill innocent people?” asked Cornelia.

“Is not many people keell-èd, Nonna! Bombe blow up little piece of house, sometime when people is out, or sleep upstair and not get hurted. You want keell somebody, is not sooch difficultee, plenty people keell-èd all time, plenty Italian keell you cheap--what you call it, black hand. I know sooch feller, plenty, hear heem talk in café, vanaglorioso for what he do. He say, ‘No sooch great keeller in whole state Massachusetts; nobody shoot so queeck, so straight.’ You pay heem onderd dollar, next night your nemico he die. What for make big bombe, big noise?”

“But they sent bombs by mail, Bart!”

“Shoore, send mail--but he not put on stamp enough--the mail do not go! What follia, Nonna! Think, amica mia, how easy to find out what is postage! You not need take bombe to post-office, no sooch reesk--no, you go any post-office, any town, you say, what postage for take five pound, ten pound, twenty pound, what you like to send. You say, got package for New York, for Chicago, any place. You not go self, send odder man, send child, you get stamp, million people buy stamp. But see, Nonna--anarchista is sooch fool, he get dinnameet, he pay money, make twenty bombe, get address, send to this man, to odder man, send to Boston, New York, Lawrence, Passaic, all place--but not got sense for finding out ow mooch stamp! Is crazy thing, Nonna, is imbecillità!”

“You think government agents did it?”

“Not go-vérnment, but what you call private agent--big feller, make million dollar. He make big scare, Congress vote money, big banker get bad fright, he spend money, he say, you sava my life, you catch anarchista, you put heem in jail, so he not blow up the bank, he not keell me. Look, amica mia, you read paper, you see this morning, big banker make--what you call--notizia--avviso--”

“Advertisement.”

“Avvertisament, whole page, scare people, say polissman must catch the red, the bomber, the anarchista, musta deport, must put in jail. Is patriottismo, militarismo--you see in paper?”

Yes, Cornelia had seen it, and not for the first time; it had become quite the fashion for groups of leading citizens, bankers, merchants, the Chamber of Commerce or other civic groups, to publish full-page advertisements warning the public of the imminent danger of red riot and insurrection. “Yes, I read it,” she told Bart--but was ashamed to add that among the signers that morning was Rupert Alvin, her son-in-law, and John Quincy Thornwell, her nephew-in-law!

Almost a year had passed since the mailing of those “May Day bombs,” and still the police had not succeeded in catching any of the senders; so naturally there was dissatisfaction on the part of patriots. What was the purpose of a huge secret service agency, built up at enormous expense? The loyal newspaper publishers forbore to express impatience in print, but privately they were outraged. A first-class red scare meant millions in increased sales, but how could the most ingenious editors and reporters keep excitement alive without a few facts?

The Department of Justice had one set of clews. A bomb had blown out the front of the home of the Attorney-General, the Quaker gentleman who was planning to move to the White House, and the man who carried this bomb had apparently himself been blown up. The authorities claimed to have identified the fragments as belonging to an Italian anarchist by the name of Valdinoci, one of the Galleani group. He had worn sandals, and in his pockets had been some leaflets in crude English, proclaiming anarchist ideas. The purpose for which the spy Ravarini had been set to work was to find the printing office in which this circular had been set up.

Ravarini sent contributions of money to Malatesta in Italy, and got letters from him, and then appeared among the comrades in Boston and New York, a very ardent Red, with literature to be printed, and precise ideas as to how it was to look. He would hang about an anarchist print-shop for several weeks, and have his stuff set up many times, or would come and set it up for himself. In this way he tried all the type in several printing offices; and at last in a shop in Brooklyn he found, or claimed to find, what the Department of Justice believed was the type from which the Valdinoci leaflets had been printed. It was the office of an anarchist paper called Il Domani--“To-morrow”--and the printers of this paper, two Italians by the name of Salsedo and Elia, were arrested and taken to the offices of the Department of Justice in the Park Row Building in lower New York.

The genial custom of holding prisoners without allowing them to communicate with their friends or even with an attorney is one for which we have neglected to invent an American name. But for the custom of torturing prisoners to make them confess, we have our jolly slang, “the third degree,” and all judges and lawyers in America know that it is employed, and all pretend not to know it, and when evidence obtained by torture is produced in court, all judges and lawyers solemnly accept it, and at the same time go on believing in the constitutional rights of accused men. It is obvious that in no other way can the system of inequality of property be maintained, and any one who denounces the “third degree” is liable to suspicion of “redness.”

Salsedo and Elia were held for three weeks in the Department of Justice offices with no warrant of law. At last Salsedo succeeded in smuggling out a letter to Vanzetti, who took it to the anarchist group in Boston. They knew without being told that the two men were being tortured, for the purpose of forcing them to implicate other anarchists in bombing plots. On Sunday, April 25th, there was a meeting of the group and it was decided that somebody must go to New York to consult with the comrades there and see what could be done for the victims. The choice fell upon Vanzetti, and he went, and called upon Carlo Tresca, editor of Il Martello, whom he had never seen before. “Don’t you know me, Carlo?” he said, gently. “I am Vanzetti.” He had been sending in collections for the support of the paper, and occasionally writing articles. Tresca embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, Italian fashion.

The two of them set out down the street: Vanzetti no small man, but outtowered by his companion, whom the strike-police used to call “the bull.” In Mesaba, where the Back Bay families of Boston were holding onto their hills of copper, they framed him for first degree murder, and kept him in jail for nine months. They put three bullets into him, at different times. One side of his face was disfigured, and during the Paterson strike a newspaper published his picture with the caption, “Who Will Be a Good Citizen and Make the Two Sides of This Face Alike?” Seven times they arrested him during this desperate strike of the silk-workers. Now the Department of Justice was anxious to get him again, and was soon to do it--for the crime of demoralizing Italian Catholic women by a two-line advertisement of a pamphlet on birth control!

Carlo and Bart were going to see an Italian lawyer who had been hired to help Salsedo and Elia; he had offices directly underneath the Department of Justice rooms--an arrangement that Carlo found suspicious. But it was a problem how to change, because Carlo could not get to the prisoners, and Salsedo’s wife had been so terrified by the detectives that she did not know what to do. They saw the lawyer, and Carlo wrote a note for the prisoners, and the lawyer took it upstairs, and came back and reported that Elia had refused to read it, and Salsedo was “getting crazy” and would not answer any questions. This confirmed their worst fears, so they consulted an American lawyer, connected with the Civil Liberties Union, who agreed to seek an interview. Bart said he would go back to Boston and send fifty dollars of his own money, and raise more to pay the lawyer.

There was one other thing Bart wanted to do in New York--to see the Statue of Liberty. He had missed the sight when he had come to this country, because his steamer had arrived in a fog. And while it was true that America was not living up to this statue, still it was a world symbol of the cause to which Bart was dedicating his life. But they were too late for the boat which goes out to Bedloe’s Island, and Bart was so much disappointed he almost had tears in his eyes. “All the years I have wanted to see it!” he said to Carlo.

XII

The day Vanzetti went to New York Cornelia spent packing two trunks. There had come a quite amazing telegram from Betty in Vienna: “Letitia married Hubay my color discovered job flooey tired need recreation come immediately positively summer Italian lake reply Hotel Royal.” Cornelia called up Deborah, and first read the message and then translated it; and after Deborah had voiced indignation at the treason of a poor relation, and horror at the idea of her daughter unchaperoned in a center of notorious gayety, she asked what Cornelia was going to do, and actually hinted for her to join Betty. So much had four years of defeat tamed the family!

Cornelia had been exerting herself beyond her strength. She was sixty-five years old now--as her daughters never failed to remind her--and for four months she had not rested a day. A summer on an Italian lake with Betty for company sounded very good, and she said she would go, and Deborah undertook to have her husband use his influence to get some kind of special passport immediately, and to engage passage on a steamer, and even pay for it. Cornelia and Betty would be taken back into the family again, and have the services of all-powerful males to make smooth their paths in whatever part of the world they chose to roam.

The Floritania was to sail from New York on Saturday afternoon, and on Friday morning Vanzetti telephoned to Cornelia, still in Boston. He had just arrived from New York and wanted to tell her the news. She asked him to lunch with her, and heard from his lips the terrible story of Salsedo and Elia. She knew the former of these two men, who had worked as a printer in Boston, and had come to the “picanics”: a frail little fellow, suffering from tuberculosis--“he very bad now,” said Bart; “wife she think they keell heem.” Bart had been to the savings-bank that morning and drawn out fifty dollars and sent it to Carlo, according to his promise; and Cornelia said she also would contribute fifty, and wrote a check. She felt quite rich that day, having several of Rupert’s handsome and impressive bank-drafts.

It seemed a shame to be going away for a holiday in a crisis like this. But Bart said instantly that Cornelia must not think of it; he agreed with her daughters that she was an old lady, and needed a rest, and nothing should interrupt it. He talked about the Italian lakes, not very far from where he had been born. “Sooch lovely countree! Gooda people, work hard, live simple, naturale. You be happy, live outdoor, walk in wood, pick little flower, send to me. I pick you mayflower, send heem in letter.” Then he added, “Maybe I come, we take little boat in Italian lake, Comrade Betty she sing little song! I think I like be deport!”

“Take care of yourself, Bart!” said Cornelia. “If you want to come, pay your fare, so then you can return.”

Bart laughed, and made his usual answer: “Anarchista musta make propaganda!” She learned that even in the midst of these perils he was organizing meetings and distributing literature. He was working with that Italian, Boda--“you know heem, little feller, macaroni salesman, he drive us one time for see dramma when we go Nick Sacc’.”

“I remember him.”

“He is got same little car. Is go bust in winter, but now he get heem fixit, pretty soon he drive heem, we distriboot the books!” And Bart laughed, like a bad boy. “Book wit’ red cover what so scare polissman--you remember book is bring Coacci and Orciani one time in Plymouth?”

“Yes, very well.”

“Is very bad book, molto pericoloso, is red anarchista cover, ‘Faccia à Faccia col Nemico.’ Is reason for deporting Coacci--they find six copy by heem, he say is the reason. He is gone two week now, maybe is Italy. I get hees what you say--address--he got wife and children leav-èd behind in Brockton. You maybe see heem in Italy.”

“Have you got any of those books in your house, Bart?”

“Shoore, two, t’ree copy, sell heem sometime. Nick Sacc’ is got more. Nick he is not ’fraid, he go anyhow, is got passport, ticket, all fixit. You not see Nick in Italy, he live in Sout’, way down in what you call boot. He is happy feller, go Italy. Is got fifteen onderd dollar save in bank--wife, she make heem sava ten dollar all week. Now he go see rivoluzione, maybe help. Is young feller, can not stay here when sooch great time come, can not be happy for trim edge of pretty shoe for fine gentleman!”

“You really think there’s a revolution coming in Italy?”

“You watch, maybe see heem! Great sight for Yankee lady--nobody harm you. Italian worker, he think America is free countree, good countree--he think he make Italy be countree like America! He do not know what happen to poor wop in Massachusett, he not read in paper how Department of Joostice agent take poor seeck printer, torture heem, beat heem, to make heem tell what Joostice agent want to be tell-èd!”

So it was with Bart--difficult to make jokes, or to plan for a holiday, because all brain-paths led to these dreadful cruelties and sufferings. Impossible to enjoy a luncheon, neatly served by a much-puzzled Negro maid! No, Bart would begin to twist bread-crumbs into little pellets, which was very bad manners; his look would grow abstracted and far off, and Cornelia would understand that he was up in the fourteenth story of the Park Row Building in New York, where two comrades might at that moment be hanging by their thumbs, or having their arms twisted behind their backs.--As a matter of fact they were being beaten in the face with blood-stained shoes, said to have been worn by the bomber who had been blown to fragments in front of the home of the Quaker Attorney-General. It was a refinement of imagination difficult for an uncultured Italian to foresee.

XIII

That night there was a theater-party, given by Rupert Alvin to serve notice upon the world that all was well between himself and his departing mother-in-law. They sat, very conspicuous, in a box, Cornelia, Rupert and Deborah, their daughter Priscilla, Cornelia’s nephew-in-law, Quincy Thornwell, and her second daughter, Alice Thornwell Winters, who had given up her latest adorer in deference to the family’s demands, and was now being rewarded in this public manner. They saw an expensive and highly sophisticated comedy from New York, dealing with people of their own social station who did not have to give up anything, not even one another’s wives. After which the Alvin limousine rolled to the station, and Cornelia and Deborah took the midnight train to New York.

Next morning they drove in a taxi-cab, and inspected the fashionable shops, and Deborah bought a few things, but Cornelia did not buy, because everything would be so much cheaper abroad. They lunched at one of the fashionable hotels, and took another taxi to the steamer; and on the way Cornelia said to the driver, “Where is the Park Row Building?”

“Way downtown, ma’am, by City Hall Park.”

“We don’t go near it?”

“Not unless you want to make a trip.”

“Never mind,” said Cornelia; and her daughter asked, “Why are you interested in the Park Row Building?”

“Oh, nothing; a couple of friends of mine have been tortured there for the past three weeks.”

It was like that with Cornelia nowadays--impossible to carry on polite conversation, to enjoy any sort of holiday. Deborah had to shut her lips tight together, and pretend she had not heard. And pretty soon there was the mighty steamer; the crowds, and the partings, and the waving of handkerchiefs, and the promises to take good care of yourself, and to write often, and to give my love to So-and-so; and then a tear or two, and the gangways coming up, and the great steamer sliding out into the river, and the tugs straightening it for the journey. And then the long panorama of towering white and gray buildings, the magical sky-line of Manhattan--

_Did ever a dream-city rise from the sea That was fairer, more fleeting and fragile than she?_

But Cornelia missed all the poetical ecstasies, because she was thinking, “Which is the Park Row Building? And which is the fourteenth story?”

But there was no one to ask, and soon the sky-line faded, and there was the Statue of Liberty, and she thought of Bart, and what it meant to him. Then came the ocean, and the rolling of the ship, and she was in her state-room for two days. When she came on deck again, there was the daily newspaper, published from wireless reports for the benefit of the vessel’s leisure class; and Cornelia read that at three o’clock on the morning of the third of May, an Italian anarchist by the name of Salsedo, held by the Department of Justice for complicity in the bomb explosions of a year ago, had committed suicide by throwing himself from the fourteenth story of the Park Row Building in New York.

No more details of such a horror, to trouble the sleek and contented passengers of the Floritania. But two more days passed, and the ship’s newspaper contained another item, this time from Brockton, Massachusetts. Two Italians, leaders of a bandit-gang, had been nabbed by the police, charged with the murder of the paymaster and a guard of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory of South Braintree, and the theft of a payroll of sixteen thousand dollars. It was believed that this band had been responsible for numerous payroll hold-ups in Eastern Massachusetts during the past year, and the police expected to nab the other members within a few hours. Cornelia read this, but it meant nothing special, for there was hardly a day that papers did not report hold-ups from some part of the country; and in this case the news-service had not thought it worth while to mention that the names of the two arrested men were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

VIII. THE DETECTIVE MACHINE

O fates that hold us at your choice, How strange a web ye spin!

Thus the poet; and never more aptly than of that web which the fates wove about the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Their two friends Cornelia and Betty were to spend the better part of seven years trying to disentangle this web; laying bare a story which for mystery and melodrama has few equals. The narrative goes back to the previous Christmas, two days prior to Cornelia’s last visit to Plymouth.

At six o’clock on the morning of December 24, 1919, Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been asleep, when one of his customers, Balboni, coming home from night-work, stopped by to get his Christmas eels. Mrs. Fortini, Bart’s landlady, woke him up, and he sold the eels to Balboni, and then dressed, and swallowed his bread soaked in coffee, and got out his little hand-cart and his scales and his basket and his packages of live eels, all weighed and wrapped the day before. He had more than forty orders to fill, because he was selling Christmas eels for thirty-five cents a pound, whereas in Boston the Italians were paying as high as a dollar and a quarter. He delivered several packages before daylight; Mrs. Augusta Niccoli was still in bed, and called to him to put the package on the kitchen table; she would pay later.

Soon after seven o’clock came Beltrando Brini, having gobbled his breakfast, excited because he was to have the baker’s horse to drive. He met Bart on the street, expecting to go with him to the baker’s; but Bart insisted that the ground was wet, and Trando must run back home and get his rubbers. It took the boy fifteen or twenty minutes to find them in the attic; meantime Bart met the elder Brini, coming home from night-work; and then went to Bastoni, the baker, and was told that the latter could not spare the horse and wagon--a development which caused much grief to the twelve-year-old Trando. This was at seven-forty-five, as the baker remembered, because at the moment Bart entered his home the whistle of the cordage company blew, and no one who has guided his life by that whistle ever thereafter fails to hear and heed it. “The whistle is our bread and butter,” said Bastoni.

It was during those same fateful minutes between seven-thirty and seven-forty-five that there occurred what is known to history as “the Bridgewater crime.” In the town of Bridgewater, some twenty-two miles from Plymouth, a truck belonging to a shoe-company came rolling down Broad Street. It contained the payroll for the week, and was driven by a chauffeur and guarded by two other men. As it neared the corner of Hale Street, there was an automobile standing, and two bandits sprang out and opened fire. The guards returned the fire, and there was a battle for a minute or two; until a street-car came down the slight grade--the motorman having run back into the car to hide from the bullets. The street-car came between the bandits and the truck, and frightened the bandits so that they ran, and leaped into their auto, and sped away. No one was hurt, so the “Bridgewater crime” was classified as “attempted robbery.”

The shoe-company employed the Pinkerton agency, and within a few hours the Pinkerton men were on the spot, interviewing every one who had witnessed the attempt. Their reports were known to the prosecution, but not to the defense in the case until six or seven years later. The reports proved that the witnesses of the crime could not agree upon essentials, not even as to the make of the bandit-car. As for description of the bandits, there was a wide range of choice, and the statements of all four leading witnesses varied greatly from what they were later to testify on the witness-stand concerning the crime.

Being balked of clues, and at the same time hounded by clamor and tempted by rewards, the authorities resorted to that method which is the mainstay of American police procedure--the “stool pigeon.” Underworld characters are paid to bring the gossip of their cafés and hang-outs. So-and-so has got a new car; So-and-so-other has given a diamond ring to his girl; So-and-so-else was heard to say that he did such-and-such a job. It is manifest that such clues are open to suspicion; jealousy and revenge play a large part in them; yet, reënforced by the “third degree,” they form the method by which a good part of the population of capitalist prisons is recruited.

The “stools” were active in this Bridgewater crime; and what they brought affords a problem for students of the occult and the mystical. Let historians investigate and psychologists weigh and philosophers speculate and make what they can of the fact: the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which echoed like a series of detonations around the world, which was destined to cause windows to be smashed in American legations in Buenos Ayres and Geneva, and taxi-cab drivers to throw their fares into the faces of American ladies in Paris--this cause célèbre had its origin in a “detective machine” invented by an underworld character, and looked into by an unnamed Italian woman in East Boston.

To the Pinkerton agents came a “stool” with the rumor that a certain A. C. Barr could tell about the Bridgewater crime. So there was a hunt for A. C. Barr--height five-feet-ten, weight 175 pounds, age forty, eyes dark, hair black, and so on. When found, the person proved to be an Italian--Angelo Christoforo Barragini, or words to that effect. He was questioned, and said, yes, he did know about the crime. How had he learned it? He had invented a “detective machine,” with which you could solve crime mysteries. It consisted of a crystal globe into which you looked, and you there saw the crimes happening. A woman in East Boston had used it and had seen the Bridgewater hold-up, committed by Italians who lived in a little house on the outskirts of a town; there were four or five of them, and they were dark, and had a car which they kept in a shed in back of the house.

Now, detectives are paid by the day while they are working, and this has a tendency to stretch out their assignments. They followed up this “detective machine” clue, taking into their confidence Mike Stewart, the worried chief of police who kept the town of Bridgewater in order between bandit-raids. Mike, a burly “small-town cop,” red-faced, heavy-lidded, good-natured but not abnormally brilliant, took the detectives in his car, and they drove about inspecting little houses inhabited by Italians on the outskirts of towns. They found several, and were suspicious of one, and caused alarm to the occupants; but they found nothing definite. The Pinkerton reports were turned in, and the Bridgewater crime was listed among the unsolved mysteries in Massachusetts police history. The “detective machine” was stowed away in the subconsciousness of Mike Stewart, ready to pop up again sometime--according to the laws of the subconsciousness, understood in all psychological laboratories.

Three months later, on April fifteenth, came another sensation, known to history as “the South Braintree crime.” In another “shoe-town,” at three o’clock in the afternoon, the paymaster of the Slater and Morrill company took the pay-money, about $16,000 in two steel boxes, and accompanied by a guard, started to carry it from the office to the factory, a distance of a couple of blocks. They were passing another factory, the Rice and Hutchins, when two foreign-looking men who had been lounging by the railing suddenly drew guns and opened fire point-blank. They put four bullets into one victim, killing him at once, and so wounded the other that he died the next day. They picked up the boxes of money, and at the same instant an automobile came rushing up the street and slowed, and the two bandits sprang in and were driven away at high speed, shooting at the bystanders as they went.

This very brutal and successful crime caused great excitement in the factory towns which lie to the south of Boston. So many raids had occurred during the past year, no town knew when its turn might come. Rewards were offered, and again the Pinkerton detectives came and made their investigations and turned in reports. Just as in the Bridgewater case, the numerous witnesses disagreed about essential details of what they had seen. They could not describe the car. One said Hudson, others said Buick; one said green, another said dark blue, others said black; one said shiny, another said spattered with mud. Many witnesses made statements quite different from what they afterwards made on the stand. So here was another unsolved crime--and a great clamor of the public, demanding to know what police were for. There was no clue--save only a memory lurking in the subconsciousness of Mike Stewart, waiting for a chance to pop up!

It so happened that the day after the South Braintree crime, while all the countryside was ringing with the horror of it, there came to see Mike Stewart a Federal immigration officer, looking for an Italian anarchist by the name of Coacci, a shoe-worker sentenced to deportation and out on bail; his time was up, but he had failed to appear, and the officer had come to arrest him, and according to the custom he asked for Mike’s help. So Mike sent a man with him to the Coacci home, which happened to be a little house on the outskirts of a near-by village.

They found the shoe-worker with an oval-shaped tin suitcase strapped and ready, the inevitable green umbrella on top. Also there was another Italian, a boarder by the name of Boda. Coacci had pleaded for delay because his wife was sick; but here was his wife, she wasn’t sick, and Coacci admitted that that had been a pretext, he had wanted a few more days to settle his affairs. Now he was ready to go. It was late at night, and the immigration officer said to wait till to-morrow; but Coacci said no, he would go now and get it over with. Some one was taking his wife to stay with relatives, and he was all packed up, and would like to get the next day’s steamer from New York.

They went, and Mike Stewart heard about it, and sat in his office and thought it over. It was midnight, a time for ghosts and goblins. Strange that a man should insist upon being taken away from a country so great and so rich as America! This fellow Coacci was a Red, and the weekly paper in Bridgewater was running a series of articles, prepared by the Department of Justice, telling the small-town population of America the crimes which the Reds were committing all over the world. Mike pondered; and suddenly there occurred a phenomenon understood in all psychological laboratories--there popped into his memory the woman in East Boston who had looked into the “detective machine”! Here was a little house on the outskirts of a town, occupied by Italians! In a flash the whole story came to Mike: Coacci had been in on the South Braintree crime, and the reason he was so anxious to get away was that he had the sixteen thousand dollars!

With another officer Mike went to the Coacci house, and there was Boda, five feet-two inches high, swarthy, with a little black mustache, soft-spoken, polite, chatty; a macaroni salesman, he told Mike; and his car was an Overland, a small car, just now laid up for repairs. Yes, he had a gun, and he let Mike examine it--a .32 Colt. There were no signs of crime, so Mike went off and pondered some more, and then telephoned to New York and learned that Coacci had sailed for Italy. They found a trunk which he had left, and they broke it open, but found no payroll money, only a few pieces of shoe-leather, which some shoe-workers consider they have a right to “swipe” from the company when they get a chance.

Mike decided to arrest Boda, so he went to the house, but now it was empty. Boda had disappeared, and the police found that suspicious. But his little Overland car was in Johnson’s garage in West Bridgewater, and Johnson was told to detain whoever came for the car, and thus have a chance at the rewards.

So the trap was set; and two weeks later came an Italian by the name of Orciani, driving a motor-cycle with a side-car containing Boda. At the same time by street-car came two other Italians, Sacco and Vanzetti. All four were anarchists, members of the Galleani group; they had made this rendezvous at Johnson’s garage, for a purpose which was to be a subject of controversy for the next seven years.

They went to Johnson’s house, and found that the car was repaired, but had no license plates for the present year, so Johnson advised them not to drive it; he kept them talking, while his wife ran to a neighbor’s and telephoned to the police. But the four men became suspicious and went away. Bart and Nick took the trolley to Brockton, and while they were on the outskirts of the town a police officer entered the car and drew a gun and ordered them, “Hands up!” Then was the time for them to make use of the weapons they carried; for Bart to put into effect his threat of not being taken alive. But alas, it was as Alfonsina Brini had predicted, he didn’t know anything about using a gun. Pretty soon came a second officer, and the prisoners were taken to the police station and locked in cells.

For years Bart had studied the life and death of “Comradda Gesu,” and “made tears” for him. And now came a strange coincidence. The first action of one of the policemen, upon having got this criminal safe behind bars, was to come to the door of the cell and call him. Bart came, meekly, and looked through the bars, whereupon the other spat full in his face.

The reason for this action was that among the documents found on Bart was a letter from an anarchist friend, referring to the evil actions of a certain priest, whom the writer called “a pig.” The policeman had spat in defense of his religion, and turned away, fully satisfied in his Catholic soul. His priests had not taught him to read the life and death of Jesus; they had taught him that Jesus was a God, and if you had asserted that Jesus was a working-class agitator, he would have wanted to spit in your face also. But Vanzetti knew what had happened to “Comradda Gesu” on the cross, and he wiped his face clean, and sat upon the cot in his cell, with cold chills running up and down his spine.

III

Sitting in their separate dungeons that first dreadful night, a common thought was in the minds of both Sacco and Vanzetti. Less than three days had elapsed since their comrade, Salsedo, had thrown himself, or had been thrown, to his death. Were they going to share his fate? One duty was obvious--to avoid saying anything that would involve other comrades. So when they were cross-questioned, they denied that they knew Boda, denied that they knew Orciani, and told lies as to where they had been and what they had been doing. These lies were easily exposed, and constituted the famous “consciousness of guilt,” upon which the prosecution was to insist for seven years.

In spite of all fears, Vanzetti had refused to give up his appeal to the workers. “Anarchista musta make propaganda!” He had planned a meeting for the ninth of May, four days off, in Brockton, and had drafted a circular, which Nick had in his pocket. So the police had something else to study and discuss: a series of questions, crude, yet with a primitive eloquence that disturbed even the dullest mind. “You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.”

It is an old idea, and has been haunting the minds of dreamers for thousands of years; you may find it voiced by the prophet Isaiah twenty-five hundred years ago. “And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another reap.” It is interesting as a symptom of the mental state of the time, that shortly before the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, a Christian clergyman in the city of Winnipeg, Canada, had been indicted for the crime of quoting these ancient Hebrew words!

Among the questions asked of Bart and Nick was: “Are you an anarchist? Are you a communist? Do you believe in the overthrow of the United States government by violence?” These were the conventional deportation questions, and were reassuring to the prisoners in fear of torture. Bart answered them gently and tactfully. “I like things a little different,” said he. When a friend came to see him next day, he smiled and said, “Well, I get free trip to Italy!” So it was that Cornelia and Betty, enjoying their second week of vacation, received a letter from Fay--fifteen years old now, and quite a cultured young lady:

“DEAR NONNA:

“I write to tell you the sad news that Bart and Nick Sacco are in the police station at Brockton. Bart asked to tell you he is not treated bad, except for being spit on once. The lawyer says he will be surely deported, because the police got a circular which he wrote about a meeting to protest about the killing of Salsedo. Bart says tell you he is happy because he will come to see you soon, and please stay on the Italian lake and do not worry, because you have worked too hard and should have a rest. As Nick was going anyhow it will save him the fare so it is all right. I write in a hurry not knowing when there goes a steamer, and Bart is afraid you might read it in the paper and be worried.”

That was all for a week; then another letter:

“I am sorry to have to say that the arrest of Bart and Nick is worse than what I wrote you. The police pretend to think that they drove an automobile and shot two men and stole a payroll in South Braintree last month. It is so silly that we cannot believe it yet, and Bart himself does not believe it, he says it is just to get something on him to deport. The comrades here have all paid money and engaged a lawyer to get him off. Bart insists that I must tell you there is nothing to worry for, as he was in Plymouth all that day and talked with many people, like Mr. Corl who was fixing a boat. And of course when they know about Bart they will not think he could be a bandit. It will make you laugh to hear the police are quite sure that Bart was the driver of the bandit-car, as you know that he never had anything to do with a machine, and papa says he is so clumsy he cannot drive a wheelbarrow. The comrades have found a rich storekeeper who will put up bail, so we hope to have Bart with us again soon. Please write him a nice letter in our care and tell him you are not worrying, because it is something he talks about each time we see him, that your vacation must not be spoiled for him. You know how like him that is, thinking about everybody else but his own trouble.”

From Italian lakes the land goes back by stages, rising higher and higher into the sky, and each stage has been taken in charge by generations of strong arms and backs, and made into orchards and gardens. Every smallest corner of soil has been terraced and buttressed with walls, and dug and planted with a row of olive trees--or a row of onions--up to where the bare rocks stick out and the white clouds gather. Here and there in sheltered places are cabins built of stone, and in them women breed prolifically, and send their progeny to Massachusetts to be known as “wops.”

The lakes are blue, and the sky almost as deep a blue; by the middle of May it is summer, and all the land is bursting with vegetation of a thousand shades of green and olive-gray. The air is balmy, and ladies from Europe and America put on gay dresses and wander about in the gardens of villas and hotels, or drift on the water in little boats, holding bright parasols overhead to protect their creamy complexions. Everything is peaceful, and it is possible to float and sing “Kennst du das Land?”--and have no idea that the peasants on the hillsides are seething with hatred of their landlords, and forming coöperatives and revolutionary societies, preparing to dump off their backs the age-old burden of parasitism.

Here in a little inn by the water-side Cornelia found her granddaughter Betty Alvin, carefully chaperoned by Joe Randall, American socialist journalist aged twenty-eight, and Pierre Leon, French communist editor aged forty-four. In the days before the war if a young lady from the Back Bay had traveled about Europe with two gentlemen, she would have caused herself to be ostracized for life; and maybe it was still so, Betty wasn’t sure--but she was sure that she didn’t want to know any one who didn’t want to know her. These two men between them had much important information, so she had begged them to come to this Italian lake while she waited for Grannie.

Pierre Leon was stocky and broad-shouldered, with a rosy face and black mustache twisted to points. He had lived for years in London teaching French, and in Berlin teaching English; he knew enough Italian to attend labor meetings, and now was studying Russian because revolutionary events demanded it. He had been an anarchist, then an anarcho-syndicalist, for a long time a left wing socialist, and now was a communist suspected of a right wing deviation. He had read most books that had ever been published on these subjects, and most good literature besides; he could talk brilliantly about anything, and liked nothing so much as having some one to argue with until three in the morning. He was supposed to be resting for his health, but it was difficult for Cornelia to see where either health or rest came in, for he lit one cigarette from another, and would work all morning writing an article, study labor and radical papers all afternoon, and argue all night about what he had read.

His qualifications as chaperon for an American young lady were peculiar. He took toward all women the attitude of the continental male, and this had caused in the American young lady a vigorous reaction, which in return had caused in the continental male an amused curiosity. Said Betty, “He thinks the purpose of woman is to submit herself, and that every woman will, if the man is fascinating enough. But I have made him understand that I’m a queer little New England old maid, so now he’s a good sport and studies me.” Betty added that Grannie was not to dislike Pierre on that account, because it was his environment, all European men were that way, especially since the war--the only difference was that the radical men could let you alone, because they had other things to think about, whereas the leisure-class men had nothing to do but chase women.

Joe Randall came from Virginia, and had wavy brown hair and a charming slow drawl. Cornelia had met him in Russia, so she knew his story; he had come as a young college graduate to an attaché’s position in our legation at St. Petersburg, and had seen the war, the revolution, and the diplomatic intrigues. This had made him into a radical, he had kicked over the traces, and now was a free-lance journalist, writing mostly for papers which could not pay him anything. But he had a small income, and was expecting to shake the world with a book about the “White Terror,” on which he worked diligently every morning, and talked all the rest of the day if any one would listen.

It was evident that Joe’s eyes followed Betty wherever they could, and Cornelia, being still an old-fashioned grandmother, wanted to know about it. “He is a dear,” said Betty, “and I have to admit that he makes me shiver now and then. But I’m not sure we shall hit it off. I’m trying to make sure.”

“What is the problem?”

“Well, several. In the first place, I’ll have to propose, because Joe is poor, and he thinks I am going to be rich. I’ll have to explain that I’ll escape being rich if I marry a Red. Also, there’s his wife.”

“Wife?” echoed Cornelia--but managing to keep too much surprise out of her voice.

“Didn’t you know he had one? She went back to New York several years ago. She doesn’t love him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Joe is. It seems that she’s reactionary, and you know enough to realize that no man and woman can be happy when they hold opposite opinions on the class struggle. That’s what I am concerned about--I think I’m turning into a communist, and Joe still ties himself to the old social-democracy that was killed in the war and doesn’t know it.”

“I see,” said Cornelia. Her heart warmed to Joe, because she did not want Betty to go with the fighting crowd. But she must not say so!

“You know,” said the girl, “I think it’s a form of our Anglo-Saxon egotism, we think we can change our social system by a method different from all the rest of mankind. We have such a marvelous constitution, and such a wise electorate, we can do it step by step--and all the while the truth is we don’t intend to change a thing, but to smash anybody that dares a move. No rough stuff--except what the possessing class needs in its business. Pierre quotes Lenin’s definition of the state: ‘a monopoly of violence.’ Don’t you see it, Grannie?”

“I am still one of the sentimentalists, Betty dear.”

“Yes, I know, and you’ll back up Joe in all our wrangles, no doubt. Well, he needs you, for he’s got all current history against him--to say nothing of the ruling class of the world!”

To this quartette of assorted thinkers came the news about Sacco and Vanzetti. When the first letter was read, Cornelia said it would be pleasant to have Bart here. But Joe Randall smiled dryly and told her not to count too much upon it; for capitalist policemen were not so eager to provide their victims with vacations on Italian lakes. When the second letter came, he said, “I told you so.”

“But it’s too absurd!” cried Cornelia. “They are innocent!”

“They have to prove it,” said Joe.

And Pierre Leon eyed the old lady with a quizzical expression. “Don’t forget, comrade,” said he, “it sometimes happens that anarchists are guilty.” Then, seeing Cornelia’s startled look, he added, “I was an anarchist myself for years; and I assure you I wasn’t always innocent!”

Said Betty, “You mustn’t say that to Grannie. She is soft-boiled.”

Pierre was interested in American slang, which he said was a new contribution to the world’s poetry. He asked about this phrase, and then went on: “People that are soft-boiled had better not go wandering about in the radical movement, because they may get their shells broken.” He went on to say that about anarchists you could never make a general statement, each one was a law to himself. You had to know him before you could say what he would do--and even then you didn’t always know.

“Well, we know Bart,” insisted Cornelia; “and we know he is no bandit.”

“And the other one?”

“I don’t know him so well, I only met him two or three times. But he’s a gentle, soft-spoken young fellow--”

“Which means absolutely nothing,” said Pierre. “Even your American two-gun-men have been that; I think it’s a tradition, out on the western plains, that your deadliest sheriffs have been mild-mannered men. The first thing you have to know about an anarchist is what leaders he follows.”

“Bart and Nick belong to the Galleani group.”

“But Galleani is a militante. If you don’t believe that, go down to Milano, or wherever he’s living now, and hear him. Who gave you the idea he is a pacifist?”

“I didn’t have that idea. Bart told me he was a militant--”

“But then, when an anarchist tells you he’s a militant, why don’t you believe him?” Pierre’s face indicated that this was one more droll aspect of American ladies. “Understand me, Comrade Thornwell, it is good of rich and cultured ladies to take an interest in the exploited workers; but you suffer always from the fact that you can’t possibly realize how they actually feel.”

“Don’t forget, Comrade Leon, I worked for a year and a half in a cordage plant, and lived on the wages.”

“I know, Betty told us; and I never heard anything like it. But all the same, if you will pardon me, it wasn’t practically real, because if you had been ill or out of a job, you’d have gone back to your family; it wasn’t psychologically real, because you always knew you could, and you had the moral support of knowing you were a lady. No worker has that; so don’t be shocked if you should some day learn that some workers commit what the bourgeoisie calls crimes in the struggle against their exploiters.”

There was a pause, while Cornelia digested these uncomfortable words. At last she said, “Crimes such as banditry, Comrade Leon?”

“Well, that’s a question that calls for definitions. If you mean by banditry, robbing for private advantage, the answer is no. If you mean robbing for the cause, the answer is, there have been such anarchists: not many, but a few. Take Ravachol; he robbed the rich and gave the money to the poor, and boasted of it.”

“What do other anarchists say of that?”

“I have heard a thousand arguments about it. It’s a practical question, whether such a course helps the cause; some say yes, some say no. A few anarchists repudiated Ravachol, others endorsed him--Elisée Reclus among the latter, and he is a god of the movement, a great scientist and a great soul. You see, Comrade, it is difficult for any anarchist to repudiate another who has acted from good motives. There are two things a real anarchist will never do; one is to betray a comrade, and the other is to profit at the expense of the cause. So long as he is loyal, and risks his own life for the cause, nothing he does can be repudiated; that lies in the nature of the doctrine, because he is a law to himself, and has a right to be that, and other anarchists proclaim that right. How can they control him? How can they refuse to stand by him?”

“That ought to frighten me,” said Cornelia, “but we New Englanders were raised on that creed--we called it Transcendentalism.”

“I know,” said Pierre. “There are few anarchist book shops without copies of Thoreau’s ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience.’”

“But we managed to keep the doctrine from involving the right to kill other people.” Thus Cornelia, sure of her Boston.

“Did you really?” asked Pierre. “Stop and think now!” There was something in his tone that told Cornelia he was going to have fun with her. The twinkle was also in Betty’s eye and in Joe’s, so she knew they were in the secret. “Think hard!” said the Frenchman, and when she gave it up, he said, “Did you ever hear of a practicing anarchist by the name of John Brown?”

“Well,” said Cornelia, hesitating; “I suppose he did kill people--”

“Yes, do suppose it! It so happens we have been reading a life of him--and while you are talking about bandit-raids, consider the one at Harper’s Ferry. It was a surprise attack, you remember; it was going to give the slaves a chance to rise and get hold of an arsenal with some guns; and to that great end, four white men, quite innocent, harmless fellows, not even slave-holders, were shot dead in the streets of a country town. And remember, they took him and hanged him as a common felon, and were certain that history would agree with them. But up in Boston your Wendell Phillips proclaimed in a public meeting, ‘He has abolished slavery in Virginia!’ And some anarchist poet wrote four lines--Comrade Betty, can you say those lines that you like so much?”

And Betty, who had been smiling, became suddenly serious, and recited:

_Not any spot six feet by two Will hold a man like thee! John Brown will tramp the shaking earth From Blue Ridge to the sea._

Needless to say, there were many questions Cornelia wanted to ask of Pierre Leon. She realized that the time for dodging was past, it was up to her to get clear in her own thinking. She admitted to these three friends what before she had feared to admit even to herself: the doubts as to whether it could be true, as the government and the newspapers took for granted, that some of the Italian anarchists had been doing that wholesale bombing.

Said Pierre, “Set this down for certain at the outset--all militant anarchists believe in bombs. Not all make them--any more than all Christians sell their goods and give to the poor. It is too uncomfortable and dangerous. But the faith calls for it, ‘anarchist christenings,’ is the phrase--and when some young enthusiast comes along and wants to practice, the preachers can’t very well say no. And when the boys get into trouble, then of course the movement has to rally and defend them.”

“And that, of course, includes telling the world they are innocent?” It was Joe, with a touch of socialist sarcasm.

“Naturally. It goes without saying that anybody who will fight will try to deceive the enemy. What you have to get clear is the central doctrine of anarchism, that property used for exploitation is theft. That makes capitalist society a gigantic bandit-raid, a wholesale killing; any killing you have to do to abolish it, or to cripple it, always is a small matter in comparison. Twenty years ago, when I used to argue questions like this, they were more or less academic; our generation had never known war. But now take what has happened, and you realize that to the working-class theorist, human life has ceased to have any value, compared with the bringing on of the revolution. We know that capitalism means one more world slaughter after another; it means that inevitably, you might say by definition. Every capitalist society has to compete for markets and raw materials, or else cease to be a capitalist society. It intends to take our lives by the tens of millions; and are we denied the right to save ourselves--because, forsooth, the effort means killing a few capitalists and kings and judges and police spies and what not? You can see that, to an anarchist, such an idea is childish.”

“Or to a communist,” added Joe Randall, the socialist.

Said the other, “Between the anarchist and the communist it is a question of technique. I once heard an American labor leader put it effectively: ‘Never use violence--until you have enough of it!’ That will serve for the communist formula--and I leave it for Joe to explain the polite social-democratic program of killing a tiger half an inch at a time.”

So they wrangled for a while, saying sharp and bitter things with perfect good humor. Pierre declared that some day he would have the job of putting Joe into jail--and maybe Cornelia, too, because she believed in free speech for capitalists, and might insist upon practicing her theory. Maybe Betty would be putting her own Grannie into jail--stranger things had happened in revolutions. To which Joe replied that it was people of Pierre’s way of talking that made a peaceable solution so difficult; they brought on reaction, and set the workers back for decades. So for a while Sacco and Vanzetti were left in the Brockton police-station, forgotten.

Until Betty said, “You are getting poor Grannie so balled up with your theories and your shocking facts that she’ll lose heart and be scared out of the movement.”

“For God’s sake,” exclaimed Pierre, “don’t let me do that! In the first place, I don’t know a thing about your Bart and Nick, they may be two harmless dreamers. And anyhow, innocent or guilty, no working-class rebel ever did a tenth part of the harm to society that society has done to him. No one of them ever carries a tenth part of the guilt that is borne by the judges and officials who prosecute him. Think of the guilt of those who caused the war, in order to extend their markets or to save their investments!”

That was coming close to home for Cornelia and Betty. Said the former, thinking of her three perfectly self-satisfied sons-in-law, “Can there be guilt when there is no consciousness of guilt?”

Pierre answered, “That is the sort of question the Puritan conscience likes to wrestle with. But let us set aside theories, and consider the practical problem of labor defense. Whether an accused worker is guilty or whether he is innocent is a matter you can almost never guess in advance. If he’s guilty, he won’t tell you, and it would be wretched taste for you to ask. On the other hand, maybe the police have got the wrong fellow; often enough they know it, and don’t care, because they figure he’s done something equally bad, and anyhow he’s the sort that is safer in jail. Then again, maybe it’s a provocateur’s job--something the bosses have planted, in order to have a pretext for raiding offices and smashing presses and throwing leaders into jail. Either way, you can’t know until you get in up to your ears. You may find you’ve got a chance to expose the police and win public sympathy--or you may have something that will discredit the movement and turn the public against you for years.”

“A complicated matter, being a revolutionist!” remarked Cornelia.

And Pierre replied, “You bet your shoes it is--to quote your American slang.”

VII

On the morning after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti came Mike Stewart, bringing his “hunch,” which was destined to control their lives and deaths forever after. Mike himself called it by the more dignified name of a “theory”; he told it to the district attorney, who liked it so well that he rented Mike from the town of Bridgewater, and for a year thereafter the policeman had nothing to do but search out facts to fit his “theory.”

A part of it was that the same bandits who had committed the South Braintree hold-up in April had committed the Bridgewater attempt of the previous December--the one which had been seen in the “detective machine.” The police proceeded to collect some fifty persons who had witnessed one or the other of these crimes. Orciani was arrested at his factory, so there were three bandits to be identified. The usual procedure is to mix up the suspects with a number of other men and see if the witnesses can pick the guilty ones. But in the dingy old police-station of Brockton the three suspects were put in a room, and the witnesses were brought in and told that these were the bandits, and could they recognize them? Sacco and Vanzetti were sleepless, unshaved, unwashed, uncombed--a condition in which a leader of fashion looks like a bandit. But even so, the witnesses were uncertain, some said they might be the right men, others said they were surely not.

Several witnesses had seen the bandits in special circumstances, for example with a cap on; so Sacco was ordered to put on a cap, and did so. Another had seen the bandit crouched down; Sacco was ordered to crouch, and the witness thought he looked more like a bandit that way. Another had seen the bandit pointing a gun; Sacco was ordered to act as if he were pointing a gun, and the witness was quite sure that made him look more like a bandit. Witnesses who were obdurate, and wouldn’t stop saying they were the wrong men, were dropped by the prosecution, and it was up to the defense to find them if they could. In a great many cases they did so--but too late.

The police had found a Buick car abandoned in some woods, two miles from Coacci’s home, and it was part of the “theory” that this had been used in the two crimes. This “bandit-car” was now brought to the police-station, and Sacco and Orciani were loaded into it, and with a detail of the state police, heavily armed, were taken for a tour of the shoe-towns. Word went in advance, “The bandits are coming,” and huge crowds gathered. At the time of the South Braintree crime several workers had run to the windows of the shoe-factory and seen the bandit-car driving away. Now the scene was reënacted, with these persons looking from the windows to judge if Sacco and Orciani looked like the men they had seen. The crowds, meantime, did not wait for a decision; they knew these were the bandits, and tried to beat them, and did spit in their faces. It was a grand public circus, and by means of it the police persuaded three shoe-workers to recognize the bandits, and to stay persuaded until the preliminary hearing a week or two later, when they changed their minds and said they couldn’t be sure. When the trial came, a year later, they had changed again, and took the stand and identified Sacco and Vanzetti as the bandits, and made three of the five witnesses upon whom the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts relied to the death.

On the day after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti the three prisoners were arraigned before a magistrate. Orciani was charged with operating a motor-cycle without a tail-light--although his motor-cycle had had a tail-light and it had been lighted; Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with carrying revolvers without a license. Bail was denied, on the pretext of a wartime law. The three victims were taken back to jail, and the task of fitting the facts to the “theory” was continued.

A week later there was a hearing upon the charge of murder; and here an unexpected thing happened--the number of bandits was reduced to two. The district attorney stated that the identification of Orciani was not sufficient. That seemed strange, because more persons had been willing to think that Orciani looked like the bandit than had been willing to think it about either Sacco or Vanzetti. What had happened was that Orciani had been able to produce an American alibi. Not merely had he punched his time-clock in the factory that morning, but he could produce his boss and several other “white men” to swear that he had been at his machine all day. It was only three weeks back, and he hadn’t missed a day.

Also it developed that Sacco was to be let off from the Bridgewater charge--because he, too, had an American alibi. But on the day of the South Braintree affair, according to his own story, he had gone up to Boston to get his passports; he had lunched at a café with friends, and had gone to the consulate, where they remembered him for the comical reason that he had been told to provide a photograph for his passport, and had brought one of great size. A clerk remembered it; but then, he was an Italian, and Italian alibis do not “go” in Yankee police-courts.

As for poor Bart, alas, he had nothing but Italian alibis for both dates. On the day before Christmas he had sold eels to fifty housewives, and during the South Braintree crime he had been digging clams and bait. But such things do not count against a policeman’s “hunch,” so Bart was charged with both crimes; the prosecution was going to prove that he was the bandit who had stood on Broad Street, in Bridgewater, firing a shotgun at the pay-truck, and also that he was the driver of the murder-car at South Braintree--he who had never touched a steering-wheel in his poor proletarian life! The moral of these developments was clear to sarcastic young radicals such as Betty Alvin--that good little wops had better stay close to the boss, and punch a time-clock four times a day. Instead of going home at night, they would be safer kept in pens.

VIII

A lawyer had been engaged to defend Sacco and Vanzetti at these preliminary hearings, an Irish gentleman by the name of John Vahey. Some lawyers with criminal practice employ what are known as “runners” to bring them business; and whether Mr. Vahey knew it or not, it was an Italian generally known as a “runner” who persuaded the friends of Vanzetti to employ Mr. Vahey. The lawyer himself was no “runner,” but a stout gentleman who did not hurry about to find witnesses for his client; he was content to let the Brinis fetch the wops to his office. He was active in the politics of Plymouth County, and intimate with those who controlled its affairs, including the district attorney, Fred Katzmann; he was an “associate judge,” and went into an arrangement to share business with Katzmann. It has been said in Vahey’s defense that Vanzetti was probably the first innocent man he had ever had as a client. Very possibly Vanzetti was wrong in his fixed idea that his lawyers had “thrown him down.” He was a hard client to defend, because he persisted stubbornly in denying that he had been to Johnson’s garage with Boda the night of his arrest; he would not permit any capitalist lawyer to persuade him to say a word that might involve another comrade.

The friends of Sacco in Boston had also engaged a lawyer to defend him. Before a month had passed there were three lawyers in the case, and one of them was young and confiding, and told how he had heard one associate say to the other, “See if you can get Sacco to tell where he buried the money, and we’ll divide it.” A part of the “theory” became that Sacco had buried the treasure in the garden of his home, which belonged to Mr. Kelley, his boss; and in each of the next seven springtimes, when Mr. Kelley’s father got ready to plant potatoes, a thrill would go through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Sacco’s boss was digging for the treasure! It was hard on poor Nick, because it implied that Mr. Kelley thought he was guilty, whereas Mr. Kelley had trusted Nick as night-watchman.

Cornelia and Betty sent money to help interest these legal gentlemen. Cornelia and Betty meant to stay in one place all summer, so they would not need Betty’s full allowance. They rowed on the lake, and climbed the mountain paths, and listened to all-day and all-night arguments on the theories of anarchism, syndicalism, communism and socialism, with the history of these movements in a dozen countries for three-quarters of a century. There came another letter from Plymouth, telling of developments, with a message from Bart insisting that Nonna was not to worry, and not to cut short her rest.

The idea of accusing Bart of the Bridgewater crime seemed to Cornelia such madness, she could not take it seriously. It was a case of mistaken identity, which would be cleared up when it was investigated. “They can’t make such a charge against a man who has lived in a town for eight years; and when he went about that whole day, peddling eels to all North Plymouth! If it had been any day but the day before Christmas, one might say there was a chance of getting the dates mixed; but everybody knows that Italians eat eels on Christmas, and Bart can prove that he had a barrel of them. It seems as if somebody has gone crazy.”

“The bourgeoisie always goes crazy when its property-rights are threatened,” said Pierre Leon.

“But I was there the day after Christmas,” persisted Cornelia, “and they told me all about what they had done--Bart and Trando, and the barrel of eels, and the baker’s horse, and how Trando would never believe Bart’s promises again. Surely I could testify to that conversation!”

“They might call it hearsay,” said Joe Randall. “And anyhow, the jury would say it was a put up job--to fool you and prepare an alibi. The Italians are cunning, you know!”

They comforted themselves with the thought of the law’s delay. Criminal cases took a long time to get on the calendar in Massachusetts; and meantime, since bail was refused, there was nothing Cornelia and Betty could do. But the law is like a sleeping tiger, capable of swift and deadly leaps when it is roused. The second week in June there came a cablegram; the situation was very bad, and Bart was to be tried for the Bridgewater crime in less than two weeks. There was just time for Cornelia and Betty to get a steamer; so the little radical party broke up at an hour’s notice. Pierre Leon would go back to his desk, and Joe Randall decided that he knew enough about the White Terror in Europe, and his book ought to have a chapter on Massachusetts!

Their steamer came in to New York one afternoon, and there on the pier, waving handkerchiefs, were Deborah and Priscilla. Betty’s sister was engaged to be married to a young mountain of copper; an enormously important alliance, which had already supplied a column of genealogy to the Transcript. The ladies were going to plunder the Fifth Avenue shops of their treasures; also the father, Rupert Alvin, was in town, on business connected with Jerry Walker’s felt-plants, now in his care. They were going to a musical comedy that evening, and had planned diversions for several days. Betty had been away a whole year, and any normal rich girl would have brought home several trunk-loads of presents for relatives and friends. But here was this madcap pair, returning precipitately, with no purchases whatever--and very mysterious about it, obliged to decline diversions, and take the night train for Boston. After much nagging, Deborah got it out of them--they were hurrying to attend the trial of an Italian anarchist bandit! And they did actually go--Betty in spite of mother, father, and sister, Cornelia in spite of daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter.

Bart was in the County Farm Jail at Plymouth, and during the afternoon was brought from his cell into the reception room. He had on a coarse gray shirt and trousers, badly shrunken; his outdoor color was gone, he was haggard and thin, and his walrus mustache drooped mournfully. But, oh, so glad he was to see them! His face lighted up, and he came, half running, holding out his hands; the messages of his soul leaped to them, love and pity and heart-breaking grief. Poor old Bart--the greatest lover of freedom Cornelia had ever known--shut up behind steel bars! Tears started into the eyes of both the women, and the prisoner’s voice broke as he tried to speak. “Oh, Nonna, I so sorry for spoiling your holiday! Oh, Betty, I so sorry for bringing you to sooch place!”

“It’s all right, Bart, we had a good holiday, and now we’re here, and we’re going to get you out in short order.” It was Betty speaking, brave little soul--no melancholy while she was in charge! “Cheer up, old pal, it’s going to be easy. This is Comrade Joe Randall, who has followed me all the way from Italy because he thinks I am going to be silly enough to marry him.”

Bart turned quickly to the good-looking young fellow. “I glad for meeting you, Comrade Jorandall. If Comrade Betty marry you be very lucky feller.”

“Oh, I’m not sure yet,” said Betty. “I’ve got to make a real Red out of him. Now he’s nothing but a pale pink, one of those riformistas that we don’t trust. But he’s going to help get you off, and that will educate him.”

Their feeble effort at jollity came to a speedy end, and they talked about the trial, only two days away. “My enemy have got me,” said Bart; and they knew without asking who this enemy was, the profit system, embodied in Plymouth by the great cordage company from which Bart had helped to extort two hundred thousand dollars every year, in the form of higher wages to its workers. “I think the go-vérnment not let me ever get away,” said Bart, and Betty’s cheerfulness could make no impression on this firm distrust.

“You see what they do,” he said. “They cannot prove Nick and me at South Braintree, have not got evidence for sending two men to electric chair. So they think, first we take Vanzett’, we fixit him for Bridgewater job, we make him convicted. So when it come trial for South Braintree job, jury will say, one of them fellers is bandit, he is convicted, it is not so hard for believing they both should die.”

“But Bart, it’s crazy to try to prove that you were in Bridgewater that morning!” It was Cornelia speaking.

“They have got it fixit, Nonna, they prove what they want. I tell all friend not fool self. They have got everything, they are friends with our lawyers.”

“Oh, Bart!”

“I sure of it. Come big feller, lazy, smoke big cigar--is what for Italian worker pay money, buy him big cigar. He is funny man, he make joke, he whistle. I say, ‘I am innochent.’ He make funny face, he say, ‘Very bad, they put you wit’ Sacc’!’ He stick up finger in air, he make it go round, so”--Bart made a spiral motion, his index finger going up. “He say, ‘Pfist!’ Is hardest work he ever do for poor wop.”

“I thought they had an investigator getting witnesses!”

“Have got Italian feller--he is spy for go-vérnment. He get all comrades put up money, buy him automobile, so he can go look for witness. But it pass many days, he not bring witness. Is plenty witness in Plymoot’, but it must Brinis find them. Is maybe witness in Bridgewater, could find people say I not look like bandit, but cannot get them.”

“Bart,” said Betty, “we are not spies for the government, and we’re going to rent a car right away, and take the Brinis this evening and see if we can find some witnesses in Bridgewater. Cheer up now, we’re really going to help you. Joe here is an expert investigator; he is writing a book on the White Terror in Europe.”

“Is same terror here, Comrade Joe, is plenty people could tell I am innochent, but will not dare speaking. Is polissman saw me on street, talk wit’ me in morning, ask for price of eel, but will not tell. Is express office man, he knows I got barrel of eel, but he will not let us look for paper--what you call it, receipt. Is superintendent of cordage plant, you know him. He know I was in Plymoot’ that day--but see if he come for witness! You saw him, Nonna, always, ever since strike, four year, he walk across street when I come, is not willing for meet me. Is may be hate, may be fear--but see if he help me getting out from jail! No, it is price I pay for eight year I try to educate worker. What is it they have said about Gesu, Nonna?”

“‘He stirreth up the people.’”

“Joosta so! And I am joosta same age, Nonna, I am thirty-two, like it was Comrade Gesu when his enemy put him in jail! I have readed about him--it is book what they give for wop to read in jail, because all church people have not know how bad rivoluzionario was Gesu!”

This was one of the themes Bart liked to talk about; he forgot his own desperate peril for a few minutes. When the three visitors went out, Joe Randall said, “This much is certain whatever happens, the police have given us a good martyr!”

The little party set out in a car that evening, and going from house to house at the scene of the Bridgewater hold-up, they found two Italians who had witnessed the crime, and had told the police that the bandit who stood on the street and fired a shotgun was a short man with a closely cropped mustache. These witnesses had been rejected by the police, as not fitting the “theory,” and they were willing to appear for the defense. There were other witnesses who might have been found, if there had been more time, and if the seekers had realized the urgency. But Cornelia was hugging her notion that the case of the prosecution was bound to break down in court; and what human mind could have conceived that ghastly eccentricity of the laws of Massachusetts, which amounted in effect to this: that whatever evidence was presented to the jury at this coming trial would count, while everything that was found out later might as well have been left in the darkness of oblivion? To quote the words of the Supreme Judicial Court of the august Commonwealth, handed down in the Sacco-Vanzetti case: “It is not imperative that a new trial be granted, even though the evidence is newly discovered, and if presented to a jury would justify a different verdict.” Such is the law of the Brahmins and Blue-bloods, which altereth not!

_O fates that hold us at your choice How strange a web ye spin!_

How strange the plight in which you have placed us--that we walk backward into our lives, with eyes that see the past, but are blind to the future! With ears that hear the past, but are deaf to the future! Betty rented a car, and Joe drove her and Cornelia and Vincenzo and Alfonsina to Bridgewater, and along with that little party went a vast throng, made up of twenty-six hundred and nine days, each one with a separate burden of griefs and regrets. Days, black-clad and somber, waving black veils unseen! Days wailing and moaning, shouting alarms unheard! Cornelia and Betty and Joe and Vincenzo and Alfonsina got out of the car, and separated and walked up and down streets, and rang door-bells and went into houses asking questions of strangers; and into every house with them went ten million mourners, ten million protestants marching, singing, carrying banners in a hundred foreign tongues. Mobs roared their fury, shrieked their imprecations; bombs exploded, sheets of plate glass were shattered; cavalry charged, clubs fell on human heads, sabers clove human flesh, men fell and bled and died--and of all that tumult not one sound reached the deaf ears, not one glimpse penetrated the blind eyes!

Voices, ghostly voices calling, up and down the streets of the little town of Bridgewater, all through that warm spring night! Run, Betty, run, on your swift young limbs that have been trained by climbing mountains! Run, and rest not, until you find those other witnesses who will testify that the bandit had a closely cropped mustache! Run, Cornelia--one last effort of those old legs, shrunken and withered so that you do not like to see them--find some one who can bring you to those Pinkerton men who interviewed the witnesses of the prosecution, and heard them say they could not identify the bandits! Joe Randall, driver of the car, don’t go back to Plymouth to-night! Turn your headlights to Boston, an hour or two away, and use your newspaper introductions to find the reporter who was first upon the scene, and will testify to what all the witnesses said! Cornelia, put your family influence to work, get the shoe-company and the insurance company to give up those Pinkerton reports--now while they will count, and not later, when they will be thrust into a pigeon-hole and forgotten by a governor’s secretary, who is paid a double salary to see that the great man’s mind is not burdened with details!

Look, Cornelia! Look, Betty and Joe, look at that man, waiting in the future; a man with a smile made of marble, with eyes like two agates, cold, expressionless, a supersalesman of automobiles who will play the part of final jury, and will politely accept your evidence, and remain of his own opinion! Joe Randall, “expert investigator,” now is your hour! Drive to Atlantic Avenue, where the wholesale fish-dealers have their stores, and find that Italian who shipped the barrel of eels! Pull off your coat and climb into the attic and search the boxes of records--it will not be so hard now as seven years later, for there are not so many records, and the dust is not so thick! When you find the book of express receipts, showing the barrel of eels consigned to “B. Vanzetti, Plymouth,” six days before Christmas, 1919, it will count with the jury--instead of being set aside, unseen by the agate eyes!

The little party turned their car home that night, well content with what they had achieved. Next morning they sat down to a conference with eminent legal authority, and Cornelia offered her testimony, and learned that it was not available, because most of it was hearsay, and anyhow, she had better not take the stand, because she would be questioned concerning Vanzetti’s beliefs, and it was not desirable to have the jury know that he was an anarchist. Of course everybody in Plymouth knew it perfectly well, but if it was not introduced in the evidence, the jury would be ordered to disregard it, and would do so--that being the merry fiction of the merry legal game. Could Cornelia testify that Vanzetti was a pacifist, and repudiated violence? Could she testify that he did not believe in the overthrow of the United States government by force? No, she could not testify that, and therefore nothing she could say about Vanzetti’s character would count with the jurors. How could they fail to be suspicious of an American woman who confessed to intimate friendship with a dangerous Italian Red?

Furthermore, there was a question whether Vanzetti should be a witness himself. He could not deny his anarchistic opinions, which would so antagonize the jurors that they would find him guilty of anything, regardless of evidence. It was a delicate matter, because Vanzetti was a draft-evader, and the jury would consist of men who had gone to the war, or had sent their sons. Also he was an infidel, and the jury would consist of devout church-goers. There was that letter found on Vanzetti, denouncing a certain Catholic priest as a “pig.” The jurymen in Plymouth County were not apt to be Catholics themselves, but they would think that Italians ought to be Catholics, and it would be better to appeal to the district attorney’s sense of fair play not to introduce that letter.

Vanzetti was stubborn, and clamorous to be heard in his own defense; but then, he would not stop denying that he had met Boda at the Johnson place the night of the arrest; and how could he expect to get away with that, in face of the testimony the prosecution could offer, if the issue were raised? No, Vanzetti must be made to realize that under the law he was not required to testify, and no conclusion unfavorable to him could be drawn from his failure to testify.

Again the future rose up and shouted! Ten million hands were waved unseen, ten million warnings were voiced unheard! The fates that held Cornelia and Betty at their choice granted no forewarning of the man with the marble smile and the agate eyes, the supersalesman of automobiles who seven years later was to be the final jury in the case. Not once did they hear him repeat his formula, which was to make him seem like a gramophone through the weary months of the future; the formula which would balk the friends of love and justice who traveled from all over the world to appeal to him; the formula which took the place of all evidence and all thought--“Why did not Vanzetti take the stand in his own behalf?”

IX. THE WEB OF FATE

Plymouth Court-house stands at the head of the square, a large and stately building of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls, and white colonial entrances, and a niche containing a figure of justice, open-eyed. The court-room is bare and white, with a throne of polished wood, and over it a great seal of the “Plymouth Society,” with the flags of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts draped on top. It is all extremely solemn and formal; the bailiff wears a uniform, and carries a “wand,” or long stick with which he holds the spectators in awe.

On the morning of the trial of Bartolomeo Vanzetti the room was filled with spectators from Bridgewater, curious to behold the wicked bandit; also a few working-people of foreign birth, Italians and Portuguese of North Plymouth who remembered what Vanzetti had done for them in the strike. The men had put on celluloid collars with gilt studs and no ties, the women wore shawls and aprons; they sat, morning and afternoon, following with strained attention a mysterious procedure in a strange tongue. There were spectators from Boston, but no reporters from there; the case excited only local interest, and was left to local correspondents.

The prisoner was brought in, shackled to a deputy by each wrist; also a steel cage was brought in, and he was locked inside. This in itself was almost equivalent to a conviction--it made him look so alarming to a jury, so much like a wild beast. The district attorney entered--a stocky man of German parentage, florid, blond, good-looking, smartly dressed. Fred Katzmann was his name, a Mason and a “joiner,” prominent in the political ring which governed the county. Most political rings in America are financed by the local corporations, and exist to carry out their will; the efficiency of a public official usually consists in the fact that he knows their needs and wishes so thoroughly that he does what they want without having to be told.

In this case Fred Katzmann’s course was very easy--to consult his prejudices. He knew that the Reds were pledged to destroy American institutions, and therefore it was a patriotic service to destroy the Reds. Later on he went before the alumni of his college, assembled for banqueting, and the chairman introduced him as a hero who was going to save the Commonwealth from its secret foes; the banqueters cheered him tumultuously, and he made a speech accepting the stern duty. All the district attorneys of the neighboring counties were making such speeches at this time--it was an easy way to be popular, and to conceal orgies of grafting and blackmailing--what was soon afterwards to be described, in the charges against one of the most oratorical, as “malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance in office.”

Fred Katzmann was personally an easy-going man, and cultivated a manner of geniality which made a hit with juries. When the lawyers for the defense came in, carrying briefcases and looking important, he greeted them cordially; they were his friends, and during the procedures he would refer to them as “my brothers.” He would carry on a merry battle of wits with them, and the moment court was adjourned, he would walk out side by side with them, and they would sit at lunch and “josh” each other about the points they had lost or won. It was exactly like a tennis tournament--except that in tennis they used a ball, while in this legal game it was a wop.

A door in the front of the court-room opened, and there entered a thin, shrunken old gentleman with a white mustache and a face like parchment. He wore a black silk robe, and the moment he appeared the bailiff pounded on the floor with his wand and shouted, “Court!” and all the lawyers stood up, and the spectators stood up, and remained standing. The bailiff drew a breath and shouted, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having anything to do before the Honorable, the Justices of the Superior Court, now sitting within and for the County of Plymouth, draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard! God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” Whereupon the wrinkled old gentleman sat down, and everybody else did the same.

Webster Thayer, judge of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was what the pathologists call a “ticquer”; that is, he blinked with a nervous affliction as he gazed about his domain. His sharp, withered face was a symbol of the old Puritan spirit; his voice, like a steel saw cutting through wood, was an ancestral inheritance, produced by three hundred years of cold and foggy winds. He aspired to exhibit repose, but his fear of so many foreigners in his court-room showed itself by incessant nervous glances. He was obsessed with a phobia on the subject of Reds, and talked about it incessantly, with so much repetition that many persons avoided him, or ruthlessly shut him up.

Cornelia had never heard of “Web” Thayer before, but he was to be the subject of her study for seven years, and before long she knew him completely. During this Plymouth trial he did not know who she was; but during the second trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti a year later, he had heard about her, and he summoned her three times to his chambers to impress his personality upon her and to justify his ways. So she learned that the basis of his being was an inferiority complex, a sense of the gulf which yawned between him and the great ones of his community, and which he would never cross, even though he won his way to the Supreme Judicial bench. He was a Thayer, but not of the “right” ones; and in Massachusetts it is a special offense to bear an honored name unless you are one of the “right” ones. There are the “right” Cabots--and assuredly they are not those who used to be called Caboto and Kabotinsky, and got permission from a too complaisant court to Americanize themselves. There are “right” Coolidges, and Calvin is not among them, and would not be, though he were president of the United States for half a dozen terms.

“Web” lived in Worcester, which is a city in the wilds of the far west--that is to say, forty miles removed from the cultural influences of the Back Bay. It is a hardware center, the home of hardware men, who hustle and “boost” and make “selling talks.” “Web” had gone to Dartmouth, a small college in the hills of New Hampshire, whose graduates are looked down upon by the haughty scions of the Harvard “Gold Coast.” “Web” asserted his uneasy personality, and drew attention to himself, something the “blue-bloods” never do, because they do not have to. In this Sacco-Vanzetti affair “Web” would do what the Commonwealth wanted him to do, but he would do it in such a way that the Back Bay would blush for him, and comfort itself by calling it one more sign of the degradation of politics, a consequence of turning over public affairs to the “mob.”

He was a man of intense vanity, and played the judicial game as a drama in which he was hero and king. But he could never be sure whether he was successful in the rôle, and the actor would stop in the middle of the play to ask the audience. To the lawyers, or any one else who came to his chambers after the sessions, he would say, “Am I handling this all right?” To the newspaper reporters he would say, “Now, boys, give me a good deal on this.” If the reporter happened to be a young and pretty woman, as it did in at least one case, he would employ the arts of gallantry, which are somehow less welcome from an old man with a skin like a mummy’s. He would take a seat beside her on the train going to the trial, and smile and ogle, and present a flower to her, and discuss the case. His voice had a penetrating quality, and when the train stopped, every one in the car would hear what he was saying. He must have known the mental discomfort he was causing to his auditor, yet something drove him to go on.

There is an ancient tradition among those who deal with the law that a judge must not discuss a case in public, at least not while it is actually before him. But in handling Sacco and Vanzetti, “Web” Thayer could not keep within these traditional limits. He would talk about the case in a club dining-room, until all the men would leave the table; he would approach a Dartmouth professor on the football field, asking in a loud voice, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards the other day?” The horror of these words became such in Massachusetts that the Commonwealth had to send its policemen with hickory clubs to crack the skulls of demonstrants who carried the words on a banner. Because there was no way to keep them from being spoken aloud, Boston Common had to be closed to public speakers for the first time in its three hundred years of history.

III

One by one the talesmen took the stand, and were questioned; under the Massachusetts practice, all this questioning was done by the judge, and the defendants’ lawyers could only exercise the right of challenge. One by one the jurors were selected: Arthur W. Burgess, shoemaker of the town of Hanson, Henry S. Burgess, caretaker of the town of Wareham, Joseph Frawley, shoe-finisher of the town of Brockton, Charles A. Gale, clerk, of the town of Norwell--so it went, all Anglo-Saxon names. Put none but Americans on guard! Edwin P. Litchfield, shoe-worker of Pembroke, Oliver B. Poole, clerk of Brockton, Alfred M. Shaw, Jr., laborer of Carver, Charles C. Wilbur, tackmaker of Kingston: such little people of the old stock, having failed for one reason or another to become rich, looked with bitter contempt upon the immigrants who came pouring into the country, to beat down wages and make life harder for the “white men” of New England. Far from having any sense of class solidarity, they clung to the American idea that their children would rise and join the leisure class; their attitude to the Italian was that of the poor whites of the south to the Negroes. “All these wops stand together,” said one juryman to another, discussing the case at lunch in a restaurant. The remark was overheard, but nothing came of it.

Another juror, Arthur S. Nickerson, a foreman in the Plymouth Cordage Company! Another foreman of that same company had thrown Vanzetti, the agitator, out of their plant, and kept him out four years and more; others had refused him employment, and some one had caused him to be shadowed by detectives for eighteen months after the strike. Now Nickerson was to help decide whether or not Vanzetti should be set at liberty to lead another strike, and deprive the cordage company of another two hundred thousand dollars a year in extra wages! Vanzetti’s friends saw with dismay his lawyers permit such a juror to be accepted. They asked themselves, could it be because one of the lawyers was a stockholder in the company, and looking to the company for legal business as well as for dividends? It was permissible to ask.

The assistant district attorney rose, and addressed the jury, telling them what he was going to prove. He told them all that elaborate “theory” about the Coacci house and the bandit-car, which had been stolen a month before the Bridgewater crime, and found in Manley woods abandoned after the South Braintree crime. He brought this car, a Buick, in front of the court-house, and he told them about Boda, and how he was going to prove that Boda had been driving a Buick car a short while before the crime. He told them about Orciani--despite the fact that they had had to drop Orciani on account of an American alibi. He told them about Sacco, despite the fact that they had had to drop Sacco from this case on account of another American alibi. He built up in the jury’s mind an elaborate picture of bandit-gangs, bandit-houses and bandit-cars--and then in the course of the trial he failed to produce a particle of evidence to connect either Sacco, Coacci, Orciani or Boda with any crime, or to connect Coacci’s house with any crime, or to connect any one of the five men with the so-called bandit-car. One scrap of testimony--a milkman had seen Boda driving a Buick car a month or two before the crime; or at least he thought it was Boda and he thought it was a Buick. Yet they brought in all this complicated and alarming mass of “theory,” not merely at this Plymouth trial, but at the later trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree crime; they showed the bandit-car in both cases, and the bullet-hole in it, and planted the mass of suspicion in the minds of both juries.

Benjamin F. Bowles to the stand: a special officer employed by the shoe-company, and at the same time a member of Mike Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. He had been riding in the seat alongside the driver of the truck, when two bandits, one with a shotgun, the other with a revolver, had rushed out and opened fire. The chauffeur of the paytruck had fainted from fright, and Bowles had seized the steering-wheel and guided the truck with his left hand, while with his right he fired a revolver at the shotgun bandit, until the bandit turned and ran. Later in the trial Bowles took the stand again and changed his testimony, so as to make it fit with the story he had told at the preliminary hearing: he now swore that he had fired, not at the shotgun-bandit, but at the other one, the revolver-bandit. So here was the picture this super-policeman presented to the jury: he had steered a fast-moving truck with his left hand, fired a revolver at a bandit with his right hand, and at the same time used his eyes to study the appearance of a second bandit, so effectively that he could give a detailed description fitting the features, hair, eyes and clothing of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, now sitting in the prisoner’s dock before him! At the preliminary hearing Bowles had been “pretty positive” that the shotgun bandit had had a “short and croppy” mustache; but now at the trial he was “positive” that this bandit had had a “bushy” mustache.

Next came a shoe-inspector, Frank Harding, known as “Skip,” who had witnessed the crime. He had talked to a reporter of the Boston Globe, an hour or two afterwards, and described the bandit as “smooth-shaven.” At the preliminary hearing he had described him as having “an overgrown Charlie Chaplin mustache.” Now at the trial he identified him as Vanzetti. He had positively identified Orciani as the other bandit; but that fact was not evidence at the trial. Neither was the Globe reporter’s testimony, for that was not discovered until years later--when it might as well not have been discovered at all. To the Pinkerton detectives “Skip” had described the bandit-car as a Hudson; and he had been an automobile mechanic and knew cars. But now he swore it was a Buick--which happened to be what the “theory” required.

Then came the paymaster, Cox, who had described the shotgun bandit at the preliminary hearing as “short and of slight build.” Now he made it agree with Bowles--“five feet eight.” But no effort of the district attorney could get him to say that he was sure Vanzetti was the man.

Then came the elderly Georgina Brooks, and with her the age of miracles came back. Mrs. Brooks testified that she had looked out of the window of the Bridgewater railroad depot--she specified which window--and had seen “fire and smoke from a gun.” It so happened that between that window and the spot where the firing had occurred, there intervened the full bulk of two two-story houses. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense employed a surveyor to make a map of the scene--but like everything else, it was too late.

Also Mrs. Brooks testified that on her way to the depot, and before the crime, she had inspected the bandit-car and the bandits. She identified Vanzetti as a man she had looked at twice, and who had looked at her “severely.” Why she should have turned to look at the car a second time, and been so particular about examining the features of a man sitting casually in an automobile was something Mrs. Brooks could not explain. But she admitted that with one eye she could barely make out the silhouette of objects, and that she had been undergoing treatment for the other eye.

Then young Shaw, a schoolboy who had heard the firing and dodged behind a tree. He had seen the shotgun-bandit run away, at a distance of a hundred and forty-five feet, and said that he could tell the man was a foreigner by the way he ran. “What sort of a foreigner?” and the boy replied, “Either Italian or Russian.”

“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a Norwegian?”

“Yes.”

“What is the difference?”

“Unsteady.”

Then came Mike Stewart, large, powerful, heavy-lidded. He brought with him his theory--but you may be sure he never mentioned the “detective machine,” from which the theory had been born! Neither did he mention the Pinkerton reports, and how they confuted the testimony of “Skip” Harding. “Skip” had taken down the number of the bandit-car, and given a memorandum to Mike, who had unfortunately lost it. Also, unfortunately, there was no number-plate on the car which the police had found in the Manley woods.

They introduced Vanzetti’s cap, and a man swore it resembled the cap worn by the shotgun-bandit--although Cox and Mrs. Brooks had sworn to a shotgun-bandit in a soft hat. And that was practically all they had to offer, except for an empty twelve-gauge shotgun shell which they claimed to have picked up at the scene of the shooting. When Vanzetti had been arrested, he had had four shotgun shells in his pocket, and these were put into evidence, but the jury never heard Vanzetti’s story of how he came to have them. He had spent the day of his arrest at Sacco’s, while the family was packing up for Italy, and these shells, left over from hunting, were picked up on a shelf; Vanzetti had put them into his pocket, saying that he would turn them over to some comrade and get fifty cents for the cause. But that story must not be told to the jury, because Vanzetti would be asked what he mean by the “cause,” and he would have to answer that it was the evil cause of anarchism. Nor would it do to put Sacco on the stand, or his wife, because that would bring in the other crime, and the lawyers were maintaining their legal fiction that the jury knew nothing about it--although, of course, every one of them had read about it on the front page of all the papers, and the assistant district attorney had brought Sacco in as a part of the “theory”!

Such was the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against Bartolomeo Vanzetti. And now it was the defendant’s turn to produce his alibi, and persuade a Yankee jury to believe it. Cornelia and Betty and Joe, watching these proceedings day by day with strained and fearful attention, realized too late how difficult it was going to be. There sat those native sons of New England, lean-faced and stern--elderly men, most of them, because the younger and more active found means to avoid jury duty. Men with such names as Burgess and Gale and Litchfield and Nickerson and Shaw were invited to believe the testimony of Vittorio Papa and Carlo Balboni and Vincenzo Brini and Enrico Bastoni and Teresa Malaguti and Adalaida Bongiovanni and Marguaritta Fiocchi: men with black hair and eyebrows, broad faces and high cheek-bones, uncouth and sinister, clad in ill-fitting cheap store-clothes; women short and stout, with broad mouths and low foreheads, with no collars to their shirt-waists, wearing aprons in front of them and dingy shawls about their shoulders, speaking a foreign jabber which was turned into English by an interpreter who looked as much like a bandit as the others. These were the “Dagoes” who were taking bread out of the mouths of the old stock, swarming into the factory towns, carrying fire-arms, living like pigs, and raising litters of as many little pigs as any farmer ever saw. “These wops all stand together,” said one juryman; and all native New England agreed.

Mrs. Mary Fortini, Bart’s landlady, told how she had waked him up at six o’clock that morning before Christmas, and how he had gulped down his bread and coffee, and hurried to get out his cart and his eels. Carlo Balboni told how he had come home from his night work, and caused Mrs. Fortini to wake Bart, so that he, Balboni, might be the first customer. John Di Carlo, who kept a shoe-store, testified how Bart had brought him eels while he was cleaning out the store, a little after seven. Each of these witnesses was harrowed by the prosecution, who sought by every legal trick to trip them up in their testimony.

The issue of “radicalism” was not supposed to be brought into the trial; the jury was not supposed to know about it, and in the years that were to follow you would hear judges and editors and governors and college presidents and other eminent persons stoutly maintaining that this issue had not entered the case until the defense had brought it in at the second trial. But behold, here was the suave district attorney, questioning the shoe-store proprietor: “Have you ever discussed government theories over there between you? Have you discussed the question of the poor man and the rich man between you?” And later comes Michael Sassi, a gardener, to the stand, and the prosecutor asks, “Have you heard anything of his political beliefs? Have you heard him make any speeches to your friends in the cordage company?” This questioning led by accident to some character testimony--in spite of the effort to bar such testimony. Said the district attorney, “You have dined many times with Vanzetti, haven’t you?”

“With Brini, as his guest, I dined many times: Vanzetti boarded with him and sometimes he was present.”

“You used to play cards with the defendant?”

“Vanzetti does not play.”

“To smoke, didn’t you?”

“I do not smoke.”

“How many times have you drank with him?”

“Vanzetti does not drink.”

Said Bart, commenting on this evidence: “What a method to find out whether I had been robbing in Bridgewater or delivering fish in Plymouth on the 24th of December, 1919!” Poor Bart, who had to sit in complete silence, watching all this from inside a cage, sternly rebuked on the one occasion when he dared to interrupt! He had to see the rascalities of the prosecution, and the unconvincing quality of the defense--he who, from first to last, understood the case better than any other person interested in it, even the most famous and most expensive of lawyers! He who could read every motive, understand every character, predict every event, and advise, generally in vain, what should be done--he had to sit and watch everything done wrong, and ruin come down upon him like a slow-grinding glacier.

One by one came Italian witnesses, telling the story of Vanzetti’s movements through every hour of that fateful day. Vincenzo Brini had come home from night-work, and got some eels, and chatted with his friend and former boarder. Bastoni, the baker, had refused to rent the horse and wagon; the time was exactly seven-forty-five, because the cordage whistle blew as Bart entered the store, and “that whistle is our bread and butter.” And then Beltrando Brini, twelve years and a half old, bright-eyed and eager, speaking very good English, and thoroughly alert to the meaning of this scene. Trando had first been with Bart about seven-thirty, and had been sent home to hunt out his rubbers from the attic. He had rejoined Bart just as the latter left the baker’s, and told about his disappointment over the horse and wagon, and how he had talked about it every day thereafter. He told how he and Bart had gone from house to house, up one street and down another, delivering their eels, until two-forty that afternoon. He named the streets and the people, described the houses and told of conversations, every detail that lived in his mind.

And Mr. Katzmann took him and spent two hours trying to trap him; making him tell parts of his story over and over, hoping that it would vary; pretending that Trando had said things he hadn’t said; trying to mix him up about the number of hours he had been with Bart--because Trando took out the time he was hunting rubbers and the time he went to lunch, and Mr. Katzmann pretended not to understand this. He asked what did the basket of eels weigh, and could Trando carry it the long route he had described. Trando replied that any one could see, the basket got lighter as he delivered. In the end Katzmann had to give up, and pay Trando the high compliment of calling him such another as Katzmann himself. Turning to the jury he said: “The parents of such an intelligent boy are right to be proud of him, but what he told you from the stand is a lesson learned by heart.”

There came a string of Italian housewives, telling how Vanzetti had sold them eels; eight or ten testified, and there were twice as many more, but the lawyers said it would be a mistake, “the jury will be bored with so much eel-talk.” If they refused to believe a score of Italian witnesses, would they believe two score or three score? The lawyers insisted that the alibi had been proved. But Bart was not satisfied, he was angry because of the efforts of the prosecution to claim that he had had a “cropped mustache.” He pointed to his soft and silky hairs, which could not be got to stand out; there were so few of them, that was why he had always worn his mustaches long; if he had cut them short, there would have been nothing. For eight years he had been going about this town of Plymouth with his walrus mustaches, and everybody knew him; but this jury contained only one Plymouth man, and did not know him. Bart insisted that the truth about his mustache must be proved, and in a passion of indignation he told his lawyers that if they did not do it, he would rise up in court and denounce them for treason to their client.

So at the last moment the Italian “runner” went scurrying to find some of Vanzetti’s friends who knew that his mustaches had never been trimmed. Also Cornelia and Betty and Joe and the Brinis went hunting--and strange was that experience, painful that discovery about human nature, in this terror-ridden town of Cordage. Policemen who knew Vanzetti, and had seen him on the street many times a week for eight years, were afraid for their jobs if they testified as to the length of his mustaches! Contractors who had hired him were afraid for their future contracts! Italian barbers were afraid for their little shops, and their little bootlegging on the side!

In the end they found two policemen who gave nervous and halting testimony that Vanzetti had always worn his walrus mustaches. They found an Italian cement contractor, Christofore, who had employed Vanzetti, and found him a good workman, and had always known him with his mustaches. The prosecuting attorney browbeat this witness, who knew no English, asking him about the mustaches of this person and that--among them of Beltrando Brini, aged twelve and a half years! He asked about the proprietor of one of Plymouth’s big hotels--what kind of a mustache did this gentleman have, and Christofore described it, a small mustache that he was growing. After the noon recess the gentleman was put upon the stand, and exhibited to the jury a completely smooth-shaven face! What was the use of all this mustache-talk, said the district attorney, when they put a mustache on a man who had never had one?

The only time in her life that Cornelia ever heard Vanzetti swear was when he talked about this dirty trick which had been played upon him. For trick it was--whether the hotel proprietor had got shaved especially for his appearance as a witness, or whether it had just happened, that he had got shaved since the Italians had last met him. This much was certain: Christofore had seen this hotel proprietor with a mustache, and so had Vanzetti and many of his friends. The jury could not know, because, with one exception, they were outsiders. But Katzmann and Judge Thayer had sometimes been known to stay at this man’s hotel, and to sit in front of his fire-place in the evening, gossiping with him about what had happened during the day.

VII

Such was the closing scene of this duel of evidence. The jury listened to the genial Mr. Katzmann become suddenly stern and patriotic. “Dagoes stand together!” he exclaimed--and it was easy for them to draw the conclusion that Americans should profit by their example. Then came Judge Thayer, thin-faced, tight-lipped, sharp-voiced, such a great man as these little men of the jury had been taught to reverence. Nothing of the inferiority complex now, nothing of the restless uneasiness, the vulgar craving for attention. It was the great actor now, playing the part which had been his life-study. He knew exactly what instructions to give to these Yankee jurymen, to appeal to their prejudices without seeming to do so. When students of the case sought to ascertain what he had said, it was discovered that the court stenographer’s notes had been burned, and that the copy furnished the defense was strangely lacking in part of the judge’s charge.

The jury retired to deliberate, and carried with them the four shotgun shells which were alleged to have been found upon Vanzetti. They had been identified as ordinary hunting shells, containing bird-shot, which would not be apt to kill a man. But the jurors decided to investigate further, so they opened them, and behold, they were filled with buckshot, which would surely kill a man!

Now there is no point upon which English and American law is more strict than this, that all evidence in a criminal trial must be produced in the presence of the defendant. Vanzetti was entitled to know about those buckshot, and to explain the fact if he could. Maybe he would have taken the stand, maybe Sacco would have done so; maybe they might have wished to ask, who had had the keeping of those shells for the past six months, and what were the chances of their having got mixed up with other shells. There were no identifying marks upon them--but Vanzetti never had a chance to point this out. The jury went ahead and brought in a verdict; and next day one of the jurors happened to meet Judge Thayer in a restaurant, and showed him several of the buckshot. Judge Thayer knew at once that if this story leaked out, the whole expensive trial would go for nothing. He hurried to Katzmann, who came and got the buckshot from the juror before he left the place. Then Katzmann phoned the other jurors to come to his office, and warned them, and the matter was hushed up.

It was half a year later that the facts got out, and then several of the jurors made affidavits about it. An effort was made to invalidate the trial on this ground, but the matter was never argued. If it had been, it would have been argued before Judge Thayer! Whenever during the next seven years the defense discovered new evidence, they would make a motion for a new trial, and under the laws of the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a decision would be handed down by Judge Thayer! When the defense set up a claim that the judge in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had shown prejudice, they made a motion, and it was referred to Judge Thayer, who solemnly listened to arguments, and solemnly handed down a decision to the effect that he had no jurisdiction! Incidentally he solemnly stated that he had no prejudice; and this after he had been going about among his clubmates for several years, saying, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?”

The indictment charged “attempting to rob” and “attempting to kill.” The judge in his instructions had directed that the second charge should be ignored, because the evidence showed that the bandits had merely sought to intimidate the guards; they could hardly have missed their targets with a shotgun at such close range. But after the jurors had opened the shells and found the buckshot, they decided to ignore the judge’s instructions, and brought in a verdict of guilty on both counts. The judge, in an effort to correct this error, took the liberty of ignoring one-half the jury’s verdict and sentencing the prisoner to the maximum penalty of fifteen years in state’s prison for attempting to rob.

The scene in the court-room when the verdict was brought in was a heart-rending one. For ten days the friends of Vanzetti had sat in a tension of anxiety, and now their grief was not to be restrained. Cornelia bowed her head in her arms and wept, while Betty sat, white-faced and quivering, clutching Joe’s hand. The Italian women became hysterical; they screamed and wailed, and the contagion spread from one to another--it was a scene of utter desperation, never anything to equal it. Vanzetti had to stand up and cry to them, “Coraggio! Coraggio!” His guards permitted that much before they shackled his wrists to their own, and led him swiftly out by a side door, and put him into a car and whisked him away to the jail.

Next day when Cornelia and Betty went to see him, for the first time they met an utterly broken man. Again and again he said the words with which he had first greeted them, “My enemy have got me!” He told them what the rest would be--he, the clear-sighted one, the thinker, the analyst of class forces. “I am a convicted. Nick is the friend of a convicted, he is a bandit already, he is a dead man. The jury will say, ‘One of them is bad, why should other be better?’” And when Cornelia pledged her word that she would move heaven and earth to have this verdict set aside, he told her, “You will try, Nonna, but never will be succeeded. It is not for bandit I am convicted, it is for anarchista. If men do sooch trick like you see in court, what is use for hoping?”

Then it was that he swore, because of that mustache trick which had been played by the hotel proprietor. At that time he did not know about the buckshot. He did not know about the Pinkerton reports, which had been kept hidden by the prosecution. He did not know about the witnesses who had been rejected by the police because they did not describe the bandits according to the “theory.” But he did know about the great cordage company, and the losses he had caused it in the strike; so, when Cornelia talked about decent people who would not stand for that “mustache trick,” he laughed a bitter laugh. “You will see, Nonna. They will say, it is for jury to decide. They will say, musta trust jury, musta stand by court.”

VIII

They put Vanzetti in an automobile, and with another car full of armed men in front and a third one bringing up the rear, they drove him to Boston and shut him behind the stone walls of the dingy old Charlestown prison--built in 1805, when the population of Massachusetts was one-tenth what it is now. It stands directly across the river from the city, so placed that on certain mornings when the sun rises clear, the shadow of Bunker Hill monument strikes its walls. An odd turn of fate, that this Italian seeker of liberty should have been convicted within sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had ridden.

They weighed him and measured him and scientifically scrutinized him, and dressed him in faded khaki, and put him in a cell containing an iron cot, and a free space eight feet long and one foot, ten inches wide, with light falling from a narrow slit in the ceiling. In that cell he would stay, fifteen and a half hours out of twenty-four, for the next seven years--except for the holidays of another indictment, trial and sentence. Of the remaining hours a day he would spend seven working in a tailor-shop, and forty minutes in a yard, overcrowded, smoky and dusty.

Soon after the beginning of this régime the Catholic chaplain of the prison came to see him. It is a Catholic maxim--therefore a prison maxim--that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”; and even an alleged atheist is a human being, and may respond to kindness and sympathy. The good Father Murphy talked to him, not about religion, but about general matters; and then, having got on friendly terms, remarked, quite casually, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?” Thereupon the alleged atheist rose up with dignity, and asked for the privilege of being alone in his cell, and the consolations of organized, institutionalized and subsidized religion were missing from the remainder of his life.

Instead he sought the consolations of literature. He wrote a long letter, pouring out his soul--and incidentally revealing that he was coming to feel at home in a new language; he no longer had to look up every word.

“I was just thinking what I would to do for past the long days jail: I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you when you will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.

“Thanks to you from the bottom of my heart for your confidence in my innocence; I am so. I did not spittel a drop of blood, or steal a cent in all my life. A little knowledge of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had gave to me some ideas very different from those of many other uman beings. But I wish to convince my fellow-men that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I preached: I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social wealth would belong to every umane creatures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for a insurrection.

“The insurrection, the great movements of the soul do not need dollars. It need love, light, spirit of sacrifice, ideas, conscience, instincts. It need more conscience, more hope and more goodness. And all this blassing things can be seeded, awoked, growed up in the heart of man in many ways, but not by robbery and murder for robbery.

“I like you to know that I think to Italy, so speaking. From the universal family, turning to this humble son, I will say that, as far as my needs, wish and aspirations call, I do not need to become a bandit. I like the teaching of Tolstoi, Saint Francesco and Dante. I like the example of Cincinnati and Garibaldi. The epicurean joi do not like to me. A little roof, a field, a few books and food is all what I need. I do not care for money, for leisure, for mondane ambition. And honest, even in this world of lambs and wolves I can have those things. But my father has many field, houses, garden. He deal in wine and fruits and granaries. He wrote to me many times to come back home, and be a business man. Well, this supposed murderer had answered to him that my conscience do not permit to me to be a business man and I will gain my bread by work his field.

“And more: The clearness of mind, the peace of the conscience, the determination and force of will, the intelligence, all, all what make the man feeling to be a part of the life, force and intelligence of the universe, will be brake by a crime. I know that, I see that, I tell that to everybody. Do not violate the law of nature, if you do not want to be a miserable. I remember: it was a night without moon, but starry. I sit alone in the darkness, I was sorry, very sorry. With the face in my hands I began to look at the stars. I feel that my soul want goes away from my body, and I have had to make an effort to keep it in my chest. So, I am the son of Nature, and I am so rich that I do not need any money. And for this they say I am a murderer and will condemn me to death. Death? It is nothing. Abbominium is cruel thing.

“Now you advise me to study. Yes, it would be a good thing. But I do not know enough this language to be able to make any study through it. I will like to read Longfellow’s, Paine’s, Franklin’s and Jefferson’s works, but I cannot. I would like to study mathematics, physics, history and science, but I have not a sufficient elementary school to begin such studies, especially the two first and I cannot study without work, hard physical work, sunshine and winds; free, blassing wind. There is no flame without the atmospheric gasses; and no light of genius in any soul without they communion with Mother Nature.

“I hope to see you very soon; I will tell you more in the matter. I will write something, a meditation perhaps and name it: Waiting for the Hanger. I have lost the confidence in the justice of man. I mean in what is called so; not of course, of that sentiment which lay in the heart of man, and that no infernal force will be strong enough to soffocate it. Your assistance and the assistance of so many good men and women, had made my cross much more light. I will not forget it.

“I beg your pardon for such a long letter, but I feel so reminiscent to you that hundred pages would not be sufficient to extern my sentiments and feelings. I am sure you will excuse me. Salve.

“Give to all my best regards and wishes, Your

“BARTHOLOMEW VANZETTI.”

Cornelia and Betty and Joe were back in Boston, the first two having been hurriedly summoned for the funeral of Great-aunt Priscilla. It is highly inconvenient, belonging to one of these big families; there are so many funerals, weddings and christenings, which it would be unthinkable not to attend.

An extraordinary thing had happened to this aged female Brahmin in the closing months of her life; the bacillus of eccentricity, which lurks in all Boston blue blood, had suddenly flared into activity. Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, aged eighty-seven, stiff as a ramrod and model of every known or conceivable kind of propriety, had suddenly fallen under the spell of an Episcopal faith-healer, who was traveling about the country insisting that every bishop, even every country parson, could demonstrate the living presence of God, work miracles, and stop the slow dribble of Episcopalians into Christian Science.

Great-aunt Priscilla almost succeeded in arising and taking up her bed and walking, in spite of the complete anchylosis of her spine; she insisted that she would have done it, had it not been that her relatives persisted in reminding her of her great age--a “negative suggestion.” She took up the habit of being what she called “instant in prayer,” which meant that she was liable to start talking to God at any moment. It was embarrassing to her relatives and friends, because of course no one likes to interrupt a talk with God, and feels something of an interloper even to sit and listen to it. Great-aunt Priscilla summoned her brother, Abner, over whom she had great authority, because he was only eighty-five years old, and tried to persuade him to appeal for a cure of his deafness. But Abner argued that if God had meant him not to be deaf, God wouldn’t have made him deaf; and this was a relief to the family, because it frightened them to imagine Abner becoming “instant in prayer,” with that deaf man’s voice which filled the biggest house in Boston.

And now it was discovered that Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, had left a letter asserting that the Episcopal service for the burial of the dead was a denial of the faith of Jesus, and specifying that she was to be buried from Trinity Church with the services for Easter Morning! It was a problem for authorities in ecclesiastical etiquette; but to defy a Thornwell was unthinkable, so the rector and his assistants finally decided that One to whom a thousand years were as a day might conceivably accept any day as Easter. There were no lilies on the market, but there were plenty of roses, and the occasion created almost as much excitement as a vaudeville show that was likely to be raided by the police. It was as if everybody were secretly wondering whether the Lord might give some sign of his displeasure at this setting back of the church calendar for three months. But apparently the Lord understood Boston, a city which is governed by the old, and especially the old ladies.

They were all at this service, even though they had to motor a hundred miles from the country. They wore their black dresses and bonnets, some new and shiny, some old and rusty--but never forget that the rustiest might be the richest. To wear a dowdy dress and a mangy fur tippet might mean one who was able to scorn ostentation--just as illiteracy in an English duke means that he is above the laws of grammar. One of these old ladies might dispose of millions upon a whim, and her lightest word was social law. They sat in family pews which had belonged to them since the great brown-stone church was built; beside them the younger generations--sweet-faced ladies, better dressed, and oh, so neat and clean, gazing with rapt faces at a fairy-story setting of white roses and candles and stained-glass-window saints, and a procession of toddlers in white robes, singing in cherubs’ voices to the rolling music of four organs in four different corners. How beautiful it all was, and how serene--and how amazing to come to it out of that world of lies and cruelty which Cornelia and Betty had just left!

Look about you at these perfect Anglo-Saxon faces--not a foreign one among them--so elegant and so satisfied! Note the costumes, polished to the last pin, and chosen with impeccable taste--broadcloth and patent leather and spats for the men, veils and laces, silk stockings and delicate scents, flowers and unostentatious jewelry for the ladies! Note the soft, cultivated voices, the gracious manners, rehearsed for centuries! Note the ancient formulas, the ritual established since eternity; the prayers and anthems rising to an Anglo-Saxon God, untainted by His temporary sojourn in a Hebrew womb. Bland saints in all the windows, with golden haloes and bright-colored robes, untainted by contact with the fishing industry. A rector who was the last word in Back Bay fashion, the Harvard manner grafted upon a mediæval ecclesiastic.

While the sweet-faced ladies gazed up at him adoringly, he pronounced a little eulogy upon the virtues of the dear departed, whose faith and funds had nourished the church for two generations and a half. It wasn’t customary to make speeches at church funerals; but since this was an Easter Sunday service, a different rule might well apply. The rector referred to the recent new fervors of the deceased, a matter which required tact, because this rector had got his training in days when the theological department of the university was separate from the medical. He made an excursion into the field of modern thought, revealing that he had heard of the science of astronomy and knew that the earth was small; more amazing yet, he gave up the Virgin birth, saying that we did not know just what had happened on that occasion, and perhaps would never know. It sounded like a hint at some scandal in the Holy Family, and would have made a scandal in Episcopal circles in other cities: but not in Boston, where everything is far advanced, and Trinity Church has to compete with King’s Chapel, which is Unitarian, and even more intellectual, and if possible more fashionable.

The funeral had the effect of bringing Cornelia and Betty back into the family, and they heard the latest gossip. Alice Winters was still supporting her “little theater,” but very unhappy, because her poet, supposed to be storming Parnassus, was getting drunk every night, and neglecting his muse for a brazen, yellow-headed flapper. Clara Scatterbridge was getting stout, and the best reducing experts could not solve her problem; she concealed the dire truth from these advisers, but not from the Argus eyes of the family--that she kept an assortment of sweets in her boudoir, and nibbled chocolates and candied fruits all day.

Great-uncle Abner was very melancholy now; he was the last of the old generation, he said, and his time would come soon--which was certainly a negative suggestion! He could no longer remember the chess moves he had made last week, and his son Quincy was losing games on purpose, in order to keep up the old man’s spirits. Abner had gone to stay with the Scatterbridges, because he liked to be with the children; each of the younger ones had a donkey to ride, and Abner had one too, and rode at the head of the procession, all over the estate--a most laughable sight. But everybody had to keep a sober face, because if you laughed at anything whatever, the old man would think you were laughing at him, and would take ineradicable offense.

Deborah came to the little apartment to have lunch with her mother and daughter; and presently it transpired that the Argus eyes of the family had observed Betty going about town with a young man by the name of Joseph Jefferson Randall. Who was he? A grandson of the actor? Betty said no, he was one of the Randalls of Pakenham Court House, Virginia, and a nephew of Senator Randall, now ambassador to one of the South American countries.

“Don’t you think, dear, you had better let your mother meet him?” inquired Deborah, mildly.

“No, Mother, I don’t,” said the younger generation. “Joe is much less radical than I, but he always says what he thinks, and so he would make you very unhappy.”

“Don’t you say what you think, my daughter?”

“Practically never, Mother. I bite my tongue off several times every hour.”

Deborah said no more, but Betty knew what she would do--and so did Deborah. What are the secret, underground channels of the blue-bloods, by which they find out whatever they wish to know? Do they have indexes and card-files, like the Quaker attorney-general, so that they can telegraph and ascertain who is who, and what are his family scandals? Anyhow, the next time Deborah came to town, she knew that Joe’s father was a “drinking man,” whose wife had divorced him. Fortunately Deborah hadn’t found out that Joe himself was married; but she imagined the worst, because divorces are a matter of heredity, like cancer, she said.

Deborah’s hope was to persuade Cornelia and Betty to accompany Betty’s older sister to Europe for the rest of the summer--since young Priscilla’s wedding had been put off by the death of her great-aunt, whose namesake she was. Failing in that, Deborah’s next campaign was to persuade the pair to come out and spend the summer at the Rupert Alvin palace on the North Shore. Deborah was lonely, she said, pathetically; her husband had so many cares just now, owing to the collapse of business. Deborah even went so far as to promise that Cornelia and Betty would be free to believe and say what they pleased, and she would not argue with them--a most remarkable “come-down” for so haughty and stern a lady.

Anything to get Betty away from the companionship of that dangerous young Virginian! To divert her with yachting and tennis and lawn-parties and picnics, in the company of sound and wholesome graduates of the Harvard “Gold Coast,” their blood free from the hereditary virus of divorce! But both Cornelia and Betty were obdurate; they were going to stay cooped up in that hot little apartment all July and August, to consult lawyers and organize committees and raise funds for the defense of two anarchist bandits!

The men of the Thornwell family indeed had their hands full that summer. The expected post-war collapse had come--or rather it had been brought about by those who realized that prices had got too high, and that “deflation” was necessary. Naturally, these men wanted to deflate everybody but themselves, and having the power, they did so. The heads of the great banking groups, of whom Rupert Alvin was one of the most careful and conscientious, had devised what they called the “Federal Reserve System,” a chain of banks financed by the government and run by the bankers; its function was to enable the great bankers to save themselves in times of panic, by issuing vast sums of new money, and lending it to the big industries, whose stocks and bonds are the mainstay of banking credit. That meant that when a panic came, it was the little fellows and the outsiders who were “deflated,” while the big bankers and their friends sat on a rock and waited for the storm to blow over.

Having this power in their hands, Rupert and his associates in the course of that summer of 1920 had their Federal Reserve banks suddenly raise the discount rates in the farming country; the result of which was to force the dumping of the country’s farm produce on the market. Prices collapsed to a point where most of the farmers were bankrupt, and in the Northwest there were whole counties with every single farm sold for taxes. Meantime the big industrialists of the East, having bank-credit, were able to hold their products, and close down their plants and wait.

But if Rupert and his Pilgrim National crowd thought they were going to have a happy time riding that storm, they learned a sad lesson. The saying that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, applies to the kings of modern credit as well as to those of Shakespearean drama. It was as if Rupert were the guardian of a huge honey-pot, and had the job of apportioning its contents to all the flies in New England. They swarmed about him, making a quite terrifying buzzing--and it was a fact that many of them had stings, more or less dangerous, and threatened to use them, and sometimes did. Impossible for a great banker to sleep with all that clamor in his ears! Impossible for any member of his family to sleep--because there were lady-flies as well as gentleman, and they too could buzz and sting!

To drop metaphors, it was a fact that a small group of bankers had to decide, during that panic, which industries of the community were to be saved and which were to go to the wall. And needless to say, in a place like Boston, it was not a question of vulgar material efficiency, it was a question of social status. Who was who, and who was married to whom, and what was the relative blueness of this blood and that? The difference between the attitudes of Boston and New York in this matter are set forth in a story which all financial men delight to tell, about the New York banker who wrote to a Boston friend, saying that he had a position for a capable young man. The Boston banker sent one, with a letter explaining that he was a great-nephew of the late Josiah Quincy Thornwell, a nephew of John Quincy Thornwell and of Rupert Alvin, a cousin of the Cabots, and so on. Whereupon the vulgar New Yorker dismissed the applicant and sent a telegram, reading: “I did not want a young man for breeding purposes, I wanted one for banking.”

The emergency now was the most desperate the Boston bluebloods had faced for a long time. It was no mere play question, like belonging to a Sewing Circle, or getting your daughters into Camp Putnam and the Friday dances, or your sons into the “Porcellian” and the “Alpha Delta Phi.” No, it was a question of your very life-blood, that privilege upon which your family existence was based. So you forgot your good manners, and fought as your ancestors had fought, in the days before they had any manners. You threatened and stormed, and raked up ancient, long-buried family skeletons, and made life miserable for a great banker who had for years been suffering from high blood pressure, and had been warned by Morrow, eminent authority upon diseases of the rich.

Rupert became morose under the strain. His pink and purple bulges, which had seemed to be radiating geniality, now took on the aspect of a threatened explosion. He fell to grumbling about human nature. Nobody cared about anything but money; friendship, family pride, honor, all were gone. He would carry his burden of sorrow for days, and suddenly it would become too heavy, and he would dump it in some quite unsuitable place. An elderly widow, a friend of Cornelia’s, sought him as adviser about the purchase of bonds, and the great and busy head of the Pilgrim National Bank kept the astonished lady for half an hour while he impressed upon her the solemn duty of guarding her property. “Hold on to it! You have nothing else--absolutely nothing! When it is gone you will discover that nobody respects you, your friends have no use for you. Nothing counts to-day but money!” The widow-lady might have had her feelings hurt, but she understood that it was impersonal, a revelation of the banker-soul.

But for the most part Rupert kept his pessimistic thoughts to pour out upon his spouse in the privacy of their chamber, after the lights were out, and they lay in the chaste retirement of their twin beds, under brocaded blue silk counterpanes. He would expatiate upon the abnormal greediness of this one and that, and after he had begun to snore, Deborah would lie still and petition the Lord to soften the hearts of the greedy ones, and spare her good and noble husband, who was sacrificing his very life to preserve sound and conservative banking in New England--which meant, of course, banking under the control of the Pilgrim National group.

XII

There are some whose claims were not to be questioned. Unthinkable that any Thornwell should go to the wall, or any one who could claim kinship, even by marriage. Those huge Thornwell Mills had to have many millions of credit, to enable them to store their manufactured products, and turn off their operatives to starve. And of course they got it; you have only to imagine the hysterics that Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge would have had in the boudoir of Deborah Thornwell Alvin, if Rupert had dreamed of refusing! John Quincy Thornwell needed a small fortune, for a shipping deal he had been putting through on the side; and he got it from Rupert’s bank. Rupert also needed a fortune, for some of those subsidiary plants which he and Henry Cabot Winters had taken away from Jerry Walker, and had kept all to themselves. Rupert got this money from the Fifth National Bank, of which John Quincy Thornwell was president. So these big fellows shifted millions about from their right-hand pockets to their left-hand pockets, and shrewd lawyers like Henry Cabot Winters were there to tell them exactly how to do it, so they need never worry if some spy told on them, and caused a government bank-examiner to drop in.

They knew that their rivals had spies on them, because they had spies on their rivals. And when these spies would bring in reports of what was going on, Henry Cabot Winters and the other legal spiders would be called in to consider how to meet the rivals’ moves. If it was discovered that some little fellow, having less expensive legal talent, had slipped up somewhere, and done something which the law did not allow, then was the time to use your pull with the bank-examiner, whom you had caused to be appointed a few years ago, and whom you were going to make into a bank-president in the course of another year or two--after he had completed the job of putting your rivals out of business.

That was the way the blue-bloods kept the banking industry a strictly blue-blooded affair. The foreigners, and especially the Jews, had got into everything else. For decades they had been boycotted as department-store owners, but now several of the biggest and most successful stores were in the hands of Jews. They had got clothing and wool and leather; they had the theaters, and were breaking into law and medicine--but they were never going to get the banking-business, not if Rupert Alvin and the rest of the “high hats” could prevent it. And they could!

At this time there was a Jewish banker who had broken into the reserve. Simon Swig was his name--which in itself was enough to demonstrate the impropriety of allowing a Jew to become directing head of a bank! He had come into the country as a common immigrant, and now had got hold of the Tremont Trust Company, an honorable institution, and was running it on bargain-day principles--paying five and a half per cent on savings accounts, and advertising the fact, which was unethical, but brought in the business. He was a rascal, so the blue-bloods said, and doubtless it was true, but you had to remember that in high finance rascality is a question of degree. The respectable bankers were breaking any number of laws, but having the banking authorities in their clubs, they were not punished. Neither were they exposed, because they had the newspapers, and their “news bureaus,” run by large stout subsidized “experts”--whose expertness lay in making the public believe whatever Rupert Alvin and men of his sort desired.

In the course of that chain of troubles, the state bank-examiners swooped down one morning and tacked a notice on the door of the Tremont Trust Company, to the effect that it was closed and forbidden to do business. And that was all there was to it--the Tremont Trust stayed closed, and it didn’t do any business. If it had been a “blue-blood” bank, it would have been “tided over”; instead of which it was turned over to a “blue-blood” receiver, and paid its savings depositors a hundred cents on the dollar--which seemed rather to justify the claim of Simon Swig that it had been sound all along.

XIII

What started the trouble that summer was the problem of Charles Ponzi. An Italian immigrant who had come to America about the same time as Vanzetti, and with even less money in his pocket, Ponzi, too, had washed dishes for a living; but he had not wasted his time dreaming about “joostice”--no, he was the sort of immigrant America wants, he had dreamed of making a million dollars in a week, and he had done it. He discovered a curious situation in international exchange, so he said; it was possible to buy postal coupons in Vienna, and sell them at a higher rate in Switzerland, and thus you could turn a thousand dollars into twenty-five thousand. It made good advertising copy, and was no more false than what the big bankers were telling the public about their Federal Reserve System. Anyhow, Ponzi opened a dingy little office in School Street, quite in the correct Boston tradition--for many of the big New England corporations had dingy little offices in some of those two-hundred-year-old houses in dark and narrow streets which had been laid out by cows.

Charles Ponzi advertised that he would sell you a forty-five-day certificate, which you were free to redeem at any time, but if you would wait till the end of the forty-five days, you would get fifty per cent interest. The tidings spread among the million inhabitants of Boston, and all those persons who cherished the dream of getting rich without working came to buy certificates--which meant that Ponzi had approximately a million customers. Such a mob of people tried to get into his dingy office all at once that the police reserves had to be called out to keep them from being crushed to death. In that suffocating room you saw rich ladies in silks and jewels, newsboys, street peddlers, workingwomen with babies in their arms, scrubwomen clutching in their hands the earnings of half a lifetime on their knees. They all wanted to give it to Ponzi, and he took it, and fulfilled the immigrant’s dream by buying himself a palace in the country, with the most expensive custom-built limousine in Boston to bring him to town.

Ponzi was imperiling the savings banks by causing the public to draw out all their money; he was buying into the big trust companies, and in danger of becoming a real banker. Worse yet, he was filling the public mind with unrest, talking recklessly to the newspapers. He kept saying that in making a hundred per cent profit in three months he was merely doing what many big bankers were doing--the difference being that he was giving the public fifty percent, whereas the big bankers gave only five percent. If any one were to say how near to the truth that was, the person would not be believed, so it would be useless to say it.

The bank-examiners and district attorneys got busy, and filled the papers with rumors that Ponzi was about to be arrested. It was difficult to take action because the ex-dishwasher was now worth about twelve million dollars, and actually had five millions cash in Boston banks, and nobody so rich had ever been arrested in New England. Moreover, he had hired a very able lawyer, who was later on disbarred as a “fixer”; he paid that lawyer a million dollars before he got through, and would undoubtedly have got off, had not Rupert and his crowd been so determined to get him out of the way.

As often occurs with financial storms, this one got out of control, and brought down several institutions: the Cosmopolitan Trust, the Prudential Trust, the Fidelity Trust--it was a rollcall of respectability. It so happened that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had several hundred thousand dollars in these banks, and several counties had as much. The city of Cambridge, the home of Harvard University, just across the river, was stuck for half a million--the greater part having been got by a trick played upon the city treasurer a few months before the crash. All this caused a terrific scandal, and a long train of consequences most distressing to Rupert Alvin and his friends. For the examinations of the banks disclosed that many of the state legislators had been borrowing money without any security, and had used this money to buy stocks in public utilities, while passing a bill to triple their value.

Not so long ago the Pilgrim National crowd had driven the Boston Elevated Railway onto the financial rocks, and taken it over; then, in order to put it back on its feet, they had jammed through the legislature a so-called Public Control bill, whereby the Commonwealth guaranteed dividends to the Elevated stockholders, which made necessary a ten-cent fare. So here was the blue-blooded and high-hatted and in all ways ineffable Rupert Alvin playing Santa Claus and angel to the politicians and legislators of his Commonwealth! The disclosure was half a year in the future, but that only meant the prolonging of Rupert’s worry; for of course he knew what was in the records of the banks, and he knew that when the public has lost a lot of money and become furiously angry, it is much harder to keep news out of the papers.

XIV

Another trouble looming, if possible even more serious! Jerry Walker had come back from his nervous breakdown, and had found out some details of the intrigue by which Rupert and Henry Cabot Winters had persuaded the other bankers to join in taking his ten-million-dollar properties. Jerry had consulted lawyers, and made a deal with one of them, a bristling little bull-dog of a man who had taken many a million away from big bankers on previous occasions. Now, under the law, Jerry had a right to put questions to Rupert, as to what Rupert had done to him, and Rupert was compelled to answer, under penalty of being considered to have admitted his guilt! So there would come to the Pilgrim National crowd and their lawyers long letters full of questions, agonizingly direct and to the point; and there would be conferences of great financial and legal personages, and private conferences in Rupert’s study late at night, in which Rupert and his brother-in-law would go over what they had done to Jerry, and many times wish they had done it a little differently!

Betty Alvin found out about this, because she ran into Lucile Walker in the lobby of one of the hotels. They had not met since Betty’s departure for Europe, more than a year ago; so they rushed into each other’s arms, girl fashion, and then adjourned to the tea-room to talk things over. Lucile had solved her financial and other problems in the good old established way; she was now Mrs. Percy G. Townsend, her husband a manufacturer of some kind of electrical equipment. He was young and enthusiastic, and so was his wife, and they were going to work hard and build up a business, and then some day one of the big banking groups would take it over.

Betty told a little about her adventures in Hungary and Russia and Plymouth, Massachusetts; after which there was an embarrassed pause on Lucile’s part, and she said, “I suppose you know what Papa is doing?” When Betty said she didn’t, Lucile told about the suit that was coming; and when Betty said that she was not taking her father’s side in his business fights, Lucile told more of the story. It was going to mean a dreadful lot of publicity for all of them, because those big State Street bankers would be put on the witness stand and questioned about the deals they had made, and how they had divided Mr. Walker’s properties. Betty said she had told her mother that she would never touch any of that money; just now she was wrestling with the problem whether she ought to take any money at all from her father. She was able to earn her own living, and wanted to--but also she wanted to give her time to organizing a Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and she couldn’t earn a living at that.

Betty went home and told her grandmother; and so when Cornelia happened to meet Henry Cabot Winters, she was able to pose as a woman of the world, in touch with secret news channels. Henry, of course, had no trouble in guessing how she knew, and there developed a curious situation. A couple of years ago he had been indignant at the idea that Jerry Walker might be using Cornelia as a means of getting information from the Thornwells; but now he wanted to use Cornelia to get information as to the plans of Jerry Walker! He went so far as to propose a “swap”: if Cornelia would find out all she could from the Walkers, Henry would use his inside connections to help Cornelia’s beloved bandits. He would get in touch with the officials, and find out what their plans were, and might even be able to find some way to get those rascals off.

Somehow this tickled Cornelia’s funny-bone, and she burst into laughter. “You and Rupert must be badly scared,” she said; and after Henry had made sure that she was not going to talk to the Walkers about it, he admitted that they were. It was not that they had done anything wrong--nobody in Boston ever does that--but it was going to be such a mess, to have the letters and telegrams and confidential memoranda of a great banking project spread out in the newspapers.

“Can’t you clean out your files?” asked Cornelia, with a twinkle in her eye. He answered that it wasn’t so easy as it sounded, because one document referred to the next, and there were copies in a dozen different banks. If you took out very much, your employees were bound to know it, and that exposed you to spying and blackmail. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!

Troubles! Troubles! Even in far-off Italy, that summer and fall, people were occupied in making troubles for Rupert Alvin and his associates. The big bankers had filled up their vaults with the gold-embossed and red-sealed financial promises of European governments; and vain was the hope to save themselves by unloading this paper on the public. Because after a bank customer had bought it, he generally came back to leave it as security up to eighty percent of its market value; and how could Rupert refuse to lend money on a bond which he had certified as an investment for widows and orphans? So it had come about that every time a European premier sneezed, Rupert Alvin jumped in his sleep; when the anarchists paraded in Milan or Turin and waved their black flags, Rupert couldn’t sleep at all.

That summer the radical labor unions of Italy made their long expected coup--moving in and taking possession of the principal steel and machine plants of the country. But having got in, they didn’t know what to do next, because they could not turn a wheel of the plants without coal, and the coal had to come from England or America, in English or American ships, upon English or American credit. Were English or American coal men going to extend credit to Italian anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, communist-anarchists and left-wing socialists? The coal men of England and America, like all the other big business men of those countries, were going to do what their Rupert Alvins told them; and the Rupert Alvins said thumbs down on Reds. So the Italian workers had to make peace with their masters, and give up the plants; and then it was necessary for the masters to organize a counter-revolutionary government, to break up the labor unions and kill off the leaders. To do that they had to have the machinery of reaction and slaughter--and where else should they come for it but to America?

So it happened that Rupert Alvin, in the midst of all his troubles with Ponzi, and Simon Swig, and the half dozen closed banks, and the threatened Elevated Railway scandal, and the hiding of evidence in the Jerry Walker case, and the unhappiness over Betty and Cornelia--with all this nightmare-load riding his shoulders, Rupert Alvin had to interview agents of the banking and manufacturing interests of Italy, and listen to plans for the coup d’état which was to turn that country into a dictatorship of big capital. No possible way to avoid it--unless all the money that had been loaned to Italy during and since the war was to be lost. The bankers of Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Chicago had to get together and do for Italy what they had already done for Hungary and Roumania and Czechoslovakia and Finland and Esthonia and Latvia and Lithuania--so many miserable little bonded states that it gave a hundred percent American a headache to learn the names.

And meantime Bartolomeo Vanzetti paced his cell, in the space eight feet by one and a half allotted him for pacing. He knew what was happening, because his friends brought him a few facts, and he could reconstruct the rest, with that clear mind which understood social forces. He knew that it meant the ruin of all his hopes, all chance of freedom for the peasants and wage-slaves of Italy for years, perhaps decades. He knew what the American bankers would do; he foretold how, when the time came to float the loan, they would have the newspapers bought and the propaganda ready, and would carry the mass of Italian-Americans into reaction with them. Meantime they had Vanzetti in jail, where he was safe--and they were going to see to it that he stayed!

VII. DEPORTATION DAYS…

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