THE lynching at Hambright had stirred the whole nation into unusual indignant interest. It happened to be the climax of a series of such crimes committed in the South in rapid succession, and the death of this negro was reported with more than usual vividness by a young newspaper man of genius.
A grand mass meeting was called in Cooper union, New York, at which were gathered delegates from different cities and states to give emphasis and unity to the movement and issue an appeal to the national government.
When Sallie Worth reached Boston, she found Helen Lowell at home alone. The Hon. Everett Lowell had made one of the speeches of his career at the mass meeting held in Faneuil Hall, and he was in New York where he had gone to make the principal address in the Cooper union Convention of Negro sympathisers.
George Harris had accompanied him, supremely fascinated by the eloquent and masterful appeal for human brotherhood he had heard him make in Boston. There was something pathetic in the dog-like worship this young negro gave to his brilliant patron. In his life in New England he had been shocked more than once by the brutal prejudices of the people against his race. His soul had been tried to the last of its powers of endurance at times. He found to his amazement that, when put to the test, the masses of the North had even deeper repugnance to the person of a Negro than the Southerners who grew up with him from the cradle. He had found himself cut off from every honourable way of earning his bread, gentleman and scholar though he was, and had looked into the river as he walked over the bridge to Cambridge one night with a well-nigh resistless impulse to end it all.
But Lowell had cheered him, laughed his gloomy ideas to scorn, and more practical still, he had secured him a clerkship in the Custom House which settled the problem of bread. Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He had taught him to lift up his head and look the world squarely in the face. Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of the free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man.
Harris had published a volume of poems which he had dedicated to Lowell, and his most inspiring verse was simply the outpouring of his soul in worship of this ideal man.
He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live on that scene for months, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared not express.
In his music he made his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to his passion, and a deep oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the imagination of his hearers in a spell. It is needless to say it was in this music he breathed his secret love.
At first he had not dared to hope for the day when he could declare this secret or take his place in the list of her admirers and fight for his chance. But of late, a great hope had filled his soul and illumined the world. As he had listened to Lowell’s impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure that he had risen above the limitations of provincialisms, racial or national prejudices.
He had begun to dream of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the privilege of addressing his daughter.
The great meeting at Cooper union had brought this dream to a sudden resolution. Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on every inch of this earth’s soil.
“I demand this perfect equality,” he cried, “absolutely without reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this we are a living lie, a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!”
A cheer from a thousand negro throats rent the air as he thus closed. The crowd surged over the platform and for ten minutes it was impossible to restore order or continue the programme. Young Harris pressed his patron’s hand and kissed it while tears of pride and gratitude rained down his face.
This speech made a national sensation. It was printed in full in all the partisan papers where it was hoped capital might be made of it for the next political campaign, and the National Campaign Committee of which he was a member ordered a million copies of it printed for distribution among the negroes.
When Lowell and Harris reached Boston, as they parted at the depot Harris said, “Will you be at home to-morrow, Mr. Lowell?”
“Yes, why?”
“I would like a talk with you in the morning on a matter of grave importance. May I call at nine o’clock?”
“Certainly. Come right into the library. You ’ll find me there, George.”
That night as Lowell walked through his brilliantly lighted home, he felt a sense of glowing pride and strength. With his hands behind him he paced back and forth in his great library and out through the spacious hall with firm tread and flushed face. He felt he could look these great ancestors in the face to-night as they gazed down on him from their heavy gold frames. They had called him to high ambitions and a strenuous life when his indolence had pleaded for ease and the dilettante-ism of a fruitless dreaming. His father had cultivated his artistic tastes, dreamed and done nothing. But these grim-visaged, eagle-eyed ancestors had called him to a life of realities, and he had heard their voices.
Yes, to-night his name was on a million lips. The door of the United States Senate was opening at his touch and mightier possibilities loomed in the future.
He felt a sense of gratitude for the heritage of that stately old home and its inspiring memories. Its roots struck down into the soil of a thousand years, and spread beneath the ocean to that greater old world life. He felt his heart beat with pride that he was adding new honours to that family history, and adding to the soul-treasures his daughter’s children would inherit.
Seated in the library next morning Harris was nervous and embarrassed. He made two or three attempts to begin the subject but turned aside with some unimportant remark.
“Well, George, what is the problem that makes you so grave this morning?” asked Lowell with kindly patronage.
Harris felt that his hour had come, and he must face it. He leaned forward in his chair and looked steadily down at the rug, while he clasped both his hands firmly across his lap and spoke with great rapidity.
“Mr. Lowell, I wish to say to you that you have taught me the greatest faith of life, faith in my fellow man without which there can be no faith in God. What I have suffered as a man as I have come in contact with the brutality with which my race is almost universally treated, God only can ever know.
“The culture I have received has simply multiplied a thousandfold my capacity to suffer. But for the inspiration of your manhood I would have ended my life in the river. In you, I saw a great light. I saw a man really made in the image of God with mind and soul trained, with head erect, seeing the weak prejudices of caste, which dare to call the image of God clean or unclean in passion or pride.
“I lifted up my head and said, one such man redeems a world from infamy. It’s worth while to live in a world honoured by one such man, for he is the prophecy of more to come.”
He paused a moment, fidgeted with a piece of paper he had picked up from the table and seemed at a loss for a word.
It never dawned on Lowell what he was driving at. He supposed, as a matter of course, he was referring to his great speeches and was going to ask for some promotion in a governmental department at Washington.
“I’m proud to have been such an inspiration to you, George. You know how much I think of you. What is on your mind?” he asked at length.
“I have hidden it from every human eye, sir, I am afraid to breath it aloud alone. I have only tried to sing it in song in an impersonal way. Your wonderful words of late have emboldened me to speak. It is this—I am madly, desperately in love with your daughter.”
Lowell sprang to his feet as though a bolt of lightning had suddenly shot down his backbone. He glared at the negro with wide dilated eyes and heaving breath as though he had been transformed into a leopard or tiger and was about to spring at his throat.
Before answering, and with a gesture commanding silence, he walked rapidly to the library door and closed it.
“And I have come to ask you,” continued Harris ignoring his gesture, “if I may pay my addresses to her with your consent.”
“Harris, this is crazy nonsense. Such an idea is preposterous. I am amazed that it should ever have entered your head. Let this be the end of it here and now, if you have any desire to retain my friendship.”
Lowell said this with a scowl, and an emphasis of indignant rising inflection. The negro seemed stunned by this swift blow in his very teeth, that seemed to place him outside the pale of a human being.
“Why is such a hope unreasonable, sir, to a man of your scientific mind?”
“It is a question of taste,” snapped Lowell.
“Am I not a graduate of the same university with you? Did I not stand as high, and age for age, am I not your equal in culture?”
“Granted. Nevertheless you are a negro, and I do not desire the infusion of your blood in my family.”
“But I have more of white than Negro blood, sir.”
“So much the worse. It is the mark of shame.”
“But it is the one drop of Negro blood at which your taste revolts, is it not?”
“To be frank, it is.”
“Why is it an unpardonable sin in me that my ancestors were born under tropic skies where skin and hair were tanned and curled to suit the sun’s fierce rays?”
“All tropic races are not negroes, and your race has characteristics apart from accidents of climate that make it unique in the annals of man,” rejoined Lowell.
“And yet you demand perfect equality of man with man, absolutely in form and substance without reservation or subterfuge!”
“Yes, political equality.”
“Politics is but a secondary phenomenon of society. You said absolute equality,” protested Harris.
“The question you broach is a question of taste, and the deeper social instincts of racial purity and self preservation. I care not what your culture, or your genius, or your position, I do not desire, and will not permit, a mixture of Negro blood in my family. The idea is nauseating, and to my daughter it would be repulsive beyond the power of words to express it!”
“And yet,” pleaded Harris, “you invited me to your home, introduced me to your daughter, seated me at your table, and used me in your appeal to your constituents, and now when I dare ask the privilege of seeking her hand in honourable marriage, you, the scholar, patriot, statesman and philosopher of Equality and Democracy, slam the door in my face and tell me that I am a negro! Is this fair or manly?”
“I fail to see its unfairness.”
“It is amazing. You are a master of history and sociology. You know as clearly as I do that social intercourse is the only possible pathway to love. And you opened it to me with your own hand. Could I control the beat of my heart? There are some powers within us that are involuntary. You could have prevented my meeting your daughter as an equal. But all the will power of earth could not prevent my loving her, when once I had seen her, and spoken to her. The sound of the human voice, the touch of the human hand in social equality are the divine sacraments that open the mystery of love.”
“Social rights are one thing, political rights another,” interrupted Lowell.
“I deny it. If you are honest with yourself, you know it is not true. Politics is but a manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit of civilisation. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any society is not a member of it. He is outside any manifestation of its essential life. You had as well talk about the importance of clothes for a dead man, as political rights for such a pariah. You have classed him with the beasts of the field. As a human unit he does not exist for you.”
“Harris, it is utterly useless to argue a point like this,” Lowell interrupted coldly. “This must be the end of our acquaintance. You must not enter my house again.”
“My God, sir, you can’t kick me out of your home like this when you brought me to it, and made it an issue of life or death!”
“I tell you again you are crazy. I have brought you here against her wishes. She left the house with her friend this morning to avoid seeing you. Your presence has always been repulsive to her, and with me it has been a political study, not a social pleasure.”
“I beg for only a desperate chance to overcome this feeling. Surely a man of your profound learning and genius can not sympathise with such prejudices? Let me try—let her decide the issue.”
“I decline to discuss the question any further.”
“I can’t give up without a struggle!” the negro cried with desperation.
Lowell arose with a gesture of impatience.
“Now you are getting to be simply a nuisance. To be perfectly plain with you, I haven’t the slightest desire that my family with its proud record of a thousand years of history and achievement shall end in this stately old house in a brood of mulatto brats!”
Harris winced and sprang to his feet, trembling with passion. “I see,” he sneered, “the soul of Simon Le-gree has at last become the soul of the nation. The South expresses the same luminous truth with a little more clumsy brutality. But their way is after all more merciful. The human body becomes unconscious at the touch of an oil-fed flame in sixty seconds. Your methods are more refined and more hellish in cruelty. You have trained my ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch and heart to feel, that you might torture with the denial of every cry of body and soul and roast me in the flames of impossible desires for time and eternity!”
“That will do now. There’s the door!” thundered Lowell with a gesture of stern emphasis. “I happen to know the important fact that a man or woman of negro ancestry, though a century removed, will suddenly breed back to a pure negro child, thick lipped, kinky headed, flat nosed, black skinned. One drop of your blood in my family could push it backward three thousand years in history. If you were able to win her consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the black waters of a Negroid life! Now go!”