Boston a novel
Easter. There were no lilies on the market, but there were plenty
of roses, and the occasion created almost as much excitement as a
vaudeville show that was likely to be raided by the police. It was as
if everybody were secretly wondering whether the Lord might give some
sign of his displeasure at this setting back of the church calendar for
three months. But apparently the Lord understood Boston, a city which
is governed by the old, and especially the old ladies.
They were all at this service, even though they had to motor a hundred
miles from the country. They wore their black dresses and bonnets, some
new and shiny, some old and rusty--but never forget that the rustiest
might be the richest. To wear a dowdy dress and a mangy fur tippet
might mean one who was able to scorn ostentation--just as illiteracy
in an English duke means that he is above the laws of grammar. One
of these old ladies might dispose of millions upon a whim, and her
lightest word was social law. They sat in family pews which had
belonged to them since the great brown-stone church was built; beside
them the younger generations--sweet-faced ladies, better dressed, and
oh, so neat and clean, gazing with rapt faces at a fairy-story setting
of white roses and candles and stained-glass-window saints, and a
procession of toddlers in white robes, singing in cherubs’ voices
to the rolling music of four organs in four different corners. How
beautiful it all was, and how serene--and how amazing to come to it
out of that world of lies and cruelty which Cornelia and Betty had just
left!
Look about you at these perfect Anglo-Saxon faces--not a foreign one
among them--so elegant and so satisfied! Note the costumes, polished to
the last pin, and chosen with impeccable taste--broadcloth and patent
leather and spats for the men, veils and laces, silk stockings and
delicate scents, flowers and unostentatious jewelry for the ladies!
Note the soft, cultivated voices, the gracious manners, rehearsed
for centuries! Note the ancient formulas, the ritual established
since eternity; the prayers and anthems rising to an Anglo-Saxon God,
untainted by His temporary sojourn in a Hebrew womb. Bland saints in
all the windows, with golden haloes and bright-colored robes, untainted
by contact with the fishing industry. A rector who was the last word
in Back Bay fashion, the Harvard manner grafted upon a mediæval
ecclesiastic.
While the sweet-faced ladies gazed up at him adoringly, he pronounced
a little eulogy upon the virtues of the dear departed, whose faith
and funds had nourished the church for two generations and a half. It
wasn’t customary to make speeches at church funerals; but since this
was an Easter Sunday service, a different rule might well apply. The
rector referred to the recent new fervors of the deceased, a matter
which required tact, because this rector had got his training in days
when the theological department of the university was separate from
the medical. He made an excursion into the field of modern thought,
revealing that he had heard of the science of astronomy and knew that
the earth was small; more amazing yet, he gave up the Virgin birth,
saying that we did not know just what had happened on that occasion,
and perhaps would never know. It sounded like a hint at some scandal in
the Holy Family, and would have made a scandal in Episcopal circles in
other cities: but not in Boston, where everything is far advanced, and
Trinity Church has to compete with King’s Chapel, which is Unitarian,
and even more intellectual, and if possible more fashionable.
X
The funeral had the effect of bringing Cornelia and Betty back into
the family, and they heard the latest gossip. Alice Winters was
still supporting her “little theater,” but very unhappy, because her
poet, supposed to be storming Parnassus, was getting drunk every
night, and neglecting his muse for a brazen, yellow-headed flapper.
Clara Scatterbridge was getting stout, and the best reducing experts
could not solve her problem; she concealed the dire truth from these
advisers, but not from the Argus eyes of the family--that she kept an
assortment of sweets in her boudoir, and nibbled chocolates and candied
fruits all day.
Great-uncle Abner was very melancholy now; he was the last of the old
generation, he said, and his time would come soon--which was certainly
a negative suggestion! He could no longer remember the chess moves he
had made last week, and his son Quincy was losing games on purpose, in
order to keep up the old man’s spirits. Abner had gone to stay with
the Scatterbridges, because he liked to be with the children; each of
the younger ones had a donkey to ride, and Abner had one too, and rode
at the head of the procession, all over the estate--a most laughable
sight. But everybody had to keep a sober face, because if you laughed
at anything whatever, the old man would think you were laughing at him,
and would take ineradicable offense.
Deborah came to the little apartment to have lunch with her mother and
daughter; and presently it transpired that the Argus eyes of the family
had observed Betty going about town with a young man by the name of
Joseph Jefferson Randall. Who was he? A grandson of the actor? Betty
said no, he was one of the Randalls of Pakenham Court House, Virginia,
and a nephew of Senator Randall, now ambassador to one of the South
American countries.
“Don’t you think, dear, you had better let your mother meet him?”
inquired Deborah, mildly.
“No, Mother, I don’t,” said the younger generation. “Joe is much less
radical than I, but he always says what he thinks, and so he would make
you very unhappy.”
“Don’t you say what you think, my daughter?”
“Practically never, Mother. I bite my tongue off several times every
hour.”
Deborah said no more, but Betty knew what she would do--and so did
Deborah. What are the secret, underground channels of the blue-bloods,
by which they find out whatever they wish to know? Do they have indexes
and card-files, like the Quaker attorney-general, so that they can
telegraph and ascertain who is who, and what are his family scandals?
Anyhow, the next time Deborah came to town, she knew that Joe’s father
was a “drinking man,” whose wife had divorced him. Fortunately Deborah
hadn’t found out that Joe himself was married; but she imagined the
worst, because divorces are a matter of heredity, like cancer, she said.
Deborah’s hope was to persuade Cornelia and Betty to accompany Betty’s
older sister to Europe for the rest of the summer--since young
Priscilla’s wedding had been put off by the death of her great-aunt,
whose namesake she was. Failing in that, Deborah’s next campaign was to
persuade the pair to come out and spend the summer at the Rupert Alvin
palace on the North Shore. Deborah was lonely, she said, pathetically;
her husband had so many cares just now, owing to the collapse of
business. Deborah even went so far as to promise that Cornelia and
Betty would be free to believe and say what they pleased, and she would
not argue with them--a most remarkable “come-down” for so haughty and
stern a lady.
Anything to get Betty away from the companionship of that dangerous
young Virginian! To divert her with yachting and tennis and
lawn-parties and picnics, in the company of sound and wholesome
graduates of the Harvard “Gold Coast,” their blood free from the
hereditary virus of divorce! But both Cornelia and Betty were obdurate;
they were going to stay cooped up in that hot little apartment all July
and August, to consult lawyers and organize committees and raise funds
for the defense of two anarchist bandits!
XI
The men of the Thornwell family indeed had their hands full that
summer. The expected post-war collapse had come--or rather it had been
brought about by those who realized that prices had got too high, and
that “deflation” was necessary. Naturally, these men wanted to deflate
everybody but themselves, and having the power, they did so. The heads
of the great banking groups, of whom Rupert Alvin was one of the most
careful and conscientious, had devised what they called the “Federal
Reserve System,” a chain of banks financed by the government and run
by the bankers; its function was to enable the great bankers to save
themselves in times of panic, by issuing vast sums of new money, and
lending it to the big industries, whose stocks and bonds are the
mainstay of banking credit. That meant that when a panic came, it was
the little fellows and the outsiders who were “deflated,” while the big
bankers and their friends sat on a rock and waited for the storm to
blow over.
Having this power in their hands, Rupert and his associates in the
course of that summer of 1920 had their Federal Reserve banks suddenly
raise the discount rates in the farming country; the result of which
was to force the dumping of the country’s farm produce on the market.
Prices collapsed to a point where most of the farmers were bankrupt,
and in the Northwest there were whole counties with every single farm
sold for taxes. Meantime the big industrialists of the East, having
bank-credit, were able to hold their products, and close down their
plants and wait.
But if Rupert and his Pilgrim National crowd thought they were going
to have a happy time riding that storm, they learned a sad lesson. The
saying that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, applies to the
kings of modern credit as well as to those of Shakespearean drama. It
was as if Rupert were the guardian of a huge honey-pot, and had the
job of apportioning its contents to all the flies in New England. They
swarmed about him, making a quite terrifying buzzing--and it was a fact
that many of them had stings, more or less dangerous, and threatened
to use them, and sometimes did. Impossible for a great banker to sleep
with all that clamor in his ears! Impossible for any member of his
family to sleep--because there were lady-flies as well as gentleman,
and they too could buzz and sting!
To drop metaphors, it was a fact that a small group of bankers had to
decide, during that panic, which industries of the community were to be
saved and which were to go to the wall. And needless to say, in a place
like Boston, it was not a question of vulgar material efficiency, it
was a question of social status. Who was who, and who was married to
whom, and what was the relative blueness of this blood and that? The
difference between the attitudes of Boston and New York in this matter
are set forth in a story which all financial men delight to tell, about
the New York banker who wrote to a Boston friend, saying that he had a
position for a capable young man. The Boston banker sent one, with a
letter explaining that he was a great-nephew of the late Josiah Quincy
Thornwell, a nephew of John Quincy Thornwell and of Rupert Alvin,
a cousin of the Cabots, and so on. Whereupon the vulgar New Yorker
dismissed the applicant and sent a telegram, reading: “I did not want a
young man for breeding purposes, I wanted one for banking.”
The emergency now was the most desperate the Boston bluebloods had
faced for a long time. It was no mere play question, like belonging to
a Sewing Circle, or getting your daughters into Camp Putnam and the
Friday dances, or your sons into the “Porcellian” and the “Alpha Delta
Phi.” No, it was a question of your very life-blood, that privilege
upon which your family existence was based. So you forgot your good
manners, and fought as your ancestors had fought, in the days before
they had any manners. You threatened and stormed, and raked up ancient,
long-buried family skeletons, and made life miserable for a great
banker who had for years been suffering from high blood pressure, and
had been warned by Morrow, eminent authority upon diseases of the rich.