Boston a novel
matter of price, or else of psychology. Some witnesses wanted money,
and then more money; but there were others who had a secret spring of
loyalty or prejudice, which, if you could touch it, might turn the
trick for a few days or forever. One would do anything to help a buddy
who had been in France, the next would do anything to oblige the Pope
of Rome; one wanted to electrocute all Italians because he had been
knifed by one in a street fight twenty years ago; another abhorred
Yankees because a school-teacher had beaten him as a child.
A singular education for a daughter of the blue-bloods, to help in
a job like this! An education which would surely not have won the
approval of her theocratic forefathers, nor yet of the plutocratic
trustees who supervised the curriculum of Radcliffe! But at least you
could say it was an education based upon fundamentals, and getting
to original sources. What was present-day New England actually like?
What did its people really do and think and feel? What was its working
governmental system, as distinguished from the one written on paper,
and taught in schools, and glorified in Fourth of July orations and
newspaper editorials? Surely these were matters worth knowing about,
even if you did not get a sheepskin diploma, and three Greek letters on
a key, and two Latin words at the end of your name!
Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin took two different trains and traveled
into the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and was bumped for ten or
fifteen miles in a buggy over country roads deep with the soft mud of
early spring, and in a ramshackle farmhouse, with the paint peeled off
and the fence palings molded and rotten, she met a girl who had been
working in the Rice and Hutchins shoe factory in South Braintree on
the afternoon when the bandits had opened fire on the paymaster and
the guard. This girl had a feeble chin and prematurely decayed teeth,
and a baby due to make its entrance into a world of torment in a very
few days. For some reason she got it into her weak head that Betty
was there in the interest of the district attorney’s office, and she
immediately became hysterical, bursting into tears and shrieking that
she was in no condition to come to a trial, and could not be forced
to testify; anyhow, she knew nothing, because when the shooting had
started, she had hidden under a bench.
Betty soothed her, assuring her there was no wish to force her to do
anything; so presently the girl calmed down and became communicative.
Too bad she could not go, because two of her former shopmates were
getting good pay to testify against those wops, and they sure ought to
be run out of the country, coming in and taking honest people’s jobs
away, and fighting and all that, and it sure was up to we Americans to
stand together against them. Later, by deft questioning, Betty drew
from this patriotic young person the information that her mother had
been an Irish peasant and her father a French peasant. A triumph of
“americanization,” and the speeding up processes of a machine age!
Betty’s ancestors, who had been tinners and carpenters and indentured
servants, had taken three hundred years to acquire their superiority
to the new immigrant workers; but here was a shoe factory girl who had
managed it in one-tenth of the time!
IX
The case of Mrs. De Falco was set for trial in a Boston police court,
and Betty and Joe turned their energies to this--digging into the
records of public officials, and running down clews of graft. Shudders
ran up and down the spines of persons high in political power, and
rage seethed in their hearts against blue-blood intruders who were not
content with the security which wealth and prominence conferred, but
turned traitor to their own privileges, and attacked the bases of law
and order. What did these high-hatted snobs want, anyhow? What was the
matter with them that they could not be content with public officials
who protected them, keeping them safe against bombers and blackmailers
and burglars and pickpockets and a thousand such predatory creatures;
making everything so comfortable, that they might be born, and grow up,
and live long, and go to pieces like the one-horse shay, of old age and
decrepitude, without ever knowing a moment of danger or making a real
effort in their lives?
The politicians and police might laugh at the blue-bloods, but they
respected and feared them, because of very real powers they still
held; not merely finance, utilities and the choicest real estate, but
solidarity, knowledge, culture--the latter a far-off, mysterious thing,
but awe-inspiring, like the power of a voodoo magician, who can cause
your right arm to wither and fall off; or anyhow, he says he can, and
how shall you be certain about it? The lower orders, having captured
the city, were afraid of their captives, and dared not make use of
their power; they stood, fierce-eyed barbarians, at the doors of the
temples, and watched the priests, clad in frock coats and high hats,
performing mysterious offices, impossible to comprehend or imitate. In
the end the barbarians capitulated, and sent their sons to study in the
temples, and become as much like the conquered caste as they could!
Politicians and police were used to many kinds of eccentricities on
the part of rich persons. Those who had enormous powers and no duties
necessarily had to work off steam. They dressed themselves in pink
coats, and rode to hounds and broke their necks; they raced motor cars
at high speeds, and learned to save themselves behind the steering-post
when they crashed; they flew in airplanes and landed on top of houses;
they built submarines and got stuck at the bottom of the sea; they
worked in chemical laboratories and asphyxiated themselves, or invented
explosives and blew themselves up; they went yachting to the North Pole
to hunt walruses, or to the equator to collect baby chimpanzees for a
psychological laboratory.
Hardly a millionaire estate without something weird and mysterious upon
it: the largest collection of old pewter in the world, or a single-tax
enclave, or an herbarium with Brazilian butterflies, or a laboratory
for the investigation of ghosts, or a mausoleum prepared in advance of
death, or a fireproof and bombproof shelter for safety against mobs!
And now and then a more sinister case--a clergyman with a fondness for
choir-boys, or an aged sybarite who must have fifteen-year-old virgins
shivering in his arms; a young lady of fashion who frequented the
“black and tan” cafés disguised as a man, or who taught the sex-lore of
the Orient to her female intimates!
The police were used to all this. They even got used to the idea that
now and then a rich eccentric would turn against his own and commit
class-suicide. They knew that in the home of a dead poet in Cambridge,
a shrine to which pilgrims traveled from all over America, the poet’s
grandson was upstairs entertaining syndicalists and communists, and
figuring the easiest way to overthrow the capitalist system. That was
treason, but it was treason to the rich, and the rich were the ones to
deal with it. What worried the politicians and police was when these
young fools took to hounding the politicians and police. That was the
treason that really mattered, that was a stab in the back, and the most
dangerous activity one could pursue in America.
And here was Betty Alvin quite blandly going to it, heedless of all
warnings. So came a string of developments, distressing to a blue-blood
family. Anonymous letters, more abusive and more widely scattered;
telephone calls, with sinister voices pronouncing dooms; visits to
Rupert from his banking associates, who talked about alarming rumors
they had heard; a call from the Republican boss with whom Rupert did
business, and who asked him if he didn’t have troubles enough! So again
Betty was summoned to her father’s home, and went through the worst
scene yet; she lost her serenity, and shed many tears, but she would
not go abroad, nor give up either her lover or her anarchists. Again
she was disinherited and disowned--whether in words, or actually upon
paper, she had no way to know.
A heavy strain upon Rupert, and a strange freak of fate! Or could it be
that there actually was some intelligence overseeing the universe, and
that Betty’s revolt was a punishment visited upon a great banker who
had left undone those things he ought to have done, and had done those
things he ought not to have done? Rupert could not escape this idea,
because he had been brought up in Trinity Church in the City of Boston,
and had heard it--not exactly preached, but skirted on the edge of,
every Sunday morning for fifty years. He would have liked to ask his
rector, or some other clergyman: could there be a God perverse enough
to object to Rupert’s having taken the felt-plants of Jerry Walker,
which Rupert could finance and Jerry couldn’t? Could any God have
wanted him to let the Boston Elevated stay on the rocks and be pounded
to pieces? Could any God be so silly as the fanatics and agitators
who denounced Rupert for having loaned money to legislators--when it
was perfectly obvious that it was not Rupert who had elected these
legislators, and that lending them money was the only way to get a
raise of fares and make the stock of the Elevated worth anything? No,
God was not going to punish the president of the Pilgrim National Bank
for having protected the people who had trusted their fortunes to him!
But then, how could God be letting Rupert’s lovely young daughter be
seduced by anarchist free love, and exposed to the furies of scandal,
at such a trying moment of her father’s life?
X
One by one the members of the family received “poison pen” letters.
Clara Thornwell Scatterbridge came to her mother, incredulous of the
scandal, because her maternal soul had never desired an impropriety.
Alice Thornwell Winters came, elegant and precious, regarding her
virtue as a hard-won possession, deserving of commensurate rewards.
No use expecting others to live up to one’s own standards--“though I
do think, Mother, Betty is beginning rather young. I must say I am
aghast at this new generation, they don’t even trouble to apologize for
their indiscretions. And I don’t know what to make of you, Mother--I
thought you believed in the old standards. I heard that these radicals
practiced free love, but somehow I didn’t think of it in relation to my
own mother.”
“Well, Alice,” said Cornelia, “you must consider my life. I was
faithful to the old standards, I lived my life without love, and where
did it get me?”
The carefully cultivated features of Alice Thornwell Winters wore
a puzzled look. Alice prided herself upon being sensitive to all
ethical and esthetic values--they were the same thing, she always
insisted--beauty was truth and beauty was goodness--but of course
beauty must be recognized by a discriminating intelligence--it was
something that could not be explained--it was a gift, very rare, but
Alice had it. “Really, Mother, how can you feel that you have had such
a hard life? Your children love you, and your grandchildren would, if
they saw more of you. Josiah was saying to me only yesterday it was
hard to understand why you found so much in Italian anarchists, and so
little in your own people.”
“Well, my dear, perhaps I know the Harvard values too well, and have
got bored with them. Tell Josiah to come to dinner, and tell me what
new things he has learned and accomplished. That is, unless you are
afraid to expose him to my free love ideas.”
That was a nasty stroke of a cat’s claws, and the sensitive Alice
winced. For everybody in the family had heard about the “wild oats” of
“Young Josiah,” only son of Alice and Henry--known as “Josie” to his