Boston: A Documentary Novel

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The decision to write this novel was taken at nine-thirty P.M. (Pacific Coast time), August 22nd, 1927: the occasion being the receipt of a telephone message from a newspaper, to the effect that Sacco and Vanzetti were dead. It seemed to the writer that the world would want to know the truth about this case; and his judgment proved correct, because there began a flood of cablegrams and letters from five continents, asking him to do the very thing he had decided upon.

A contemporary historical novel is an unusual art-form, and may call for explanation. So far as concerns the two individuals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, this book is not fiction, but an effort at history; everything they are represented as doing they actually did, and their words have been taken from their letters, or from the dictation of friends and enemies. All others who played important parts in this drama likewise appear as they were, and under their own names.

Paralleling the Sacco-Vanzetti case throughout the book is a story of business and high finance which will be recognized as a famous law case recently carried to the United States Supreme Court. I have used the incidents of this case as material for my fiction; but the characters which I have invented to enact this story are wholly fictitious, and bear no relation whatever to the real persons in the case, who are entirely unknown to me. There is one simple rule for guidance in reading the novel: the characters who are real persons bear real names, while those who bear fictitious names are fictitious characters.

The writer has been visiting Boston off and on for twenty-five years. The first visits had to do with the novel Manassas, and involved meetings with the city’s old-time heroes, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank B. Sanborn, Julia Ward Howe. The later visits, having to do with The Brass Check, The Goose-step and Oil!, involved a change of view-point not without its interest to students of our history. Nevertheless, it should be said at the outset that what is great in Boston finds due recognition in this story. Those who have made the city’s glory have never been its rulers, but always a saving minority, and that minority is there to-day, and it is active.

The task has not been approached in a spirit of grudge; on the contrary, the writer regards with a mixture of gratitude and amusement those Boston officials who provided for Oil! an advertisement which went around the world several times. To them he owes the fact that he is almost out of debt to his printer, for the first time in twenty-five years as publisher of his own writings. An honest effort has here been made to portray a complex community exactly as it is. The story has no hero but the truth, and its heroines are two women, one old and the other young, who are ardently seeking the truth.

The complete legal record of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is soon to be published in six volumes. I would have checked by this record every statement having to do with legal proceedings, but unfortunately a few documents were not accessible at the time of writing. I had the 3,900 pages of the Dedham trial testimony, but the Plymouth trial testimony, of which only one copy existed, was withheld from me. I have checked my narrative by many documents derived from the record, and had the manuscript read by a dozen persons who have made an eight-year study of the case. I have omitted every statement concerning which doubt has been voiced, and the story contains no errors of any real significance. It so happens that the important thing in connection with the Sacco-Vanzetti case is to know, not what a certain witness testified, but how he came to testify at all. Those who read my story attentively will get the meaning of this remark.

I wish to make clear that I have not written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. I have tried to be a historian. What I think I know, I have told the reader. What is uncertain, I have so portrayed—and have let the partisans of both sides voice their feelings and beliefs. My book will not satisfy either side completely; both have already expressed dissent—which I take to mean that I have done my job.

I desire to acknowledge my great indebtedness to James Fuchs and Floyd Dell for valuable literary criticism, and to many Bostonians and ex-Bostonians for advice and help. So many of these prefer to have their thanks in private that I confine myself to this general acknowledgment. Also I owe apology to persons active in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, whose letters and adventures I have purloined and assigned to my fictitious characters. Extraordinary adventures—let no one say that romance is gone from the world! Also, let no fiction-writer imagine that his powers of invention can rival those of the Great Novelist who makes up history!

I think I should add that Cornelia, the heroine of this story, is a lady eighty-six years of age, an old friend of mine, who ran away from her family at the age of sixty as I have described. But this lady never had anything to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and my character, Cornelia, bears no relation to any of the ladies who interested themselves in that case.

CHAPTER 1

THE RUNAWAY GRANDMOTHER

I

It was the parlor-maid who found Old Josiah in the morning, seated at his desk, his head fallen forward upon his arms. He might have been asleep, but his dinner-coat told her that he had not been to bed. She stood in the door-way, whispering his name feebly; then she fled to Addicks, the butler, who was privileged to make intrusions. He touched his master’s hand and found that it was cold. So Cornelia Thornwell was awakened and told of her release.

She had had a right to expect it many years ago. Now that it had come, it seemed too late. Fright seized her, an indescribable sense of loneliness. What would life be like, without a husband to direct it? How would her grandchildren know what to do, without Josiah to incarnate the Thornwell tradition?

But she must not show emotion to servants. She slipped into her dressing-gown and came down to her husband’s study. Call Dr. Morrow, she said to the man. And then notify Mr. James or Miss Clara. Her youngest daughter, wife of James Scatterbridge, lived upon the estate, in a house just visible through the distant trees. At this hour Clara would be getting her brood of seven started on the day, and James would be dressing for his work at the mills. Both would drop everything and hurry over to relieve Cornelia of care.

The daughter arrived in three or four minutes; very emotional, as always—it seemed as if she had come to be one more of the large brood she was raising. She was growing continually in bulk, as they did; she was chattering as eagerly as they, and her mind, like theirs, would fly from one small topic to the next. But she had a strong sense of what was proper, and was shocked to discover no tears in her mother’s eyes.

James Scatterbridge came with her. He ordered the body taken upstairs and called up his two brothers-in-law and gave the news; then he came to Cornelia. Now, Mother, you are not to worry about the practical details. We’ll attend to it all. James was solidly made, both in body and mind; a plain-looking and plain-thinking business man, with nothing of what he called frills. He ran the great cotton-mills in the valley below them, and a little thing like a funeral presented no difficulties to his mind. I’ll notify Hobson, the undertakers; also, there will be the press to see to. He moved away; and Clara, drying her tears, started off upon the subject of a dressmaker for her mother’s mourning costume and her own.

Such things had to be attended to, Cornelia realized. But, Clara, I’m not going to wear a veil.

Oh, Mother! Whoever heard of such a thing! Clara’s large china-blue eyes grew even larger and rounder with dismay.

I am not going to be a Hindoo widow and jump on the funeral pyre.

Mother, don’t start making jokes! You of all people cannot afford to be eccentric.

Why, my dear?

Because everybody knows you weren’t happy with Father—you didn’t really love him.

Because I didn’t really love him, must I pretend that I did?

But Mother, we don’t want to set everybody talking! Surely you owe him one last tribute!

The telephone rang in Cornelia’s room. It was her oldest daughter, Deborah. Mother, Henry and I will be right over. We’ll be there in an hour, and meantime I want to make sure nothing is done about practical arrangements.

How do you mean, dear?

I mean the funeral.

James said he would notify Hobson’s.

Oh, Mother, how perfectly atrocious! Don’t you know that nobody has Hobson’s?

I don’t know anything about it, Deborah.

Well, I do think we ought to be allowed to manage our own father’s funeral without having our in-laws take everything out of our hands! Clara has no more taste than a sack of potatoes, and she lets James run her, and put the stamp of his commonness on everything in our lives. Won’t you please see to it that those undertakers don’t get into the house?

My dear, said Cornelia, I shall follow my usual policy of letting my children do their own disputing. And she hung up the receiver.

It was not merely a matter of the social standing of undertakers, she realized; it was a deep-seated, bitter quarrel among her children, never to be assuaged. Deborah and Alice, the two oldest, considered that the husband of Clara had robbed them of their patrimony, and that Clara had compounded the felony by failing to make his life miserable. Originally the Thornwell mills had been Thornwell; established by Josiah’s father and extended by the son, with James Scatterbridge an employee of low standing. But James had forced his way to the front, and after the panic of 1907, when a reorganization had been necessary, it had been he who possessed the confidence of the directors and bankers. So now a great block of shares, instead of being a family inheritance, were tucked away in James’s safety-vaults.

Nor had the ex-employee helped matters by marrying the youngest daughter; that was a scandal, which the world would never forget. Three generations from now, you would hear whisperings at Boston dinner-tables: Oh, but, my dear, don’t you know that story? The original Scatterbridge was a clerk in the plant and he got all the stock away from them, and they had to marry him to get it back!

It was not as if the other two sons-in-law had needed the money. Rupert Alvin was a banker who counted the year a failure if he had not added a million to his fortune; and Cornelia had heard Henry Cabot Winters boast that his law firm never had less than twenty-five millions in litigation. But apparently this money game was one in which it was not possible to be satisfied. Rupert and Henry, who composed a team, would have liked to take in Jerry Walker’s felt-plants and the Thornwell cotton-mills, each in one bite. They had their lines on so many other properties that Cornelia could not keep track of them; the names were to her like those of ancient battles, famous in story, but which she had never looked up on a map.

II

Dr. Morrow came; the pink of fashion, rosy-faced and silver-haired, with sharply trimmed, dapper white mustaches. His manner reminded you that good breeding asserts superiority to every weakness of mortality. He went to the big four-poster bed, felt the cold hands, listened for the non-existent heart-beats, and then turned to the widow. Well, Cornelia, old Josiah had fourteen years more than the Bible promised him. So we can’t complain. He knew there had been no love between them.

Hearing the verdict, the efficient James instructed Josiah’s secretary to notify the papers. Some went to press early, and would need time to handle this important story. The secretary would begin with the Transcript, the family organ of all the families that count in Massachusetts. The mischievously-minded assert that mortality records show a great increase upon Fridays, due to desire of the socially elect to appear in Saturday’s obituary columns.

Meantime the efficient James was closeted in Josiah’s study with the efficient head of the Hobson undertaking establishment, and these two were learning to understand each other. It was to be a great funeral, a matter of state, which would mean prestige and advertising to the concern which secured the contract. The family was wealthy, and would pay for the best, but there must be a distinct understanding that they were to get what they paid for. Mr. Hobson listened politely and replied that he understood Mr. Scatterbridge’s position perfectly. There was no reason why a funeral should not be dealt with as any other matter of business; and certainly his firm appreciated the importance of social prestige and would be prepared to adjust its price accordingly. After which he produced a portfolio about caskets, revealing that there were art-modeled items of burnished bronze for which it was possible to pay from twenty-five thousand up. James Scatterbridge gulped once and composed his features, and did not reveal his plebeian astonishment.

Meantime Deborah Thornwell Alvin was descending from her limousine, tall and stiff, always ready for a funeral, because she dressed in black, with only a touch of white at the neck and a double necklace of white pearls. She had her father’s lean and stern features, and had served as his deputy in keeping the family traditions in effect. As soon as she was in the house she began objecting in decorous whispers; and presently there arrived her sister, Alice, her ally in war on the Scatterbridge clan. Who had given James authority to bring those vulgar Hobson people into the case? Who had taken the responsibility to rush the family into print, from who could tell what cheap and sensational angle?

Mother, said Deborah, do you know anything about Father’s will?

Nothing, my child; he never spoke of it to me in his life.

We’re going to find, of course, that James has got this house and the land. You know he took a mortgage on it when Father lost his money in the New Haven jam.

Let me remind you, Mother, put in Alice. Father promised me my pick of the old furniture. He knew I was the only one that appreciated it—he told me that again and again.

Yes, my dear. I hope he put it into the will.

I can only say this, if James and Clara get that Mayflower cradle that I was rocked in, they may bury me in it. Alice Thornwell Winters’s fair blonde features were set in a look which her beauty-specialists would have deplored, because it made sharp lines on each side of her mouth. Alice was the adventurous one of the family, going in for costly culture, inviting poets and artists and people of that dubious sort to her home. She had been painted several times and hung in exhibitions, and had learned to regard herself as a work of art, a feature of the social landscape. The fact that she could appreciate the old treasures of the family was a moral reason for a family quarrel: something which Boston quarrels require.

III

If Cornelia had realized the previous night that she was hearing her husband’s last words, no doubt she would have paid more attention. There is a certain importance attaching to finality as such, even when it applies to the words of a man who has been your husband for forty years, and whose every mental reaction is known to you in advance.

Cornelia had been reading about the destruction of the Rheims cathedral; there was an engraving of it among the works of art she had brought back from her honeymoon, and she had gone into her husband’s study, and seated herself upon a hassock, and begun rummaging in the drawers of a chest which had belonged to Great-grandfather Thornwell, holding the records of his ships in the East India trade. In a drawer bearing in faded gold letters the label, Sylph of the Sea, she had found the portfolio of engravings and sat turning them over for an hour or two.

And meantime Josiah was conversing with Rupert Alvin,—oldest of his sons-in-law. They paid no more attention to Cornelia than if she had been a mouse. They were talking about Jerry Walker and his felt-business; and Cornelia, even while thinking about cathedrals, could not help catching the drift of their remarks. Jerry Walker had been an errand boy in an institution of which Cornelia had been a patroness; and now it appeared that he was on the way to monopolizing the felt-business of New England. Rupert Alvin, who ran the Pilgrim National Bank, objected to monopolies in the hands of other people, and was of the opinion that Jerry was dangerously impulsive—he had paid over a million dollars for the Atlas hat-works, while Rupert was in the midst of making up his mind whether the concern was good for a small loan.

Cornelia glanced at her son-in-law, who sat very straight, as he always did, in the big leather armchair; his dinner-coat bulging, his tucked shirt-front puffed out, so that he looked like a black and white pouter-pigeon. Rupert’s face ran to bulges: his forehead a great pink bulge, with two minor ones over the eyes, his cheeks half a dozen rosy-red bulges, and his neck and chins a number of bigger and redder ones. To Cornelia there was something comical in his indignation that some one else had dared to think more quickly than he. But that was the kind of thought she had spent forty years learning to keep to herself.

Josiah gave his decision, in his old man’s voice that was beginning to crack. Jerry Walker might break himself some day, but not now; these were the days to buy anything at any price; hats were necessary to armies and felt slippers were worn in hospitals. That led them to the subject which all men of affairs were discussing in this summer of 1915. Josiah repeated his well-known opinion that it would be a long war and that it was the part of wisdom to buy and buy. Cornelia sat thinking of human lives while they were thinking of money.