Boston a novel
dinner-tables: “Oh, but, my dear, don’t you know that story? The
original Scatterbridge was a clerk in the plant and he got all the
stock away from them, and they had to marry him to get it back!”
It was not as if the other two sons-in-law had needed the money. Rupert
Alvin was a banker who counted the year a failure if he had not added
a million to his fortune; and Cornelia had heard Henry Cabot Winters
boast that his law firm never had less than twenty-five millions in
litigation. But apparently this money game was one in which it was not
possible to be satisfied. Rupert and Henry, who composed a team, would
have liked to take in Jerry Walker’s felt-plants and the Thornwell
cotton-mills, each in one bite. They had their “lines” on so many other
properties that Cornelia could not keep track of them; the names were
to her like those of ancient battles, famous in story, but which she
had never looked up on a map.
II
Dr. Morrow came; the pink of fashion, rosy-faced and silver-haired,
with sharply trimmed, dapper white mustaches. His manner reminded you
that good breeding asserts superiority to every weakness of mortality.
He went to the big four-poster bed, felt the cold hands, listened for
the non-existent heart-beats, and then turned to the widow. “Well,
Cornelia, old Josiah had fourteen years more than the Bible promised
him. So we can’t complain.” He knew there had been no love between them.
Hearing the verdict, the efficient James instructed Josiah’s secretary
to notify the papers. Some went to press early, and would need time
to handle this important story. The secretary would begin with the
_Transcript_, the family organ of all the families that “count” in
Massachusetts. The mischievously-minded assert that mortality records
show a great increase upon Fridays, due to desire of the socially elect
to appear in Saturday’s obituary columns.
Meantime the efficient James was closeted in Josiah’s study with the
efficient head of the Hobson undertaking establishment, and these two
were learning to understand each other. It was to be a great funeral,
a matter of state, which would mean prestige and advertising to the
concern which secured the contract. The family was wealthy, and would
pay for the best, but there must be a distinct understanding that
they were to get what they paid for. Mr. Hobson listened politely and
replied that he understood Mr. Scatterbridge’s position perfectly.
There was no reason why a funeral should not be dealt with as any
other matter of business; and certainly his firm appreciated the
importance of social prestige and would be prepared to adjust its
price accordingly. After which he produced a portfolio about caskets,
revealing that there were art-modeled items of burnished bronze for
which it was possible to pay from twenty-five thousand up. James
Scatterbridge gulped once and composed his features, and did not reveal
his plebeian astonishment.
Meantime Deborah Thornwell Alvin was descending from her limousine,
tall and stiff, always ready for a funeral, because she dressed in
black, with only a touch of white at the neck and a double necklace of
white pearls. She had her father’s lean and stern features, and had
served as his deputy in keeping the family traditions in effect. As
soon as she was in the house she began objecting in decorous whispers;
and presently there arrived her sister, Alice, her ally in war on the
Scatterbridge clan. Who had given James authority to bring those vulgar
Hobson people into the case? Who had taken the responsibility to rush
the family into print, from who could tell what cheap and sensational
angle?
“Mother,” said Deborah, “do you know anything about Father’s will?”
“Nothing, my child; he never spoke of it to me in his life.”
“We’re going to find, of course, that James has got this house and the
land. You know he took a mortgage on it when Father lost his money in
the New Haven jam.”
“Let me remind you, Mother,” put in Alice. “Father promised me my pick
of the old furniture. He knew I was the only one that appreciated
it--he told me that again and again.”
“Yes, my dear. I hope he put it into the will.”
“I can only say this, if James and Clara get that Mayflower cradle that
I was rocked in, they may bury me in it.” Alice Thornwell Winters’s
fair blonde features were set in a look which her beauty-specialists
would have deplored, because it made sharp lines on each side of her
mouth. Alice was the adventurous one of the family, going in for costly
culture, inviting poets and artists and people of that dubious sort to
her home. She had been painted several times and hung in exhibitions,
and had learned to regard herself as a work of art, a feature of the
social landscape. The fact that she could appreciate the old treasures
of the family was a moral reason for a family quarrel: something which
Boston quarrels require.
III
If Cornelia had realized the previous night that she was hearing her
husband’s last words, no doubt she would have paid more attention.
There is a certain importance attaching to finality as such, even when
it applies to the words of a man who has been your husband for forty
years, and whose every mental reaction is known to you in advance.
Cornelia had been reading about the destruction of the Rheims
cathedral; there was an engraving of it among the works of art she had
brought back from her honeymoon, and she had gone into her husband’s
study, and seated herself upon a hassock, and begun rummaging in the
drawers of a chest which had belonged to Great-grandfather Thornwell,
holding the records of his ships in the East India trade. In a drawer
bearing in faded gold letters the label, “Sylph of the Sea,” she had
found the portfolio of engravings and sat turning them over for an hour
or two.
And meantime Josiah was conversing with Rupert Alvin,--oldest of
his sons-in-law. They paid no more attention to Cornelia than if
she had been a mouse. They were talking about Jerry Walker and his
felt-business; and Cornelia, even while thinking about cathedrals,
could not help catching the drift of their remarks. Jerry Walker had
been an errand boy in an institution of which Cornelia had been a
patroness; and now it appeared that he was on the way to monopolizing
the felt-business of New England. Rupert Alvin, who ran the Pilgrim
National Bank, objected to monopolies in the hands of other people, and
was of the opinion that Jerry was dangerously impulsive--he had paid
over a million dollars for the Atlas hat-works, while Rupert was in the
midst of making up his mind whether the concern was good for a small
loan.
Cornelia glanced at her son-in-law, who sat very straight, as he
always did, in the big leather armchair; his dinner-coat bulging, his
tucked shirt-front puffed out, so that he looked like a black and
white pouter-pigeon. Rupert’s face ran to bulges: his forehead a great
pink bulge, with two minor ones over the eyes, his cheeks half a dozen
rosy-red bulges, and his neck and chins a number of bigger and redder
ones. To Cornelia there was something comical in his indignation that
some one else had dared to think more quickly than he. But that was the
kind of thought she had spent forty years learning to keep to herself.
Josiah gave his decision, in his old man’s voice that was beginning to
crack. Jerry Walker might break himself some day, but not now; these
were the days to buy anything at any price; hats were necessary to
armies and felt slippers were worn in hospitals. That led them to the
subject which all men of affairs were discussing in this summer of
1915. Josiah repeated his well-known opinion that it would be a long
war and that it was the part of wisdom to buy and buy. Cornelia sat
thinking of human lives while they were thinking of money.
Rupert was of the opinion that the war couldn’t last over the year,
because the warring nations were heading for bankruptcy. But Josiah
told him not to worry; we would lend them the money, provided they
spent it for our goods. How would we get the money back? And Josiah
said we wouldn’t have to get it back--it would be like Jerry Walker’s
felt-business. “When Jerry can’t pay what he owes us we’ll take over
his plants.”
Cornelia got up, carrying her engraving. “Good-night,” she said, and
they answered in a perfunctory way; and that would have been the end
of it if she had been the right sort of a wife. But she could not
resist the impulse to stop in front of her son-in-law and remark,
“It’ll be fine, Rupert, when we can bring Europe up to date.” Rupert, a
practical-minded man, assented; and Cornelia held up the picture of the
cathedral. “We can widen out this Angel Tower and make it the branch
office of Jerry Walker’s felt-plants.”
For forty years, even during the two that Josiah Quincy Thornwell had
been governor of the Commonwealth, Cornelia had been saying things like
this, and some people had found it roguish. But never Josiah; always
he would frown, and remark, as now, “Your sense of humor is untimely,
Cornelia.” She put her hand lightly on the top of his white wig and
said, “Some day, my husband, you will tell me the proper time for my
sense of humor.”
So she tripped out, the little old lady who had seen so much that was
funny in this big household that the wrinkles around her eyes had got
set in a pattern of laughter. Not even the destruction of the Rheims
cathedral, not even the thought of the peasant-boys in the trenches,
could wipe out her amusement at the moral impulse of Boston, which was
driving Rupert Alvin to take charge of Jerry Walker’s felt-business,
and likewise of the geography and finance of Europe. Her last thought
was “He’ll do both those things.” And, in his own time and at his own
convenience, he did.
IV
In the offices of half a dozen evening papers the “rewrite” men had
dug out a column or two of copy which had waited for thirty years,
being brought up to date every year or two. They inserted at the top
the information that Josiah Quincy Thornwell, twice governor of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, leading manufacturer and philanthropist,
for twenty years a member of the Republican State Committee, had
been found that morning dead at his desk in the family home in the
town of Thornwell, the probable cause being heart failure. The more
sensational papers added how the body had been found by a parlor-maid;
the sort of thing for which Deborah would hold James Scatterbridge
responsible. Also they said that the funeral services would be held at
Trinity Church, Boston--whereas Deborah and Alice were determined that
they should be at the family home, so that the undesirables might be
excluded.
Upstairs in the ex-governor’s apartments Mr. Hobson’s shirt-sleeved
assistants were spreading their rubber-sheets and placing two tables
end to end, at the same time listening to their employer set forth his
conviction, that “ninety percent of this business is psychology. You
meet a hard-boiled guy like that one downstairs and you have to let him
talk himself out, and then he’s ashamed of himself and you can do what
you want with him. After all, what does he know about funerals and how
a swell one ought to be conducted?”
And at the same time in Cornelia’s sitting-room Deborah and Alice had
brought up the subject of the Shah of Persia’s rug. “It really is my
property,” Deborah was saying. “I only left it in the house because I
knew Father liked to have the heirlooms all together. For years I have
seen to the cleaning of it every spring and sent a servant to make sure
it was safe. You know that is true.”
“Yes, of course,” said Alice.
“And now if James and Clara think they are going to move in and let
their children trample it--”
Cornelia went downstairs and met Great-uncle Abner, Josiah’s