Boston a novel
effort to use capitalist courts, which they regarded with abhorrence!
Was not Mrs. De Falco herself a human being, a victim of the class
system? What business had an anarchist giving information against her,
and trying to send her to jail? The Italians did not hesitate to charge
that Lee Swenson wanted to get the money, instead of the De Falco
woman; he wanted a big legal case for himself!
IV
A terrible world to live in! A world full of tangles impossible to
unravel, of dangers impossible to foresee! A world in which wild
beasts roamed in the darkness, slaying and devouring--no change from
the old days of the jungle!
About twenty-four hours after the De Falco story was spread on the
front page of all the Boston newspapers--“Reds Charge Bribery Plot
to State,” and so on--Cornelia’s telephone rang, and she heard the
voice of her oldest daughter. “Mother, is that you?” The voice was
trembling, so that Cornelia’s heart started at the first sound. “What
has happened?”
“Oh, Mother, the most dreadful thing! I can’t tell you over the phone!
I will come at once. Be at home!” There was a sob in Deborah’s voice,
something that was rarely heard. But no chance to ask more--she hung up
the receiver.
Half an hour later she came in, breathless from hurrying up the stairs.
Her mother had never seen such distress on her face. Mutely she held
out a letter, which Cornelia took. It had a canceled special delivery
stamp, on an ordinary envelope, such as you buy at the post office,
addressed on a typewriter to Mrs. Rupert Alvin at the Commonwealth
Avenue address. Cornelia opened it, and found a typewritten sheet of
paper, which seemed to burn her eyeballs as she read:
“Call off your daughter and your mother from the aiding and
abetting of anarchists, or you and your family will live to regret
it. Why do you let your daughter travel about town day and night
with a young anarchist with a criminal record? Look up his wife
he deserted. Do you want the world to know that your daughter
sleeps with him under your mother’s protection? We want no Russian
free love in Boston. We will expose them in the papers if they do
not get out of town, and your other daughter’s wedding will be
postponed again.
“AMERICAN PATRIOT.”
So there was a bagful of cats turned loose, to rampage over the place,
and maintain a dreadful clamor. No possibility of counting them--any
more than the stream of wild questions flung at Cornelia’s gray head.
One horror, of course, led the rest: was it true that Betty was living
in adulterous relations with a married man, and Cornelia abetting the
crime? It was a question difficult to answer without sounding cynical
to a pillar of Trinity Church in the City of Boston. Cornelia said,
as calmly as she could, that Betty and Joe loved each other truly,
and were going to marry as soon as the law permitted, after Joe’s wife
had got her Reno divorce. Oh, horrible! horrible! Deborah broke down,
and hid her face in her hands, because she could not contemplate such
depravity in her mother and her daughter. Or would it be more accurate
to say, because she thought that she ought not contemplate it? Human
motives are complicated, and in the effort to have our own way we
sometimes contrive elaborate emotional dramas.
Said Cornelia: “They will be a perfectly respectable married couple as
soon as it is over. There are some in our most fashionable society who
have done the same thing.”
“At least they had the decency to wait till they were divorced!”
“As to that, Deborah, you should ask your cousin Quincy. He dines
frequently at Mrs. Jack Gardner’s, where I understand they discuss such
cases in detail.”
Then the other counts of the indictment. “No Deborah, Joe has no
‘criminal record,’ I assure you.”
“But how do you know it?”
“I know it because I know Joe. He is a fine young idealist, whom I
love, and was glad to accept in his present rôle.”
“An anarchist free-lover!”
“In the first place, he isn’t an anarchist, but a socialist, which is
the opposite pole of thought. He is much more conservative than Betty,
and their honeymoon quarrels are over his efforts to tone her down. You
should be grateful to him.”
“But what does this letter mean--his ‘criminal record’?”
“It is nothing but a coward’s attempt to frighten and distress us.
Joe was connected with the American legation in Russia, and he saw
President Wilson begin his private war on the Russian people, which was
nothing but wholesale murder for the benefit of the British Tories. Joe
said what he thought about it, and he may have actually done something
to try to stop it. If he has a ‘criminal record,’ that is it, I am
sure.”
“And his wife--she is really going to get a divorce?”
“She is planning to remarry.”
Deborah made a face of disgust. Ugh, such a world! it seemed to say. It
did not improve the long lean features, so much like those of Josiah,
which Cornelia had come to know too well. She waited until the ugly
moment was past, and then said, very gently: “There are two great
improprieties, Deborah--one is love without marriage, and the other is
marriage without love. The latter was my portion, and I assure you, if
Betty had to choose one or the other, I am glad it was the other. I
did not will this situation, and if they had asked my advice, I would
have told them to wait. But they settled it for themselves, and it was
a condition and not a theory that confronted me. Betty offered to tell
you, but I could see no good in distressing you.”
V
They argued the ethics of free love versus purchased love for a while;
until Deborah’s practical mind got to work at its customary task of
telling other people what to do. “We must not have a scandal--now that
Priscilla’s wedding invitations have been sent out! We must think up
some reason for Betty to go to Europe at once, and stay until the man
can marry her.”
“I fear you will not be able to arrange that, Deborah. Betty is wrapped
up in this case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the trial is coming in the
spring. She and Joe are working over it day and night, and surely, when
a young couple are busy and happy, it is not the part of wisdom to
break them up.”
“But this, Mother! This!” Deborah held the letter in her trembling
hand. “How can we face this horrible thing?”
“It is an effort to break our nerve, and it must not succeed.”
“But what can we do--if they expose us?”
“How _can_ they expose us? Betty lives here, and Joe visits here
occasionally, but never unless I am in the apartment. Are they going to
break into my home to look for evidence against my granddaughter?”
“Betty must come back and stay with her parents at once!”
“Betty is a grown woman, responsible for her own life. I think you will
have to let her make her own decisions, and face her own enemies.”
They argued back and forth, and in the process Cornelia’s mind became
more clear. “I am quite certain nothing will happen, Deborah, except
the writing of more letters. The police have spies in the office of
our committee, and they pick up bits of gossip, but they don’t really
know anything. Surely we can stand upon our family dignity, and ignore
anonymous slanderers! You and I and Joe and Betty are the only ones who
know the facts, and we are not going to tell any one else--except, of
course, Rupert.”
Poor Rupert! He was almost worried to death, his wife broke out. That
dreadful man Jerry Walker was bringing a suit and charging all sorts
of outrageous things; and some of Rupert’s associates were quarreling
with him for having got them into the mess. They had entirely forgotten
how glad they were to get their share of the profits. And then this
business about the Boston Elevated--had Cornelia been told about that?
“Not much, except what has been in the papers.”
“Well, they are going to make all the members of the legislature
testify as to their stock investments, and they are looking up the
loans they got from some of the banks. They will call it bribery, of
course, but it was nothing in the world except that Rupert was trying
to save the Elevated from bankruptcy, and the stockholders from ruin,
and those vicious politicians were holding him up, refusing to grant
any increase in fares. They wouldn’t vote until they got money to buy
Elevated stocks. You can’t imagine what the politicians are!”
“My child, I know exactly what they are--they are trying to send two of
my friends to the electric chair, unless we will raise forty thousand
dollars to buy them off. Betty and Joe and I have been having to make
that decision in the last few days, and I think the reason you got this
letter is because we refused to pay.”
Deborah sat staring before her, her tall forehead wrinkled in thought.
Her surrender was not indicated by throwing up her hands, but merely by
beginning to talk sensibly. “Mother, I ought to meet that young man.”
“Of course you ought--that is, provided you will behave yourself, and
understand that he is your son-in-law.”
“Is he--does he look like a gentleman?”
“He comes from an Old Virginia family, and they think they are quite as
good as we are--in fact, I understand they sometimes make fun of us,
saying that we talk through our noses.”
“I suppose I’ll have to tell Rupert,” said Deborah. “He might get one
of these letters, too. I’ll tell him to-night, and we’ll make some
arrangement--I don’t know just what. I suppose this--what is his name,
Randall--ought to be invited to dinner.”
“Thank you, my dear, that is certainly sensible.”
“Well, if they are going to be married, we have to try to make it seem
decent. I don’t want people to say that Betty married a man she picked
up off the street.”
“No, it is not at all like that. You can tell people they met at the
first session of the Third International in Moscow.”
VI
Priscilla Quincy Adams Thornwell had been a sufficient time in her
grave for it to be proper for her grand-niece, Priscilla Thornwell
Alvin, to be united to the young mountain of copper. So there was
another of those stately ceremonials which mark the coming and going
of the generations, and advertise their social importance. Out of this
union there would proceed many copper hills and branch banks, bearing
the sacred names of Thornwell and Quincy and Adams and Shaw and Cabot,
shuffled into new combinations. Engraved invitations were sent to all
members of the clans, and the hot-houses of the florists were emptied,
and Trinity Church became a mid-winter bower, and the four organs
played the Lohengrin march coming and the Mendelssohn march going, and
there was a procession of two little “flower-girls,” and six young
ladies with faces rigid and intense with the effort of keeping in
step under the eyes of so many relatives. They wore drooping hats and
carried large bouquets of roses, as white as the driven snow before it
has been driven through the bituminous smoke of Boston. This symbolized
the undoubted purity of the bride, and nowhere in the consecrated
spaces of the brown-stone edifice was there a single red rose of
adultery.
Except in the hearts of the supposed-to-be-happy parents of the bride,
haunted by the cruel secret of their younger daughter’s shame. Rupert
and Deborah were in the grip of a terror such as had never before
attended a Thornwell wedding-service. Their imaginations played
with a string of horrors, which might be perpetrated by a writer of
devilish anonymous letters. After all, what limit could you set to
the perversity of such a creature? A bomb in the church--say in the
vestibule, where it would not kill any one, but would make a scandal
heard round the world! Or perhaps what was called a “stink-bomb,”
that would drive everybody from the edifice! Or foul whispers by an