CHAPTER VII
VAGABONDAGE
"Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is, and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps, told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of white faces produced something like fear (and the evil spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races." [10]
[10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell?
The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman, "Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries, which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of his unbalanced mental equipment.
On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing reporter's work for the Enquirer he fell under the "Shadow of the Ethiopian."
In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle.
"He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs. Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat extremes of hate and love—a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature. Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been better for those dependent on us."
The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn, then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863 President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself.