“Not very, no.”
I looked again and it seemed very obvious. Back in the kitchen was occasionally visible B. Kagi, and it seemed to me even then that the girl looked like him. However, the air was so frigid from then on that I scarcely enjoyed my meal. And to confound me, as it were, several townspeople came in and my supposedly purely Japanese maid talked in the normal middle West fashion, even to a kind of a nasal intonation which we all have. Obviously she was American born and raised in this region. “But why the likeness?” I kept saying to myself in my worst and most suspicious manner. And then I began to build up a kind of fictional background for her, with this B. Kagi as her real, but for reasons of policy, concealed father, and so on and so forth, until I had quite a short story in mind. But I don’t suppose I’ll ever come to the pleasure of writing it.
CHAPTER XXX
OSTEND PURGED OF SIN
At Vermilion the sun suddenly burst forth once more, clear and warm from a blanket of grey, and the whole world looked different and much more alluring. Speed arrived with the car just when we had finished luncheon, and we had the pleasure of sitting outside and feeling thoroughly warm and gay while he ate. Betimes Franklin commented on the probable character of the life in a community like this. He was of the conviction that it never rose above a certain dead level of mediocrity—however charming and grateful the same might be as life—and that all the ideas of all concerned ran to simple duties and in grooves of amusing, if not deadly prejudice; which was entirely satisfactory, so long as they did not interfere with or destroy your life. He was convinced that there was this narrow, solemn prejudice which made all life a sham, or a kind of rural show piece, in which all played a prescribed part, some thinking one thing, perhaps, and secretly conforming to it as much as possible, while publicly professing another and conforming to that, publicly, or, as is the case with the majority, actually believing in and conforming to life as they found it here. I know there were many such in the home communities in which I was brought up. Franklin was not one to charge general and widespread hypocrisy, as do some, but rather to sympathize with and appreciate the simple beliefs, tastes, and appetites of all concerned.
“Now take those four town loafers sitting over there on that bin in front of that store,” he commented, apropos of four old cronies who had come out to sun themselves. “They haven’t a single thing in their minds above petty little humors which do not seriously affect anyone but themselves. They sit and comment and jest and talk about people in the town who are doing things, quite as four ducks might quack. They haven’t a single thing to do, not an important ambition. Crime of any kind is nearly beyond them.”
Just then a boy came by crying a Cleveland afternoon paper. He was calling, “All about the lynching of Leo Frank.” This was a young Jew who had been arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, some months before, charged with the very disturbing crime of attempted rape and subsequent murder, the victim being a pretty working girl in a factory of which the murderer, socalled, was foreman or superintendent. The trick by which the crime was supposed to have been accomplished, as it was charged, was that of causing the girl to stay after work and then, when alone, attempting to seduce or force her. In this instance a struggle seems to have ensued. The girl may have fallen and crushed her head against a table, or she may have been struck on the head. The man arrested denied vigorously that he had anything to do with it. He attempted, I believe, to throw the blame on a negro janitor, or, if not that, he did nothing to aid in clearing him of suspicion. And there is the bare possibility that the negro did commit the crime, though personally I doubted it. When, upon trial, Frank’s conviction of murder in the first degree followed, a great uproar ensued, Jews and other citizens in all parts of the country protested and contributed money for a new trial. The case was appealed to the supreme court, but without result. Local or state sentiment was too strong. It was charged by the friends of the condemned man that the trial had been grossly unfair, and that Southern opposition to all manner of sex offenses was so abnormal and peculiar, having a curious relationship to the inversion of the psychoanalyst, that no fair trial could be expected in that section. Personally, I had felt that the man should have been tried elsewhere because of this very sectional characteristic, which I had noticed myself.
It had been charged that a southern mob overawed the jury in the very court room in which the case had been conducted, that the act of rape had never really been proved, that the death had really been accidental as described, that the very suspicious circumstance of the body being found in the cellar was due to fear on the part of the murderer, whoever he was, of being found out, and that the girl had not been brutally slain at all. Nevertheless, when the reigning governor, whose term was about to expire, commuted the sentence from death to life imprisonment, he had to leave the state under armed protection, and a few weeks later the criminal, if he was one, was set upon by a fellow convict in the penitentiary at Atlanta and his throat cut. It was assumed that the convict was employed by the element inimical to Frank at the trial. A little later, while he was still in the hospital, practically dying from this wound, Frank was taken out by a lynching party, taken to the small home town of the girl, Marietta, Georgia, and there lynched. It was this latest development which was being hawked about by the small newsboy at Vermilion.
Personally, as I say, I had the feeling that Frank had been unjustly dealt with. This seemed another exhibition of that blood lust of the South which produces feuds, duels, lynchings and burning at the stake even to this day and which I invariably relate to the enforced suppression of very natural desires in another direction. Southerners are usually so avid of women and so loud in their assertions that they are not. I have no opposition to Southerners as such. In many respects they are an interesting and charming people, courteous, hospitable, a little inclined to over-emphasis of gallantry and chivalry and their alleged moral purity, but otherwise interesting. But this sort of thing always strikes me as a definite indictment of the real native sense of the people. Have they brains, poise, judgment? Why, then, indulge in the antics and furies of children and savages?
I raged at the South for its narrowness and inefficiency and ignorance. Franklin, stung by the crime, no doubt, agreed with me. He told me of being in a quick lunch room in New York one day when a young Southerner entered and found a negro in the place, eating. Now as everyone knows, this is a commonplace. I, often, have sat next to a negro and eaten in peace and comfort. But according to Franklin, the first impulse of this Southerner was to make a scene and stir up as much prejudice as possible, beginning, as usual, with “What the hell is a damned negro doing in here, anyhow?”
“He looked about for sympathy,” said Franklin, “but no one paid the slightest attention to him. Then he began pushing his chair about irritably and swaggering, but still no one heeded him. Finally, reducing his voice to a grumble, he went quietly and secured his sandwich, his coffee and his pie, like any other downtrodden American.”