Name: Boston
Author: Upton Sinclair

X. THE LEGAL SYSTEM

On the 11th of September, 1920, the grand jury of Norfolk County brought indictments against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charging them with the murder of the paymaster and guard at South Braintree in the previous April. This county shared with Plymouth the same district attorney; and Nick and Bart were brought before the same Judge Thayer. They pleaded not guilty, and the trial was set for February. Meantime Bart went back to the tailor-shop at Charlestown, serving his sentence for the Bridgewater crime; while Nick returned to the county jail at Dedham--a very unhappy man, because they gave him nothing whatever to do in this prison, and he nearly went out of his mind.

Meantime a little group in Boston set about organizing what they called the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. In the beginning it consisted entirely of Italians, the foremost among them being Aldino Felicani, anarchist printer, a tall, ascetic-looking young man, soft-voiced and reserved. He would set up type for the circulars, and translate them into Italian. Others would address envelopes, and visit the meeting-places of radicals in neighboring towns, and circulate subscription lists. So would come a few dollars here and a few dollars there. At the outset there was no office, no secretary, only the volunteer labors of a few comrades.

Joe Randall had finished his book on the “White Terror”; he had lost hope of bringing it up to date, since events happened faster than pen could move. Now he became a volunteer press agent for the committee; he wrote news stories, and made carbon copies, and went about trying to cajole this editor and that into giving a little publicity. With him came another young journalist, Art Shields, a tireless worker; you would see lights burning and hear typewriters clicking in the office until two or three o’clock in the morning. Betty learned to make speeches, and put her youth and beauty and social prestige to work; she would visit labor headquarters and “vamp” the officials, seeking to overcome the bitter prejudice of Irish-Catholic and Yankee labor leaders against a pair of wops who were admitted to be infidels, anarchists and draft-dodgers. Cornelia and Betty would go together to places where they encountered ladies with blue blood ever so slightly tinged with pink. The services the pair had rendered to the suffrage cause--now victorious--gave them prestige, and they could get small checks.

The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was from the outset a peculiar organization. It consisted largely of a name, and nobody could say just who were its members, or what was their authority. Those Americans who later joined and helped to build it up did so from sympathy with an oppressed group, and they served as a “front”; they were featured in the newspapers, they made speeches, and conferred respectability. But they did not know so much about the case, and naturally they had to defer to the Italians in a crisis.

Among these latter, also, appeared a division; there was an Italian “front”: such men as Felicani, the printer, and Felice Guadagni, the journalist whom Cornelia had met when he came down to help in the Plymouth cordage strike; also Rosina Sacco, wife of the prisoner, an alert and intelligent woman, devoted to her husband’s cause. These were known; but there were others who stayed in the background, and in a time of crisis would reach out a hand, as it were from behind a curtain, and influence a decision. These were anarchists, intimates of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it was easy enough to understand why they kept hidden; they stood in danger of deportation, and perhaps of being accused of crimes, along with the two in jail. But it made committee functioning difficult, when you never knew what decision would be changed, or by whom, or for what reason. Public statements would be prepared and issued in English, and then translated into Italian, and the discovery would be made that the Italian version was quite different, and even contradictory; yet it would not be known just how this had happened.

There was the element of fear, and of course, the element of suspicion. It was inevitable that the enemy should send spies among the committee--and that these would be persons sufficiently cunning to pose as “good radicals.” From first to last the prosecution was fully informed as to everything that went on among the committee, the decisions that were taken as well as the arguments and the quarrels. These spies came and went; and after they were gone, they would joke about how they had collected money for the cause and spent it having a good time in their own fashion. Then you would hear the great ones of Massachusetts, who had employed these spies, solemnly charging that the funds of the committee had been stolen!

Among both English and Italian groups there were sharp divisions according to political beliefs. Some insisted that this was a criminal case, and should be handled as such; others thought it was a case of labor persecution, to be featured as an episode in the class struggle. Strange as it might seem, the anarchists for the most part took the former view; they saw clearly that efforts to make anarchist propaganda might not merely bring about a conviction of the two men, but might get their defenders into trouble. But a socialist like Joe Randall was free from such fear, and to him the case was an effort of big business to put two of its dangerous enemies out of the way; he could never write anything about the case that was not disguised propaganda for socialism, and of course he did not like to have his propaganda cut out by non-socialist members of the committee. Young persons like Betty Alvin, who at this stage of her life insisted that she was a communist--such young persons wanted to put in a different kind of propaganda, and their persistence increased as the case grew more conspicuous.

It was a controversy that would never cease, up to the very last hour, and even beyond it--when men and women fought with deadly bitterness over the question of what should be done with the ashes of the victims. You saw the germs of it at the first meeting, when eight or ten ill-assorted enthusiasts fell to discussing what kind of lawyer should be employed for the trial. Should they get a labor man, who would make an appeal to the movement throughout the country? Or should they get a respectable lawyer, who would confer dignity upon the case, and impress the public and the jury in the good old Boston way? Still another possibility, should they look for a criminal expert, with knowledge of the trickeries of a highly technical game? Joe and Betty united for the first plan, Cornelia urged the second, while the Italians divided between the first and third.

A powerful factor in the decision was, of course, the two prisoners, who never wavered for a moment; to them it was a class-war case, they were being persecuted because of their threat to the rich of Massachusetts. To Vanzetti the very idea of respectability was an insult, the idea of legal trickery nearly as bad. All such hopes would prove delusive, and only the labor movement could save them. “Unless a million men can be mobilized for our defense, we are lost!”--so he said in the first days, and so he said in the last.

As for Sacco, he was even more extreme; shut up in his half-dark cell in Dedham jail, he was like a rat in a trap, a creature all of steel springs and fury. He brooded incessantly, and ate his heart out, and never let himself be fooled by a hope. “They have got us, they will kill us,” he would say; and whenever his enemies came near him, he would throw his revolutionary convictions into their faces. “Viva l’anarchia!” were his last words, and this summed up his attitude at every stage of the seven years’ struggle.

III

Cornelia went downtown to have lunch with Henry Cabot Winters, who knew all the lawyers in town. First he would make the protest which family proprieties required; and then he would betray his secret amusement--being in truth rather proud of his runaway mother-in-law, who was telling the world to go to the devil in the very best “old Boston” manner.

But this time Cornelia missed the usual twinkle in Henry’s fine dark eyes. In the first place, the great lawyer was worried by some of the things he had learned that Jerry Walker had learned about him. And in the second place, Henry had been shocked by the Wall Street “bomb explosion.” Five days after the indictment of Sacco and Vanzetti a wagonload of explosives had gone off in front of the building of J. P. Morgan and Company in New York, and thirty-three persons had been blown to fragments. The newspapers were certain that this was the work of anarchists, and the Boston Traveler had come out with a full-page article, to the effect that the crime had been traced to the Galleani group, a vengeance for the arrest of the bandits, Sacco and Vanzetti.

“Mother, that is a horrible thing!” said Henry; and Cornelia said, yes, it was indeed horrible for a newspaper to prejudge the case of two accused men, and make it impossible for them to get a fair jury in the community. Henry, as a lawyer, must know that such an article would have that effect, and under the very strict laws of Massachusetts was contempt of court.

But Henry did not discuss that aspect of the matter. “I am told,” said he, “that the Boston anarchists made no attempt to conceal their glee when they learned of that explosion.”

“Why should they?” said Cornelia. “If they had learned that an earthquake had destroyed every building in Wall Street, they would have been still more pleased; but that would not mean they control earthquakes. Their glee expressed their conviction that the practices of Wall Street cause boundless suffering to the workers of America; and in that they are right.”

“Now, Mother,” said Henry, “let’s look at the menu. We don’t want to get off on politics.”

Cornelia laughed. “I am always entertained to discover the identity of attitude of my Back Bay and my anarchist friends. The anarchists don’t want to get off on politics either, they share your faith in direct action.”

Henry ordered the lunch; and Cornelia repeated what she had learned from the radical papers, that the explosion had been caused by a load of blasting gelatine, being illegally taken through the city in the daytime; while Henry repeated what he had read in the capitalist papers, that it was an anarchist bomb. He wanted to know, with some irritation, “Do you think that anarchists never use bombs?”

“I have been told they sometimes do.”

“Yet you can be certain these two friends of yours never did any such thing?”

“They aren’t accused of having done that, Henry.”

“I know. But people say--”

“What people, Henry?”

“Well, friends of mine who are in position to know the inside.”

“Will you tell me their names?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Did you ask who gave them the information?”

“No, but--”

“I am interested to watch the process of rumor. People say this and people say that, and always when you try to get something definite, there is nothing. Can you bring me a single fact, Henry--one that you as a first-class lawyer would respect? I am ready to deal with it honestly; and surely it’s worth the family’s while to keep me from being led into a trap.” Cornelia looked her son-in-law in his dark fine eyes, gravely and steadily; and he said all right, he would try to help her.

The waiter brought oysters, since there was an “r” in the month. And after he had set down the crackers and the lemons and the paprika, and made all the necessary flourishes, he went his way, and Henry returned to the dangerous subject of bombs, which haunted the thoughts of all leisure-class Boston in those desperate days. Despite his pretenses of omniscience, Cornelia represented his only direct contact with the anarchist movement.

“You know, Mother, somebody did make bombs--the ones that went through the mail. You can’t dispute that.”

“No, of course not.”

“What do your friends say about those?”

“Vanzetti is quite certain it was a frame-up.”

“By whom?”

“Some one of the big detective agencies, which are making millions out of this anti-red agitation.”

Henry smiled pityingly. “You accept that?”

“I don’t accept it as a fact, because I don’t know. I certainly accept it as a possibility.”

“Believe me, Mother, you’ll have to look for a better alibi. Frame-ups don’t happen.”

Henry saw the pair of brown eyes fixed upon his dark ones. They were soft, and always kind, but they were persistent, and he had learned that they saw deep. “Be careful, and don’t commit yourself too completely. You may need an alibi yourself, my son.” And that was hardly fair at the beginning of a luncheon; a poor appetizer for a great lawyer who was going to be a defendant, and get large daily doses of his own medicine. His look clouded, and for a while he was less quick to interrupt.

“Five or six years ago, Henry, I’d have agreed with you about the frame-up; I’d have said it was a device of criminals in trouble, and a sign they were hard-pressed. But now I know that the frame-up is a regular weapon in the class-struggle, just as well understood as, for example, jury-fixing, or the buying of labor leaders. Did you ever have William M. Wood for a client?”

“No, Mother, I have never been that fortunate.”

“How rich is he?”

“I don’t know; pretty rich--ten or fifteen million, maybe.”

“Enough to be one of our leading industrialists, the president of our great woolen corporation. You’d think he was big enough not to frame up conspiracies against his workers, wouldn’t you? Do you happen to remember what he did in the Lawrence strike, seven or eight years ago? He couldn’t see any other way to break the union, so he had dynamite planted, to be blamed upon the union leaders. He was indicted and tried for it--”

“And acquitted, if I remember correctly.”

“Yes, you know what it means for a great mill-owner to be acquitted in his own bailiwick. It is a fact that the men he hired to do the job were convicted; and I leave it for you to suggest that he didn’t know what they were doing for him. This much is certain, the story was given out to the newspapers that dynamite had been found by the police in a shoe-box in the union headquarters. The box had been brought there by a detective, and somebody slipped up on the time, and the story was in the Boston American before the raid took place and the dynamite was found! That was bad management, at least.”

The great lawyer could not help smiling. “I will say that if I had had the matter in charge, it wouldn’t have happened that way.”

“Well, don’t forget that it is a part of American labor history, and graven into the consciousness of all those people you call ‘Reds.’ So when the great gossip machine starts to grinding, and we hear that ‘people say’ our friends are guilty, that ‘everybody knows it,’ and that ‘frame-ups don’t happen,’--well, Henry, we fall back on the good old tradition of English and American law, that every man is innocent until he is proved guilty. And in the effort to get him a fair trial we go to a lot of trouble--such as inviting ourselves to lunch with our rich and famous sons-in-law, and asking for the names of lawyers who might possibly care about justice!”

Henry supplied the names of respectable lawyers, and Cornelia went to interview them, but in vain. Later on, after years of struggle had made a world issue of the case, it would be possible to interest great lawyers in it; but at present there was no man who would burden himself with the defense of two anarchist infidel draft-dodgers accused of murder.

Also Henry named some of the legal tricksters, and Cornelia had curious experiences interviewing these. There was one uniform objection to all these powerful ones, the amount of money necessary to start their powers into action. Some said fifty thousand, some said seventy-five; and this was a stage in the life of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when there were discussions as to whether they could afford to rent a post-office box, and whether it would be the part of wisdom to buy a second-hand typewriter.

Later on there would be ladies of wealth and fashion interested in the case, and money would be pouring in from labor groups all over the world; but at this stage, when money would really have counted, the only large sum in sight was what Cornelia could raise on her income and lend to the committee. She had discovered by talking to bankers that she could not raise very much, because her life expectancy at sixty-five was limited. If she had wanted fifty thousand dollars for an orphan asylum, or for a house to live in, or even for a string of pearls to hang about her withered neck, she had three daughters and three sons-in-law, any one of whom would have written her a check, and been glad to get such a hold upon her. But when it was a question of imperiling the Commonwealth by aiding and abetting anarchism, Cornelia did not have to ask for the money, she could hear in advance the polite but firm rebuke.

The problem of a lawyer was settled by the Italians. It happened that Lee Swenson was in New York, recuperating from the labor of saving a bunch of I.W.W. from jail in Kansas, and swearing to himself by all the gods he disbelieved in that never again. But Carlo Tresca came to see him, and Swenson knew Carlo from the Ettor-Giovannitti case. Carlo told the pitiful story of two anarchists in jail in Massachusetts, who had the skids under them, all ready to be slid into the electric chair; he told what a fine fellow Bart was, and how he had all but had tears in his eyes because he missed seeing the Statue of Liberty, and now maybe he would never see it; and about Nick’s wife and little boy, and the new baby expected in a month or two. Carlo came again and again, and appealed to Lee Swenson’s friendship, until finally he said he would go up to Boston and look things over.

Lee Swenson was of Swedish descent, and came originally from Minnesota. He had been in practically every big criminal case which involved labor during the past fifteen or twenty years. As a cub lawyer he had helped to get evidence for Moyer and Haywood in Idaho; he had helped to defend the McNamaras in Los Angeles and Tom Mooney in San Francisco, and several groups of the I.W.W. in Chicago and the middle west. He stood six feet and a couple of unnecessary inches, and was badly put together; he did not know what to do with his big hands and feet, nor in fact with any part of himself; he liked to sit on his neck, and his feet liked to get up off the floor. He had a thick shock of yellow hair, and when it was not arranged it looked as if one of those western windstorms had hit it, and when it was arranged it appeared to be done with vaseline.

Lee Swenson was too intelligent a man not to know the disturbing effect he produced upon the respectable citizens of New England. Was he really rattled by them, as he pretended, or did he enjoy the effect he produced, somewhere back in the deeps where he kept his laughter until it came rumbling forth like thunder from the mountains? After he had been nosing into the case for a couple of weeks, he asked for a conference with Cornelia, and she invited him to her little apartment to dinner, on an evening when Joe and Betty were scheduled for a hearing before the carpenters’ union. Before they went into the dining-room, Lee Swenson sank into Cornelia’s one Morris-chair, and then slid most of the way out of it, and said, “Will you be shocked if I cross my legs?”--and did it without waiting for an answer.

“Not at all,” said Cornelia, hastily.

“Not even when you discover that I wear woolen socks?”

“I know you are making fun of Boston, Mr. Swenson.”

“My God,” said he--“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Thornwell, but this is a terrible place for a man that grew up in a sod hut. I realized when we were defending Ettor and Giovannitti in Salem that I didn’t fit, but I never had time to go into details, and never happened to meet the right person. But I believe you are it.”

“Is that why you wanted to talk with me?”

“No, but you can do it on the side. Tell me how to avoid shocking judges and juries who talk through their noses.”

“Do you really want me to tell?”

“I said it.”

“Well, why do you wear a broad-brimmed black felt hat such as nobody ever saw in Boston?”

“But it’s what I had when I came to town, and I can’t afford another.”

“Are you really that hard up?”

“Maybe you don’t know how it is with a radical lawyer. Imagine a score or two of cases, each like this one. There is two dollars and fourteen cents in the treasury to-night. They offer to pay me a hundred and fifty a week while the case lasts, but you know how it will be, they’ll be seventeen weeks behind in their payments at the end of eighteen weeks, and when I get a check, there’ll be some emergency next day that I’ll pay out of my own pocket. You see, I’m not really going to be a lawyer--that will be merely incidental; I’m going to be organizer, propagandist, press agent and promoter; any money I get, I’ve first got to raise, and understanding that the committee will begrudge me every cent I take.”

“Surely it won’t be as bad as that, Mr. Swenson!”

“You are a newcomer, Mrs. Thornwell; but this is my twentieth committee, and believe me, I know them. It won’t be their fault, they will be sincere and devoted, most of them; but they will be poor, and narrow-minded--not used to spending money with the magnificent abandon of us privileged persons. They won’t see what I need with so much, and when the newspapers and the outside public begin to tell how I have got away with one or two hundred thousand on the sly, they will think maybe it’s the truth. I tell you this in advance, because, when it’s over, my one chance of getting arrears of salary will be by vamping some of the rich ladies, your friends who will be interested in the case. And then I’ll get my new hat.”

“Meantime,” said Cornelia, hastily, “you can at least get a haircut.”

But the other replied, “If I did, the hat would be bigger than ever, with nothing to hold it but my ears.”

After they had dined, and were back in the little living-room, in front of the coal grate-fire, the lawyer asked if he might close the door. He drew his chair close to Cornelia, and slid down into it and began: “Mrs. Thornwell, I have been digging into this case, and I am completely baffled, and don’t know what to do. The last time I talked with Vanzetti, he told me that you were the one American he would trust. He admires your granddaughter, but he’s afraid she would be shocked if I talked straight to her.”

“He is mistaken,” said Cornelia, smiling in spite of herself. “I am far more easily shocked than Betty. The younger generation is taking life into its own hands.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I prefer the old ones. You and I have suffered, and we have a deeper foundation under us. Do you mind if I ask for your confidence?”

“Not at all, Mr. Swenson. I will tell you anything I can. But I fear it won’t be much.”

“First, all you know about these two boys--everything that will help me to judge them.”

“Sacco I hardly know at all. I only met him two or three times prior to the arrest. I have been to see him three times in Dedham, partly because I wanted to make up my mind about him.”

“And what are your conclusions?”

“He is a difficult man to know, under the circumstances. He has a primitive mind, I judge. He does very little thinking; he is satisfied with a formula, that the rich exploit the poor, and are the enemies of the poor, and always have a self-seeking motive in relation to them. And of course I don’t fit into that formula. Why should a rich woman, who might have everything she wants, burn up gasoline and tires traveling down to Dedham to visit an anarchist in prison? He is instinctively polite, and affectionate to his friends, I am told. He hasn’t given me any hint of a suspicion, but he probably fears that I may be another trap the enemy has set for him. You know, of course, they put a spy in the cell next to him soon after his arrest?”

“Yes, he told me that.”

“Also they wanted to get one into his home, to try to board with his wife. I’m told the district attorney had that bright idea. I suppose it is too much to expect those gentry to have delicate sensibilities, but you’d think they might have guessed that a woman who was deprived of her husband, and was expecting another baby in two or three months, would rather have a woman-boarder than a man. Anyhow, somebody found out about it, and naturally the Saccos are very suspicious. So I haven’t tried to talk about the case with either of them. When I have seen Nick, I have talked about his garden, and the wonderful tomatoes he used to have--those tomatoes were like so many babies to him. I take him a bunch of chrysanthemums--they let him have flowers, though they won’t let Bart have any.”

“Oh, surely not!”

“It’s a regulation at Charlestown, I suppose that a saw or a knife might be hidden in them; or maybe drugs. I get round it by wearing one flower, and when I ask the guard if I may leave it with Bart, he is ashamed to say no. I am trying to win the hearts of all of them, because it seems to me the jailers are in jail as much as the prisoners.”

“We are all in jail, Mrs. Thornwell. Take it from one who has been playing the game twenty years--we are prisoners of the system. I walk about with a chain on my wrist, and at the other end are fastened so many lies that it seems like the population of all seven of Dante’s hells. That is a part of what I want to talk to you about.”

VII

It took Cornelia a good hour to tell the story of how she had come into the Brini home and what she had seen there. She told about Bart’s ideas and dreams, his work and his play and his personal habits. She told about the sick kitten he had refused to have killed, and the rabbits he had brought home in a sack, and kept in pens for several months--until the sorrowful realization was forced upon him that there was no earthly way to keep those creatures from getting out and gnawing the vegetables of his Catholic neighbor, Mrs. O’Dowd. She told about the lost purse he had refused to take from the policeman, and the boots he had let the poor laborer keep, and the lessons in hygiene he had given to the “riformista,” Compagno Culla--all those incidents which were destined to become Vanzetti legends, and be repeated whenever his Italian friends mentioned his name.

Also, because a lawyer had a right to the whole truth, she told him about the fights; and how the anarchist youths had come armed to the Galleani meeting, vowing to defend their hero to the death; and how Bart had got a gun and declared that he would never let himself be taken and put through the third degree.

“Now you are getting to what I want,” said Swenson. “Do you know whether that gun is the same one that he had on when he was arrested?”

“I believe he gave it away,” said Cornelia. “From what I know of him, he wouldn’t keep any piece of property as long as four years.”

“Well, I can’t get them to tell me where they got those guns; at least, I can’t get them to tell me the truth. That’s why I’m so up against it. They are afraid of me, afraid of everybody.”

“They have reason to be cautious. But won’t they take Tresca’s word for your reliability?”

“I suppose if I could get them both together with Carlo, we could come to an understanding; but as it is, they go on repeating the stories they told to the police; and their friends outside do the same. Orciani has been driving me about, looking for evidence, and I’ve been appealing to him. Do you know him?”

“Only slightly.”

“He has the courage of a man with the mind of a child: a simple Italian peasant, picked up off the countryside and dumped into the maelstrom of America. I have managed to win his affection, and he will talk to me frankly about everything in the world but this case. I point out his contradictions, but it doesn’t make any difference. It is a peculiarity of Italian anarchists that I have observed, they can go on insisting that black is white longer than any other human beings I have ever seen. But somehow it has got to be put across to them that they can’t go before a Yankee jury with those stories--it will be throwing away their lives.”

“What stories, Mr. Swenson?”

“Well, the one about what they did on the night they were arrested. I can’t get a single one of those fellows to admit to me that they were in front of the Johnson place that night; yet it’s a physical fact that any jury will see--there’s a swampy meadow on both sides of the road, and no other way for Sacco and Vanzetti to have got from the place where they admit they got off the street-car to the place where they got on again. If we’re going to save them, we’ve simply got to make a story that a jury will believe.”

There was a pause; Lee Swenson got up and went to the door that led into the dining-room, and opened it, to make sure the Negro maid was not listening. Then he came back, and when he spoke again, it was in a lower voice. “Mrs. Thornwell, I know enough about Boston to understand that you will be startled to hear me discuss the ‘making’ of stories to be presented to a jury.”

“You use what I might call an optimistic phrase, Mr. Swenson.”

“Every professional man does that when he deals with the shady parts of his job. You may know that when the fashionable ladies go to a surgeon for an abortion, he refers to it as a ‘curettage’.”

“I have three daughters,” said Cornelia, placidly. “But I thought that in this case, if we are dealing with men who are innocent--”

“You thought we might trust to the truth?”

“I admit I was that naïve.”

“Well, Mrs. Thornwell, I can only tell you--in my experience with labor frame-ups in a dozen states, I have always found it necessary to fight the devil with his own fire.”

VIII

Cornelia’s little round face wore an anxious look, and her soft brown eyes were wide open, staring at the man in front of her. She saw a big, rough-hewn face, marked by small-pox; with a lower jaw which had a way of thrusting itself up, making a deep crease on each side of the mouth. The eyes were set under shaggy yellow brows--in short it was the face of a fighting man, no product of a Back Bay drawing-room.

But somehow Lee Swenson had learned how people felt in drawing-rooms--possibly from Henry James, whom he read incessantly. “You are saying to yourself that I grew up in the wild and woolly west, Mrs. Thornwell, and things are different in Massachusetts. But I assure you it is one system, from Maine to California, when some radical is accused of violence in the class struggle. The authorities are sure the man is guilty, if not of this crime, then of others just as bad, and so to ‘make’ a case against him is a worthy work. When a class-war trial begins, you will see on the stand police officers who know that it is part of their job to swear to whatever the chief tells them; and maybe an ex-convict, who knows that the prosecution has something on him, and testifies as a condition of getting off; and a prostitute, who carries on her ancient profession at the discretion of the police. In this case there will be workers from that shoe factory, semi-morons, incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, but knowing what a reward is, and having rehearsed a lesson until they can say it in their sleep. It will be simple and easy--‘Yes, I saw the bandits, I saw them shoot, I am positive these are the men.’ These witnesses will sit with Sacco and Vanzetti in front of them, and when they are asked to describe the bandits, they will describe the men in front of them, and what could be more convincing?”

“I attended the Plymouth trial,” said Cornelia. “I was shocked by its unfairness, but I hated to believe it was a deliberate frame-up.”

Said Lee Swenson: “My knowledge of your Massachusetts procedure was got at the Ettor-Giovannitti trial, seven years ago, as perfect a frame-up as ever came under my eyes. The men were no more guilty of murder than I was; every particle of the testimony was ‘made,’ and the whole case prepared and the indictments drawn up by lawyers of great corporations. The victims were Italians, I.W.W. leaders, efficient and dangerous--the more so because one of them was a fine poet. And how did we save their lives, Mrs. Thornwell? Was it by trusting to the truth? As a matter of fact, we had seventeen eye-witnesses to the shooting of Anna Lo Pizzo, and they absolutely insisted that it was done by a police officer, and they identified the officer; but because they were all Italians, and there were so many of them, we didn’t dare use their story, for fear the jury would think it was a frame-up! That’s how far the truth gets you in Massachusetts!”

Lee Swenson waited for Cornelia’s comment; but what could she say?

“Some day,” continued the lawyer, “I’ll tell you the inside of that story--as weird a tangle of plot and counterplot as you could want for a crime-romance. The district attorney was carrying on a political fight against William M. Wood, the head of the woolen trust, and so we were able to get hold of the checks which Wood had paid to have dynamite planted, in a frame-up against the union leaders. With that evidence in hand we practically blackmailed the executives of the woolen mills, and made them take the stand, one after another, and testify that the speeches of the strike leaders had been opposed to violence. I could name several laws of your great Commonwealth we broke in putting that job across--and if we hadn’t done it, the world would never have read ‘Arrows in the Gale,’ by Arturo Giovannitti.”

Cornelia sat staring before her, pondering this strange moral dilemma. At last she said, “I have always been taught, Mr. Swenson, that one gets a certain moral backing from telling the truth.”

“I know--I also have read Emerson; but how would it work in our courts of law? Consider Vanzetti’s trial in Plymouth. There was an alibi, as good as any one could want. The crime occurred on the day before Christmas, and everybody had something to remember--the eels. Did you accept that alibi?”

“I was absolutely convinced by it. I have been all over North Plymouth with Trando, and he showed me the places; every spot is alive to him with the memory of Bart, whom he adored. The things jump out of the child, in a way that couldn’t happen if he had had to learn them. He will interrupt a talk, ‘There is one of the houses where I took the eels, and Bart was across the street, and I had to go for change.’ He will say, ‘Under that tree he dismissed me, and gave me fifty cents for the work.’ If you knew those simple, kindly people, Mr. Swenson, you couldn’t doubt their story.”

“All right--but where does that leave your argument? You trusted to the truth with that Plymouth jury--and it got you nowhere! No, Mrs. Thornwell, we must fight the prosecution with its own weapons. We have to do the reverse of what they have done--convince ourselves that the boys are innocent, and that whatever we do to get them off is a worthy work. And then take a joy in the performance--learn to build a good alibi with the same pleasure that a novelist gets from constructing a detective story, with every detail fitting precisely, and contributing to the final result--an acquittal, and a booming reputation as a lawyer who has never lost a client.”

“Is that really what you want me to believe about your profession, Mr. Swenson?”

“In strict confidence, you understand, Mrs. Thornwell!”

“Oh, of course.”

“I want you to believe there is no other way to be a successful criminal lawyer in America; I have never heard of any man who has done it, and I do not believe it can be done. That is the game, and you either play it, or you play some other game.”

“It sounds as if it would be hard on the nerves.”

“This is America, and you know our motto, ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’ You play for high stakes, and every time it is ‘doubles or quits,’ if you understand the slang of the gambler. Win the big case and you’re on top of the heap; lose it, and you’re a dead one! That’s why it’s so foolish of me to take a case like this. There is no way to win except to make a big public splurge; and then, if I don’t make good, it is back to the sticks for me. That is the real moral problem that confronts a radical lawyer, Mrs. Thornwell--can he afford to have a heart? Can he feel sorry for some hero-soul like your Bart, who has apparently got into a jam not of his own making? It’s a decision I have to make, and naturally it depends very largely upon Bart’s friends.”

There was a pause. “Just what is it you want me to say, Mr. Swenson?”

“For the present, nothing in particular. That may come later. What I want is for you to know the situation--what a murder trial is, and how it has to be fought--so that later on, when you find out about this detail and that, you won’t be horrified and disgusted with me, and draw out and leave me alone with the Italians.”

Lee Swenson had said his say, and it was up to Cornelia. She sat with her two hands locked together, and her eyes closed, and only the trembling of the lids to tell what was going on within. When at last she spoke, her voice was weak, and so were her words. “I never had anything like that put up to me in my life, Mr. Swenson.”

“I can believe that. Your life has been lived among people who are not accused of crimes. And you have your strict moral code--which doesn’t allow for perjury!” Then, seeing a trace of tears in the old lady’s eyes, he added quickly, “I fear that I misunderstood you in one way, Mrs. Thornwell--I thought you knew more about your great moral city than apparently you do. You went to consult Larry Shay about this case, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“Well, I have sources of information. How did you come to go to him?”

“My son-in-law, Henry Cabot Winters, named him.”

“Why did he name him?”

“He said he would be the best man to get the boys off.”

“And what happened when you went to see him?”

“He wanted fifty thousand dollars, and I told him we didn’t have it.”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he pointed out that it was a capital case, and would mean a lot of hard work.”

“What did you understand by that?”

“Wasn’t it obvious? It will take a lot of time to prepare the case, and it may be a long trial.”

Lee Swenson laughed, one of those polite laughs which he kept inside him, out of consideration for Boston. “You are much too good, my dear Nonna! I think I will call you by Bart’s name, if you don’t mind, because it is friendly, and at the same time respectful.”

“I don’t mind,” said Cornelia.

“Out west,” said the other, “they call me Lee, and they don’t wait a whole lifetime, as they do in Boston. But now let me explain about Larry Shay: if he had taken the case, there wasn’t going to be any trial.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that Larry is the official ‘fixer’ for the political ring which governs Boston and its environs. If you have committed a crime, and got caught, your friends go to him to find out what it will cost to have the case dropped.”

“Oh, Mr.--Lee!”

“You, lovely and naïve blue-blood lady, carried to this legal shark a proposition to bribe some of the prosecuting officials of your state, and he made you an offer, and you didn’t even know what it was about!”

“Do you really know all that?”

“Everybody knows it that knows about the insides of this town. Worse than that--they ‘make’ the cases, for the purpose of collecting blackmail. I could tell you quite a number of stories, only they are not fit for a lady’s ears--having to do with women and road-houses.”

There was a pause, while Cornelia thought hard. “You mean, Lee Swenson, that if I raise fifty thousand dollars and pay it to these politicians, I can have the case against our two boys dropped?”

“I mean exactly that. And there’s another moral problem for a blue-blood lady who has lived a sheltered life, and listened to her husband, the governor, make fine speeches about their noble Commonwealth!”

The telephone rang; Betty calling. She and Joe had had a successful time at the carpenters’ union, had got a twenty-five dollar contribution. Now Betty was going somewhere else. She could not explain over the phone, but she would be late, and Grannie was not to wait up for her. Go to sleep. She hung up, and Lee Swenson took his departure, saying that he had put enough burdens upon her mind for one evening. He would not ask anything definite, she would need time to think matters over. Cornelia thanked him.

She did not go to sleep, but sat in the Morris chair which the lawyer had vacated, and moral whirlwinds seized her thoughts and flung them this way and that. She, Cornelia Thornwell, widow of the sternest governor that Massachusetts had had for a century, the most ruthless punisher of lawbreakers and corruptionists--she had sat in this room and listened to a proposition that she should conspire to commit perjury! Yes, that was it, no use mincing words. She had heard, and from now on would be accessory before the fact to whatever might be done! She had not risen and denounced the proposer and ordered him from her home; no, she had hesitated--which in itself was guilt--and when he had told her it was confidential, she had assented, which was double guilt!

Punishment for Cornelia Thornwell, feminist and suffragist! Now she knew what the wise men had meant when they told her that woman’s place was the home! Woman’s place was the Sewing Circle, where they made long flannel petticoats which the poor would not wear! Woman’s place was the Parish House of Trinity Church in the City of Boston, where perfect ladies gathered to arrange for visitation of the sick and care of widows and orphans! If a lady insisted on going out into the harsh and wicked world, this was what she ran into--perjury, subornation of perjury, conspiracy to commit perjury! Cornelia saw these awful phrases in the headlines of all the newspapers of Boston.

The soul of Bartolomeo Vanzetti came to keep watch with her, and share her worries. Bart did not sleep soundly in his prison cell; he lay awake and brooded over the case, and thought of letters to write, and suggestions to make to friends and lawyers. So now he came in spirit, and Cornelia asked him all those questions she would never ask in the flesh. What did he want her to do? What would best serve his cause, the “joostice” for which he lived?

She questioned her own soul. What was right, what was wrong? To stand by the stern moral code of Puritan Boston--which all of them preached, and some of them practiced? Say that the law was sacred, and an oath was binding before God, and it was better for men to die than to break God’s law? Easy to say that, when it concerned yourself; something in you would take pleasure in dying for a code. But when it was some other man’s life, did you have the right to force your code upon him?

Vanzetti had proved that he did not subscribe to that code, because he had told lies to the police. But then, he faced the same problem as Cornelia; it wasn’t for himself that he lied, but for others. Sometime previously Cornelia had put to him a very grave question. There appeared to be much more evidence against Sacco than against him, so it might be wise to demand separate trials, and save at least one of them. But Bart had turned the idea down without a moment’s hesitation. “Save Nick, he got the wife and kids!” That was his attitude, from first to last.

Something easy to understand--to lie for a wife and kids! In contrast with that, Cornelia’s ideal seemed far-off, cold and aloof. In this world truth was a luxury, denied to all but the fastidious, the ivory-tower personalities, who had no hearts and no sympathies! Who were good at shutting their eyes and refusing to know uncomfortable facts!

Cornelia thought over Lee Swenson’s statement, that her life had been lived among people who were not accused of crimes. A careful and lawyer-like phrase! Not those who did not commit crimes, but those who were not accused! Cornelia searched her memory, and forced herself to face reality. Did her sort of people really refuse to lie? The case of Jerry Walker leaped to her mind, because she had just been talking to her son-in-law about it. Had Rupert and Henry lied to Jerry Walker, in order to get his property away from him? Of course they had! Henry had even lied to Cornelia, and treated it as a matter of course. They had lied to their associates, and their associates were now accusing them of it--so Cornelia had learned from family gossip.

Sooner or later Rupert and Henry were going upon the witness-stand, to be cross-questioned as to what they had done. Were they going to admit their conspiracy to take ten million dollars’ worth of property from Jerry Walker? Were they going to say that the law was sacred, and that an oath was binding before God? Of course they were not! What they were going to do was to follow the Lee Swenson formula--sit down with their lawyers and frame up an elaborate story, learn every detail of it by heart, and go upon the witness-stand and lie like troopers--or, in the modern equivalent, like policemen who know that it is part of their job to swear to whatever the chief tells them! Rupert and Henry would do that, and all State Street would know they were doing it, and take it as a good joke, nothing worse.

A world of lies, a world run on the basis of lies, so that when you talked about truth-telling you were a Utopian and a dreamer; worse yet, a traitor to your friends, to your business associates, your family, your class! A fastidious person, an ivory-tower esthete, preferring your own peace of mind to the rights of those who had taken you into their confidence, assuming that you would play the game as everybody else played it, for your profit and comfort as well as their own!

Lies! Lies! It was the autumn of the year 1920, and a great political campaign was at its climax; America had ceased to be a republic, it was an absolute monarchy, its ruler the Prince of Lies! That little man, “Silent Cal,” whom Cornelia knew so well as governor of the Commonwealth, was being elected vice-president of the United States by a lie! He who had run away from the police-strike was being rewarded for breaking the police-strike! His backers had managed to suppress the report of the citizens’ committee, which had worked so hard to avoid a strike, and had told the whole truth; instead, they had made a nursery-legend, such as the pious Parson Weems had invented about George Washington and the cherry-tree!

And worse yet, look at the man they were making president! Cornelia’s mind was a witch’s caldron, with the tales Joe Randall brought home; for Joe knew the newspaper men, and picked up the gossip which could not be printed, and used it to spice the meals he ate in the little apartment. Joe’s mind had turned rancid, after four months’ contact with American morals and American justice; he found his pleasure in believing the most shocking things about the great and noble persons of the land. This Senator Harding, who was to be the next president, had been picked out by the oil-men, who were planning to loot the oil-reserves of the nation; he was handsome and dignified, a magnificent statesman, when you read about him in the capitalist newspapers--but Joe called him an old booze-fighter, a small-town rake, whose idea of entertainment was to sit in his shirt-sleeves and chew tobacco and play poker all night with his cronies, “the Ohio gang.” His managers had had to get a newspaper man to write his speeches for him, because, when he was turned loose for himself, he used polysyllables like a Negro preacher, with no idea what they meant.

And worse yet, he traveled round the country with a young girl who was his mistress! He stayed in rooms in various cheap hotels with her, and when the house-detectives ventured to object, he would present them with his card! It was something entirely new in American history, and Joe Randall turned his fancy loose to play with the theme; some day, he said, the American people would build a memorial to this oil-statesman, and when the radicals came into power they would carve an inscription across the front of it, and set it with flaming red rubies: “Nan Britton’s Boy!”

XII

A cruel, cruel world! Impossible to live in a place where such wickedness was done! A sudden weariness seized Cornelia, a failing of the heart; it was time for her to quit, to move on and leave the world to a new generation, which had stronger nerves and could face such issues. The runaway grandmother would run back to shelter.

The fire in the grate had burned nearly out, and the room was growing cold, the chill creeping into the bones of the old woman sitting in the chair. She looked at the clock; it was after two in the morning, and suddenly she realized that Betty had not come home. What could the child be doing at that hour?

Lee Swenson had asked her not to tell Betty about these problems. But that was hardly fair. Betty had come to be her mainstay--she realized it all of a sudden. Betty was young, Betty was not afraid, Betty could face any facts there were! To try to hide anything from her would be one more deception, in a world which seemed to be made of nothing else.

There was a sound in the hall, and Cornelia turned her head. A key in the latch, and the door opened. There was Betty, rosy, shining from a walk in the chill night air. “Why, Grannie! You waited up for me! You shouldn’t have done that!” She closed the door, and came to Cornelia, brimming over with affection and concern. “You poor dear, you let the fire die down, you are cold!”

Betty herself was warm; the blood flooded her cheeks and throat, it came and went, like northern lights in the winter sky, a lovely thing to watch. Her eyes shone--something must have happened to-night, they were so much alive. Such an eager face, a smile with two rows of white teeth, even and smooth, almost translucent. She wore a soft brown coat, with a neckpiece of fur, matching her hair, her eyes--a picture that people turned to look at on the street. So delicate, so quick and sensitive--and she knew about this wickedness, she could face it and not quail from it, not feel old and chilly, ready to die!

“Grannie dear, what is it? You’re worried about something!” She could read Cornelia’s mind as if she entered it. “What is bothering you? Has Lee Swenson been telling you something discouraging?” Then quickly, “Don’t let him frighten you, my dear! We’re going to get those boys off! Is he afraid about them?”

“No, dear--”

“Then what did he say? Tell me, what?”

“We talked about many things, this case and others. It is a terrible world, Betty dear.”

“Yes, they frame people; and then sometimes, people have done something, too! It’s hard to tell which is which, and your poor dear head is addled with trying to know it all! Is that it?”

“Mr. Swenson didn’t want me to talk--”

Betty laughed gayly. “The old rascal! He thinks he’s going to keep secrets from Joe and me! I know, it’s very dangerous, and we mustn’t whisper. But you tell him, I know what’s in your head before you do, and he can’t run this case without Joe and me. This is a young folk’s job, believe me!”

Betty shed her coat, and the little brown bowl of a hat trimmed with fur, and knelt down and put her warm cheek against her grandmother’s cold one. “The idea of worrying a nice old Victorian lady with secrets and mysteries! I suppose he told you that government witnesses don’t always tell the truth, and defense lawyers sometimes fight the devil with fire. Is that what you’re worried over?”

“Where were you so late, dear?” countered Cornelia--the only evasion she could think of in a hurry.

“Never you mind--that’s more secrets and mysteries, I’ll tell you in the morning. Now you go to bed, before your old bones turn to ice.” She led Cornelia into her bedroom, and turned down the covers, and brought her a glass of hot milk, describing her as “seecka kitten,” from the days when Cornelia had been worn out with the work in the cordage-plant, and Bart had nursed her so tenderly. When she had drunk the milk, Betty tucked her in like a baby, and kissed her good-night and put out the light, and raised the window, and said, “Now be a good child, and in the morning you shall hear some nice gossip!”

XIII

Bright sunlight, and the Negro maid building the fire, and Cornelia in her dressing-gown in the big chair before the grate, drinking her coffee and nibbling her toast. Betty sat by her in a blue silk kimono, and when she was through eating, took the tray and set it one side, remarking, “So you won’t upset it or anything in your excitement.” Then she closed the door, and took a seat close to her grandmother, and pushed her bobbed hair back from her forehead, and said, “Now, bless your old dear heart, get yourself together and don’t faint dead away--Joe and I are married.”

Cornelia’s hands went limp in her lap. “Married!”

“Yes, dear.”

“But Joe has a wife!”

“Yes, that’s an old story.”

“But then--but--you can’t marry a man who is already married.”

“We can, Grannie dear, we arranged it; you see, we married ourselves.”

Something inside Cornelia quit working for a moment--heart, or lungs, or solar plexus which controlled them both--and her voice failed her altogether. Betty’s voice was steady, but one of those waves of color flooded her neck and face, right up to the bobbed brown hair. “You see, Grannie, since the law won’t be sensible, we took matters into our own hands. Joe’s wife is in Reno, but it takes a lot of time, one can’t be sure how long; and it was too silly that we who love each other should sit around waiting for some politician to give us permission to live our lives.”

There was a pause. Cornelia’s voice had not yet come back.

“Let me say right away, Grannie, this isn’t any free love foolishness. You’ll be thinking about Mary Wollstonecraft and all that, but I was only a child then, I was using a lot of romantic words. But now I’m twenty-two, and I’m in love, and I want my man, and I want him for life, and he knows that--I’ve told him that if any other woman tries to take him away, I’ll scratch her eyes out. So you see it’s perfectly respectable and conventional.”

“Y-yes,” said Cornelia, feebly.

“I have waited--I’ve been a good six months and more making up my mind I wasn’t making any mistake. Now that I’m sure, I’d be perfectly willing for any judge or clergyman to say the magic words that would change it from immorality to the holy bonds of matrimony; but you see how it is, the judge won’t do it for an indefinite time, and the clergyman never will, because Joe’s wife has not committed adultery--at least, she has, her man is out there with her, but it isn’t going to be legally proved, so the curiosity of the Episcopalian clergymen will not be satisfied according to canon law. I have looked all this up in the library, and I’ll explain it if you don’t know what I mean.”

“No, I understand,” said Cornelia--still feebly.

“Well, Grannie dear, in your marrying time no one did his own thinking, but now the world is changing, so my dear blessed old chaperon has got to sit down and ask herself this plain question: Do you think that my love for Joe, or his for me, would be in any way more sanctified or purified by any formula that any judge or clergyman could pronounce over us? Do you really believe that?”

Cornelia had to think.

“Be sure, now.”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

“All right, then. And do you think we’d be apt to be more true to each other if we had dressed up in party clothes, and spent several thousand dollars for flowers in Trinity Church, and had four organs play the Lohengrin wedding march going in and the Mendelssohn wedding march going out, and had the rector say a formula which seems absolutely superfluous to both of us? Do you believe that?”

“No, dear, I suppose I really don’t. Only--we always have done it in our family.”

“Most of the time,” said Betty. “But this is a special case, and Joe and I talked it out and decided that it is just too silly that our love-life should be maimed for we can’t tell how long. We decided that the law is an imposition, and we have taken the liberty of being our own clergy, that is all.”

“Yes, dear. But--suppose you get into trouble?”

“Well, we’ll do our best to keep it from happening. We have taken the best advice. But if there should be an accident, we’ll face the consequences. I promise you I won’t have what they call a ‘curettage’--as you remember Aunt Alice did not so long ago. You didn’t know I knew about that, I suppose! And neither will I have an appendicitis operation, like Cousin Julia. I wouldn’t mind a bit having a baby by the man I love, and telling the world exactly what I had done and why; only, of course, the family would die, so if the worst comes to the worst, you and I and Joe will take another trip to Europe, and stay there till we can marry. And meantime you must be a good sensible soul, and tell yourself that Joe and I are married before God and you, and when he comes in you are to kiss him on both cheeks and welcome him as your grandson-in-law. Because, you see, he’s quite embarrassed about it, knowing how eminently respectable you are. Indeed, he’s that way himself, coming from Virginia--he’s almost as bad as Roger Lowell, and I had to take matters into my own hands, and do all the marrying, so to speak. But now it’s done, and I want you to feel comfortable and happy about it, so that we can be comfortable and happy too. The sensible thing is for you to chaperon us, and let us meet here, because it’s very disagreeable having to go to third-rate hotels, and besides, it’s dangerous, because the politicians in this pious Puritan city are preying on the free lovers--those who happen to be rich and prominent. Joe says they have a regular blackmail ring, they catch some man in a hotel room with a woman, and it costs him anywhere from twenty to two hundred thousand dollars--that is, of course, unless he can show the card of a United States senator and presidential candidate!”

There was a pause. “That’s all, Grannie.” Then another pause.

“You are putting a heavy responsibility on me, dear.”

“One more secret to keep!” Betty stood up, looking like a new-risen sun with laughter and joy and health. “Bless her dear old frightened soul!” She stooped and put a kiss on each of Cornelia’s cheeks, and one on her forehead; then, laughing again, “You don’t have to carry the burden if it’s too heavy. I’ll take it all off your blessed shoulders.”

“How, dear?”

“Say the word, and I’ll move into an apartment with Joe, and write a note to Mother, telling her all about it. What do you say?”

This time there was no pause. Cornelia said instantly, “No! No!”

XIV

“Bring me good choosing book,” wrote Bart. “I will get the fundament which I have so long needing.” So whenever Cornelia went for a visit, she would take two or three volumes from her little library: Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Paine’s “Rights of Man,” the letters and speeches of Jefferson, Thoreau’s “Walden” and Emerson’s essays, a life of Garrison and one of John Brown. She thought he ought to know that New England in which he was to fight for his life, and he agreed with her in this. He had the most intense interest in history, and the lives of men who had played a part in it, especially in the cause of liberty and “joostice.” He identified himself with these great characters, he lived their lives, finding comments on his case in their words, and vindication in history’s verdict upon them. He read every minute that the prison regulations permitted, and at Cornelia’s request he would write comments on the margins of the books, and many pages of pencil notes. It was a regular college course in New England culture, and each time they met there was progress to report.

The old Charlestown prison is built in the form of a cross, and in the center is a large airy room, in which the prisoners are permitted to see visitors. Cornelia would come, with her books and her one flower. She would have to wait while he washed his hands and face--because he was shoveling coal now, and wheeling it in a barrow for the prison furnaces; he would apologize for the condition of his clothes, which he could not help. Cornelia had interceded with the warden and got him this job, instead of the work in the tailor shop, which fitted him ill. Outdoor labor was what he had been used to during his ten years in America, and it kept him in physical condition.

He was a model prisoner, except that he would not stand indignities from his keepers. Once when Cornelia came she was told that she could not see him, he was in “solitary” upon bread and water, because he had refused to do his work. There followed sessions with the warden, and it transpired that Bart considered that the guard had addressed him in a way injurious to his dignity. It took tact on Cornelia’s part to patch up this situation; for the American prison system does not allow for dignity, and it is not easy to persuade authorities that an anarchist has a soul. But they could understand that it was unwise to exasperate a man who received visits from ladies of high social station, and who might cause a fuss in the newspapers.

Also Cornelia visited Mrs. Sacco, in the village of South Stoughton. The new baby had arrived, a lovely little girl, and Cornelia and Betty took this news to the prisoner in the county jail at Dedham, and received a warm welcome. Poor Nick required a great deal of cheering, because he was a man who had lived by physical activity, and could not read and study and think like Bart. He had to learn to spend about twenty-two hours a day in a cell, with nothing whatever to do, and he did not want to wait for a trial, he did not want lawyers to fool with his case and waste the money of the anarchist movement--he wanted to be killed and have it over with. Cornelia and Betty would argue with him, in patient half-English and half-Italian, finding ways to appeal to his pride, reminding him of revolutionary heroes who had managed to endure prison. Why not work out a régime for himself--do gymnastics, of both body and soul? Why not study English, so as to do better work for the cause if he got out, and to write his message to the world if he failed?

The next time they came, they would find that he had shaved himself meticulously, and wore one of the flowers they had brought him. He was practicing walking about the cell on his hands, and counting the number of times he could “chin” himself on his cell-door--he had got up to forty-something, which was remarkable for any man. He was proud of that, and when they told him about the lovely eyes of the baby, his spirit bounded as high as previously it had sunk low. Two races comprise the Italian nation: those of the north who are descended from Teutons and Gauls, and are capable of reflection, like Vanzetti; and those of the south, descendants of Greeks and Carthaginians and Moors, brown and excitable people, who live their lives outside, and utter extremes of emotion with many words and gestures. An odd turn of fate that so many of these should have come to Massachusetts, to annoy the stern and forbidding ghosts of Puritans!

Lee Swenson had decided that he would take the case. He said no more to Cornelia, but evidently there had been some understanding with Betty and Joe, for the young couple sat in at long conferences, and covered half the state in Betty’s runabout, interviewing witnesses and tracing clews. Cornelia succeeded in raising five thousand dollars by pledging one-half her income--which meant that a money-lender was willing to gamble that she would live more than two years, in spite of all her worries and labors. She brought in this money, after which the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee had an office, and a post-office box, and no less than two second-hand typewriters clicking away on envelopes. There was a pamphlet telling about the case, mailed out to lists of radicals all over the country. Articles appeared in socialist and labor papers, both in America and Europe; for Joe and Betty wrote long letters to Pierre Leon, and he would translate them into French and publish them in his paper. So the readers of anarchist and communist and socialist papers all over Europe began to hear about two Italians who had fallen victims to the White Terror, in what had once been the sweet land of liberty, but was now the banking-headquarters of reaction for the whole world.

Also Cornelia’s labors among the blue-bloods were not without fruit. Many of these people knew the corruption of their political parties, and the alliance between the politicians and the exploiting interests. They had heard of the Ettor-Giovannitti frame-up, and had watched another strike in Lawrence, a little more than a year ago, with several near-murders committed by thugs in the mill-owners’ employ. They had seen the “Reds” paraded down State Street in chains, and had seen the government forced to turn most of them loose, having not even a pretense of evidence against them. So a few well-to-do persons began to take an interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. This gave an air of prosperity--and brought a new development, highly characteristic of the great Puritan city. One afternoon Lee Swenson called Cornelia on the phone. “How are you to-day? Nerves fairly strong?”

“What has happened?”--for Cornelia knew his way of teasing her.

“Do you remember the talk we had in your apartment, when I told you there might be a way to put our boys on the street?”

“I remember.”

“Well, can I drop in for tea and tell you about it? Send the maid out if you can--it’s a time for being alone!”

The lawyer came, and this is what he had to report. Felice Guadagni, journalist, who was one of the mainstays of the committee, had had several visits from an Italian woman named De Falco, an interpreter for the district court at Dedham, in Norfolk County. She claimed to come from the district attorney’s office, and offered to have the men released at the price of sixty thousand dollars. There had been several conferences, and Felicani, the printer, had met the woman, and when he pleaded poverty, she had offered to get the price reduced to fifty thousand. The sum was to be disguised as a retaining fee for the brother of an official, who was to be hired by the defense. The Commonwealth would then decide that there was not enough evidence against the pair, and they would be turned loose. “So there’s your righteous and law-abiding Boston!” said Lee Swenson--and looked at Cornelia with a twinkle in his wild western blue eyes.

“You think it’s really genuine, Lee?”

“Lawyers tell me it’s a common procedure in other counties. The woman undertakes to give us satisfactory assurances.”

“What would they be?”

“She has already given Felicani the names of other cases she claims to have settled in the same way, and we can investigate them. But first we have to decide the question--do we want to buy the boys off, or do we want to trap the rascal politicians and get something on them?”

Said Cornelia: “It seems to me it all depends on whether we are sure our boys are innocent. I believe they are. Do you, Lee?”

He answered:

“Yes, I do. But that is not the only point. Even though innocent, they may be convicted; and the problem is, do they want to risk their lives for some propaganda?”

The lawyer would be allowed to see his clients in the evening, so he said that he would run out to Charlestown and ask Bart about it. “I’ll make my guess,” he added, “if no ladies are present, he’ll say, tell them to go to hell.”

XI. THE GRAFT RING

Quincy Thornwell was dining with his Aunt Cornelia. He called her that, scrupulously, though he was only two years her junior; he had done it, scrupulously, for forty-five years, since he had been a freshman at Harvard, and she had married into the older generation. Every so often he came to dinner, as a mark of respect, and because family solidarity must be maintained, as the last trace of order in a disintegrating world. For the same reason he put on his honorific clothes; a matter of ritual, a symbol of membership in a group which did the right thing always, as a matter of course and without discussion.

Cornelia also did her part. Her dinner-gown was years out of fashion, but that was a sign that she was superior to fashion. Her little apartment was in a tenement, but that did not matter, because everybody knew it was eccentricity, not necessity. Visiting members of the family had brought boxes now and then, quite casually, and almost without mentioning it; so now she had silver, and shining crystal, and old family china, and linen with strawberry designs, lighted by four tall thin tapering candles. There were flowers in the center of the table--sent with Quincy’s card. The Negro maid wore a white cap and apron, and had learned how to serve a meal, because Deborah had sent a real servant to give her lessons. No matter how “red” your poor mother may turn in her old age, she must be kept in touch with the decencies of life.

Quincy--continue to pronounce him like a disease of the throat--was dieting under a doctor’s orders, and shrinking up rapidly in the process, so that there were more wrinkles in his face every time you met him. He had become almost entirely bald, and with a bright pink scalp. His nose and cheeks were red, with fine little veins of purple--his blue blood showing through, he would say, mockingly. The extraordinary thing was that when he opened his mouth in laughter, which he did frequently, you saw a cavern of exactly the same color; it seemed unhuman, and when you knew him well you realized that it was.

No more canvas-backs, cooked a quick brown on the outside and deep purple inside, according to the fastidious taste of an habitué of the Somerset Club! No more good honest roast beef, not even any more Boston beans, since they too were high protein, and suspected of uric acid! You must have fish for Quincy, and then chicken--white meat, if you please; and no mayonnaise on the salad--the devil of it was it made you talk about food, and started other people telling their diets, and the women with their everlasting reducing. Thence the company got onto the subject of drink, and after that there was nothing but the private life of their bootleggers. Good conversation was dead in Boston.

What Quincy meant by good conversation was gossip about the hundred or two persons he knew, and the thousand or two he knew about. They were always doing queer things, or getting into trouble, and he would tell the tales with comical embellishments, and throw back his head and chuckle. He had been a widower for the greater part of his life, so no woman had felt free to point out to him how queer he looked when he revealed his dental plates. But his mother or some one had taught him very young that it is bad form to laugh, so he had a series of chuckles which became convulsive, and turned his face a deeper red, but never became audible.

He talked about the family. Poor old Father was failing fast; he had to have a man to go about with him. He still insisted on riding a pony along with the Scatterbridge children, so the attendant had to have a pony too--impossible to imagine a more comical spectacle than that family procession, riding all over the estate but never going off it, for fear of automobiles. Impossible to play chess with Father any more, yet it was necessary to pretend to play, to avoid breaking the old man’s heart. The universal curse of life, that our ambitions exceed our abilities! Nothing of that sort for Quincy, he had found out what he could do, and confined his wishes to the possible. He might never be heroic, but he would be a lot safer.

James Scatterbridge was one of the unsafe ones. Tried to do too much with those enormous mills. It seemed there would never be any market for cotton goods again. Rupert and John Quincy--that was Quincy’s older brother--were having the devil’s own time pulling James through. Both of them were showing the strain of running all the finance of New England. To the devil with it, said Quincy; enough for him if he could watch the beast, and judge the right moment, and step in and slice off a juicy chunk. Rupert and John scolded him because he didn’t produce anything; and he chuckled--a fine mess they had produced!

The maid brought in a pitcher of steaming hot water, with a couple of glasses; and Quincy took from his hip-pocket a silver flask, comfortably curved to fit that portion of the anatomy. He understood that he had to “bring his own” when he came to Aunt Cornelia’s, because she was engaged in more serious kinds of law-breaking, and could not afford to expose herself to the lesser risks. Quincy mixed himself a mild dose of rum and sugar and water, and Cornelia took a sip, in order to be good company. “My ancestors used to smuggle in molasses to make this stuff,” said the old gentleman. “Now the stuff itself is smuggled, and a new aristocracy is emerging, that will dine on spaghetti from gold plate.”

So he talked about prohibition! They were bringing it in by the schooner-load, everywhere along the coast, every night that didn’t happen to be moonlit or stormy. Yet the prices got higher and higher, and the quality worse and worse. You might get ever so good a bootlegger, and investigate his ancestry, his police record, his church affiliations and all that, and still you couldn’t be sure, because the rascal dealers would fool him. They were making synthetic stuff in the cellars of Boston slums, putting it onto boats, unloading it on the shore, and selling it for Canadian Scotch. The “booties” were being held up all along the line, they would pay the police where they started from, and then the police would send a motor-cycle cop after them to hold them up and get some more.

It was a good thing for labor, Quincy admitted; made it possible to get work done on Monday, so for that reason the law would probably stay. But it was mighty demoralizing; graft was spreading so fast, you hardly knew the old New England. Quincy had been talking that day with a politician in a boardroom, watching the course of stocks, and this politician had quoted the value of the pickpocket, burglary, and confidence men concessions of Suffolk and Middlesex counties. “What do you think of that?” said Quincy, and had one of his convulsions of chuckling.

“It makes me think of something I want to ask you,” said Cornelia. “I also have connections with the underworld nowadays.”

“I know,” said Quincy, “those two wops of yours.”

“No,” said his aunt, “not the wops, but the officials who are prosecuting them. I need a lot of advice, provided it can be confidential.”

The old gentleman became instantly serious. “My dear Aunt Cornelia, I gossip about every family in the world but one!”

Cornelia set forth her problem. The Italians who were trying to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti found no difficulty in believing that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was corrupt. They knew all the bootleggers--some of them were bootleggers--and were used to paying the police. But Cornelia herself found it hard to believe that the woman, Mrs. De Falco, who told them they could buy the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti for fifty thousand dollars, really knew what she was talking about, and had the power she claimed.

Quincy Thornwell looked thoughtful. “Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money, Aunt Cornelia, even for our politicians. My advice would be, say forty, and when you come to the real showdown, it will be thirty.”

It might have been possible to see a humorous aspect to that reply, but Cornelia was not in a smiling mood. “You mean it is genuine, then?”

Quincy answered, it surprised him a little, coming from Plymouth and Norfolk counties. Suffolk everybody knew about, it was Irish, and the decent people had moved out and let the “micks” have their own way. Suffolk County comprised the city of Boston proper; and years ago, when it had gone Democratic, the old aristocracy of wealth and fashion had begun an exodus, and now lived in suburban towns, where they could run their local governments and spend their own taxes. They regarded Boston as the place where they came to clip their coupons and do their shopping and go to the theater. So long as the politicians refrained from stealing the banks and public buildings, the blue bloods generally let them alone.

“It sounds like regular city hall stuff,” continued Quincy. “You know that people refer to the city hall as the ‘steal works.’ When they arrested those wops, the gang thought they had no friends, and could be sent up without trouble, and it would be a good mark for the police. But now it appears they have money, and money is more than good marks. It seems obvious enough.”

“Quincy, do you think a civilization can endure on the basis of corruption like that?”

“No, of course it can’t.”

“You give up our civilization?”

“I gave it up a generation ago, when I saw we didn’t have sense enough to keep the scum of Europe out. We built a nation on the basis of self-government, and we could do it because we had people who were capable of self-government. But when we let ourselves be overrun by hordes of peasants, we signed our own death-warrant. A few of us old fogies protested, but we couldn’t stop it, and we gave up. I said to Uncle Josiah, thirty years ago, I wouldn’t touch politics again with a ten-foot pole. And Father said the same.”

“Josiah insisted we could teach them, Quincy.”

“The last thing in the world they want is to learn anything from us. They hate us because we are different, and better, and we know it. All they want is to rob us of everything we have. You saw those wops plundering the shoe companies--and now the Irish step in to plunder the wops. That’s the way it goes in the jungle.”

“But, Quincy, the government in Norfolk County is Yankee, and so are most of the voters!”

“That’s all right, but if you dig into it, you’ll find it’s the Irish ring, mark my words. Some of the loot will go to Larry Shay, the head fixer for the crime concessions.”

Said Cornelia, “I went to see Shay about this case. Henry told me he’d be a good lawyer to try it.”

“None better in Massachusetts. What did he say?”

“He wanted fifty thousand dollars.”

Quincy had one of his spells of chuckling. “And you didn’t notice the coincidence in price! Don’t you see, Aunt Cornelia--when you didn’t take up Larry’s proposition, he tried it on the Italians! He figured that you, being a simple old lady, might really believe the wops to be innocent; but the Italians wouldn’t share your touching faith, so they’d talk turkey. If the politicians had been wise, they’d have warned the Italians not to mention the matter to you.”

“As a matter of fact, they did,” admitted Cornelia. “They tried to keep Lee Swenson out also. The woman has refused to meet him.”

“Well, there you are,” said Quincy. “He has a bad reputation--he’s a labor agitator and a publicity seeker, and they want to deal with criminals. No, Aunt Cornelia, you don’t have to worry about it, all you have to do is raise the money. Have you got it in sight?”

“I don’t know. Some of the Italians have hinted it might be got.”

“Send out the boys and raid another payroll!” said Quincy, with a grin. “Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not a millionaire, as you know, and I have to work for my money--even though it seems easy to those who never played the market. But I’ll chip in a few thousand to help you out of this trouble. I think the family would put up the whole amount, if they could be sure it would teach you a lesson.”

“You mean,” said Cornelia, “I would never again believe in the government of Massachusetts?” There was a naughty twinkle in her eye.

But now her worldly-wise old nephew was “talking turkey” himself. “I mean that you’d take a little care of yourself, and quit fooling with anarchists.”

“But, Quincy, don’t you think it is up to us people of the old stock to set the wops an example? If I sell out, what will be left for them?”

“Don’t you really want to get your friends out of trouble?”

“Yes, but I want to get a lot of others out of trouble also. It would be a poor bargain, from our point of view, to save two men from the electric chair and leave millions in slavery.”

“Now, Aunt Cornelia, don’t start your Bolshevik propaganda on me! I know I’m a parasite and a bloodsucker, but every last one of your wops would take my place if he could get it, and I assure you, before he does get it, he’s got to fight.”

To which Cornelia replied: “If you only knew how much like a Bolshevik you talk, you’d be quite shocked by yourself!”

III

The first serious split in the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was developing over the problem of the De Falco offer. On the one side was Lee Swenson, backed by Betty and Joe, who were like two bloodhounds held in leash. On the other side were some of the anarchists--those who stayed in the background, and were not seen in headquarters.

Lee Swenson came to Cornelia. “Nonna, we have a marvelous case to fight. I know what I’m talking about, I can make it the most famous labor case in American history, if the committee will only stand behind me, and give me the funds. This De Falco thing is plain blackmail; the police know that Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent of the crime, but they think they’ve got other things on the group, and expect to trade on our fears. You know how it is with the anarchists, they are liable to be deported--and maybe there are other secrets that break their nerve. Some of them want to settle; they won’t say it plainly, but they are blocking my moves.”

“But, Lee! Yesterday Bart said to me he’d rather die than be bought out.”

“I know; but Bart is in jail, and it’s the committee that is paymaster. I have an idea some of them are going ahead with their plans to raise the money and close the deal. If we persist in having our way, they might throw us down and ruin us.”

“Oh, surely not that!”

“You are new at the game of intrigue, Nonna. It might even happen by accident--we have got to allow for the spies on our committee. The prosecution will have one, and the Department of Justice will have one, and they probably won’t even know each other. If we delay too long and talk too much, we may find ourselves arrested, charged with an effort to bribe the noble-minded authorities.”

Joe and Betty had already made a few automobile excursions, following Mrs. De Falco’s car. They had seen it spend a couple of evenings parked near the car of the gentleman who was to be employed for a retaining fee now reduced to forty thousand dollars. On one of these occasions a public official’s car had come up, and he had entered the house. Also Lee Swenson had investigated some “references” the woman had offered; that is to say, murder cases and other crimes which had resulted in dismissals and acquittals through her intervention. What Lee found was that when he started to question the lawyers and relatives who had negotiated these settlements, they became ill at ease and refused to talk--which was to be expected under the circumstances.

Also he had an “investigator” looking into Mrs. De Falco herself. She was one of the many who hung around the courts, looking for openings to be of service to lawyers and witnesses. In short, she was a “runner,” one of those who intervene between accused persons and lawyers. Ignorant foreigners who have broken the law are badly frightened, and the “runner” is a comforting friend, who helps to steer them in a strange world--and incidentally finds out how much money they have, or how much their friends can raise, so that the lawyer can fix the fee at the maximum, and then “split” with the “runner.” Such a person soon learns the tricks of the courts, and profits by many forms of graft. An odd circumstance, that the investigators reported Mrs. De Falco had an improvident husband, and the fruits of her legal labors went to maintain a home for several children. A complicated world to work in!

She persisted in refusing to see Lee Swenson under any circumstances; so Lee sent to New York for his dictograph--the one he had used in breaking up the government witnesses in a frame-up against the I.W.W. in Seattle five years previously. He set it up in the room where Felicani had been meeting Mrs. De Falco, a big barren place in an old tenement house, next door to a print-shop. He got his own stenographer, and another whom he could trust--and whom the jury would have to trust, because she had served with the A.E.F. in France! The trap was set for seven o’clock in the evening, and the De Falco woman came on schedule time and repeated her assurances of what she was able to do, and explained that it was impossible to come any lower in the price. Meantime several persons strolled casually into the room and out again, so as to be able to testify that Felicani and Mrs. De Falco were talking; and the stenographers diligently took down what they got of the conversation. Unfortunately the printer next door, not having been warned of the plot, started up one of his presses, which caused the dictograph to sound like an avalanche in Switzerland!

However, part of the conversation was recorded; and now, what next? Some of the committee insisted upon waiting, they wanted to get money and mark it, and pay it to Mrs. De Falco. But they delayed to act, and Lee Swenson suspected they were playing for time, their real purpose was to raise the full amount and settle the case. He insisted, such a story would not lie quiet more than a day or two; so many persons knew about it, and the moment the authorities got a hint it was a matter of minutes which would act first. Joe Randall, as a newspaper man, backed up Lee in this; everything depended on how the story first reached the public. If the authorities filed a complaint, charging Felicani with an effort to purchase justice, that would be what the world would believe about the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, regardless of what evidence might later be produced. Trust the capitalist press for that!

So Lee took matters into his own hands, and filed a complaint, charging Mrs. De Falco with soliciting a bribe. It was a matter for which some of the anarchists never forgave either him or Joe. Who were these two, non-anarchists, therefore enemies of anarchism, to come in and play with the lives of two comrades? To involve Sacco and Vanzetti in an effort to use capitalist courts, which they regarded with abhorrence! Was not Mrs. De Falco herself a human being, a victim of the class system? What business had an anarchist giving information against her, and trying to send her to jail? The Italians did not hesitate to charge that Lee Swenson wanted to get the money, instead of the De Falco woman; he wanted a big legal case for himself!

A terrible world to live in! A world full of tangles impossible to unravel, of dangers impossible to foresee! A world in which wild beasts roamed in the darkness, slaying and devouring--no change from the old days of the jungle!

About twenty-four hours after the De Falco story was spread on the front page of all the Boston newspapers--“Reds Charge Bribery Plot to State,” and so on--Cornelia’s telephone rang, and she heard the voice of her oldest daughter. “Mother, is that you?” The voice was trembling, so that Cornelia’s heart started at the first sound. “What has happened?”

“Oh, Mother, the most dreadful thing! I can’t tell you over the phone! I will come at once. Be at home!” There was a sob in Deborah’s voice, something that was rarely heard. But no chance to ask more--she hung up the receiver.

Half an hour later she came in, breathless from hurrying up the stairs. Her mother had never seen such distress on her face. Mutely she held out a letter, which Cornelia took. It had a canceled special delivery stamp, on an ordinary envelope, such as you buy at the post office, addressed on a typewriter to Mrs. Rupert Alvin at the Commonwealth Avenue address. Cornelia opened it, and found a typewritten sheet of paper, which seemed to burn her eyeballs as she read:

“Call off your daughter and your mother from the aiding and abetting of anarchists, or you and your family will live to regret it. Why do you let your daughter travel about town day and night with a young anarchist with a criminal record? Look up his wife he deserted. Do you want the world to know that your daughter sleeps with him under your mother’s protection? We want no Russian free love in Boston. We will expose them in the papers if they do not get out of town, and your other daughter’s wedding will be postponed again.

“AMERICAN PATRIOT.”

So there was a bagful of cats turned loose, to rampage over the place, and maintain a dreadful clamor. No possibility of counting them--any more than the stream of wild questions flung at Cornelia’s gray head. One horror, of course, led the rest: was it true that Betty was living in adulterous relations with a married man, and Cornelia abetting the crime? It was a question difficult to answer without sounding cynical to a pillar of Trinity Church in the City of Boston. Cornelia said, as calmly as she could, that Betty and Joe loved each other truly, and were going to marry as soon as the law permitted, after Joe’s wife had got her Reno divorce. Oh, horrible! horrible! Deborah broke down, and hid her face in her hands, because she could not contemplate such depravity in her mother and her daughter. Or would it be more accurate to say, because she thought that she ought not contemplate it? Human motives are complicated, and in the effort to have our own way we sometimes contrive elaborate emotional dramas.

Said Cornelia: “They will be a perfectly respectable married couple as soon as it is over. There are some in our most fashionable society who have done the same thing.”

“At least they had the decency to wait till they were divorced!”

“As to that, Deborah, you should ask your cousin Quincy. He dines frequently at Mrs. Jack Gardner’s, where I understand they discuss such cases in detail.”

Then the other counts of the indictment. “No Deborah, Joe has no ‘criminal record,’ I assure you.”

“But how do you know it?”

“I know it because I know Joe. He is a fine young idealist, whom I love, and was glad to accept in his present rôle.”

“An anarchist free-lover!”

“In the first place, he isn’t an anarchist, but a socialist, which is the opposite pole of thought. He is much more conservative than Betty, and their honeymoon quarrels are over his efforts to tone her down. You should be grateful to him.”

“But what does this letter mean--his ‘criminal record’?”

“It is nothing but a coward’s attempt to frighten and distress us. Joe was connected with the American legation in Russia, and he saw President Wilson begin his private war on the Russian people, which was nothing but wholesale murder for the benefit of the British Tories. Joe said what he thought about it, and he may have actually done something to try to stop it. If he has a ‘criminal record,’ that is it, I am sure.”

“And his wife--she is really going to get a divorce?”

“She is planning to remarry.”

Deborah made a face of disgust. Ugh, such a world! it seemed to say. It did not improve the long lean features, so much like those of Josiah, which Cornelia had come to know too well. She waited until the ugly moment was past, and then said, very gently: “There are two great improprieties, Deborah--one is love without marriage, and the other is marriage without love. The latter was my portion, and I assure you, if Betty had to choose one or the other, I am glad it was the other. I did not will this situation, and if they had asked my advice, I would have told them to wait. But they settled it for themselves, and it was a condition and not a theory that confronted me. Betty offered to tell you, but I could see no good in distressing you.”

They argued the ethics of free love versus purchased love for a while; until Deborah’s practical mind got to work at its customary task of telling other people what to do. “We must not have a scandal--now that Priscilla’s wedding invitations have been sent out! We must think up some reason for Betty to go to Europe at once, and stay until the man can marry her.”

“I fear you will not be able to arrange that, Deborah. Betty is wrapped up in this case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the trial is coming in the spring. She and Joe are working over it day and night, and surely, when a young couple are busy and happy, it is not the part of wisdom to break them up.”

“But this, Mother! This!” Deborah held the letter in her trembling hand. “How can we face this horrible thing?”

“It is an effort to break our nerve, and it must not succeed.”

“But what can we do--if they expose us?”

“How can they expose us? Betty lives here, and Joe visits here occasionally, but never unless I am in the apartment. Are they going to break into my home to look for evidence against my granddaughter?”

“Betty must come back and stay with her parents at once!”

“Betty is a grown woman, responsible for her own life. I think you will have to let her make her own decisions, and face her own enemies.”

They argued back and forth, and in the process Cornelia’s mind became more clear. “I am quite certain nothing will happen, Deborah, except the writing of more letters. The police have spies in the office of our committee, and they pick up bits of gossip, but they don’t really know anything. Surely we can stand upon our family dignity, and ignore anonymous slanderers! You and I and Joe and Betty are the only ones who know the facts, and we are not going to tell any one else--except, of course, Rupert.”

Poor Rupert! He was almost worried to death, his wife broke out. That dreadful man Jerry Walker was bringing a suit and charging all sorts of outrageous things; and some of Rupert’s associates were quarreling with him for having got them into the mess. They had entirely forgotten how glad they were to get their share of the profits. And then this business about the Boston Elevated--had Cornelia been told about that?

“Not much, except what has been in the papers.”

“Well, they are going to make all the members of the legislature testify as to their stock investments, and they are looking up the loans they got from some of the banks. They will call it bribery, of course, but it was nothing in the world except that Rupert was trying to save the Elevated from bankruptcy, and the stockholders from ruin, and those vicious politicians were holding him up, refusing to grant any increase in fares. They wouldn’t vote until they got money to buy Elevated stocks. You can’t imagine what the politicians are!”

“My child, I know exactly what they are--they are trying to send two of my friends to the electric chair, unless we will raise forty thousand dollars to buy them off. Betty and Joe and I have been having to make that decision in the last few days, and I think the reason you got this letter is because we refused to pay.”

Deborah sat staring before her, her tall forehead wrinkled in thought. Her surrender was not indicated by throwing up her hands, but merely by beginning to talk sensibly. “Mother, I ought to meet that young man.”

“Of course you ought--that is, provided you will behave yourself, and understand that he is your son-in-law.”

“Is he--does he look like a gentleman?”

“He comes from an Old Virginia family, and they think they are quite as good as we are--in fact, I understand they sometimes make fun of us, saying that we talk through our noses.”

“I suppose I’ll have to tell Rupert,” said Deborah. “He might get one of these letters, too. I’ll tell him to-night, and we’ll make some arrangement--I don’t know just what. I suppose this--what is his name, Randall--ought to be invited to dinner.”

“Thank you, my dear, that is certainly sensible.”

“Well, if they are going to be married, we have to try to make it seem decent. I don’t want people to say that Betty married a man she picked up off the street.”

“No, it is not at all like that. You can tell people they met at the first session of the Third International in Moscow.”

Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell had been a sufficient time in her grave for it to be proper for her grand-niece, Priscilla Thornwell Alvin, to be united to the young mountain of copper. So there was another of those stately ceremonials which mark the coming and going of the generations, and advertise their social importance. Out of this union there would proceed many copper hills and branch banks, bearing the sacred names of Thornwell and Quincy and Adams and Shaw and Cabot, shuffled into new combinations. Engraved invitations were sent to all members of the clans, and the hot-houses of the florists were emptied, and Trinity Church became a mid-winter bower, and the four organs played the Lohengrin march coming and the Mendelssohn march going, and there was a procession of two little “flower-girls,” and six young ladies with faces rigid and intense with the effort of keeping in step under the eyes of so many relatives. They wore drooping hats and carried large bouquets of roses, as white as the driven snow before it has been driven through the bituminous smoke of Boston. This symbolized the undoubted purity of the bride, and nowhere in the consecrated spaces of the brown-stone edifice was there a single red rose of adultery.

Except in the hearts of the supposed-to-be-happy parents of the bride, haunted by the cruel secret of their younger daughter’s shame. Rupert and Deborah were in the grip of a terror such as had never before attended a Thornwell wedding-service. Their imaginations played with a string of horrors, which might be perpetrated by a writer of devilish anonymous letters. After all, what limit could you set to the perversity of such a creature? A bomb in the church--say in the vestibule, where it would not kill any one, but would make a scandal heard round the world! Or perhaps what was called a “stink-bomb,” that would drive everybody from the edifice! Or foul whispers by an old gipsy woman, or poison-leaflets distributed in the pews--it had happened once in Boston history. There was a moment when the hearts of Rupert and Deborah jumped into their throats--when the rector pronounced the bold challenge: “If any man can show just cause, why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him now speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace!”

A dreadful silence, during which Rupert and Deborah heard a voice shout out that the younger sister of the bride was living in adultery, and therefore the family was not “eligible.” But no one else heard a sound, and the ceremony was completed; six immaculate ushers from Harvard marched out with the six bridesmaids, and the little flower girls carried the bride’s train. The bride and groom were whisked away to the Alvin home, where an elaborate breakfast was served to the family and intimate friends. The bride, now attired in traveling costume, was kissed on both cheeks by relatives male and female--her pure white forehead was stained by the red lips of adultery, and she did not know it! Yes, Betty hugged and kissed her good old sister several times, and wished her all the respectable luck which so respectable a young lady was bound to have; and if there were tears in Betty’s eyes, they were not tears of shame, because Betty was lost to shame, and only her poor mother had to blush for her, and weep for the dreadful hidden secret--and tremble, because the danger was not yet over--there might be poison-leaflets thrown into the departing bridal-car, in place of the rice and old shoes which Boston society had abandoned as undignified.

But again the fears proved baseless, and the young couple departed in blissful certainty that everything had happened exactly as it had always happened, and as it ought to happen--one and the same thing in Boston. They took the train to New York, and from there to Palm Beach, where they stopped at the most expensive hotel, and dressed themselves three times a day in the proper summer costumes, and innumerable attendants rushed this way and that to anticipate their needs, and no one embarrassed them by a smile or hint that they were suspected of not being entirely accustomed to the intimacies of holy matrimony.

So, in secrecy and retirement, a young creature who was to bear a string of honored names began his career; and the conscientious young progenitors had nothing in the world to worry about except the inescapable problem which dogs the footsteps of Boston blue-bloods en voyage--whom is it safe to know and whom not? If people hail from Seattle or Oshkosh, it may be rather amusing to talk to them, because they will not presume to expect to know you at home; but if they come from New England, then you have to speculate anxiously as to who they are, and wish you had Mother or Aunt Alice to advise you. Can they be the “right” Cabots? Do any of the “real” Lowells come from New Hampshire? Are the Adamses of Scituate the ones who are cousins of the Adamses of Concord, or can they be those dreadful people that were divorced some years ago? Better to walk the esplanade in solemn dignity by yourself, than take the risk of making such a serious misstep!

VII

An odd experience for Cornelia and Betty--to take part in this orgy of hand-shaking and kissing--to be dipped, as it were, into an ocean of propriety and perfume, to be transported to a fairy-land of white veils and roses, frock-coats and silk hats and kid gloves, crystal and silver and pearl and diamond wedding-presents--and then to step into a motor-car and be carried along the Back Bay and across the river, and find themselves within the gates of an ancient stone dungeon, stained dark by factory smoke, with steel bars on the windows and steel doors clanging, and faces of grim command, and faces of lowering hate, faces brutalized and degraded, marked by disease, fear, cruelty--a thousand evils which poverty, ignorance and neglect inflict upon the tormented human race. Church doctrine teaches that between heaven and hell there is an abyss across which none may travel; but Cornelia and her granddaughter crossed it at least once, and sometimes two or three times a week; they went back and forth between celestial and infernal regions, associating freely with both angels and devils--and finding them not so different one from the other as their fears and hates caused them to believe!

Bart came, with the coal-dust hastily washed from his face and hands, but not from his neck and wrists. He greeted them with his smile of joy, and asked to sit near the window, in the sunshine, so rare in his life. He saw the white roses they were wearing, and learned that they were bridal roses; he traveled in fancy to the River Magra, where weddings meant fiddles and dancing and wine, in addition to flowers and white veils. Such lovely country, such happy people--if it were not for landlord, for padrone, for wicked go-vérnment, taking boys away from home to make soldier, to make cruel war!

They talked about the case, and Bart with tact and gentleness strove to convey to his dear friends the unhappiness which was tormenting him. Never had he thought it could happen that he would be the means of sending any human being to prison, a place of wickedness and suffering like this. “Is something should not be attempting, Nonna, it is not according with filosofia anarchica. Mrs. De Falco is criminal, yes, but is poor victim, is ignorant, is not blam-èd for what she do. It is principle for me--it is wrong ever to call law, to punish wit’ judge and sooch thing.”

“But, Bart, you told Lee you would leave it to his judgment.”

“I know, I have shame for that. I am stranger, poor man, have not mooch knowledge. I think, friend have bring lawyer, he is educate, he onderstand, he try hard for helping--how can I make contraddizione? But then come Italian friend, they say, ‘What is this, Vanzett’, you are anarchista, you make woman be arrest? You have deny principle of whole living?’ And I say, ‘It is true, I have done wrong, I would better be convict of any crime in world!’”

“Well, Bart”--it was Betty speaking--“you should have an anarchist lawyer.”

“Is not many soocha t’ing, Betty, is hard for be. Should not have no lawyer. Anarchista should stand in court, should say, ‘Is wicked place, is wicked sistema. You have power, you have victim in hand, you can crush him, but you cannot crush his soul, his doctrine it live, will spread to whole umane kind.’”

“Then you really don’t want to be saved, Bart?”

“I want for anarchismo be sav-èd.”

“Joe has gone to Maine, to try to get the record of one of the witnesses for the prosecution, that we have heard has been convicted of crime. Now, if we find it is so, do you want us to use the fact? It will hurt the man’s feelings, no doubt.”

Vanzetti sat with brow furrowed in thought. “I not know. I have said always, it is good for speak truth. I think anarchista can speak what is truth.”

“Yet you might be the cause of the man’s being sent to jail again. It might turn out he is wanted by the police for something else.”

Time was needed to answer that! It was a complicated world, and often it would happen that Vanzetti would agree to the proposals of Betty and Joe and Lee Swenson, and then think it over, or hear the protests of his comrades, and decide that it was not according to “filosofia anarchica.” All he could say now, having brooded over the problem of Mrs. De Falco through long hours in his cell, was that he did not want her sent to jail, not even to save his life. Anyhow, he was sure the move against her would not help his cause; rather it would embitter the go-vérnment, it would make them redouble their efforts for a conviction. It was difficult to explain this in a foreign language, but Bart’s idea was that the authorities would consider Lee Swenson was not playing the game. The law, from the point of view of a politician in power, was an opportunity for graft, and the most dangerous person in the world was not the bandit, but the man who threatened the graft system.

“He is not so mooch fraid for bandit, he know plenty bandit, is us-èd him, do plenty business with him. It is big bandit put up money for election him. But man what expose, man what tell newspaper, tell people, he is real nemico--what you say, enemy, he is one you musta keell. I think he keell me for teach Lee Swenson he cannot break graft in Massachusett.”

“I am sorry if we have made things worse, Bart.” It was Cornelia speaking, and her words brought tears into the prisoner’s eyes. He laid his hand upon her arm, and begged her pardon for his bad way of saying things, it was hard to express these complicated ideas. He was not afraid to die, and whatever happened, they must not grieve. He was a poor, unknown man, he had talked for years unheeded; to be executed for his beliefs was perhaps the one way he could make them known. But he wanted to die with a clean conscience--not having caused a mother of several children to be sent to jail, for trying to get her pitiful share of that loot which the rich and powerful ones of the community tried to keep for their own.

VIII

Lee Swenson had obtained a postponement of the Sacco-Vanzetti case until the month of June, to give him time to prepare. The law of the Puritans, otherwise stern and parsimonious, would be prodigal only of delay. Sacco would sit in his cell in Dedham--when he grew bored with standing on his head or walking on his hands--and wonder by what malicious turn of fate it had happened that he who despised the law was tangled in a legal net, denied even the boon of swift, uncomplicated death. Now and then there would be papers he would have to sign on his own behalf; invariably he would refuse to sign them, and there would begin a campaign of diplomacy.

Visits from his wife, carrying the newly born infant, surely a reason to make a fight for freedom! Visits from committees of this “gruppo” and that, bringing messages and resolutions, a newspaper article, a cablegram from Italy. You could never tell what odd circumstance might turn the trick with Sacco: a bouquet of flowers, a chat about what was to be planted in the garden this spring, or questions as to what would be blooming in Torremaggiore at this time of year--and suddenly the hard shell of anarchistic principle would melt, and the tormented man would smile, and stretch out his hand for the paper, saying, “Is crazy t’ing, but you say it, I sign heem.”

Meantime typewriters were clicking, and circulars and pamphlets going out, and a scrapbook filling with clippings about the case. Throughout labor and radical circles in America the names of Sacco and Vanzetti were becoming known as the latest victims of the “frame-up” system. Money was coming in, and several investigators were at work, and the busy brain of Lee Swenson was spinning counterplots like a nest of caterpillars in a pine tree. Under the law of the Commonwealth he had the right to a list of the witnesses to be used by the prosecution; and part of his preparation of the case was interviews with these persons, and efforts to get their stories from them, to break them down, to delve into their past and find out anything that would discredit them, or frighten them, or cause them to swing over to the other side.

Under this system, a legal case became a miniature war, a contest of sappers and miners, of spies and counterspies; some witnesses would sell out more than once, and change their stories back and forth--one statement to the Pinkerton detectives, a different one to the friends of the defense, yet another to the district attorney, another to the lawyers of the defense--and which one finally got to the jury was a matter of price, or else of psychology. Some witnesses wanted money, and then more money; but there were others who had a secret spring of loyalty or prejudice, which, if you could touch it, might turn the trick for a few days or forever. One would do anything to help a buddy who had been in France, the next would do anything to oblige the Pope of Rome; one wanted to electrocute all Italians because he had been knifed by one in a street fight twenty years ago; another abhorred Yankees because a school-teacher had beaten him as a child.

A singular education for a daughter of the blue-bloods, to help in a job like this! An education which would surely not have won the approval of her theocratic forefathers, nor yet of the plutocratic trustees who supervised the curriculum of Radcliffe! But at least you could say it was an education based upon fundamentals, and getting to original sources. What was present-day New England actually like? What did its people really do and think and feel? What was its working governmental system, as distinguished from the one written on paper, and taught in schools, and glorified in Fourth of July orations and newspaper editorials? Surely these were matters worth knowing about, even if you did not get a sheepskin diploma, and three Greek letters on a key, and two Latin words at the end of your name!

Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin took two different trains and traveled into the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and was bumped for ten or fifteen miles in a buggy over country roads deep with the soft mud of early spring, and in a ramshackle farmhouse, with the paint peeled off and the fence palings molded and rotten, she met a girl who had been working in the Rice and Hutchins shoe factory in South Braintree on the afternoon when the bandits had opened fire on the paymaster and the guard. This girl had a feeble chin and prematurely decayed teeth, and a baby due to make its entrance into a world of torment in a very few days. For some reason she got it into her weak head that Betty was there in the interest of the district attorney’s office, and she immediately became hysterical, bursting into tears and shrieking that she was in no condition to come to a trial, and could not be forced to testify; anyhow, she knew nothing, because when the shooting had started, she had hidden under a bench.

Betty soothed her, assuring her there was no wish to force her to do anything; so presently the girl calmed down and became communicative. Too bad she could not go, because two of her former shopmates were getting good pay to testify against those wops, and they sure ought to be run out of the country, coming in and taking honest people’s jobs away, and fighting and all that, and it sure was up to we Americans to stand together against them. Later, by deft questioning, Betty drew from this patriotic young person the information that her mother had been an Irish peasant and her father a French peasant. A triumph of “americanization,” and the speeding up processes of a machine age! Betty’s ancestors, who had been tinners and carpenters and indentured servants, had taken three hundred years to acquire their superiority to the new immigrant workers; but here was a shoe factory girl who had managed it in one-tenth of the time!

The case of Mrs. De Falco was set for trial in a Boston police court, and Betty and Joe turned their energies to this--digging into the records of public officials, and running down clews of graft. Shudders ran up and down the spines of persons high in political power, and rage seethed in their hearts against blue-blood intruders who were not content with the security which wealth and prominence conferred, but turned traitor to their own privileges, and attacked the bases of law and order. What did these high-hatted snobs want, anyhow? What was the matter with them that they could not be content with public officials who protected them, keeping them safe against bombers and blackmailers and burglars and pickpockets and a thousand such predatory creatures; making everything so comfortable, that they might be born, and grow up, and live long, and go to pieces like the one-horse shay, of old age and decrepitude, without ever knowing a moment of danger or making a real effort in their lives?

The politicians and police might laugh at the blue-bloods, but they respected and feared them, because of very real powers they still held; not merely finance, utilities and the choicest real estate, but solidarity, knowledge, culture--the latter a far-off, mysterious thing, but awe-inspiring, like the power of a voodoo magician, who can cause your right arm to wither and fall off; or anyhow, he says he can, and how shall you be certain about it? The lower orders, having captured the city, were afraid of their captives, and dared not make use of their power; they stood, fierce-eyed barbarians, at the doors of the temples, and watched the priests, clad in frock coats and high hats, performing mysterious offices, impossible to comprehend or imitate. In the end the barbarians capitulated, and sent their sons to study in the temples, and become as much like the conquered caste as they could!

Politicians and police were used to many kinds of eccentricities on the part of rich persons. Those who had enormous powers and no duties necessarily had to work off steam. They dressed themselves in pink coats, and rode to hounds and broke their necks; they raced motor cars at high speeds, and learned to save themselves behind the steering-post when they crashed; they flew in airplanes and landed on top of houses; they built submarines and got stuck at the bottom of the sea; they worked in chemical laboratories and asphyxiated themselves, or invented explosives and blew themselves up; they went yachting to the North Pole to hunt walruses, or to the equator to collect baby chimpanzees for a psychological laboratory.

Hardly a millionaire estate without something weird and mysterious upon it: the largest collection of old pewter in the world, or a single-tax enclave, or an herbarium with Brazilian butterflies, or a laboratory for the investigation of ghosts, or a mausoleum prepared in advance of death, or a fireproof and bombproof shelter for safety against mobs! And now and then a more sinister case--a clergyman with a fondness for choir-boys, or an aged sybarite who must have fifteen-year-old virgins shivering in his arms; a young lady of fashion who frequented the “black and tan” cafés disguised as a man, or who taught the sex-lore of the Orient to her female intimates!

The police were used to all this. They even got used to the idea that now and then a rich eccentric would turn against his own and commit class-suicide. They knew that in the home of a dead poet in Cambridge, a shrine to which pilgrims traveled from all over America, the poet’s grandson was upstairs entertaining syndicalists and communists, and figuring the easiest way to overthrow the capitalist system. That was treason, but it was treason to the rich, and the rich were the ones to deal with it. What worried the politicians and police was when these young fools took to hounding the politicians and police. That was the treason that really mattered, that was a stab in the back, and the most dangerous activity one could pursue in America.

And here was Betty Alvin quite blandly going to it, heedless of all warnings. So came a string of developments, distressing to a blue-blood family. Anonymous letters, more abusive and more widely scattered; telephone calls, with sinister voices pronouncing dooms; visits to Rupert from his banking associates, who talked about alarming rumors they had heard; a call from the Republican boss with whom Rupert did business, and who asked him if he didn’t have troubles enough! So again Betty was summoned to her father’s home, and went through the worst scene yet; she lost her serenity, and shed many tears, but she would not go abroad, nor give up either her lover or her anarchists. Again she was disinherited and disowned--whether in words, or actually upon paper, she had no way to know.

A heavy strain upon Rupert, and a strange freak of fate! Or could it be that there actually was some intelligence overseeing the universe, and that Betty’s revolt was a punishment visited upon a great banker who had left undone those things he ought to have done, and had done those things he ought not to have done? Rupert could not escape this idea, because he had been brought up in Trinity Church in the City of Boston, and had heard it--not exactly preached, but skirted on the edge of, every Sunday morning for fifty years. He would have liked to ask his rector, or some other clergyman: could there be a God perverse enough to object to Rupert’s having taken the felt-plants of Jerry Walker, which Rupert could finance and Jerry couldn’t? Could any God have wanted him to let the Boston Elevated stay on the rocks and be pounded to pieces? Could any God be so silly as the fanatics and agitators who denounced Rupert for having loaned money to legislators--when it was perfectly obvious that it was not Rupert who had elected these legislators, and that lending them money was the only way to get a raise of fares and make the stock of the Elevated worth anything? No, God was not going to punish the president of the Pilgrim National Bank for having protected the people who had trusted their fortunes to him! But then, how could God be letting Rupert’s lovely young daughter be seduced by anarchist free love, and exposed to the furies of scandal, at such a trying moment of her father’s life?

One by one the members of the family received “poison pen” letters. Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge came to her mother, incredulous of the scandal, because her maternal soul had never desired an impropriety. Alice Thornwell Winters came, elegant and precious, regarding her virtue as a hard-won possession, deserving of commensurate rewards. No use expecting others to live up to one’s own standards--“though I do think, Mother, Betty is beginning rather young. I must say I am aghast at this new generation, they don’t even trouble to apologize for their indiscretions. And I don’t know what to make of you, Mother--I thought you believed in the old standards. I heard that these radicals practiced free love, but somehow I didn’t think of it in relation to my own mother.”

“Well, Alice,” said Cornelia, “you must consider my life. I was faithful to the old standards, I lived my life without love, and where did it get me?”

The carefully cultivated features of Alice Thornwell Winters wore a puzzled look. Alice prided herself upon being sensitive to all ethical and esthetic values--they were the same thing, she always insisted--beauty was truth and beauty was goodness--but of course beauty must be recognized by a discriminating intelligence--it was something that could not be explained--it was a gift, very rare, but Alice had it. “Really, Mother, how can you feel that you have had such a hard life? Your children love you, and your grandchildren would, if they saw more of you. Josiah was saying to me only yesterday it was hard to understand why you found so much in Italian anarchists, and so little in your own people.”

“Well, my dear, perhaps I know the Harvard values too well, and have got bored with them. Tell Josiah to come to dinner, and tell me what new things he has learned and accomplished. That is, unless you are afraid to expose him to my free love ideas.”

That was a nasty stroke of a cat’s claws, and the sensitive Alice winced. For everybody in the family had heard about the “wild oats” of “Young Josiah,” only son of Alice and Henry--known as “Josie” to his boyhood playmates, and as “Si” to the members of “Porcellian” and of “Alpha Delta Phi.” Alice allowed for him, because he was a man, and that was the way men did, apparently; they got over it in time, and settled down. But nowadays the girls were doing it, too, and how would there be any esthetic standards, if the women did not maintain them? That was what shocked Alice in the episode of Betty and Joe--it was so unesthetic, to come to the apartment where Betty’s grandmother lived! To which Cornelia answered that she had never been to a roadhouse, and could not judge, but it might be, of course, that some of them were fixed up esthetically. Look out for the cat’s claws of this gentle-seeming old woman!

Alice went away, and Josiah Thornwell Winters called up, and made an appointment to dine with his grandmother, and tell her what he had learned and accomplished as a Harvard senior. But when he came, he did not mention the subject--because meantime the current of his thoughts had been diverted. The grandson and namesake of the stern old governor had fallen the newest victim to the calamities which were raining upon his conspicuous family.

Cornelia happened to drop in at the office of the defense committee, and Lee Swenson gave her the first news of the event. “I don’t like to repeat gossip, Nonna, but my guess is, your latest family trouble is a result of what you and Betty are doing, so you need to know about it.”

“What do you mean, Lee?”

“There’s a story all over town--last night the political gangs were roaring drunk in their bootleg-joints, and when they had a round of drinks, they would say, ‘Have one on Young Josiah!’”

“What has he done?”

“Well, they caught him in a hotel room with a woman. Undoubtedly she lured him there--it’s a regular system they have. They took a flashlight photograph of him, and Henry Cabot Winters paid seventy-five thousand dollars to kill the story.”

Cornelia, the “Red,” was supposed to be lacking in shame; but now she looked down, instead of at her friend. “Can it really be true, Lee?”

“It is what is being told. You can find out, of course.”

“They can do that kind of thing in Boston, and not be punished?”

“It’s the punishers who are doing it, Nonna. It’s a blackmail ring, and the district attorneys get a share of the loot. There is an aged millionaire in this town--perhaps you know him--old man Barbour?”

“I have met him.”

“Well, they got him in the same kind of jam, and soaked him to the tune of three hundred and eighty-six thousand. You can hardly believe that, but I got the amount from one of his lawyers. And then young Searles--he inherited a fortune from his uncle, I think it was, and the gang got him in an apartment with a couple of girls and cleaned him out. Over in Woburn they got a bunch of moving-picture people in a roadhouse for a wild party, and it cost those celebrities a hundred and five thousand.”

“One might expect it of people like that,” said Cornelia. “But it is something new for the Thornwells, unless I am mistaken. I’m glad that my Josiah is not here to see what has become of his name.”

So it was that when Josiah Thornwell Winters came to dinner two or three days afterwards, his grandmother did not chat about the polite nothings of the Harvard curriculum and of “Porcellian” and “Alpha Delta Phi.” Throwing aside those reticences which are supposed to be the crown of womanhood, she talked in plain language about unspeakable things--“man to man,” as she put it. And “Young Josiah,” who had never dreamed of such a thing from an old lady, turned pink to the roots of his hair and looked as if he wanted to grab his hat and run; but after a while he got used to it, and found it a relief to talk about realities. He had come very close to shooting his head off, and neither the horrified grief of his pure mother, nor the withering scorn of his successful father had been of the slightest use to him.

He was twenty-two years old, and at the age of seventeen he had sprung up to the Thornwell height of six feet and more, but had never filled out his lean figure. His shoulders were stooped and his complexion pale, and his fingers yellow with nicotine; but he had the most elegant Harvard drawl, and a complete equipment of skepticism and boredom, applied to matters about which he knew nothing, as well as to those about which Harvard had taught him everything. His manner was “right,” his clothing had the proper shade of carelessness, and his apartment on the “Gold Coast” contained shelves of exquisite smut, beginning with Petronius and ending with James Branch Cabell, in numbered editions at from fifteen to fifty dollars a volume.

But now all that solemn pose of maturity had fallen like a cheap actor’s cloak, and Cornelia confronted a raw, weedy youth with vicious habits and a sick sense of shame. “I’m a rotter,” he said, “but I could tell you things to show you it wasn’t entirely my fault. The Pater gave me the razz--he all but told me I’d oblige him if I’d eat a chunk of cyanide--and I said nothing. But you must know, Grandmother, he hasn’t been any saint.”

“I know he keeps a woman,” said Cornelia, grimly.

“More than that. There’s a tradition on the crew--you know, after he was graduated, the Pater coached the crew for a couple of years--and he told the fellows they would have to go with prostitutes, or they’d lose their virility. That made the church crowd hot, and they got rid of him, but the story stayed on, and a lot of the fellows think he was right. Now, of course, the Pater says I’ve gone too far, but then, who is to do the measuring? It was my hard luck that I knew too much about both my father and my mother. Do you want me to talk about Mother?”

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

“Well, Mother has wonderful emotions, but she’s a little short on brains, and I rarely got anything useful from her. When I was about fifteen, I heard a terrible quarrel between her and the Pater, they told each other all the dirt they knew. I was behind a curtain, and had to stay there, because I was ashamed to let them know I’d heard the beginning. You know Mother’s way, she has platonic thrills, but she doesn’t go the limit, so that makes it all right. The Pater had got a story on her--her friends were talking about how she had traveled to New York with one of her poets, and had lain in his arms all night in the sleeping-car berth, but not parted with her virtue; that was her remarkable spirituality, and the fellow was supposed to enjoy it, too. The Pater called her some rotten names, and then she told what she knew about him, and that was my introduction to the subject of love. It wasn’t exactly helpful, was it?”

Cornelia accepted the plea.

“Well, when I was sixteen, I was visiting a fellow from St. Mark’s. It was a place on the North Shore, and he had an aunt--one of these up-to-date ladies who had divorced one husband and was getting rid of another, and her lover was in Europe, and she was bored. She came from New York, and they are ahead of us--but not more than a year or two, I have found--perhaps because they get the new shows a season earlier. Anyhow, this was good family, a country club crowd, no end of money, and it seemed all right. She came to my room at night--all fixed up, very beautiful and sweet-smelling, and what chance did a kid stand against a proposition like that? She stayed around a while, and taught me a lot--until her lover came back from Europe, and then we said good-by. But it was only a week before a young widow took me on. You can’t imagine how it is, Grandmother--I know it wasn’t that way in your time. The women know what they want, and they just go to it.”

“Are they trying to marry you?”

“Not often. Some have husbands, but they’ve been reading Freud, and have got the idea that all their troubles are repressions. And the young girls are worse.”

“All of them, Josiah?”

“No, of course not--there are plenty of girls like Priscilla and Betty--I suppose they are straight. What happened to me was, I got a reputation, so I drew the wild ones. I was supposed to be a lady-killer. I don’t imagine I’m abnormally attractive, but family counts for a lot, and Harvard, of course--the high-hat stuff. Anyhow, I assure you I never had to do any seducing, and I never made any promises I didn’t keep. I’ve spent a lot of money, but always in respectable ways, I mean entertainments and presents and so on. I never got stuck for blackmail but this once.”

Cornelia smiled. “You remember Æsop’s fable,” she said, “about the lioness who had only one cub, but that one was a lion.”

XII

Young Josiah skirted around the cage of this “lion” for quite a while. It didn’t seem really decent to tell such “dirt” to one’s grandmother. But Cornelia pinned him down. “I have other grandchildren coming along, and I need to know about my city.”

“Well, it’s a rotten hole,” said the youth. “I think this blackmail business is a result of the fact that Bostonians have to pretend to be so much better than they can be. Or maybe it’s the Irish, bringing us Yankees off our high horses.”

“Who was the woman?”

“She belongs to what is known as ‘Larry Shay’s stable’--not a very elegant name, but you say you want to know Boston. She looked like a society girl, and I really thought she was.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“I had seen her around Harvard Square for a week or two, and I thought she lived in the neighborhood--a neglected young wife or something. She can’t be over nineteen; she was dressed up to the minute, and looked like springtime. I suppose she was watching me, finding out about my habits. Anyhow, she passed me now and then, and always looked willing, but not too eager. This time I was sitting in my car, waiting for a fellow, and she came along smiling, and naturally I was smiling, and she walked up and said, ‘You are Josiah Winters, aren’t you?’ She said, ‘I know your cousin, Betty Alvin, but I’m not a “Red” like her, so don’t be afraid of me.’ She had got posted about Betty, and of course I thought Betty knew lots of people that the rest of the family wouldn’t know. I laughed, and asked her if she’d like to ride, and she got in, and we rode all over, and I kissed her a few times, and she said she had never done anything like this before, and paid me a lot of compliments, but she wouldn’t go to a roadhouse, and when we came back to town we had supper, and a little champagne, and--the upshot of it was, she knew a hotel where a girl-friend of hers lived, and she wouldn’t be afraid to go there. So we went to a room; and about ten minutes after we got in, somebody put his shoulder to the door, and there were half a dozen men, and one of them held a camera, and another set off a flashlight, and they said they were county detectives, and I was under arrest, and the picture would be in the Boston ‘Telegram’ the next afternoon. The girl went into hysterics--she was a good actress, I must say--or maybe she liked me and was sorry--I’m fool enough to wonder, because she was so young. But there it was, and the Pater pungled up seventy-five thousand bucks, and took it out by telling me what he really thought of me. It took quite a while, and went into details.”

Cornelia was moved to say, “You must allow for the financial strain.”

“No, it is what he really thinks; he’s been cherishing it up for a long time. He is disappointed in me, I’m a weakling, and he needs a strong man for his successor. He might stop and think, what has there been in my life to develop strength--assuming I had the possibility? When the Pater got through Harvard he had to pitch in and fight his own way; but I never had to, it was no good trying to fool myself with the idea that I was anything but a millionaire’s son. Of course Mother’s spoiling me was from affection, but that didn’t change the result. I have enough of the Pater’s brains to understand what happened. I never had to do anything but call somebody else. If the car was out of order, tell the chauffeur; if I wanted a bunch of flowers, tell the gardener. So many servants to wait on one kid; so many courtiers, to make you think you’re the top of the heap--so why should you climb any higher? And then the women come, and after that, it is impossible to break through. I don’t mean merely sex--I mean all the things they want to do--tea-parties and dances and motoring and yachting. Honest truth, Grandmother, except for things like this blackmail, there’s nothing to choose between the fashionable girls and the ones you pick up; they want to do the same things, and the only difference is where you go, and how much it costs. The one thing none of them will let you do is any serious work.”

There was more to this revealing story, and Cornelia listened to it all and asked many questions. “I ought to have known these things many years ago,” she said. “I might have helped you a great deal.”

“Yes, of course. Nobody talks straight to us fellows. Mother doesn’t know much that is real, and the Pater has been so busy making money--too busy to think what good it will do anybody. He must be pretty sick, because I show so few signs of solving the problem for him.”

“Wouldn’t you like to come and see me now and then? Perhaps Betty and I could bring you in touch with people who are doing worth-while things.”

“Well, Grandmother, of course, I’ll meet anybody you say, but I don’t see much hope in that crowd of yours. The way it looks to me, you and Betty have got a little money, and family position, and they are using you for what you are worth.”

“Yes, my boy,” said Cornelia, gently, “but what I thought was, you might forget those Harvard ideas. I will take you to Charlestown prison and introduce you to one of my wops, who has never had either money or family position, and no education except what he picked up after washing dishes fourteen hours a day. He cannot express himself in English very well, yet he has managed to impress me as a very great man. It is possible he might impress you also, and make you realize what it means to men who lose the money that you get.”

“I don’t understand just what you mean by that,” said Young Josiah from Harvard.

XIII

The trial of Mrs. De Falco came up in a Boston police court, and Cornelia extended her knowledge of the “blackmail ring” and its power. A long-haired Swede from the West had come into Massachusetts to tell them how to run their system of justice; a “Red” and an enemy of society, who would not play the game as other lawyers played it, but tried to throw sticks into the machinery! Well, they would show him--and they did.

The magistrate was an Irish-Catholic, an ardent patriot, and these were the days of most bitter prejudice against anarchists, atheists and wops. The lawyer representing the defendant was an aggressive and loud-mouthed Jew, and the way he and the judge collaborated was a prophecy of an immortal drama of the emotions called “Abie’s Irish Rose.” When Felicani, and Lopez, a Spanish anarchist, explained their conscientious objections to taking an oath, the devout Hebrew gentleman went after them hammer and tongs, and the devout Catholic gentleman beamed with delight. After that, it ceased to be the trial of an alleged bribe-seeker, and became the trial of two self-confessed free-thinkers. The judge actually ordered Lopez under arrest, and it took a lot of persuading to change his mind.

The two stenographers took the stand, and the fact that one of them had served with the A.E.F. in France did not help them in the least. Did they know the voice of Mrs. De Falco? If not, how could they be sure that the voice they had heard over the dictaphone was the voice of Mrs. De Falco? To be sure, others had seen Mrs. De Falco talking in the room; but maybe these others were lying, maybe somebody had staged a performance to fool the stenographers and make them think they were listening to Mrs. De Falco, when in reality they were listening to some other Italian woman making a bribe proposition! Who could set a limit to the rascalities that atheists and anarchists might contrive, in order to discredit the legal system of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts?

And then Mrs. De Falco herself, an alert and capable young woman, whose wits had been sharpened by years of battle for life in the police courts. She sturdily denied every charge; and especially she denied any trace of connection between herself and any officials. The high officials of Norfolk and Plymouth counties were upright and honorable gentlemen, and never had made any proposition to let criminals escape for a money consideration, and never had the employment of a relative as counsel for accused criminals, had anything to do with subsequent dismissal of proceedings against such criminals. That was, of course, the real issue being tried in this police court; to find the Italian woman guilty meant to find the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts guilty, and how could a patriotic judge do that? When the testimony about the officials began to come in, the judge ordered everybody out of the court-room except the witness and the counsel.

The defendant was acquitted; and Lee Swenson, feeling very blue, went off by himself, and sat down at a luncheon table in a restaurant--when who should come in but the aggressive and loud-mouthed Jewish lawyer! He was feeling good, naturally, and joined his victim at the table, and “kidded” him a bit, after the fashion of lawyers--and incidentally talked about the case, as one sensible man to another. Mrs. De Falco had hung around the courts for so many years, she of course knew both the high official and his brother, and she had tried to capitalize her knowledge and get some money out of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. She knew the details of other court cases, enough to be able to make it appear that she was able to “swing” deals; she had gone to meeting-places with officials, to talk about other matters--knowing that she would be followed by the defense, who would thus conclude that she had a “pull.”

Maybe so, said Lee; but it seemed to him a little strange that a lawyer should be saying such things about his client, and making so elaborate a defense of two other persons who were not his clients! Could it be that any of the officials were paying for this legal victory? The lawyer denied it, and Lee smiled his patient Swedish smile. Of course, you could never be sure; it might be that it had all happened as the other said; sometimes truth really was stranger than fiction. It might be that the officials had happened in while Mrs. De Falco was there, purely as a coincidence; or again, it might be that all of them had met there to say their prayers.

The judge had been of that opinion, and the case was history. The one thing Lee Swenson had accomplished--he realized it, now that it was too late--was to exacerbate the prosecution, to give to all officials having anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case a reason for bitter and personal animus. The name of Lee Swenson became a byword to all politicians and officials; the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee became a nest of active and dangerous foes, and the task of sending two wops to the electric chair became one with the defense of every criminal-in-office in the entire community. Which was exactly as Vanzetti, lying through those endless hours in his prison cell, had figured out and predicted. Always it happened, sooner or later, that everything turned out as Vanzetti had figured out and predicted!

XII. SHADOWS BEFORE

Springtime in New England! Not all the giant factories with belching smoke, not all the dingy tenements, billboards, hot-dog stands and filling stations could conceal the fact that something magical was happening to the land. Even to prisoners in jail, there was a difference in the air which crept through the corridors. Just as boys know when to fly kites, with no outsider to remind them--so Nick Sacco knew it was time for the garden to be spaded, and when you went to see him, he would ask who was going to do it, and what was to be planted. It was good form to insist that he would be out in time to weed the garden, and to eat the first tomatoes.

Vanzetti, who spent fifteen and a half hours in a cell with only a slit in the top for light, and worked in a yard blackened with coal dust and smoke of near-by factories--even he knew that it was spring. You took a bunch of mayflowers when you went to see him, and the guard could not refuse to let you give him one. A pitiful thing, a frail blossom, but--“flower in the crannied wall”--it was a symbol, it meant a whole springtime; it meant those beautiful woods about Plymouth, and the walks which Bart had taken with Nonna and the children. “How happy we been, Nonna! We not know what happiness we have, till we los-èd him!”

He would talk about the things they had done and seen; it was all alive in his memory, it came like a vision, shining with a light that never was in any springtime. He fed his soul upon such memories, lying through the long hours in his cage. Friendship, kindness, beauty--he had had these “blassings” in his life; not a full share--but then, he had observed that people who had a full share did not appreciate so much their “blassings.” “Plenty people go in sunshine, they not think. But I got little time for seeing, I make notice!” He would move nearer to the window.

Betty had occasion to go to Plymouth, and she brought back Beltrando Brini in her car with her. Another kind of springtime, a musical talent putting forth buds! The little boy came to the prison, and after Cornelia had interceded with the warden, he was brought into the big reception room, and unlimbered his fiddle and tuned it up. Bart sat watching every move, bursting with pride, as if he were the child’s mother. Trando was scared, of course, for he was only thirteen and a half, and this was a terrible place, slouchy brown figures gliding here and there, watchers with hard faces and eyes. But he tucked the fiddle under his chin, and quavering notes stole on the air--“When you and I were young, Maggie”--the tune which Bart had heard him struggling to play, back in those happy days at home!

He had learned other tunes now--“Old Black Joe,” and “Home, Sweet Home.” He could almost play Drdla’s “Serenade”--he would try it, if Bart would excuse mistakes; Bart sat with tears running down his cheeks, no use trying to hide them. The convicts stole to the doors of their cells and strained their ears; even the hard-faced keepers listened, and were reminded suddenly that they, too, were in jail, victims of the hatreds they themselves engendered. All the prison drew together, realizing its shame; the steel bars were melted--and the harder and tougher moods which had made the steel. Oh, man, how strange a fate--to make jails for yourself, and be led out by a little child with a magic wand--and then find yourself afraid, and obliged to run back and shut yourself in! A clock struck, and visitors must leave, and magic cease.

Such holidays of the spirit were rare in the life of Cornelia and Betty these days. For the most part their talk was about harsh reality. The trial loomed near, a portentous event, a battle of armies; no longer a mere matter of two wops accused of crime, but a contest over the good name and dignity of the august Commonwealth. A lawyer had come from the wild west and opened an office and started a propaganda campaign, slandering the good name of Massachusetts all over the world. He was raising tens of thousands of dollars--no one could say how much, but they guessed high, and every dollar was a separate outrage and insult; a refusal to play the game according to the rules.

Lee Swenson knew the danger into which he had put his clients by the De Falco procedure, and this thought was a goad which gave him no rest. He was a cyclone of energy; writing circulars, or suggesting ideas for others to write; printing appeals, getting lists for mailing, writing to this person and that, to get information, to pull wires for publicity, money, or support; interviewing witnesses, hunting up new ones, probing this or that detail of their lives. He would come out to dine with Cornelia, and sit in her big Morris chair by the window, and fan himself and sigh with exhaustion; but in a few minutes he would be telling about a new idea, and before long something else would pop into his head, and out would come his notebook, and what was supposed to be a memorandum might turn into a new set of campaign plans.

Another lawyer had come, a friend of Swenson’s from the west; Fred Moore, an Irishman, but a radical, and Swenson’s aide in many a fight. Also there were two more journalists on the staff, John Nicholas Beffel and Eugene Lyons, devoted young fellows, passionately convinced of the justice of the cause, and writing newspaper and magazine stuff that went all over the world. As an investigator, there was Bob Reid, a Boston constable, gray old veteran who had been through the Ettor-Giovannitti case with Swenson, and could follow the trail of the authorities like an Indian hunter. If there was anything about Massachusetts police practice too dreadful for Cornelia to believe, all she had to do was to ask this man, and he would cauterize her doubts.

And then another figure, still more alarming to a lady who had lived a sheltered life; a figure out of the underworld, furtive-eyed, silent--a man whom Swenson or Moore usually saw alone, and with whom they made mysterious appointments. Lee, it appeared, was going to try the “stool pigeon” methods of the authorities. Somebody had actually committed the South Braintree crime, he insisted, and the Bridgewater one, too; the way to nail down the prosecution was to find the guilty men. A rumor had come to Lee that in a city not far away from Boston there was a gang of real bandits who were driving an automobile which they called, jeeringly, “Sacco’s car.” Now the lawyers were spending money to trail this gang, and Cornelia began to hear whispers of dread names. Lee Swenson saw himself playing the “lead” in a fifth act, in which the prosecution would be confronted with the real evidence, so overwhelming that truth would be vindicated and justice done.

Lee was much of a boy, in spite of his forty years, and he managed to communicate this excitement to Betty and Joe and Cornelia. But he found it impossible to get the Italians of the committee to share his idea; as in the De Falco case, it was contrary to “filosofia anarchica.” When you argued about it, you would meet shrugs of the shoulders; let the cops do their own dirty work. “We no raise money for sooch job.” When you declared that here might be real bandits, there would be a still higher shrug of the shoulders, a wider sweep of the hands. “What if they did? Is poor feller, musta live. Is victim of wicked sistema, what right I got for punish?”

And when you took the question to Bart and Nick, you met exactly the same response. They would not be saved at the expense of any other human being; they would not compromise their principles, even to prove their innocence. The business of anarchists was to end the system of exploitation, after which crime would cease of itself. If you could live according to these principles, all right, then live; if you could not, then it was up to you to die. Such stubbornness was embarrassing to persons of Yankee upbringing, who believed in adjusting means to ends, and took “law and order” seriously. Also embarrassing to a lawyer, who had spent twenty years training himself to play a certain game, and now was expected to play it and not play it at the same time!

III

Day by day, as the work continued, the intricacies of the case developed. The list of witnesses for the prosecution numbered more than fifty, those for the defense close to one hundred. There were not investigators enough to run down all the clews, there were not cells enough in the human brain to hold all the details. The crime had occurred in mid-afternoon, on a busy street, and there were many witnesses, each one a separate problem; the more you dug into him or her, the more extra problems you would discover--husbands, wives, sweethearts, children, employers--to say nothing of policemen and investigators and prosecuting officials who had been there before you! The witnesses were mostly persons of low social station, the neglected poor of America. To probe into their lives, to uncover their family skeletons, their vices and secret shames, their greeds and fears and vanities and hates--it seemed to Cornelia there was nothing so horrible being done in all the world. Except, perhaps, the work which a large force of Americans, guided by sentimentality and superstition, were now performing in France; digging up the dead bodies of soldier boys who had been slain in battle, and had been rotting underground for three years.

Take the soul of Lola Andrews. Cornelia lived with the soul of Lola Andrews for months, walked, talked, ate, slept, dined or fasted with Lola Andrews; because Betty took Lola for her task, consecrating her youth and beauty, her social charm, her faith, hope and charity, to the task of trying to persuade Lola to tell the truth. Naturally Betty, being new at the practice of psychopathology, not very well informed as to the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria, paranoia, hyperesthesia and all abnormalities, would bring her problems to Grannie, and the two would hold long consultations, and Cornelia would visit the famous Dr. Morrow and ask his advice.

Lola Andrews had begun life in the wilderness of Maine, as the hapless child of an Italian man and a Yankee farmer’s daughter. Her mother died, her father disappeared, and she grew up, slim and small, black of eyes and hair, a kind of woodland sprite, used to the sneers of the world. At the age of seventeen, when she was married, her hair was such a mat of filth and vermin that her husband had been compelled to take her to a barber and have her head shaved close. This husband was a soldier returned from the Philippines; after a child was born, Lola began running out to dances, and he left her. During years of misery she made the discovery that by screaming and crying she could get people to pay attention to her; so she became an hysteric, and at any time during the investigation, if anything happened that Lola didn’t like, up would go her hands and forth would come a shriek. After which, she would calm down, and talk quite reasonably about her own interests.

At the time of the South Braintree crime Lola had been taking care of an elderly man who was bedridden, in the hope that he would leave her a part of his property at his death. Meantime, since he gave her nothing, she scrubbed floors, she went out and did washing--and of course was preyed upon. The police of the town knew about her life, yet in this case they would be willing to make use of her.

It was Lola’s story that she had been walking down the street, four hours prior to the crime, and had twice passed what she thought was the bandit car. It was a great weakness of the prosecution that the crime had taken place at such speed, there had been only a minute or so for observation; but here was Lola, who had stopped and chatted with the bandits. One of the two men standing by the car was yellow-haired--and when Joe Randall heard this part of the story he said, “Look out, Lee Swenson, they are after you!” The other man had been under the car, doing something to the works, and this was the one Lola had made a special point to observe, and was willing to describe in any way that seemed most to the advantage of Lola.

So here was a problem in applied psychology; to explore the dark caverns of this tortured soul, to know more about her than she knew about herself, so that you could pull the strings and manipulate her to the ends of “joostice.” But alas, it was easier to dream than to accomplish; the science of psychopathology is still in its infancy, and the few months’ time allowed was insufficient to bring it to maturity. Lola would have moods of frankness; she was nearing forty now, her charms were gone, she was a poor wreck, and this was her chance to get what was coming to her; the world was a place of “dog eat dog,” and why should she worry about a pair of wops who would never worry about her? Why should she worry about what she had said at preliminary hearings, or to newspaper reporters, or investigators, or any of the other people who had pestered her? All she had to do was deny it, and the district attorney would protect her, and the jury would believe her.

There was a secret spring by which the soul of Lola might be moved, but alas, the defense did not find it until after the trial. The fates so willed it, that everything that was really significant in the Sacco-Vanzetti case was not found until after the trial. Lola’s son was living up in Maine, under another name, and in the effort to keep his esteem, she would make sacrifices--for a few days. When confronted with this son, and his reminder of other cases where she had “staged a show,” Lola broke down and admitted that she had lied, and that her identification had been “framed.” She made affidavit to this in the presence of her son and several reliable witnesses. But under police pressure, she took it all back, and made another affidavit, with a lurid tale about how the defense had intimidated her. Subsequently she took that back also.

Such was Lola Andrews, who sat in the witness chair at the trial, and identified Sacco as the “dark-complexioned man” who had been under the car, and identified the car as the bandit car because, “when I heard of the shooting I somehow associated the man I saw at the car.” And when the defense started to question her about her past life, she suddenly threw her much-tried fainting stunt, and Judge Thayer hastened to adjourn court. When she was asked the cause of her excitement, she said it was because she had recognized in the court-room a man who had assaulted her in a toilet in Quincy! And Judge Thayer, who had no more training in psychopathology than Cornelia and Betty, ordered all the doors of the court-room closed, while the officers attempted to catch the man whom Lola had recognized. Never had she had so much attention, never had she been such a heroine!

Along with this problem came Mrs. Campbell, the elderly woman who had been with Lola on the day of the crime, and had gone into the shoe factory with her to seek a job. It took fancy detective work to locate Mrs. Campbell, because she was not listed by the prosecution; when she was found, the reason was apparent--she completely wiped Lola out. The man they had spoken to was not the man under the car at all, but a man in khaki clothes standing near the factory; neither of them had spoken to any man who was working on an automobile. An investigator for the government had come to Mrs. Campbell, and hearing her story, had assured her there was no need for her to come to Dedham to testify, what she knew was of no importance, and it would cost too much money to bring her. It would have added ten or twenty dollars to the seventy thousand which the great Commonwealth was spending to put two wops out of the way.

A topsy-turvy world, a lunatic’s dream of a world, impossible to believe in, even when you saw it with your eyes and heard it with your ears! What could you make of a world in which you studied Lola Andrews for months, and came to know every quirk of her fantastic soul; in which you saw her exposed and discredited by witness after witness--even a policeman and a newspaper reporter to whom she had admitted that she did not see the faces of the men she thought were the bandits; and then, in the face of all this, you saw the Honorable Fred Katzmann, district attorney of Norfolk County, stand up to address the jury, and solemnly declare: “I have been in this office, gentlemen, for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews!”

And then Carlos Goodridge! This man, the manager of a small music store, had happened to be in a pool-room near the scene of the crime. There were four other men in the room, and none of them had got a glimpse of the bandits, and to these others Goodridge had admitted that he could not identify the bandits. “If I have got to say who the man was, I can’t say.” But seven months later Goodridge and his wife were in court, charged with stealing several hundred dollars of money and goods from the music store. It so happened that Sacco was there at the same time, pleading to some motion, and Goodridge saw his opportunity, and told the authorities that he recognized Sacco and could identify him as one of the South Braintree bandits. Could a deal have been made? Impossible to say; but the case was “placed on file”--that is to say, Goodridge did not have to serve the sentence for his crime, but took the witness stand and swore to the guilt of another man.

And here was Lee Swenson, insisting to Cornelia and Betty and Joe that the prosecution would be able to “get away” with that! Judge Thayer would find some trick of the law to bar all testimony to the effect that Goodridge had a sentence hanging over him; he would send the jurors from the room while the matter was argued, so they would never know they were listening to a criminal. Lee insisted that the only hope would be to “get something else” on that fellow! Lee’s instinct, what he called his “smell for crime,” told him that Goodridge had been in jail. But where? And how to prove it?

It was a matter to which the lawyer hung on with bulldog grip; they must follow this clew and that, they must get more investigators, spend more money. But they had only a few weeks, and the right clew came too late! After the trial they knew all about Carlos Goodridge--his real name was Erastus Corning Whitney, which in itself meant that he had committed perjury when he testified against Sacco. He had served terms in Elmira Reformatory and in Auburn State Prison, New York, and was now wanted in that state for grand larceny. He had had a number of wives, and Swenson collected a string of affidavits from these ladies, setting forth his habits of marrying under various names, of stealing everything in sight, and of lying freely. One added that he had been attacked by Italians whom he had cheated of their belongings, and had borne a grudge against Italians ever since.

Too late! Too late! The curse that lay upon the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that everything came too late! When the only thing you could do was to make another motion before Webster Thayer, and have that just and upright judge respond, “Motion denied!” Lee Swenson and one of his men tracked “Goodridge” to the little village of Vassalboro, Maine, and confronted him with his record, and he held out his wrists for the handcuffs. Later they had him arrested, but--strange solidarity of the rulers of America--New York State did not want him now, could not be persuaded to take him! When once a criminal has obliged the police in any part of the country, he has become a member of the gang, and is immune.

And stranger yet, the august judiciary will rally to his defense, and not permit him to be slandered by having his criminal record exposed! Webster Thayer, a Daniel come to judgment, would hand down his decision on the motion for a new trial, rebuking the defense for its pursuit of Goodridge, and saying that he had done right to resist a lawyer’s efforts to intimidate him. “Motion denied!”

Too late! Too late! Several times, in the midst of investigations for South Braintree, they turned up evidence concerning the earlier case. Evidence which would have saved poor Bart, if only it could have been got to the jury! New witnesses--Yankee witnesses--who had seen the Bridgewater shooting, and declared that the bandits did not look like Vanzetti! Witnesses who had stated this to the police, and been told to go home and keep quiet! Now this case was legally dead; Vanzetti’s friends could not even have the poor pleasure of bringing the new evidence to the attention of Judge Thayer. No matter what happened at the coming trial, Bart would stay in Charlestown prison fourteen more years--save in the unlikely event that Massachusetts might elect a governor with a heart.

So now Cornelia heard those ghostly voices which on past occasions had shouted to her in vain! If only she had waited until that family which was away from home had come back! If only she had turned up this street instead of that! And of course these vain regrets brought terrors for the future; Cornelia and her friends began to hear, far off and faint, the ghostly voices warning them about the new case. They were like enchanted people in an old-time legend, living halfway between two worlds, holding communion with both. Lee Swenson, sitting in Cornelia’s big chair, with his chin in his hand and his heavy brows knitted in thought, became some medieval magician, wrestling with spirits and demons he challenged, but could not command.

_Creature of Flame, thou shalt not daunt me! ’Tis I! ’Tis Faust! Thy peer I vaunt me!_

Many things this new Faustus demanded of the “busy spirit that ranges round the world.” Find the man with a bullet hole in his overcoat! Again and again this clew turned up; there had been a man by the name of Roy Gould, who had been fired upon by the bandits, and the bullet had pierced his coat. But nobody knew this man’s address. Manifestly, the police would not have overlooked such a witness; and the fact that he was not listed by them made it sure that he had failed to identify Sacco and Vanzetti. Presently it was learned that he was a salesman of shaving paste; some one reported that he was in the habit of selling his wares to crowds at circuses and fairs, so it was a question of getting a list of all the circuses in New England!

Like all others, this mystery was solved too late. The man turned up, several months after the trial. The bandit car had passed within five or ten feet of him, and the bandit who was supposed to be Sacco had fired at him, and he said it could not possibly be Sacco. He would go down into history as the “Gould motion”; one of nine different appeals for a new trial, which would compel Judge Thayer to repeat nine times his celebrated formula, “Motion denied.”

Also the witnesses who were to refute Louis Pelzer, a shoe cutter and dullard who had been in the Rice and Hutchins factory when the shots were fired, and had run to the window, and then dropped down out of sight. He had really seen nothing and had so stated to many persons; but the prosecution was to get hold of him, and drill him for a star witness. Deep in the soul of this Jewish boy was a reverence for authority, the buried memories of a hundred pogroms, when his ancestors had cowered in ghetto tenements and seen whole families brained before their eyes. When a blue uniform appeared in the room, when a prosecuting official frowned upon him, something inside Louis Pelzer gave way.

So he was going to say that one of the bandits was the “dead image” of Sacco; he would learn this phrase, and repeat it as often as desired. And where were the witnesses to break him? Three of them, fellow-workers, would be found by the defense; but the most important of them would be found too late. Four months after the trial, Louis was to make an affidavit, declaring that his testimony was false, the words “dead image” had been put into his mouth by the district attorney. Six months after that, he was to take it all back, and be safe with the police again!

But most loudly the ghostly voices shouted about the Pinkerton reports. The operative “H.H.” had been on the scene immediately after the crime, and his reports wiped out the most important of all the witnesses of the prosecution, Mary Splaine. Not merely had she identified other men, but she had told stories to the Pinkerton operative which in themselves discredited her. And all this was known to the prosecution--but not a hint of it to the defense! Most amazing circumstance of all--that detective was going to attend the trial, and take the stand and testify against a defense witness! Henry Hellyer, the “operative H.H.,” came to the court-room where Mary Splaine swore away the life of Sacco, knowing what she had told him, and what he had written and turned in to his employers! The mockery of it--the devilishness of it--that prosecuting authorities would play such a trick! And the ghostly voices would shout into the ears of Cornelia and Betty and Joe, and no one of them would hear a sound! Lee Swenson might sit with his chin in his hand, and bend his brows and torture his wits all night--but the “busy spirit that ranges round the world” could never be conjured to give him a hint of that secret!

There was a fatality hanging over Cornelia. She had seen it coming--no way to stop it, yet she had pushed the thought away and refused to face it. But now the trial was only a week off, and there could be no more evasion. Lee Swenson telephoned, asking if he might come to dinner that evening; he wanted to be alone with her, he said--and she knew the time had come.

Lee looked very tired; there were deep lines about his mouth, and deep shadows under his eyes, and he hardly tasted his very good dinner. For a while Cornelia managed to divert him--asking for the news. A curious development in the case, ready-made for a detective romance: from a scrubwoman whom he had befriended, Lee had learned that detectives had hired the janitor of his tumble-down office building to deliver the contents of his trash-basket every night! He knew that they had their minds fixed upon the sixteen thousand dollars which they thought Sacco had buried; so the lawyer would divert his tired mind by drawing maps of buried treasure! He made a plot of Sacco’s garden: sixteen feet north from the southwest corner, twenty-two feet east--then dig! The next time Cornelia went to Stoughton, she must find out if anybody had done so!

Dinner was over, and the maid dismissed, and the doors closed; the clouds came back to the lawyer’s face. “Nonna,” he said, “we are going to lose these boys!”

“Oh, Lee!” Cornelia’s voice almost failed her.

“They have got us sewed up in a strait-jacket.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Do you realize what lies ahead of this trial? We start on the day after Memorial Day, and then comes the anniversary of Belleau Wood, and then Bunker Hill Day, and before we get through it will be the Fourth of July! And all these dead soldier boys they are bringing home, all the weeping and praying and dedicating our lives to our country!”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“You ask me seriously? This is going to be the great peacetime service for heroes to render to the nation; a defense of our heritage against foreign anarchy and Bolshevism. And what have we got? Very few Yankee witnesses! A string of wops--worse than at Vanzetti’s trial!”

The lawyer began to count on his fingers--the scores of witnesses he had been able to find. On the day of the South Braintree crime, Bart had been selling fish, and digging clams and bait in Plymouth, and had met few Yankees. He had stopped and chatted with one Yankee fisherman--but the jury would say this fellow had got mixed up on the date. Bart had bought some cloth from a Yiddish peddler, of whom Katzmann would make a monkey. For the rest, they would have to depend upon Alfonsina and Lefevre Brini, and Antonio Carbone and Angelo Giadabone--hardly the sort of names to impress a Yankee jury!

As for Nick, he had been in Boston that day, but talked to only one American he could remember. He had had lunch with Guadagni at Boni’s restaurant, and later there had been two other Italians present; he had paid some money to an Italian grocer, and then gone to the consulate, to get his passport--but the man who waited on him there had gone back to Italy, and all they had was a deposition, not very convincing to a jury.

So much for the alibis. And then for the identifications; what perversity of fate that so many of them depended upon wops! Why did it have to be that Goodridge had been working for an Italian at the time of the crime, and that his former employer was also an Italian? And the men in the pool-room, to whom Goodridge had declared that he could not recognize the bandits! Such names as Magazu, Arrigoni, Mangoni, D’Amato! And then a bunch of men who had been working on a trench in the street when the bandit car passed; a whole gang who would testify that they had seen the bandits in the car, and that none of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti. But what good would it do? “It’s just no use to put on a string of Italians, Nonna--three are better than thirty, because you bore the jury and get them cross. Fred Katzmann will make some playful remark--‘What is this, a Columbus Day parade?’--and after that the jury will never stop smiling.”

There was a long silence. “Remember, Nonna, this means death for both of them. There is no middle ground.”

“I know it, Lee.”

“And if we don’t win the verdict, don’t fool yourself about the future. Remember, so long as Web Thayer lives, he stays the boss of this case; the supreme court of Massachusetts has seldom reversed a verdict in a capital case--only two or three times in its entire history. So it’s now or never.”

“I know, Lee.” Cornelia’s voice was faint.

Again a silence. The lawyer’s somber look was fixed upon her, and she could not meet it.

“Do you really want to save those boys, Nonna?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then why don’t you do it? Why not testify for them?”

“You told me you couldn’t use character witnesses.”

“I don’t mean that sort of witness, Nonna. I mean, why don’t you let me fix you up a story, about how you went down to Plymouth on April fifteenth of last year, and spent the day with the Brinis, and had lunch with Bart, and later walked on the beach and saw him digging clams? That’s the way to win this case, Nonna; it will end right there--a knockout!”

VII

What was it--some instinct buried deep in Cornelia Thornwell, something in the very fiber of her being, that made it necessary for her to be shocked by these words--even though the idea had been haunting her mind for months? Nothing really new that Lee Swenson could say to her--yet she had to let him say it, and act as if she had never thought of it! “Oh, Lee, I couldn’t do it!”

“Why couldn’t you? Did you really never tell a lie?”

“Never one like that!”

“Little ones, Nonna, for little occasions. But this is a big occasion! This is life or death!”

Again a pause. When the lawyer resumed, his voice was grim, and he dropped the playful nickname. “I am not going to try to put pressure on you, Mrs. Thornwell, as I have on other witnesses in my life; for after all, it is your case--Bart is your friend, far more than he is mine, and why should I want to save him more than you?”

“Don’t put it that way, Lee!”

“But that is the way to put it! You have your friends, and you have your principles, and you must weigh them, and decide which you value more. We all have to make such choices--Bart made one, you remember, he lied for his friends. Those lies he told in the police-station were to save Boda and Orciani from sharing the fate of Salsedo. He will tell a different story on the witness stand, and whether it is the truth or not--judge for yourself!”

Another pause. “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell? Have you religious scruples about an oath? Do you believe God will blast you to eternity if you save these boys from the electric chair?”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“Is it patriotism? Do you think it will help your country to let a bunch of crooks kill a pair of idealists, as a means of frightening the others?”

“No, not that.”

“Then it’s just a matter of good form? It’s that you are a lady, and such things are not done!”

“No, not that, either. As a matter of fact, they are done all the time. My sons-in-law are lying in business, and they will lie on the stand to back each other up.”

“Exactly!” And to himself Lee Swenson thought, “She has been debating it with herself!” Aloud he said, “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell?”

“It is just--I wouldn’t know how to do it!”

“But if that is all that troubles you, here’s a thoroughly qualified expert to take charge. Put yourself in my hands, as if it were a surgical operation, and I’ll guarantee we’ll have Nick on the street before the Fourth of July, and we’ll start a move to get Bart pardoned!”

“But Lee, how could I do such a thing?”

“If you mean it as a technical question, nothing more simple: you take the stand and swear that you were in Plymouth that day, and you recite the details of some other day when you were actually there. It can all be worked out, very easily. You were in the habit of going there off and on, nobody can dispute that. You remember the date, because of something that happened the day before or the day after. Perhaps there was a concert you had just been to, or there was to be one, and you had to leave in order to attend it. We can go back and find a public event to tie to; or perhaps you have a diary, or some letters.”

“But suppose I did something in Boston on that day?”

“There’ll be a way to get round it. You understand that, according to your story, you only had to remember back three weeks. As soon as you heard Bart was arrested, you naturally looked back, and realized that you had been with him the day of the crime. But anybody who is going to refute you has got to begin now, and remember back a year--which isn’t apt to happen. If they have documentary evidence, like a letter--well, the trial will be over a day or two after you testify. There might be a scandal among your friends, but nothing serious, and anyhow, the boys will be free--you understand that when a jury has acquitted them, they can’t ever be tried for South Braintree again.”

VIII

Lee kept his promise not to put pressure on her. What he did was to go over the case, telling what each government witness would testify, and just how that testimony had been “made.” As a piece of prophecy it was a miracle, but Lee claimed no occult powers. With bitterness he said, “If I want to know what the other side is doing, I figure what I would do myself.”

He had talked with some of these witnesses; others, who had refused to talk to him, had become the subject of “reports.” So he knew their motives, and how they would be controlled. When there had been need of “rough stuff,” the police had done it. The more subtle work had been done by college-bred gentlemen of the district attorney’s office, who had learned to manufacture in weaker minds like Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin what the psychologists term a “false memory.” They would take these women to the jail again and again and show them Sacco and Vanzetti; they would present pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, insisting that these were the bandits, these were the men whom the women had seen in the bandit car; until in the women’s minds the prison memories and the photograph memories became superposed upon the bandit memories, so completely merged with them that they could no longer be separated.

There were a thousand tricks that successful prosecuting officials knew. They stood in with the political ring, they could promise favors--contracts and business, a job for a man who needed it, immunity from trouble with the police. “I am a friend of Mr. Jones, in the district attorney’s office”--such a statement would tear up an auto tag, or suppress a liquor charge any day. “It is what we call power,” said Lee Swenson, “and those who hold it know how to use it.”

Like Virgil, leading Dante through successive stages of the infernal regions, Lee Swenson conducted the widow of Governor Thornwell into the interior of the Boston “ring.” He knew the way, because in the Ettor-Giovannitti case he had had these forces to deal with, and other lawyers associated with the case had “put him wise.” Indeed, the factional quarrels in the political gang had been such that one side had betrayed the other, and Lee had seen documents that would have entitled leading statesmen to spend the rest of their days in Charlestown prison. When you had listened to his stories for an hour or two, you understood Lola Andrews’ statement that it was “dog eat dog”; you forgot the Emersonian notion of making truth count in Boston!

Cornelia, probing her own soul, confessed to a certain snobbery in her attitude toward perjury. It was a thing she associated with foreigners accused of crime, and with Irish politicians. The City Hall belonged to the Irish, so it was called the “steal works”; but the State House with its golden dome was run by gentlemen, and was a sacred spot. Now, however, Lee Swenson declared there was ten times as much graft in the State House--the only difference was that it was legalized; such things as fixing up laws to enable great corporations to plunder the public. There under the golden dome you would encounter a blue-blood banker who wanted his attorney made into a supreme court judge, so that the banker would be safe forever after; or a state bank commissioner who wanted to become president of a bank; a great lawyer who wanted to use his inside knowledge of politics to plunder the clients of banks; a financier who was lending money to legislators, who were passing bills to multiply the value of his public utility holdings.

Cornelia understood all these references; Lee Swenson was attacking the Thornwell family, undermining its claims to moral superiority. He was pointing to scandals in which her family was involved--some that were in the public prints, others that were whispered in the gossip of the clubs. And she knew it was all true; she knew that Rupert Alvin and Henry Cabot Winters and John Quincy Thornwell were busy right now framing up their perjury in the Jerry Walker case. When an I.W.W. lawyer hinted this possibility, she did not rebuke him. She did not even protect her family dignity when he mentioned that her son-in-law had begun his legal career as counsel for the Boston streets railways, which meant that he had done most kinds of dirty work known to the legal profession.

“Believe me, Nonna, I can tell you,” said the man from the wild west. “I began with the Great Northern Railroad, and spent my time gyping poor workers out of damages. I was paid five hundred a month, very nice for a young fellow, and I had the way clear before me, right up to the top, maybe a seat on the supreme court bench--that is how you get there. But it made me sick; I couldn’t forget the faces of the men I had robbed, and their pitiful wives and children. I just couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. So I threw up the job, and went in to try to help the workers; and what I saw--well, I have a simple formula, Nonna, I don’t care what a man has done in the labor cause, he can never be so guilty as those who take dividends of his sweat and blood.”

Said Cornelia: “Henry has talked to me a lot about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, trying to drag me out of it. The next time he broaches it, I’ll ask him about some of these matters.”

At which the lawyer smiled. “Well, get it straight. Don’t ask if he pays bribes to witnesses; don’t ask if he ‘frames’ them. Everything is done very carefully and decorously, in the office of a great Boston lawyer. When a witness comes in he doesn’t see the chief, he sees a young subordinate. The witness says, ‘I saw the man and he was wearing a blue hat.’ The young lawyer interrupts him, ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken, we have information that the man was wearing a red hat. Think it over and see if you weren’t mistaken.’ He sends the witness away, and next day the witness comes back, and meets another subordinate, and says, ‘I saw this man and he was wearing a red hat.’ ‘That is right,’ says the young lawyer. ‘And he was walking,’ says the witness, ‘rather slowly.’ ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken,’ says the lawyer, ‘we understand he was running at top speed. Think it over and see if you don’t realize that that is how it was.’ So the witness goes away, and next time he comes he meets a third subordinate, and he says, ‘I saw this man, and he had a red hat on, and he was running very, very fast’--and so on, until he knows exactly what happened. So then he meets the chief, and tells the chief what he saw, and the chief says, ‘That is a very good witness, a dependable person.’ When he presents the witness to the jury, he assures the jury this is a dependable person, and no one can possibly say the great and famous lawyer ever did a dishonorable action.”

“Lee, I just couldn’t do it!”--those were Cornelia’s parting words. He answered, “Think about it,”--knowing well that she would think about nothing else. Cowardice, weakness, false pride--she was willing to call it any bad name, but there was something in her that stopped dead when she tried to think of going upon the witness stand and swearing to a made-up story. How could truth ever exist in the world, if somebody did not stand by it?

Vanzetti came, as usual, to keep the midnight watch with her. “I am poor wop,” said he. “But what you say if it was a Thornwell?” Cornelia’s fancy played with that theme. She saw her daughter Alice, in one of those ferocious quarrels which had marked the early stages of her marital disharmony; with jealousy gnawing her heart, Alice bought a revolver and shot Henry, and so was on trial, in danger of the electric chair. But no, it was absurd, the electric chair was not for Thornwells, there could be no such issue; they would adjudge Alice insane, and put her in a sanitarium, take a year or two to “cure” her, and then let her loose. But suppose, for the sake of argument, Alice was in danger, and Cornelia had to take the witness stand. If she told the truth her daughter would be executed, and if she lied her daughter would go free. Which would she do?

Right was right, and wrong was wrong, people said, and it sounded simple. But when you met a concrete case, you discovered that you could not live by formulas. To refuse to do a lesser wrong, and thereby do a greater--was that moral? On the other hand, if you said that the end justified the means, where would you stop? Every man would be a law to himself, and there would be chaos instead of order. There must be rules, something men could count on. But the moment you said that, you had a system, with high judges sitting on top, sentencing men to death for the convenience of the Boston aristocracy. Cornelia remembered Mr. Emerson, who had said that a good citizen must not obey the laws too well.

The cruelty of the dilemma lay here, that what was supposed to be justice was really class-greed. Bart and Nick were not going to be tried because they had held up a payroll; they were going to be tried because they were dangerous leaders of social revolt. That would be the real motive power behind prosecutor, judge and jury; that would be the thought in the minds of every one of them, at every stage of the trial. The rest would be pretense, a cloak of propriety. And that was the real lie--the real perjury: Fred Katzmann’s genial smile, veiling a sneer; Web Thayer’s cold dignity, with a wink now and then to the jury. When Cornelia remembered what she had seen in the Plymouth court-room, it seemed to her that God would surely forgive any lies that served to thwart such knavery!

So she swung back and forth, from one point of view to the other, never satisfied with either. Lee Swenson said no more, but from that day his presence was a question. Bart’s picture on the mantel-piece was a challenge--what was friendship worth, it seemed to demand. You were not asked to give your life for your friend, but only your ethical code; your exclusiveness, your idea that you were something special, apart from the harsh, rough world--in short that you were “Boston”!

From first to last Betty never spoke about the matter; and that was surprising to Cornelia--it had the effect of putting her off by herself, as if in a museum, or a mausoleum. Betty and Joe were bound to have talked about the matter; everybody on the committee must have thought of it. “Mrs. Thornwell could save our boys, if she would!” To that Betty would make reply, “No use to put anything like that up to Grannie, she belongs to the old generation.” Cornelia wondered, would the new generation take the liberty of lying when it pleased? The issue did not arise, because Betty and Joe had been in Europe, and could hardly invent a special trip back, in order to be with Bart on the day of the South Braintree crime!

If Cornelia could not face the thought of perjury, neither could she face the other alternative. When she thought of the electric chair, and Bart and Nick strapped into it--no, no, it was too horrible, it simply could not happen! So each skirmish in this war of conscience served to start Cornelia into new activity. In spite of aching back she would write more letters, in spite of tired limbs she would set forth to a committee meeting, or to speak to a group of women, to assault the ears of the heedless and drag them away from a bridge party to a murder trial.

She had the idea now that she could help the cause by persuading a group of ladies of good family to go to Dedham and watch the proceedings. They would move to the town for a month, and invade the court-room in a phalanx, and sit like the “tricoteuses” of the French revolution, doing fancy work! They might frighten “Web” Thayer into a semblance of impartiality, and possibly even restrain Fred Katzmann’s crude wit at the expense of wops. The courts were supposed to be immune to outside influences, but Cornelia knew her Boston too well for that.

In one way or another, several ladies of social standing had become interested in the case. There was Mrs. Lois Rantoul, who was a Lowell, than which nothing could be more impressive in a court-room. And Mrs. Jessica Henderson, well-to-do--though she had hurt her social position by getting arrested, along with Cornelia and Betty, the day President Wilson had been welcomed to Boston. Mrs. Henderson and her daughter Wilma had spent the night in that old Joy Street police station, and had fed their blood to the vermin--a modern form of initiation into a sisterhood of social justice.

And then Mrs. Evans, still earlier on the ground. Elizabeth Glendower Evans was the widow of a young lawyer who had died before he had ever had a case. She had become a charity worker, through youth and middle age. Now she was gray-haired--and what a relief to Cornelia to have some one else who was elderly and respectable, to help bear the brunt of criticism! Mrs. Evans had got her social awakening during the Lawrence strike of two years ago; she had gone, with others, to see fair play, and instead had seen an unresisting striker felled to earth by three husky policemen, and shoved into a patrol wagon like a dead log. Next morning she saw the man, with head cut and plastered, arraigned for assault, and she arose and told the court what she had seen. Said His Honor: “Your testimony would be important if the police were under accusation”--and thereupon he sentenced all the strikers. Mrs. Evans spoke again, saying, “I go bail for all these prisoners,”--which was very picturesque, and made a front-page story in the papers.

“Old Boston” again, you see! She was a stockholder in the Lawrence mills, which made it still more picturesque, and shocking to the mill masters. To go to strike headquarters, and say to I.W.W. leaders, wops and dagoes and guinneys and such riffraff, “I don’t know whether the wages you ask are reasonable, but I do know that you are persecuted by the authorities, and denied the legal rights to which you are entitled, and to that extent I am with you”--to say that was to become, in the columns of the press, leader of the revolution and commander-in-chief of the picket line.

Now Mrs. Evans was interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and was going to the trial at Dedham, to watch Web Thayer and Fred Katzmann, and be horrified like everybody else. And maybe her testimony would have been important, if Thayer and Katzmann had been on trial. But that time had not come, and would not come for five or six years.

Captain John Quincy Thornwell, Jr., Cornelia’s grandnephew, oldest son of the president of the Fifth National Bank of Boston, had been an officer in Battery A, the fashionable militia organization, in which the young blue-bloods dashed about expensively. Tall, golden-haired, haughty, he had looked so “fetching” in his fancy uniform that he had fetched a wife who would some day own ten per cent of the electric light industry of New England. “Captain John” was a director in his father’s bank, a builder of airplanes, and of anything else which had to do with killing--so sure of his own superiority he was.

Never would Cornelia forget the day when he and his unit had departed for France. She had gone with the heartbroken young wife to see them off; a dreadful experience--all the Boston blue-bloods there in their expensive limousines, many of them stuck in a swampy field alongside the Ipswich River, caught by a sudden deluge of rain, and an ear-splitting thunderstorm; all social influence, all family connections set at nought by the irreverent elements--it was quite like being at war--blue-bloods actually struck by lightning and killed! And these refined and delicately nurtured young Harvard men, dressed in water-soaked khaki plastered with mud, standing at attention for the “Star-Spangled Banner”; then struggling with exasperated horses, to get very real and bloodthirsty cannon dragged out of mudholes!

“Captain John” had ridden off, like many others, forever; in the desperate fighting in the Argonne Forest he had disappeared from human ken. But in the process of digging up the remains of American soldiers in France there was found a seal ring with one of the bodies, and this ring was sent to Boston, and mentioned in the papers, and “Captain John’s” mother went to inspect and identify it. So now the family had a corpse in an air-tight coffin, over which to be publicly sentimental for the glory of their country. A famous sculptor was designing a monument, and meantime there were to be parades and muffled drums and prayers and salutes--and one of the street intersections most frequented by the wealth and fashion of Boston was to be christened “John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square.” All over the city and in the suburban towns they were doing this; so that future generations of tourists would walk down Jones Street, looking for the corner of Jones and Smith, and would be perplexed to discover that there was no such place, but that a quite ordinary crossing with a drugstore, an undertaking parlor, a grocery and a delicatessen shop, was known as “Michael Callahan O’Grady Square.”

These ceremonies were to take place on May 29th, two days before the opening of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial at Dedham; and the event was the subject of a vehement discussion between the great-aunt of the hero, and his cousin, Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin. Unthinkable that any relative should fail to attend this ceremony! Cornelia was going, because she was always hoping to keep peace with the family; but Betty declared that she preferred to attend a circus, in a last effort to trace the man with the bullet hole in his overcoat! When Cornelia argued that “John did give his life for his country,” the new generation answered, “Don’t talk like a legionnaire! He gave his life for Father’s bonds. I didn’t want them and I’m not going to get them, so I can’t see that I owe any reverence to my military cousin.”

“He is dead, Betty--”

“Exactly, and we aren’t helping him by parading behind his corpse. We are doing it for our own glory, and especially for the young fellows--so that when Father wants them to protect his bonds again, they’ll think they are being glorious. It is vicious propaganda for militarism, and if you who call yourself a pacifist do anything to help it along--it will simply mean that you’re old and tired, Grannie dear!”

XII

Was it accident, or was it the playful malice of fate, that Memorial Day fell on a Monday, so that the patriots had two whole days, preceding the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, to rouse the population against the Reds? On that Sunday and Monday it was estimated that at least two hundred thousand Bostonians, one-fifth of the whole population, took part in ceremonies. The governor and the mayor were busy all day long, making speeches at breakfasts, luncheons and banquets, with parades in between, and dedications and unveilings. Senators and congressmen, councilmen and district attorneys took a double holiday from stealing, and delivered eloquent praise of the flag, and denunciations of its foes, the vicious and malicious “radicals.” There was high mass in hundreds of Catholic churches, with parades of the Knights of Columbus, and speeches by the biggest and most successful rascals in Massachusetts. There were memorial services in Forest Hills Cemetery, with nine hundred veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic decorating graves. There were religious services in Fenway Park, with veterans of three wars forming in Copley Square, and loud-speakers installed so that huge throngs might hear. The Park Street Church unveiled a tablet, with names of the members who had given their lives in the World War. The Elks paraded, and had a bugler sounding taps. The oldest veterans, too feeble even to put wreaths on graves, were taken in launches, to strew flowers on the bay in honor of the unknown dead.

All over the Commonwealth the same thing went on; no community too small to have its heroes and its memories. Flag poles were set up and monuments unveiled. Quincy, the largest city in Norfolk County, from which the Sacco-Vanzetti jury was to be drawn, dedicated three squares to its dead. One man had been killed in the Spanish War, another in an uprising in the Philippines; many years they had spent in the land of the shades without distinction, but now they were called up--on the day before two anarchist bandits went to trial! The first Quincy boy killed in the Civil War was resurrected for honors--sixty years he had been forgotten! In Bridgewater, scene of the crime for which Vanzetti was in prison, the remains of a World War veteran brought back from France were buried with solemn ceremonials; in Braintree, scene of the second crime, another body was buried, with the whole population in attendance--a parade, and speeches by officials, with the selectmen and other great persons standing by with bared heads. Another in Quincy, another in Weymouth--with banners furled, and muffled drums, and soldiers firing a salute over the grave.

A storm of patriotic fervor, a torrent of eloquence, in support of America, and in denunciation of her foes; hundreds of thousands of patient people, standing reverently in the spring sunshine; millions of the same kind reading about it in editions of a dozen great newspapers; and only one circumstance to mar the perfection of the double holiday--the fact that the papers were obliged to print details of several scandals then in the midst of exploding with a frightful stink. The attorney general of the Commonwealth had just filed charges against the district attorney of Middlesex County, just across the river from Boston, charging him with having blackmailed a group of leading moving picture producers of something over a hundred thousand dollars, the price of immunity for a “Nero’s Circus” which they had held in a roadhouse. The papers were full of lurid details about naked girls dancing the highland fling; they said that several leading politicians and criminal lawyers of Boston had shared in the loot.

Also the state bank commissioner was digging into the matter of the bribery of legislators revealed by the recent bank failures; and it was an embarrassing fact that many patriotic orators of this double holiday had been sharing in such graft. The public did not know it, but the orators knew it, so they pounded the rostrum, and waved their arms until their faces grew purple and the sweat dissolved the starch in their collars; the loud-speakers bellowed, and the parks and public places, the churches and temples and banquet halls resounded with sentiments of seraphic idealism, voiced by persons whose social functions were those of hogs in a trough.

XIII

It was not so bad at the ceremony which Cornelia attended; because that was Thornwell, and you may be sure the clan saw to it that no person tainted with scandal did any orating at John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square. The clan knew--for were they not the paymasters? The mayor of the city happened to be a blue-blood that year--a rare interval of respectability. And if the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth was to go directly from the governor’s chair to the vice-presidency of one of Rupert’s banks, and soon after having appointed two of Rupert’s very good friends to the supreme judicial bench--well, that was a scandal of such colossal proportions that it became respectable. Men could not face the implications of it, so it was not discussed, except by a few insiders, and members of the rival banking group, who knew what Rupert was after.

A grand stand had been built, and flags and bunting made the consecrated square into a child’s dream of peppermint candy. Lines of ropes and policemen kept the throngs back; and there came “Captain John’s” own Battery A, khaki-clad, with rumble of guns and tramp of horses, and fluttering of pennants, red field, with figures in yellow. And the infantry, known as the “Cadets,” in long blue trousers with yellow stripes. There came a hundred Grand Army veterans, pitiful old boys in every stage of decrepitude, carrying their tattered battle flags, and wearing their faded blue uniforms, covered with medals and decorations. There came khaki-clad veterans of American Legion posts, and the Boy Cadets, their faces newly washed and shining. There came automobiles full of great personages in braided broadcloth suits and shiny top hats, and ladies in costly chiffons and new spring bonnets.

A beautiful show; with rolling of drums and blowing of bugles, and standing up and sitting down again, and baring heads and bowing them, while the rector of Trinity Church in the City of Boston offered an invocation to the God of Battles, and His Son, the Prince of Peace. War and Peace were thus mixed up in the ceremony, so that nobody could tell at any moment which was which. The orators declared that the way to insure peace was to prepare for war; upon which program the nations had just led themselves into the greatest war to end war in all history, and now were spending several times as much money to prepare for an even greater war to end war.

It would be safe to say that in that vast throng of cheering and singing and reverently listening people, these traitor-thoughts found lodgment in only one head, that of the little old lady who sat in the front row, among the highest of the high-up dignitaries. She, the widow of a former governor, a Thornwell, and the great-aunt of the hero, could not have been denied her proper place without making a scandal, and emphasizing the dreadful rumors that she had been seduced by the enemy within our gates, and turned into a friend of bomb throwers and bandits. So nice to look upon, with her hair now almost white, and her little round face much wrinkled, but still jolly, and her new spring costume selected and presented by her daughter Alice of impeccable taste; so gentle in manner, so quiet and ladylike--it was impossible to believe what everybody knew about her, that she was actually going down to Dedham the next day, and face all the uproar and notoriety, and lend her sanction to the defense of desperate anarchists on trial for their lives.

She watched with tears in her eyes, while her great-grandniece, the little daughter of the dead hero, came forward to draw the veil from the bronze tablet. The bugles blew, and the audience rose and bared its head, and the bands started to play “America,” and everybody sang--a sublime moment. The lovely young widow of the hero had to hide her face in her hands, and even the stolid James Scatterbridge and the cynical Henry Cabot Winters and the stately Rupert Alvin were not ashamed to be moved. Cornelia’s tears were right and proper, and she kept her traitor-thoughts to herself. No one guessed that she was weeping for other heroes who were still to die. For the little boys in their khaki uniforms, lifting their shining faces to the orators and the beautiful waving flags! For the mothers who brought them there, to be consecrated and pledged to future slaughters! For the great humble masses who packed the streets in every direction, and stood bareheaded and trusting, gazing up to the great ones, and believing every word the loud-speakers told them!

A sharp division in that audience, between the many who believed, and the few who knew. To the former the name America, and its symbol, the flag, meant liberty and justice for all mankind; while to the few it meant private property in land, machinery and credit, and the exploitation of labor based thereon. By means of this system, the knowing ones had brought the lesser nations and weaker peoples into debt to them; so America and the flag meant battleships and guns and airplanes and poison gas to collect this tribute to all eternity. That was the reason these busy gentlemen took two days off from business, and built stands and tacked up decorations, and set up loud-speakers to carry the words of politicians and priests and preachers to crowds in the public squares. That was why you heard no patriotic address which failed to mention the “enemy within our gates,” the vicious and criminal “Reds” who refused to love America and appreciate her ideals, but wanted to overthrow the greatest government in the world, and repudiate all the debts, and nationalize all the women, and make America a vassal of what the orators called the “Bolshevikis,” or sometimes, like Judge Webster Thayer, the “arnychists.”

BOSTON

A Novel by UPTON SINCLAIR

VOLUME II

UPTON SINCLAIR STATION A PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

First and Second Printings before publication

X. THE LEGAL SYSTEM…

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