Boston a novel
there. But it made me sick; I couldn’t forget the faces of the men I
had robbed, and their pitiful wives and children. I just couldn’t look
at myself in the mirror. So I threw up the job, and went in to try to
help the workers; and what I saw--well, I have a simple formula, Nonna,
I don’t care what a man has done in the labor cause, he can never be so
guilty as those who take dividends of his sweat and blood.”
Said Cornelia: “Henry has talked to me a lot about the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, trying to drag me out of it. The next time he broaches it, I’ll
ask him about some of these matters.”
At which the lawyer smiled. “Well, get it straight. Don’t ask if he
pays bribes to witnesses; don’t ask if he ‘frames’ them. Everything is
done very carefully and decorously, in the office of a great Boston
lawyer. When a witness comes in he doesn’t see the chief, he sees a
young subordinate. The witness says, ‘I saw the man and he was wearing
a blue hat.’ The young lawyer interrupts him, ‘Oh, surely you are
mistaken, we have information that the man was wearing a red hat. Think
it over and see if you weren’t mistaken.’ He sends the witness away,
and next day the witness comes back, and meets another subordinate, and
says, ‘I saw this man and he was wearing a red hat.’ ‘That is right,’
says the young lawyer. ‘And he was walking,’ says the witness, ‘rather
slowly.’ ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken,’ says the lawyer, ‘we understand
he was running at top speed. Think it over and see if you don’t realize
that that is how it was.’ So the witness goes away, and next time he
comes he meets a third subordinate, and he says, ‘I saw this man, and
he had a red hat on, and he was running very, very fast’--and so on,
until he knows exactly what happened. So then he meets the chief,
and tells the chief what he saw, and the chief says, ‘That is a very
good witness, a dependable person.’ When he presents the witness to
the jury, he assures the jury this is a dependable person, and no one
can possibly say the great and famous lawyer ever did a dishonorable
action.”
IX
“Lee, I just _couldn’t_ do it!”--those were Cornelia’s parting words.
He answered, “Think about it,”--knowing well that she would think about
nothing else. Cowardice, weakness, false pride--she was willing to call
it any bad name, but there was something in her that stopped dead when
she tried to think of going upon the witness stand and swearing to a
made-up story. How could truth ever exist in the world, if somebody did
not stand by it?
Vanzetti came, as usual, to keep the midnight watch with her. “I
am poor wop,” said he. “But what you say if it was a Thornwell?”
Cornelia’s fancy played with that theme. She saw her daughter Alice,
in one of those ferocious quarrels which had marked the early stages
of her marital disharmony; with jealousy gnawing her heart, Alice
bought a revolver and shot Henry, and so was on trial, in danger of
the electric chair. But no, it was absurd, the electric chair was not
for Thornwells, there could be no such issue; they would adjudge Alice
insane, and put her in a sanitarium, take a year or two to “cure” her,
and then let her loose. But suppose, for the sake of argument, Alice
was in danger, and Cornelia had to take the witness stand. If she told
the truth her daughter would be executed, and if she lied her daughter
would go free. Which would she do?
Right was right, and wrong was wrong, people said, and it sounded
simple. But when you met a concrete case, you discovered that you could
not live by formulas. To refuse to do a lesser wrong, and thereby do a
greater--was that moral? On the other hand, if you said that the end
justified the means, where would you stop? Every man would be a law
to himself, and there would be chaos instead of order. There must be
rules, something men could count on. But the moment you said that, you
had a system, with high judges sitting on top, sentencing men to death
for the convenience of the Boston aristocracy. Cornelia remembered Mr.
Emerson, who had said that a good citizen must not obey the laws too
well.
The cruelty of the dilemma lay here, that what was supposed to be
justice was really class-greed. Bart and Nick were not going to be
tried because they had held up a payroll; they were going to be tried
because they were dangerous leaders of social revolt. That would be
the real motive power behind prosecutor, judge and jury; that would be
the thought in the minds of every one of them, at every stage of the
trial. The rest would be pretense, a cloak of propriety. And that was
the real lie--the real perjury: Fred Katzmann’s genial smile, veiling a
sneer; Web Thayer’s cold dignity, with a wink now and then to the jury.
When Cornelia remembered what she had seen in the Plymouth court-room,
it seemed to her that God would surely forgive any lies that served to
thwart such knavery!
So she swung back and forth, from one point of view to the other, never
satisfied with either. Lee Swenson said no more, but from that day his
presence was a question. Bart’s picture on the mantel-piece was a
challenge--what was friendship worth, it seemed to demand. You were not
asked to give your life for your friend, but only your ethical code;
your exclusiveness, your idea that you were something special, apart
from the harsh, rough world--in short that you were “Boston”!
From first to last Betty never spoke about the matter; and that was
surprising to Cornelia--it had the effect of putting her off by
herself, as if in a museum, or a mausoleum. Betty and Joe were bound
to have talked about the matter; everybody on the committee must have
thought of it. “Mrs. Thornwell could save our boys, if she would!” To
that Betty would make reply, “No use to put anything like that up to
Grannie, she belongs to the old generation.” Cornelia wondered, would
the new generation take the liberty of lying when it pleased? The issue
did not arise, because Betty and Joe had been in Europe, and could
hardly invent a special trip back, in order to be with Bart on the day
of the South Braintree crime!
X
If Cornelia could not face the thought of perjury, neither could she
face the other alternative. When she thought of the electric chair, and
Bart and Nick strapped into it--no, no, it was too horrible, it simply
_could_ not happen! So each skirmish in this war of conscience served
to start Cornelia into new activity. In spite of aching back she would
write more letters, in spite of tired limbs she would set forth to a
committee meeting, or to speak to a group of women, to assault the ears
of the heedless and drag them away from a bridge party to a murder
trial.
She had the idea now that she could help the cause by persuading
a group of ladies of good family to go to Dedham and watch the
proceedings. They would move to the town for a month, and invade the
court-room in a phalanx, and sit like the “tricoteuses” of the French
revolution, doing fancy work! They might frighten “Web” Thayer into a
semblance of impartiality, and possibly even restrain Fred Katzmann’s
crude wit at the expense of wops. The courts were supposed to be immune
to outside influences, but Cornelia knew her Boston too well for that.
In one way or another, several ladies of social standing had become
interested in the case. There was Mrs. Lois Rantoul, who was a Lowell,
than which nothing could be more impressive in a court-room. And Mrs.
Jessica Henderson, well-to-do--though she had hurt her social position
by getting arrested, along with Cornelia and Betty, the day President
Wilson had been welcomed to Boston. Mrs. Henderson and her daughter
Wilma had spent the night in that old Joy Street police station, and
had fed their blood to the vermin--a modern form of initiation into a
sisterhood of social justice.
And then Mrs. Evans, still earlier on the ground. Elizabeth Glendower
Evans was the widow of a young lawyer who had died before he had
ever had a case. She had become a charity worker, through youth and
middle age. Now she was gray-haired--and what a relief to Cornelia to
have some one else who was elderly and respectable, to help bear the
brunt of criticism! Mrs. Evans had got her social awakening during
the Lawrence strike of two years ago; she had gone, with others, to
see fair play, and instead had seen an unresisting striker felled to
earth by three husky policemen, and shoved into a patrol wagon like a
dead log. Next morning she saw the man, with head cut and plastered,
arraigned for assault, and she arose and told the court what she
had seen. Said His Honor: “Your testimony would be important if the
police were under accusation”--and thereupon he sentenced all the
strikers. Mrs. Evans spoke again, saying, “I go bail for all these
prisoners,”--which was very picturesque, and made a front-page story in
the papers.
“Old Boston” again, you see! She was a stockholder in the Lawrence
mills, which made it still more picturesque, and shocking to the mill
masters. To go to strike headquarters, and say to I.W.W. leaders, wops
and dagoes and guinneys and such riffraff, “I don’t know whether the
wages you ask are reasonable, but I do know that you are persecuted by
the authorities, and denied the legal rights to which you are entitled,
and to that extent I am with you”--to say that was to become, in the
columns of the press, leader of the revolution and commander-in-chief
of the picket line.
Now Mrs. Evans was interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and was
going to the trial at Dedham, to watch Web Thayer and Fred Katzmann,
and be horrified like everybody else. And maybe her testimony would
have been important, if Thayer and Katzmann had been on trial. But that
time had not come, and would not come for five or six years.
XI
Captain John Quincy Thornwell, Jr., Cornelia’s grandnephew, oldest son
of the president of the Fifth National Bank of Boston, had been an
officer in Battery A, the fashionable militia organization, in which
the young blue-bloods dashed about expensively. Tall, golden-haired,
haughty, he had looked so “fetching” in his fancy uniform that he had
fetched a wife who would some day own ten per cent of the electric
light industry of New England. “Captain John” was a director in his
father’s bank, a builder of airplanes, and of anything else which had
to do with killing--so sure of his own superiority he was.
Never would Cornelia forget the day when he and his unit had departed
for France. She had gone with the heartbroken young wife to see
them off; a dreadful experience--all the Boston blue-bloods there
in their expensive limousines, many of them stuck in a swampy field
alongside the Ipswich River, caught by a sudden deluge of rain, and
an ear-splitting thunderstorm; all social influence, all family
connections set at nought by the irreverent elements--it was quite like
being at war--blue-bloods actually struck by lightning and killed! And
these refined and delicately nurtured young Harvard men, dressed in
water-soaked khaki plastered with mud, standing at attention for the
“Star-Spangled Banner”; then struggling with exasperated horses, to get
very real and bloodthirsty cannon dragged out of mudholes!
“Captain John” had ridden off, like many others, forever; in the
desperate fighting in the Argonne Forest he had disappeared from human
ken. But in the process of digging up the remains of American soldiers
in France there was found a seal ring with one of the bodies, and this
ring was sent to Boston, and mentioned in the papers, and “Captain
John’s” mother went to inspect and identify it. So now the family had
a corpse in an air-tight coffin, over which to be publicly sentimental
for the glory of their country. A famous sculptor was designing a
monument, and meantime there were to be parades and muffled drums