Katherine Anne Porter (124 page)

“No, don’t, darling,” said one of the men to the girl as she went on crying her tuneless chorus aloud, pouring the raw gin down her throat as she changed her tune to the gibberish of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,” she sang the silly words to the claptrap tune in march time, striding back and forth. The Communist sympathizers and the Jews alike flinched, offended, and all the faces turned sour, frowning.

“Jesus,” said Mike Gold, “leave Christ out of this!”

“With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me,” sang the girl, swinging the bottle and marching, her eyes blinded, her face as white as a frosted lantern.

“We’ve got to
stop
her,” said a young woman—I don’t remember who but I remember the words—“This is dangerous!” and she must have heard them too, for she turned instantly and broke from the room and ran down the hall toward the window at the end. Several of us ran after her and two of the men seized her from the open window. She broke into submissive tears and gave way at once. They brought her back and we put her to bed, fully dressed, then and there; she slept almost at once. The rest of us sat up nearly all night, with nothing to say, nothing to do, brought to a blank pause, keeping a vigil with the dead in the first lonely long night of death. It was no consolation to say their long ordeal was ended. It was not ended for us—and perhaps I should speak for myself—their memory was already turning to stone in my mind. In my whole life I have never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love and hope, as hung over us all in that room—or did we breathe it out of ourselves? A darkness of shame, too, settled down with us, a most deplorable kind of shame. It was in every pair of eyes that met other eyes in furtive roving. Shame at our useless, now self-indulgent emotions, our disarmed state, our absurd lack of spirit. At last we
broke up and parted—I remember nothing more of this incident. It dissolves and disappears like salt poured into water—but the salt taste is there.

In the morning when we began straggling out in small parties on our way to the trial, several of us went down in the elevator with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness, pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel. We were pale and tight-faced; our eyelids were swollen; no doubt in spite of hot coffee and cold baths, we looked rumpled, unkempt, disreputable, discredited, vaguely guilty, pretty well frayed out by then. The gentlemen regarded us glossily, then turned to each other. As we descended the many floors in silence, one of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, “It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again,” and the others nodded with wise, smug, complacent faces.

To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression—a butter paddle—something he would feel through that smug layer of too-well-fed fat. For a long time after, I felt that I had sprained my very soul in the effort I had to make resisting that impulse to let fly. I shut my eyes and clenched my hands behind me and saw, in lightning flashes, myself doing ferocious things, like pushing him down an endless flight of stairs, or dropping him without warning into a bottomless well, or stringing him up to a stout beam and leaving him to dangle, or—or other things of the sort; no guns, no knives, no baseball bats, nothing to cause outright bloodshed, just silent, grim, sudden murder by hand was my intention. All this was far beyond my bodily powers of course, and I like to believe beyond my criminal powers too. For I woke when we struck the searing hot light of the August morning as if I had come out of a nightmare, horrified at my own thoughts and feeling as if I had got some incurable wound to my very humanity—as indeed I had. However inflicted, a wound there was, with painful scar tissue, left upon my living self by that appalling
event. My conscience stirs as if, in my impulse to do violence to my enemy, I had assisted at his crime.

In the huge, bare, dusty room where the court sat, it was instantly clear that the Pink Tea Squad had been taken off duty for this round. We were all huddled in together—I don’t remember any chairs—and stood around, or sat on the grimy floor or on a shallow flight of steps leading I forget where; the place was as dismal and breathless as a tenement fire escape in August. Big, overmuscled, beefy policemen with real thug faces bawled at us senselessly (we were all of us merely passive by then), crowded in among us to keep us moving and generally hustled us around, not violently, just viciously and sordidly and impudently, by way of showing what they
could
do if sufficiently provoked. We were forbidden to smoke but I tried it anyway—the whole scene struck me as just second-rate melodrama, nothing to be taken seriously anymore. John Dos Passos, sitting near me, held a spread newspaper above me while I snatched a whiff, but we were seen and yelled at. I was sorry then to have involved him in such a useless disturbance, though he did not seem in the least to mind; he always had in those days—I have hardly seen him since
*
—a wonderful, gentle composure of manner, and I have never forgotten his expression of amiable distance from the whole grubby scene as I put out the cigarette and he folded his newspaper, while the greasy, sweating man in the blue suit stood above us and went on glaring and bawling a little longer, just in case we had not heard him the first time.

Mrs. Stuart Chase, who had been faithfully on the picket line and was now waiting trial with the rest, also had been one of the speakers at some of the rallies; she showed me several anonymous letters she had received, of an unbelievable obscenity and threatening her with some very imaginative mutilations. It was Mrs. Chase who told me that there was a rumor afloat that we were going to be treated simply as common nuisances, the charge was to be “loitering and obstructing traffic”! Arthur Garfield Hays, the attorney for all of us, for all the various defense committees, had explained that if we were
to be tried on the real charge, God knew where it would end, there could easily be embarrassing consequences all around—more to the prosecution than to us, it seemed, and I remember wondering why, at that point, we should be troubled to spare their feelings. Naturally it turned out not to be a matter of feelings in any direction but of legal points obscure to perhaps any but the legal mind. There was then in existence—is it still, I wonder?—an infamous law called Baumes’ Law, which provided that anyone who had been arrested as much as four times—or was it
more
than four times?—should be eligible to imprisonment for life. There were a good number of perennial, roving, year-round emergency picketers in that group—people whose good pleasure it was to join almost any picket line on sight, and of course they would be arrested sooner or later and these arrests could mount up to a pretty respectable number very soon. One woman said to me, “Suppose I told them I’ve been arrested seventeen times?” and I said, “Well, why
don’t
you?” but of course she could not because for one thing she was not allowed to get within speaking distance of the court.

However, on getting this news straight, about twenty-five of us decided that under Baumes’ Law (some of us couldn’t believe such a monstrosity existed on our statute books; we thought someone was playing a low joke on our ignorance) we must surely be more than eligible for at least ninety-nine years each in the clink and decided to agitate for it. Our plan was to make a point of forcing them to observe that lunatic Baumes’ Law and overload their jails. For a number of us, writers and artists of all kinds particularly, it might so nicely have settled the problem of where we were to eat and sleep while writing that book or doing whatever it was we had in mind. In those days it was believed that political prisoners were not treated too badly; we learned our mistake later, that it was the big gangsters who were treated well, but at that time, in our innocence, it looked to some of us like the last broad highway to the practice of the arts.

It was not to be; we should have known from the first. The prisoners who had records of more than three arrests were simply pushed back into a captive audience, while several celebrities from various walks were chosen as tokens to stand
trial for all of us. I remember of them—a half-dozen—only Edna St. Vincent Millay and Paxton Hibben. It was worth going there to see our attorney, Arthur Garfield Hays, in confidential palaver with the judge, a little old gray man with pointed whiskers and the face of a smart, conspiratorial chipmunk. In a single rolling sentence the judge, not just with a straight face but portentously, as if pronouncing another death sentence, found us guilty of loitering and obstructing traffic, fined us five dollars each, and the tragic farce took its place in history.

When two or three of our number tried to raise and demand separate trials on sterner grounds, they were squelched by everybody—the judge, our attorney, the policemen, and even their own neighbors—for a lot of them were after all home-keeping persons who had come out, as you might say, on borrowed time and now were anxious to get back home again. The judge, the lawyers, the police, the whole court, the whole city of Boston, and the State of Massachusetts desired nothing in the world so much as to be rid of us, to see the last of us forever, to hear the last of this scandal (though they have never, alas, and will never!), and all the slightest signs of dissent from any direction were so adroitly and quickly suppressed that even the most enthusiastic troublemaker never quite knew how it was done. Simply our representatives were tried in a group in about five minutes.

A busy, abstracted woman wearing pinch-nose spectacles, whom I never saw before or since, pushed her way among us, pressing five dollars into every hand, instructing us one and all to pay our fines, then and there, which we did. I do not in the least remember how my note changed hands again, but no doubt I gave it to the right person as all of us did, and there we were, out on the sidewalk again, discredited once for all, it seemed, mere vagrants but in movement, no longer loitering and obstructing traffic. “Get on there,” yelled our policemen, “get going there, keep moving”; and their parting advice to us was that we all go back where we came from and stay there. It was their next-best repartee, but a poor, thin substitute for one good whack at our skulls with their truncheons.

I returned to the hotel and found the temporary office already being dismantled. Another woman came up and said,
“Are you packed and ready to go?” She pressed into my hand a railroad ticket to New York and ten dollars in cash. “Go straight to the station now and take the next train,” she said. I did this with no farewells and no looking back. I found several other persons, some of whom I had sat up with nearly all night more than once, also being banished from the scene of the crime. We greeted each other without surprise or pleasure and scattered out singly and separately with no desire for each other’s company. I do not even remember who many of them were, if I ever knew their names at all. I only remember our silence and the dazed melancholy in all the faces.

In all this I should speak only for myself, for never in my life have I felt so isolated as I did in that host of people, all presumably moved in the same impulse, with the same or at least sympathetic motive; when one might think hearts would have opened, minds would respond with kindness we did not find it so, but precisely the contrary. I went through the time in a mist of unbelief, or the kind of unwillingness to believe what is passing before one’s eyes that comes often in nightmares. But before in my sleep I could always say, “It is only a dream and you will wake and wonder at yourself for being frightened.” But I was suffering, I know it now, from pure fright, from shock—I was not an inexperienced girl, I was thirty-seven years old; I knew a good deal about the evils and abuses and cruelties of the world; I had known victims of injustice, of crime. I was not ignorant of history, nor of literature; I had witnessed a revolution in Mexico, had in a way taken part in it, had seen it follow the classic trail of all revolutions. Besides all the moral force and irreproachable motives of so many, I knew the deviousness and wickedness of both sides, on all sides, and the mixed motives—plain love of making mischief, love of irresponsible power, unscrupulous ambition of many men who never stopped short of murder, if murder would advance their careers an inch. But this was something very different, unfamiliar.

Now, through all this distance of time, I remember most vividly Mrs. Harriman’s horsehair lace and flower garden party hats; Lola Ridge standing in the half darkness before Charlestown Prison under the rearing horse’s hoofs; the gentle young
girl striding and drinking gin from the bottle and singing her wake-dirges; Luigia Vanzetti’s face as she stared in horror down into the crowd howling like beasts; and Rosa Baron’s little pinpoints of eyes glittering through her spectacles at me and her shrill, accusing voice: “Saved? Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”

I cannot even now decide by my own evidence whether or not they were guilty of the crime for which they were put to death. They expressed in their letters many thoughts, if not always noble, at least elevated, exalted even. Their fervor and human feelings gave the glow of life to the weary stock phrases of those writing about them, and we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good. Yet, no matter what, it was a terrible miscarriage of justice; it was a most reprehensible abuse of legal power, in their attempt to prove that the law is something to be inflicted—not enforced—and that it is above the judgment of the people.