Boston a novel
pairs of eyes would steal a glance at the head-table, and particularly
at Cornelia. As a matter of mathematics, it is obvious that this meant
a number of eyes upon her all the time, and she was aware of it, and
her answers to the president’s remarks were absent-minded, and her
efforts to consume a proper quantity of lamb chop, peas and potatoes
were intermittent.
It is a bad thing to eat solid food when you are excited, but Cornelia
had not yet learned that lesson so important to orators. As “first
lady” of the Commonwealth she had now and then been compelled to say
a few words of thanks to the lady chairmen of visiting delegations;
but this was the first time she had been a “headliner,” her début as
pacifist and rebel. The story of her adventure had of course been
whispered all over by this time; and not ten generations’ training in
austerity and reticence could keep the four or five hundred pairs of
eyes from manifesting interest. There was not a vacant seat at any
table; after the dessert and coffee had been served, and the tables
piled back out of the way in a corner, there were not folding chairs
enough for the throng, and all the doorways were packed with standers.
The lady with the slit eyes and the coppery skin was a native graduate
of a Chinese mission school supported by Boston money. She was
introduced, and told them about life in this school--employing a pure
and perfect Bostonese, with the broadest possible “a” and no “r” at
all; she even referred to “that cradle of liberty, Funnel Hall”--just
as if her name were Cabot or Lowell, instead of being Wang-Sin-She!
American school-histories tell about a place called “Fanueil Hall,” and
you know how it looks, but unless you visit “old Boston,” you don’t
know how it sounds.
Every Saturday through the fall and winter the Twentieth Century Club
held these luncheons, and you would hear the head of a Negro school
in Mississippi or maybe in Liberia; a woman who had been studying
the opium trade in the Orient, or white slavery in the Argentine;
a physician who had been curing the Eskimos of trachoma, or a
strike-leader who had been jailed in Colorado. It did not matter where
you came from or what you had, so long as it had to do with making the
world better. This was the only organization of elderly liberals in the
whole world; they were always ready to join something new, and if you
were persuasive enough they would write you checks. Nowhere else in the
world were appearances more deceptive; nowhere did fine feathers so
fail to make fine birds. The old lady in front of you, dressed in rusty
black silk and carrying an umbrella frayed at the edges, might be the
owner of a mountain of copper in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan, or
of six city blocks of tenements in East Boston.
Cornelia saw many persons whom she knew, and others whose faces were
familiar--perhaps because they were types. The very same kind of old
ladies made up the “Sewing Circle”; but there they had made long yellow
flannel petticoats for the poor, while here they remade the world. Old
ladies with little round faces, like Cornelia herself; old ladies with
long faces; dimply faces, wrinkly faces with mouths drawn down at the
corners; little bustling ladies, large ample ladies, timid shy ladies,
grim determined ladies--row after row of them, with eyes fixed upon
the copper-colored speaker. It would not have been polite for Cornelia
to look at any one of them too long, so her eyes moved from one face
to the next. She saw hair drawn up in tight little topknots, hair
pitifully thin, with pink scalps showing through; hair in curls, hair
in waves, hair neatly plastered down at the sides. An old lady with a
benevolent boy’s face, and one with bulgy rosy cheeks; one with deeply
graven mouth and double lines at the side, one with wide outstanding
ears, one with round white forehead, one shiny in new silk and ropes
of pearls, one tinkling with chains and medallions.
And scattered in between, old gentlemen! Bald ones whose scalps were
pink, and bald ones whose scalps were white; some with thin white hair,
some with bushy gray hair; some with neatly trimmed military mustaches,
with droopy mustaches, with grandfatherly beards, with chin-whiskers,
round like a quarter-moon, relics of old New England. Old gentlemen
with saggy cheeks, or portly, like bishops, or military and erect;
rosy clubmen; earnest, ascetic preachers with clerical collars; one
with a red nose; one very fashionable, with glasses hanging from a
black silk cord; one famous scholar with no hair on top of his head,
but covering his collar in back. These, no more than the ladies, could
be judged by appearances; the poorest-looking might be the richest,
the mildest-looking might hold the most revolutionary opinions. One
thing alone was certain--you could never voice an idea too strange, a
course of action too dangerous, for some of these elderly idealists to
applaud! There would even be one or two ready to follow you, to act
upon their convictions, even to the death. It was “old Boston”!
IV
Cornelia made her little speech; very gently and quietly, even humbly.
She found many who were with her; and many, of course, furiously
opposed to her--though etiquette forbade them to show it except by
looking stern and grim. Next morning the newspapers reported the event,
briefly but with dignity; yes, even the most rabidly patriotic were
respectful--it was the right she had acquired on the day she became a
Thornwell. Nothing she could do, short of murder, would forfeit that
immunity. If she became a maniac, and had to be shut up in an asylum,
the papers would decorously cease to mention her; but no opinion held
or expressed would ever cause them to insult a sacred Brahmin.
And curiously enough, the rest of the clan were proud of that fact; in
a perverse kind of way they gloried in the eccentric old lady who had
told the world to go to the devil. Much as they hated her ideas, they
would have been ready to stamp their heels hard on any miserable shrimp
of a journalist who dared to deal impolitely with her. The fact that
no such shrimp appeared, helped to reconcile them to what had happened;
they realized, as families frequently do, that the reality was not so
bad as the anticipation. So, after a week or two, Betty was permitted
to take her grandmother to a symphony concert.
But Cornelia did not succeed in preventing the war. The great machine
rolled on, flattening out all opposition. The Irish of Boston might
parade and spit, they might hold meetings that turned into riots, they
might make the city a scandal throughout the nation--but the great
machine would flatten them out in the end, their mayor, their police
force, and their cardinal. It would do the same with socialists and
anarchists, pacifists, sentimentalists, all other varieties of cranks.
Clear the way for Juggernaut!
And meantime Rupert Alvin, Henry Cabot Winters and their “crowd” were
busy taking possession of the electrical manufacturing plant of Haupt.
All this “crowd” were active Republicans, and this was a Democratic
administration; its promise to be non-partisan and patriotic was a kind
of chaff that would not catch old birds like Rupert and Henry. They got
hold of a prominent Democratic statesman, close to the administration,
and took him in with them, on the basis of a ten per cent “cut”; and
he had a nephew whom he installed in the office of the “Alien Property
Custodian,” who had charge of robbing the enemies of America at home.
So Rupert and Henry got possession of the great property for
one-twentieth of its market value, and turned out the German-American
executives, and put in some younger sons of the “blue-bloods,” and were
ready to manufacture war supplies and sell them to the government at
the highest possible prices. And the government was ready to buy with
patriotic fervor. If the business men of the country made big profits,
they could pay high wages, and enlarge the plants, and increase the
product, and there would be prosperity for every one except the Kaiser.
Billions of money and millions of men--such was the slogan. Congress
passed a conscription act, ordering all men between the ages of
twenty-one and thirty to register for the draft: soon after which there
was a ring at Cornelia’s doorbell, and when she answered, she saw her
friend, the maker of pistacchio bombs. She had sent him her address,
but not telling him of her change of name. Sooner or later he would
find out who she was, but meantime she would put both names on the door
of her apartment, and let her Italian friends go on using the name they
had learned.
So there stood Bartolomeo Vanzetti, hesitating a little, not sure
if she would want to see him, since she had given up being a
working-woman. “I come for say good by, Nonna.”
“Where are you going?”
He came in. “Anybody here for hear me?” Then he told her, “I go Mexico
for keep out from war. I go wit’ Nick--you know, young feller you see
in dramma one time, Nick Sacc’. Is good feller, we go Mexico togedder
for not get draft. Never will fight for capitalista, Nonna.”
“Of course not, Bart.”
“You no t’ink I am coward for run away, Nonna! You see me and Nick, we
fight when time come, but is not yet. You see worker get in war, he get
his eye open, he learn what is capitalismo. You see great t’ing come
when dissa war is done, Nonna. Come greata change, come rivoluzione.
I know, you cannot believe, joosta wait, you see what I tell. Come
bad time, come unemploy-èd, come big strike, lika war. Maybe it come
great richa countree, like Britain, maybe it come poor countree like
Russia--go what you say--cannot pay debt--bancarotta--”
“Bankrupt.”
“Maybe come Russia, you see tsar get kill-èd, grand duke run away.
Maybe come Italy, plenty chance for Italian anarchista make fight. I go
Mexico, wait soocha time.”
“How will you get along, Bart?”
“I get along, all time. Got two good arm, good back, worka picka
shov’, make living. Some odder Italian come, we not get lonely. I
write letter some time, maybe get book, learn write Eengleesh, get
educate, shoore! I never forget you, Nonna, besta friend, good lady,
help workingman--onderstand heem. It is best t’ing of all, Nonna, it is
better for onderstand as if you give million dollar. It is t’ing what
come from heart. I want you know”--and here the maker of pistacchio
bombs laid his hand gently on her shoulder--“I want you know, Nonna,
I have for you the sentiment. I not know to say Eengleesh--is Italian
word, sentimento--mean kinda feeling.”
“I understand, Bart.” There were tears in Cornelia’s eyes. “I shall
think of you often. You have taught me more than you realize--perhaps
more than I realize myself.”
A curious circumstance, that neither Vanzetti nor Sacco needed to
run away to Mexico. As Italian subjects, they were not liable to
the draft. But they believed they were--and so did Cornelia. They
became draft-dodgers in thought, which to New England, home of
Transcendentalism, was exactly the same thing as draft-dodgers in
reality.
They went; and a few days later Cornelia picked up her morning paper,
and there on the front page was a startling story: a revolution in
Russia, the tsar a prisoner, and a democratic, popular party in
control! An amazing, an incredible event; making it possible once
more to have hopes, to believe that changes were possible, that evil
systems, entrenched for generations, might at last be broken down.
Also, it raised Bartolomeo Vanzetti from the status of a dreamer to
that of a prophet. Cornelia had listened to his phrases, and smiled
gently at his peasant simplicity of mind; but here suddenly his ideas
became reality, made known upon the front pages of every newspaper in
the world!
V