Boston a novel
the judge’s instructions, and brought in a verdict of guilty on both
counts. The judge, in an effort to correct this error, took the liberty
of ignoring one-half the jury’s verdict and sentencing the prisoner to
the maximum penalty of fifteen years in state’s prison for attempting
to rob.
The scene in the court-room when the verdict was brought in was a
heart-rending one. For ten days the friends of Vanzetti had sat in
a tension of anxiety, and now their grief was not to be restrained.
Cornelia bowed her head in her arms and wept, while Betty sat,
white-faced and quivering, clutching Joe’s hand. The Italian women
became hysterical; they screamed and wailed, and the contagion spread
from one to another--it was a scene of utter desperation, never
anything to equal it. Vanzetti had to stand up and cry to them,
“Coraggio! Coraggio!” His guards permitted that much before they
shackled his wrists to their own, and led him swiftly out by a side
door, and put him into a car and whisked him away to the jail.
Next day when Cornelia and Betty went to see him, for the first time
they met an utterly broken man. Again and again he said the words
with which he had first greeted them, “My enemy have got me!” He told
them what the rest would be--he, the clear-sighted one, the thinker,
the analyst of class forces. “I am a convicted. Nick is the friend
of a convicted, he is a bandit already, he is a dead man. The jury
will say, ‘One of them is bad, why should other be better?’” And when
Cornelia pledged her word that she would move heaven and earth to have
this verdict set aside, he told her, “You will try, Nonna, but never
will be succeeded. It is not for bandit I am convicted, it is for
anarchista. If men do sooch trick like you see in court, what is use
for hoping?”
Then it was that he swore, because of that mustache trick which had
been played by the hotel proprietor. At that time he did not know
about the buckshot. He did not know about the Pinkerton reports, which
had been kept hidden by the prosecution. He did not know about the
witnesses who had been rejected by the police because they did not
describe the bandits according to the “theory.” But he did know about
the great cordage company, and the losses he had caused it in the
strike; so, when Cornelia talked about decent people who would not
stand for that “mustache trick,” he laughed a bitter laugh. “You will
see, Nonna. They will say, it is for jury to decide. They will say,
musta trust jury, musta stand by court.”
VIII
They put Vanzetti in an automobile, and with another car full of armed
men in front and a third one bringing up the rear, they drove him to
Boston and shut him behind the stone walls of the dingy old Charlestown
prison--built in 1805, when the population of Massachusetts was
one-tenth what it is now. It stands directly across the river from the
city, so placed that on certain mornings when the sun rises clear, the
shadow of Bunker Hill monument strikes its walls. An odd turn of fate,
that this Italian seeker of liberty should have been convicted within
sight of Plymouth Rock, and killed on ground over which Paul Revere had
ridden.
They weighed him and measured him and scientifically scrutinized him,
and dressed him in faded khaki, and put him in a cell containing an
iron cot, and a free space eight feet long and one foot, ten inches
wide, with light falling from a narrow slit in the ceiling. In that
cell he would stay, fifteen and a half hours out of twenty-four, for
the next seven years--except for the holidays of another indictment,
trial and sentence. Of the remaining hours a day he would spend seven
working in a tailor-shop, and forty minutes in a yard, overcrowded,
smoky and dusty.
Soon after the beginning of this régime the Catholic chaplain of the
prison came to see him. It is a Catholic maxim--therefore a prison
maxim--that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”; and even an alleged
atheist is a human being, and may respond to kindness and sympathy. The
good Father Murphy talked to him, not about religion, but about general
matters; and then, having got on friendly terms, remarked, quite
casually, “Tell me, Vanzetti, who drove the car at South Braintree?”
Thereupon the alleged atheist rose up with dignity, and asked for
the privilege of being alone in his cell, and the consolations of
organized, institutionalized and subsidized religion were missing from
the remainder of his life.
Instead he sought the consolations of literature. He wrote a long
letter, pouring out his soul--and incidentally revealing that he was
coming to feel at home in a new language; he no longer had to look up
every word.
“I was just thinking what I would to do for past the long days
jail: I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A
gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why
don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you when you
will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.
“Thanks to you from the bottom of my heart for your confidence
in my innocence; I am so. I did not spittel a drop of blood, or
steal a cent in all my life. A little knowledge of the past;
a sorrowful experience of the life itself had gave to me some
ideas very different from those of many other uman beings. But I
wish to convince my fellow-men that only with virtue and honesty
is possible for us to find a little happiness in the world. I
preached: I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social
wealth would belong to every umane creatures, so well as it was
the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for a
insurrection.
“The insurrection, the great movements of the soul do not need
dollars. It need love, light, spirit of sacrifice, ideas,
conscience, instincts. It need more conscience, more hope and more
goodness. And all this blassing things can be seeded, awoked,
growed up in the heart of man in many ways, but not by robbery and
murder for robbery.
“I like you to know that I think to Italy, so speaking. From the
universal family, turning to this humble son, I will say that,
as far as my needs, wish and aspirations call, I do not need to
become a bandit. I like the teaching of Tolstoi, Saint Francesco
and Dante. I like the example of Cincinnati and Garibaldi. The
epicurean joi do not like to me. A little roof, a field, a few
books and food is all what I need. I do not care for money, for
leisure, for mondane ambition. And honest, even in this world of
lambs and wolves I can have those things. But my father has many
field, houses, garden. He deal in wine and fruits and granaries. He
wrote to me many times to come back home, and be a business man.
Well, this supposed murderer had answered to him that my conscience
do not permit to me to be a business man and I will gain my bread
by work his field.
“And more: The clearness of mind, the peace of the conscience,
the determination and force of will, the intelligence, all, all
what make the man feeling to be a part of the life, force and
intelligence of the universe, will be brake by a crime. I know
that, I see that, I tell that to everybody. Do not violate the law
of nature, if you do not want to be a miserable. I remember: it was
a night without moon, but starry. I sit alone in the darkness, I
was sorry, very sorry. With the face in my hands I began to look at
the stars. I feel that my soul want goes away from my body, and I
have had to make an effort to keep it in my chest. So, I am the son
of Nature, and I am so rich that I do not need any money. And for
this they say I am a murderer and will condemn me to death. Death?
It is nothing. Abbominium is cruel thing.
“Now you advise me to study. Yes, it would be a good thing.
But I do not know enough this language to be able to make any
study through it. I will like to read Longfellow’s, Paine’s,
Franklin’s and Jefferson’s works, but I cannot. I would like to
study mathematics, physics, history and science, but I have not
a sufficient elementary school to begin such studies, especially
the two first and I cannot study without work, hard physical work,
sunshine and winds; free, blassing wind. There is no flame without
the atmospheric gasses; and no light of genius in any soul without
they communion with Mother Nature.
“I hope to see you very soon; I will tell you more in the matter.
I will write something, a meditation perhaps and name it: Waiting
for the Hanger. I have lost the confidence in the justice of man.
I mean in what is called so; not of course, of that sentiment which
lay in the heart of man, and that no infernal force will be strong
enough to soffocate it. Your assistance and the assistance of so
many good men and women, had made my cross much more light. I will
not forget it.
“I beg your pardon for such a long letter, but I feel so
reminiscent to you that hundred pages would not be sufficient to
extern my sentiments and feelings. I am sure you will excuse me.
Salve.
“Give to all my best regards and wishes, Your
“BARTHOLOMEW VANZETTI.”
IX
Cornelia and Betty and Joe were back in Boston, the first two having
been hurriedly summoned for the funeral of Great-aunt Priscilla. It
is highly inconvenient, belonging to one of these big families; there
are so many funerals, weddings and christenings, which it would be
unthinkable not to attend.
An extraordinary thing had happened to this aged female Brahmin in the
closing months of her life; the bacillus of eccentricity, which lurks
in all Boston blue blood, had suddenly flared into activity. Priscilla
Quincy Adams Thornwell, spinster, aged eighty-seven, stiff as a ramrod
and model of every known or conceivable kind of propriety, had suddenly
fallen under the spell of an Episcopal faith-healer, who was traveling
about the country insisting that every bishop, even every country
parson, could demonstrate the living presence of God, work miracles,
and stop the slow dribble of Episcopalians into Christian Science.
Great-aunt Priscilla almost succeeded in arising and taking up her
bed and walking, in spite of the complete anchylosis of her spine;
she insisted that she would have done it, had it not been that her
relatives persisted in reminding her of her great age--a “negative
suggestion.” She took up the habit of being what she called “instant in
prayer,” which meant that she was liable to start talking to God at any
moment. It was embarrassing to her relatives and friends, because of
course no one likes to interrupt a talk with God, and feels something
of an interloper even to sit and listen to it. Great-aunt Priscilla
summoned her brother, Abner, over whom she had great authority,
because he was only eighty-five years old, and tried to persuade him
to appeal for a cure of his deafness. But Abner argued that if God had
meant him not to be deaf, God wouldn’t have made him deaf; and this was
a relief to the family, because it frightened them to imagine Abner
becoming “instant in prayer,” with that deaf man’s voice which filled
the biggest house in Boston.
And now it was discovered that Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell,
spinster, had left a letter asserting that the Episcopal service
for the burial of the dead was a denial of the faith of Jesus, and
specifying that she was to be buried from Trinity Church with the
services for Easter Morning! It was a problem for authorities in
ecclesiastical etiquette; but to defy a Thornwell was unthinkable,
so the rector and his assistants finally decided that One to whom
a thousand years were as a day might conceivably accept any day as