Boston a novel
but he could not get the banking credit. Everybody else was getting it,
all along the line, but from him the bankers demanded practically the
taking over of his business.
It was the working out of a situation which Cornelia understood
clearly; but she did not have the right to talk about it, not even to
Betty. The latter had learned of Mr. Walker’s troubles from Lucile, and
was embarrassed, because among those who held the whip-hand were her
own father and her uncle, John Quincy Thornwell, president of the Fifth
National Bank. “Grannie, I don’t know much about banking, and I don’t
suppose you do, but I can’t help thinking it seems to go by favor. Mr.
Walker never wore the hat-band of a Harvard club, and his wife isn’t in
the Sewing Circle! Do you suppose that is why they say such bad things
about him?”
Cornelia answered, “I once heard Great-uncle Abner say that banking is
the private preserve of the blue-bloods, a feeding-crib for the sons
and nephews and cousins.”
“But, Grannie, that isn’t fair! There’s Father and Uncle John, who can
get all the money they need from their own banks--”
“No, dear, they can’t do that--it would be against the law.”
“It wouldn’t be against the law for them to lend to each other, would
it? Or to Uncle James, or other members of the family? Certainly you
never hear of the Thornwell mills having to scuffle for credit. And Mr.
Walker is a capable man, who has built up his business by hard work and
not by family favors. I would talk to Father about it, if I thought it
would help.”
“No, dear, you’d better not meddle. Your parents would say the Walkers
were trying to use you.”
“I suppose that’s why they hate to have me come here. I must only know
the people who come to our dinner-table.”
Cornelia laughed. “Dear child, it is embarrassing to know those who are
coming to your dinner-table on a platter!”
VIII
The fall of 1917. All about Cornelia a gigantic stir of war
preparation, but very little intellectual preparation to match it. She
did not have to go far in her studies to learn that the various peoples
of Europe had been fighting among themselves for centuries, and in this
fighting had frequently shifted partners. Whatever enemy they had at
the time, they hated that enemy just as heartily, and accused him of
atrocities, and did not hesitate to have priests and bishops invoke
the aid of God to overcome him. Always the real cause of the war was a
desire to take land from the other nation; plus the fear that the other
nation would reverse the procedure--as indeed it would.
Could the same situation exist in this greatest and most cruel of all
conflicts? To have that question answered, Cornelia had to get in the
Negro maid, and invite Quincy Thornwell to dinner. Do not confuse
Quincy with his older brother, John Quincy, for these two sons of
Great-uncle Abner were very different beings. John, the banker, had the
reputation of being the closest-mouthed person in Boston, which was
like being the tallest mountain in the Himalayas. But Quincy lived by
gossip, quite literally; for twenty years he had listened to the talk
of his family and friends, and turned their advance knowledge into a
comfortable fortune on the stock-market. His wizened features were
set in mockery, and if you were in the family he would tell you most
outrageous and delightful anecdotes.
Quincy went everywhere, and met everybody. He could tell you what
the British ambassador had said to Major Higginson last week. The
evening before last he had dined at Fenway Court, the palace of the
eccentric but brilliant Mrs. “Jack” Gardner, and had there met Sir
Leslie Buttock, the latest of the procession of British propagandists
who were coming to fascinate and thrill the American plutocracy. Sir
Leslie was making the transcontinental tour, and after he had praised
the champagne of a Minneapolis banker, or the cigars of a Seattle
ship-builder, each of these provincials was an insider and social
equal for the rest of his life, and the price was five--ten--twenty
billions--no one knew just how much--to be used in doubling the area of
the British empire.
A generation or more ago “Mrs. Jack” had set out to cut a swath through
Boston society with the millions of a big department store. A vivid
little creature, with the continental standard of manners and morals,
she had horrified the Back Bay beyond utterance; when she lost her
temper, she would break into cursing like any British aristocrat. But
she went abroad and hobnobbed with royalty, and was cabled back home;
she bought famous paintings, and built herself a palace in what was
then the suburbs of the Fenway, and thumbed her nose at the prudes.
Now she was an old lady, with decades of notoriety behind her, the
acknowledged leader of the smart set.
A British diplomat once gave the official definition of a lie--a
falsehood told to a person who has a right to the truth. All diplomats
and propagandists who came to Boston did “Mrs. Jack” the honor of
admitting her into the inner circle. At her dinner-parties you took
off your propaganda-coat, so to speak, and lounged in your military
shirt-sleeves. So Quincy Thornwell could tell his aunt exactly why the
war was lasting so long. The price of Italy’s repudiating her alliance
with Austria and Germany had been the Trentino and Trieste, which meant
the mastery of the Adriatic. Japan’s price was Shantung from China.
Russia was to have Constantinople. France was to have Alsace-Lorraine,
and if possible the Rhine. Britain was to have all the German colonies,
an empire in themselves. When you talked to Quincy about any of these
powers giving up their spoils because of the beautiful speeches of
Woodrow Wilson, he showed his good manners by pretending it was your
idea of being humorous.
And yet there were a hundred million or so of good Americans who
really believed that their President was somehow going to achieve
that miracle! Deborah, for example, and her serious elder daughter,
Priscilla, who was going in for Red Cross work of the higher,
administrative kind. When you talked to them about peace terms, you
discovered that they were trusting the country entirely to a man who
was a Democrat, and came from the wrong university! If you mentioned
the secret treaties, they would say that these matters were too
delicate for public discussion; the President of course had sources of
information that were not open to us--
“But why not?” cried Cornelia, and could get no convincing answer.
Either the allies were going to give up their predatory aims or they
were not. If they were, why not publish the fact? Such declaration
would save millions of lives and billions of treasure--for manifestly,
one reason for enemy resistance was fear of the consequences of defeat.
But if you tried to point this out, you were called pro-German, and
people turned their backs on you. They had adopted a slogan, “Win the
war!”--which meant that they found it easier to fight than to think.
And Cornelia, who had gone out into public life, now had the duty
of laboring with them, and suffering because of their blindness. No
more could she be content with the troubles of three daughters--their
diseases in childhood, their moral training, their love-affairs and
marriages, their fourteen pregnancies and eleven children. Now she had
a million sons in France, and must agonize with them all--even when
they were wayward sons and spurned their foster-mother’s care!
IX
Betty was going to Radcliffe. It was a compromise that had worked
itself out with her parents; provided she would put herself under
respectable instructors, and read the sound and wholesome books they
would indicate to her, she might go and live in the apartment with
her grandmother, and meet anarchists and socialists and atheists and
pacifists and German agents in her off hours. It had been a losing
fight for Deborah and Rupert, because they had other things they must
think about, while Betty had nothing but the determination to get with
Grannie. After all, what could be more respectable than a grandmother?
What more laudable desire for a young girl than to comfort an elderly
widow, alone and poverty-stricken? It was really a scandal to balk such
an impulse; it was advertising to the world that Cornelia was a shady
character!
So Betty installed a few of her books and her clothes in the little
room, and the pair of them were as happy as honeymooners--they gave
each other a hug every time they met. The Negro maid came every
day--because the Alvins insisted on Betty’s paying half the household
expenses. Betty’s runabout was in a garage nearby, and any time it
was raining or snowing, a man from the garage would bring it over,
and Betty would drive Grannie to anarchist or socialist or atheist
or pacifist or pro-German meetings. Or they would sit at home in the
evenings and study subversive books with red bindings, of which there
were now a hundred or so on Grannie’s shelves--Mr. Longfellow and Mr.
Emerson and Dr. Holmes having been relegated to a box under the bed.
Betty would give her college studies “a lick and a promise,” and then
take up Bertrand Russell on world imperialism. Most convenient to have
a respectable aristocrat, brother of an earl, to quote against Sir
Leslie Buttock and Sir Syphon Scotch!
It was well that this idyllic menage had got definitely under way
before the second, or Bolshevik, revolution in Russia. Possession is
nine points out of ten in family affairs, as in revolutions, and it
was no more possible to get Betty out of Grannie’s apartment on the
north side of Beacon Hill than it was to get Lenin and Trotsky out of
the Kremlin. But what agony of soul for the Alvin family, and for the
Winters and the Scatterbridges, and the whole Thornwell clan! The
face of the war changed in ten hideous days! The eastern front gone
all to pieces, and a million or two of Germans set free to overwhelm
the western front! Russia out of the war, and no one but America to
take her place! And red revolution on the rampage over a sixth of the
surface of the globe! Insolent, low-down workingmen daring to take
possession of a great government, and calling on their fellows in other
lands to follow suit!
Every property interest throughout the civilized world rallied against
that peril, and the greatest machine of propaganda in history went
into action. To meet the immediate emergency, Lenin and Trotsky must
be German agents; so a mass of documents were forged, endorsed by the
state department, and spread upon the front pages of the newspapers.
Then came the atrocities--for which little Belgium had been a dress
rehearsal. Bureaus for the construction of horrors were set up in
every border city from Helsingfors to Vladivostok, and the cruelty
and bloodshed inevitable to a great revolution were magnified a
thousand fold. It was St. Bartholomew’s Eve in Russia every time an
American newspaper went to press. The Soviet government collapsed
once a week, and Lenin jailed Trotsky, or was murdered by Trotsky, in
alternating afternoon editions. The “free love” element became the
basis of the most obscene hoax of the ages, and fifty million women
were “nationalized” in one colossal orgy. Every decent woman in America
believed it--and so it was possible for President Wilson to begin his
private war upon the Russian people, in defiance of the Constitution
which he had spent his life in expounding.
From that time on the advocacy of reasonable peace-terms ceased to be
a society function, a diversion of after-luncheon orators, and became
a criminal conspiracy, conducted by little groups in upstairs rooms
with the shades drawn and admission by pass-word. It became, in short,
“Bolshevik plotting.” Did not the Bolsheviks prove it by proceeding