Boston a novel
dreadfully. Mrs. Walker doesn’t belong to either set, and she ought to
be glad--but she isn’t.” They walked on, until suddenly the girl burst
out, “Do you know what I’d really like to do, Grannie?”
“What, dear?”
“Stay right here the rest of the summer, and get a job in the cordage
plant with you, and prove that I’m some use.”
“No, dear, you can’t do that, it would make your mother and father too
unhappy. And besides, it would be giving away my secret.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But anyhow, I am going to do something worthwhile
before I get through.”
“Where you going the rest of the summer?”
“Camp Putnam for August; and of course that’s exciting, in a way. Did
they have Camp Putnam when you were a girl?”
“No, people didn’t go as far as the Adirondacks; and besides, I wasn’t
a fashionable person.”
“Well, anyhow, they found some way to get you married off to an
eligible man!” And Betty laughed. “Oh, yes, we know what Camp Putnam is
for! The old people think they are being so sly, they get together and
plan the list every summer, and rule out the least desirable ones--it’s
as select as if it was God we were visiting. They even try to arrange
the partners, but it doesn’t work out to oblige them. I know Mother
wants to put me off on Ebenezer Cabot, but Grannie, he’s an out-and-out
moron.”
“Don’t say that, dear!”
“But it’s true! You know perfectly well that most of us old families
have feeble-minded ones, and regular lunatics, with keepers watching
them, somewhere off in a remote wing of the house. Isn’t it true that
Great-uncle Ahab was that way for years?”
“Yes, dear, but you mustn’t speak of it.”
“Only to you, Grannie. But I’m telling you there’ll be no Ebenezer in
my young life. But I think before this summer’s over I’m going to have
to deal with a proposal.”
“Who from?”
“Roger Lowell. He was there last year, and he almost did it, but it
wouldn’t have been proper, because he was only a sophomore then, and
they’re not supposed to be engaged; but this year he’s a junior, and so
it’ll be all right.”
“Do you like him?”
“Well, I do and I don’t, Grannie. He’s a dear, in a way, and very good,
but so awfully stiff and prim, so conscious of his great family, and
what it’s correct for him to do. If I were to marry him, I think I’d be
like you and Grandfather Thornwell, I’d hardly dare crack a smile the
rest of my life. I’ve already shocked him by some of the things I’ve
said. I told him a woman should promise to stay with a man so long as
she loved him, not any more. He said she ought to promise to love him
forever, but I said that would be silly, because how could you tell?
Did you ever meet him, Grannie?”
“The first time I met him, he had his pink toes up in the air.”
“Oh, I’ll tell him that, and humiliate him to death! No Lowell should
be seen in such a position!”
“And the second time he had a bib around his neck, and porridge running
down it. The last time I met him, he was in evening dress, and his
collar was stiff and his tie was puffy, and his sober round face looked
over the top like a big pink chrysanthemum.”
“Oh, Grannie, that’s Roger exactly! And I’m his ideal of womanhood--if
only I wouldn’t make jokes! Now I’m going to read Vanzetti’s books, and
be really serious, but I’m not sure if he will like me as an anarchist.
And Grannie, I’m supposed to go home to-morrow, but I hate to leave you
like this--honestly, I’m ashamed of the food I eat.”
“I’m having a very happy time, dear.”
“How long do you plan to stay?”
“I’m not sure--I keep changing my mind. When I read in the paper about
that speech your father made, trying to get us into the war--then all
of a sudden I think I’ll come back and take up a pacifist campaign.”
“Oh, Grannie! How perfectly appalling! You’d be like old Mrs. Abigail
Webster Adams--she made a speech at a socialist meeting, and Father
said she ought to be locked up in an asylum.”
“No doubt he’ll say that about me,” said Cornelia. It was a prophecy.
VIII
Betty went away, and the rest of Cornelia’s stay was enlivened by
letters, addressed to Mrs. Nonna Cornell--it was Betty’s little joke.
They were highly confidential letters, full of family information.
“Uncle Quincy has found the perfect chess player, a man who can foresee
all possible combinations. Uncle James is building a whole new house
on the back of ‘Hillview.’ And Father says the Boston banks have got
a hundred million dollars of British and French bonds. They sold them
to the public, but had to take them as collateral, and if the allies
should lose, not a bank in Boston could keep open. So you had better
come on up and make that pacifist speech.”
And then: “I have been to the book-store that Mr. Vanzetti told me
about. It is kept by a nice dark-eyed young Russian who was eager to
undertake my education. I have a number of books which I keep hidden
in the bottom of a trunk, they are lots worse than the ‘Cosmo’ with
Robert W. Chambers. One is called ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women,’
by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The preface says it is a hundred and
twenty-five years old. The world has not caught up with her yet. I am
very much excited about this book, because it is just what I had been
thinking. But Roger will not like it.”
Then: “I am at Camp Putnam, ready to be paired off for life, with no
possibility of its not being good family. It really is the loveliest
country, and impossible not to have a good time. It is so nice to wear
sensible camping clothes; how I wish that women might wear short skirts
all the time. But if I were to walk down Tremont street this way, I
suppose I’d have a crowd of boys hooting me. There is much in the world
to be changed. I think the Mary Wollstonecraft book has made me into a
suffragette. Would that shock you?
“I am going out now to climb a mountain. We shall all spend the night
on top and see the sunrise, and come home to-morrow, and then we shall
eat most tremendous quantities of cakes and syrup. We seem to be hungry
all the time. Aunt Betty, who runs the camp and us, has put a big block
of chocolate in the pantry, and a little hatchet with which we knock
off pieces. Mother says it was exactly the same in her day--the same
hatchet, but I don’t suppose the same block of chocolate. At least, we
shall not leave much for our children.”
And then: “We have climbed many mountains, and are having our good
time in a sober, conscientious way. We are really very serious young
people. Did I tell you that we have a way of testing any newcomer? We
have a funny story that we tell him; at least it is said to be funny,
but really it has no point, and we watch to see if he laughs. If he
does, we know that he is not sincere. It is very ingenious, but after
you have watched the procedure two or three times it strikes you as a
little self-conscious. I suppose it is our Puritan blood that makes it
necessary for us to be always consciously and deliberately righteous.
“It would not be a very good test with Roger, for he might not laugh
even if the joke did have a point. We have had some long talks and I
thought I would break the news gently, so I said, ‘I have met several
radicals, and am much interested in their ideas.’ Roger said, ‘That
is all right, I am the same way, I had a prof last year who was quite
terribly radical.’ I asked, ‘What did he say?’ and Roger answered,
‘Oh, all sorts of things. He kept talking about the “lost books of the
Bible,” and he said that the substance of the ten commandments was
found in earlier writings, and the story of the flood was derived from
Babylonian sources.’ You might tell that to Mr. Vanzetti and shock him!”
The climax of the courtship: “Oh, Grannie dear, my dolly is stuffed
with sawdust! Roger and I have had a heart to heart talk and a most
terrible quarrel, and it is all over--my name is never going to be
Lowell. I told him I had come to realize that marriage was a form of
slavery for women; and he said he knew what I meant, it was the word
obey in the ceremony, but there were some clergymen who would leave
that out if you asked them to. And I said it wasn’t only that, it was
the idea of a woman’s parting with her autonomy; that every woman ought
to have the final say about the children she bore; she ought to be
free--especially if she were willing to earn her own way, as I meant to
do.
“So then he was much puzzled, and asked me what I thought we ought to
do, and I said I believed in a free union, with our own promise to
each other, to be true to our best selves, and to do our best to love
each other, but not stay together if we couldn’t. And Roger said,
‘You mean--you mean you wouldn’t really--you wouldn’t get married at
all?’ and he turned red to the tips of his ears, and I said, ‘You don’t
understand my feelings.’ But he couldn’t talk about it any more--he
said, ‘Betty Alvin, if I had made such a proposition to you, it would
have been a deadly insult.’ And I said, ‘Maybe so, but I am making it
to you, and that is something different.’ And he wanted to know where I
had got such outrageous ideas, but when I tried to tell him he didn’t
really want to know, and wouldn’t look at the book. He tried to talk
to me about my soul, and I laughed at him, and so now we are most
fearfully polite to each other when anybody else is present, because of
course we don’t want to have a scandal in the camp. Oh, Grannie, I wish
you would come back home, because I am going to be so lonely!”
IX
The “Gruppo Autonomo di Plymouth” gave a “picanic” that fall, and from
all the neighboring towns came swarms of Italians, by train and bus and
second-hand automobile. And then it was announced that the “Circolo
Drammatico Mario Papisardi” was going to give a play in Stoughton, a
“shoe-town” some thirty miles away. They had quite a fine dramatic
organization, and Bart laid off work for three days to travel round and
place tickets for them. Illness kept the Brinis from going, but some
neighbors, the Angelottis, invited Cornelia.
A young anarchist comrade called for them in his car; Mike Boda was
his name, and he told Cornelia that he was a macaroni salesman, and
raced about the country in his little Overland car, hopping in and out
at Italian homes. He was a chipper little fellow, about five feet two
inches high, and it was just as well that he was no heavier, because
when you had Bart on the front seat with a boy on his knee, and Mr. and
Mrs. Angelotti and Cornelia on the back seat, with another boy on the
father’s lap and another on the mother’s, you had about as much weight
as the springs of a low-priced car could be expected to stand.
But the roads were good, and they rolled along singing songs, and it
was a gay party that swept into the shoe-town. The children had been to
the movies, of course, and they had seen a play at school, but this
was their first grown-up play, and they could hardly contain their
excitement. They drove to the home of a comrade whom Vanzetti had
recently met at one of the East Boston gatherings. Nicola Sacco was his
name, and he lived in a fine cottage, which had formerly belonged to
his boss. “Great feller, Nick,” explained Bart. “He work shoe-factory,
is edge-trimmer, mooch skill work, he make so mooch fifty, sixty dollar
week, that boy--smart feller, got lovely wife, you see.”
Their host ran out to the gate to meet them, a chap of twenty-five,
with even, regular features and black hair and eyes; very active, like
a cat, a figure all of steel springs. He had come from the ankle of the
Italian boot, while his wife, Rosina, came from the north--young and
dainty, with vivid auburn hair and an eager face full of sunshine and
freckles. They had a little boy, about three years old. “Hello, Dante!”
called Bart. “Someday we have nodder poet!” But the new poet was shy,