U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [532]
freighter and place him in a not at al comfortable jail. Again money had been mysteriously wafted from Eng-land, the healing balm began to flow, lawyers were hired, interpreters expostulated, doctors made diag-noses; but Angora was boss and Insul was shipped off to Smyrna to be turned
over to the assistant federal districtattorney who had come al that way to arrest him. The Turks wouldn't even let Mme. Kouryoumd-
jouglou, 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 fel ow pas-sengers, was taken off at Sandy Hook and rushed to Chicago to be arraigned.
In Chicago the government spiteful y kept him a
couple of nights in jail; men he'd never known, so the newspapers said, stepped forward to go on his two
hundredandfiftythousanddollar 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 cal .
-531-The trial was very beautiful. The prosecution got bogged in finance technicalities. The judge was not un-friendly. The Insul s stole the show. They were folks, they smiled at reporters, they
posed for photographers, they went down to the court-room by bus. Investors might have been ruined but so, they al owed it to be known, were the Insul s; the captain had gone down with the ship.
Old Samuel Insul 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 Insul
wept. Brother Martin wept. The lawyers wept.
With voices choked with emotion headliners of Chicago business told from the witnessstand how much Insul had done for business in Chicago. There wasn't a dry eye in the jury.
Final y driven to the wal by the prosecutingattor-ney Samuel Insul blurted out that yes, he had made an error of some ten mil ion dol ars in accounting but that it had been an honest error.
Verdict: Not Guilty.
Smiling through their tears the happy Insul s
went to their towncar amid the cheers of the crowd. Thousands of ruined investors, at least so the news-papers said, who had lost their life savings sat crying over the home editions at the thought of how Mr. Insul 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 twenty-one thousand a year that the directors of his old com-panies dutiful y restored to him. After fifty years of work, he said, my job is gone.
-532-MARY FRENCH
Mary French had to stay late at the office and couldn't get to the hal 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 hal fil ed suddenly with voices and the scrape and shuffle of feet she ran out ahead of the crowd and up the al ey 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 tel herself, of a man who had just come from a date with his best girl. It was some time be-fore Don saw her in the group that gathered round him in the al ey. Without looking at her he swept her along with the men he was talking to and walked them fast towards the corner 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 hal . Mary tingled with the feeling of warm ownership in the looks of the workers as their eyes fol owed Don Stevens down the street.