The idyll was interrupted when the Roosevelt Administration began to put the heat on the Greek foreign office. Government lawyers in Chicago were accumulating truckloads of evidence and chalking up more and more drastic indictments.
Finally after many a postponement (he had hired physicians as well as lawyers, they cried to high heaven that it would kill him to leave the genial climate of the Attic plain), he was ordered to leave Greece as an undesirable alien to the great indignation of Balkan society and of Mme. Kouryoumdjouglou.
He hired the Maiotis a small and grubby Greek freighter and panicked the foreignnews services by slipping off for an unknown destination.
It was rumored that the new Odysseus was bound for Aden, for the islands of the South Seas, that he’d been invited to Persia. After a few days he turned up rather seasick in the Bosporus on his way, it was said, to Rumania where Madame Kouryoumdjouglou had advised him to put himself under the protection of her friend la Lupescu.
At the request of the American ambassador the Turks were delighted to drag him off the Greek freighter and place him in a not at all comfortable jail. Again money had been mysteriously wafted from England, the healing balm began to flow, lawyers were hired, interpreters expostulated, doctors made diagnoses;
but Angora was boss
and Insull was shipped off to Smyrna to be turned over to the assistant federal districtattorney who had come all that way to arrest him.
The Turks wouldn’t even let Mme. Kouryoumdjouglou, on her way back from making arrangements in Bucharest, go ashore to speak to him. In a scuffle with the officials on the steamboat the poor lady was pushed overboard
and with difficulty fished out of the Bosporus.
Once he was cornered the old man let himself tamely be taken home on the Exilona, started writing his memoirs, made himself agreeable to his fellow passengers, was taken off at Sandy Hook and rushed to Chicago to be arraigned.
In Chicago the government spitefully kept him a couple of nights in jail; men he’d never known, so the newspapers said, stepped forward to go on his twohundredandfiftythousanddollar bail. He was moved to a hospital that he himself had endowed. Solidarity. The leading businessmen in Chicago were photographed visiting him there. Henry Ford paid a call.
The trial was very beautiful. The prosecution got bogged in finance technicalities. The judge was not unfriendly. The Insulls stole the show.
They were folks, they smiled at reporters, they posed for photographers, they went down to the courtroom by bus. Investors might have been ruined but so, they allowed it to be known, were the Insulls; the captain had gone down with the ship.
Old Samuel Insull rambled amiably on the stand, told his lifestory: from officeboy to powermagnate, his struggle to make good, his love for his home and the kiddies. He didn’t deny he’d made mistakes; who hadn’t, but they were honest errors. Samuel Insull wept. Brother Martin wept. The lawyers wept. With voices choked with emotion headliners of Chicago business told from the witnessstand how much Insull had done for business in Chicago. There wasn’t a dry eye in the jury.
Finally driven to the wall by the prosecutingattorney Samuel Insull blurted out that yes, he had made an error of some ten million dollars in accounting but that it had been an honest error.
Verdict: Not Guilty.
Smiling through their tears the happy Insulls went to their towncar amid the cheers of the crowd. Thousands of ruined investors, at least so the newspapers said, who had lost their life savings sat crying over the home editions at the thought of how Mr. Insull had suffered. The bankers were happy, the bankers had moved in on the properties.
In an odor of sanctity the deposed monarch of superpower, the officeboy who made good, enjoys his declining years spending the pension of twentyone thousand a year that the directors of his old companies dutifully restored to him. After fifty years of work, he said, my job is gone.
Mary French
Mary French had to stay late at the office and couldn’t get to the hall until the meeting was almost over. There were no seats left so she stood in the back. So many people were standing in front of her that she couldn’t see Don, she could only hear his ringing harsh voice and feel the tense attention in the silence during his pauses. When a roar of applause answered his last words and the hall filled suddenly with voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet she ran out ahead of the crowd and up the alley to the back door. Don was just coming out of the black sheetiron door talking over his shoulder as he came to two of the miners’ delegates. He stopped a second to hold the door open for them with a long arm. His face had the flushed smile, there was the shine in his eye he often had after speaking, the look, Mary used to tell herself, of a man who had just come from a date with his best girl. It was some time before Don saw her in the group that gathered round him in the alley. Without looking at her he swept her along with the men he was talking to and walked them fast towards the cor ner of the street. Eyes looked after them as they went from the groups of furworkers and garmentworkers that dotted the pavement in front of the hall. Mary tingled with the feeling of warm ownership in the looks of the workers as their eyes followed Don Stevens down the street.
It wasn’t until they were seated in a small lunchroom under the el that Don turned to Mary and squeezed her hand. “Tired?” She nodded. “Aren’t you, Don?” He laughed and drawled, “No, I’m not tired. I’m hungry.”
“Comrade French, I thought we’d detailed you to see that Comrade Stevens ate regular,” said Rudy Goldfarb with a flash of teeth out of a dark Italianlooking face.
“He won’t ever eat anything when he’s going to speak,” Mary said.
“I make up for it afterwards,” said Don. “Say, Mary, I hope you have some change. I don’t think I’ve got a cent on me.” Mary nodded, smiling. “Mother came across again,” she whispered.
“Money,” broke in Steve Mestrovich. “We got to have money or else we’re licked.” “The truck got off today,” said Mary. “That’s why I was so late getting to the meeting.” Mestrovich passed the grimed bulk of his hand across his puttycolored face that had a sharply turnedup nose peppered with black pores. “If cossack don’t git him.”
“Eddy Spellman’s a smart kid. He gets through like a shadow. I don’t know how he does it.”
“You don’t know what them clothes means to women and kids and… listen, Miss French, don’t hold back nothin’ because too raggedy. Ain’t nothin’ so ragged like what our little kids got on their backs.”
“Eddy’s taking five cases of condensed milk. We’ll have more as soon as he comes back.”
“Say, Mary,” said Don suddenly, looking up from his plate of soup, “how about calling up Sylvia? I forgot to ask how much we collected at the meeting.” Young Goldfarb got to his feet. “I’ll call. You look tired, Comrade French… Anybody got a nickel?”
“Here, I got nickel,” said Mestrovich. He threw back his head and laughed. “Damn funny… miner with nickel. Down our way miner got nickel put in frame send Meester Carnegie Museum… very rare.” He got up roaring laughter and put on his black longvisored miner’s cap. “Goodnight, comrade, I walk Brooklyn. Reliefcommittee nine o’clock… right, Miss French?” As he strode out of the lunchroom the heavy tread of his black boots made the sugarbowls jingle on the ta bles. “Oh, Lord,” said Mary, with tears suddenly coming to her eyes. “That was his last nickel.”