Boston a novel
other people and about life, and that would be it. Last week it was
Quincy sitting there, and he told me all the latest from Mrs. Jack’s
sickroom; they came to ask for a contribution to the Charitable Eye
and Ear Infirmary of Boston, and she said, ‘I didn’t know there was a
charitable eye or ear in Boston.’ That is our wit, Henry, the tone of
our world. We are raising our young people on it--and then wonder why
they are going to the devil!”
“You are setting me a large problem now, Mother.”
“No problem at all! We are living off the labor of these wops whom
we despise, and hold in order with clubs and bayonets. Think of it,
Henry--that man whose head I saw split open was getting nine dollars a
week to keep a family on, and his crime was that he was asking twelve.
We women were getting six dollars a week, and our crime was that we
were asking eight--and Vanzetti’s crime was helping us! There was the
greatest and richest cordage concern in the country--their net profits
that year were nearly three million dollars! Think of the families we
know who are living off those profits, doing nothing else, unless they
choose! Think of the imbecilities--one collecting butterflies and
one collecting pottery, several getting drunk, one doing charity--God
save his soul, he is running a mission for newsboys just down the
street here, and keeps it in a place over a pool-room, a hangout for
pickpockets and pimps, where every now and then they hold a prizefight!
But if you talk to cordage stockholders about going among their
working-people and living with them, becoming real leaders and guides
and friends, spending the surplus product upon a system of training
in self-government, so that industry may become democratic without
revolution and violence--if you should talk about that, they would say
you had very bad taste, and stop inviting you to their dinner-parties!”
X
The little white-haired old lady had got up from her chair during this
stump-speech. She was walking about, and had made several gestures--a
consequence of having been so much among the wops. The poor soul was
bound to be humiliated, having the truth pointed out to her; she would
have to excuse herself, and blame somebody else--it was human nature.
Henry Cabot Winters understood psychology, and sat patiently, waiting
for the storm to blow over.
Cornelia began telling the story of Sacco, as Sacco had told it to
her. He had been in the Milford foundry strike, and had been knocked
down on the picket-line, and then thrown into jail. The police had
followed their usual tactics of knocking down wholesale, for the
purpose of breaking the courage of the workers; it was all that anybody
in New England knew or thought about industry, it was the “American
plan”--so said the widow of the late Governor Thornwell, pouring out
her bitterness. “And remember, Henry, while you are bringing your
indictment against these wops, they learned their anarchism right here
in New England. Nick was a perfectly ignorant working-boy when he came,
and Bart was a religious dreamer, slightly touched with utopianism. If
they became militants and terrorists, we taught it to them!”
“They learned it in a foreign language, Mother; and certainly they
followed foreign models.”
“That is true enough. But men don’t act upon what they read in books,
they act upon the realities of their daily lives. The principal fact
in Bart’s life for the past few years has been the war. The capitalist
system was trying to put him into a uniform and send him out to kill
his fellow-workers; and he was resisting with all his power. To abolish
the slaughter of workingmen for the profit of masters--that has been
his leading thought, ever since I have been his friend.”
“Does he expect to stop war by blowing people up with bombs?”
“Militant anarchists do; they think that if enough workers would
resist, forcibly, to the death--if enough of them were willing to be
martyrs--the capitalist class would lose its pleasure in exploitation.
Whether that is right or wrong is another question--but that is what
the militant anarchist thinks. And watching the thing as I have done,
it seems that you men who are running our country want to prove him
right, because you shut off every avenue of redress and hope. You
corrupt politics, so that it is a piece of rusty junk instead of a
running machine. You make the law into a net of red tape, in which
the worker is tied hand and foot. You make the newspapers a mess of
falsehood and sensation. Your colleges are busy turning young men into
quick climbers. Your churches have no time for social justice--they are
turning prayer-wheels and saying magic words--”
“In short, Mother, there is nothing left but dynamite!” There was a
touch of acid in the great lawyer’s tone; it was getting to be a very
long stump-speech.
“There are two things for the rebel, Henry; one is to die suffering,
and the other is to die fighting. I try to persuade them that the
former is more effective in the long run, but I can’t always get them
to see it. Sometimes I imagine there is a pleading look in Bart’s eyes,
as if he would like to tell me that he wishes he had taken my advice.”
“Yes, I know,” said Henry, “we are familiar with the fact that men are
militants until they get caught, and pacifists afterwards. It is the
purpose of jails to effect that transformation.”
XI
This duel of moral forces continued until the arrival of Betty and
Joe, who had been to a theater, and then walked home. Betty had been
told that her uncle was coming, and she had had no trouble in guessing
what for. When she and Joe entered the living-room, and saw the little
white-haired old lady in the Morris chair, looking so anxious and
strained, and the great lawyer completely surrounded by an array of
documents, it seemed to Betty that the combat was one-sided. “Well,
Grannie dear, has he succeeded in convincing you that our boys are
bandits? Or is it dynamiters they are, Uncle Henry?”
“Henry,” said Cornelia, “these young persons are so clever I cannot
keep anything to myself.”
Said Betty, “The efforts of my family to keep me in the nursery at the
age of twenty-three are mysteriously unsuccessful! I suppose Father and
Uncle Henry have been interviewing the police, and getting all the dirt
on Bart and Nick. Let me tell you some, Uncle Henry--I understand that
Captain Proctor interviewed all the witnesses, and told Mike Stewart he
had got the wrong men, and wouldn’t have any more to do with the case.
Is that true?”
“I haven’t talked with Proctor,” said the lawyer.
“Well, you could help us so much, if you only would, Uncle Henry.
I’m told that Chief Gallivan of South Braintree says the whole thing
was a frame-up. Make him talk! Make Katzmann give us the address of
Roy Gould, the man who got a bullet through his overcoat. And those
witnesses that Mike Stewart had at the Brockton police station--surely
our good uncle who loves us ought to get their names!”
The “good uncle” continued to wear the genial smile which was part
of his stock in trade as man of the world. He was interested in the
phenomenon known as the “new generation.” He looked at this vision in
pale blue chiffon, with a little basket of blue straw turned upside
down on her hair cut like a boy’s; her cheeks shining from a long walk,
apparently without the artificial aids which were coming to be the
fashion, even among the blue-bloods. An amazing thing that a girl with
such charms, who might have gone anywhere, should be devoting herself
exclusively to Bolsheviks!
Said Betty, as fast as her thoughts: “Grannie, you look tired; you have
been worrying! Is it because the police say the money went to Italy, to
make an anarchist revolution? Or have they found out how Bart and Nick
were hiding dynamite the night they were arrested?”
“You seem to be well informed, my dear niece,” said the lawyer.
“Some day, Uncle Henry, after our boys are on the street--or in
their graves, whichever it is--I’ll tell you what I know about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, and you’ll think you are listening to the memoirs
of Mata Hari, the international spy. Your dear niece has become the
super-sleuth of the social revolution--if the movie people knew what I
have, Hollywood would be a deserted village, and studios would rise on
the shores of the Back Bay. It is my job, when the police send a new
spy, to get him alone and remind him that he is an Italian, and get him
to tell me what he has told the police. Do you know how they found the
maps of Sacco’s buried treasure in Lee Swenson’s trash-basket, and had
three men digging in Mr. Kelly’s garden one whole night?”
Henry Cabot Winters still wore his smile; but it was not in his voice
as he said, “My niece does not seem to be much horrified at the idea of
blowing people up with bombs.”
“Uncle Henry, to be blown up with a bomb seems to me a nice clean
experience, compared with things I saw in Europe, caused by the greed
of elderly statesmen whose shirt-fronts were entirely covered with
ribbons and decorations.”
“So then, because statesmen blundered--”
“Blundering had no part in it, Uncle Henry--they knew exactly what they
wanted, and they took it. It is the organized greed called patriotism
that I’m talking about. And while I’m sick of all kinds of killing,
it is the men who kill for greed that I am out to get. Those who kill
for a cause, no matter how mistaken--those who risk their lives for
the good of the workers--seem to me to shine with a bright light in
comparison.”
“That halo extends to bandits, my dear niece?”
“I will answer you, Uncle Henry, that small bandits break the law and
are punished, while big bandits make the law and go free.”
Cornelia thought that conversation had gone far enough. She knew
exactly what Betty had in her mind--the Jerry Walker case. In a minute
more, the child would be referring to it! “Betty dear, if you love me--”
“Love you, Grannie? I love you enough to let you think your own
thoughts and live your own life, which is more than anybody else will
do for you. I love you so much that I will suppress my combative
impulses, and show respect to my elders. Uncle Henry, you want to know
if I think Sacco and Vanzetti ever did a job of banditry. If I knew,
I would tell you; but of course, nobody really knows, except the men
who did the job. The spies who bring tales to the police are earning
their livings by pretending to know what they only guess, and the
evidence they bring is not fit to hang a dog on. I can only estimate
the chances. I have tried with all my might to picture Bart and Nick
committing such a crime, and I cannot do it--the idea is preposterous
and unthinkable. And this much I really do know--this I would die
for--they never were proved guilty, and their trials were a shameful
and wicked farce. Now, is that a respectful answer, Grannie?”
“Yes, dear--”
“All right; and if it won’t be presuming, you look very tired, and I
think we ought to adjourn and talk about something cheerful. May I tell
them the news, Joe?”
Joe Randall, who realized that he did not have even the status of
an “in-law” in this family, had retired to a corner of the room and
lighted a cigarette. “It’s all right with me,” he said.
“Well, Joe has a telegram advising him that the divorce decree has been
made final, so to-morrow we are going to be married, and the shadow
of the great scandal will be lifted from the family, and we shall no
longer get poison-pen letters in our mail, and Joe won’t have to go off
to his own place when he brings me home from the theater, for fear one
of my relatives will be shocked by the sight of him staying here.”
Henry Cabot Winters rose with his most courtly manner. “Permit me to be
excused, and not inconvenience you!”