CHAPTER XXIXTHE FLAT LANDS OF OHIO
But now Cleveland by no means moved me as it once had. Not that there was anything wrong with Cleveland. The change was in me, no doubt—a septicæmia which makes things look different in middle life. We breakfasted at a rather attractive looking restaurant which graced a very lively outlying corner, where a most stately and perfect featured young woman cashier claimed our almost undivided attention. (Hail, Eros!) And then we sped on to the Hollenden, an hotel which I recalled as being the best in my day, to consult the Cleveland Automobile Club as to the condition of the roads west.
Sitting before this hotel in our car, under a grey sky and with the wind whipping about rather chilly for an August morning, I was reminded of other days spent in this same hotel, not as a guest but as a youthful chair warmer between such hours as I was not working on the ClevelandPlain Dealeror walking the streets of the city, or sleeping in the very dull room I had engaged in a very dingy and smoky looking old house. Why didn’t I get a better place? Well, my uncertainty as to whether I should long remain in Cleveland was very great. This house was convenient to the business heart, the rooms were clean, and from the several windows on the second floor I could see a wide sweep of the lake, with its white caps and gulls and ships, and closer at hand the imposing buildings of the city. It was a great spectacle, and I was somewhat of a recluse and fonder of spectacles than I was of people.
But the Hollenden, which was then the principal hotel of the city and centre of all the extravagant transient life of the time, appealed to me as a convenient methodof obtaining comfort of sorts without any expense. Newspaper men have a habit of making themselves at home almost anywhere. Their kaleidoscopic contact with the rough facts of life, and their commercial compulsion to go, do, see, under all circumstances and at all hours, soon robs them of that nervous fear or awe which possesses less sophisticated souls. When you are sent in the morning to attend a wedding or a fire, at noon to interview a celebrity or describe a trial, and at night to report an explosion, a political meeting or a murder, you soon lose all that sense of unwelcomed intrusion which restrains the average citizen. Celebrities become mere people. Gorgeous functions melt into commonplace affairs, no better than any other function that has been or will be again; an hotel like this is little more than a mere lounging place to the itinerant scribe, to the comforts of which as a representative of the press he is entitled.
If not awe or mystery, then certainly nervous anticipation attaches to the movements and personality of nearly all reporters. At least it does in my case. To this day, though I have been one in my time, I stand in fear of them. I never know what to expect, what scarifying question they are going to hurtle at me, or what cold, examining eyes are going to strip me to the bone—eyes that represent brains so shrewd and merciless that one wonders why they do not startle the world long before they usually do.
In those days this hotel was the most luxurious in Cleveland, and here, between hours, because it was cold and I was lonely, I came to sit and stare out at all the passing throng, vigorous and active enough to entertain anyone. It was a brisk life that Cleveland presented, and young. The great question with me always was, how did people come to be, in the first place? What were the underlying laws of our being? How did it come that human beings could separate themselves from cosmic solidarity and navigate alone? Why did we all have much the same tastes, appetites, desires? Why should two billion people on earth have two feet, two eyes, two hands? The factthat Darwin had already set forward his facts as to evolution did not clear things up for me at all. I wanted to know who started the thing evolving, and why. And so I loved to sit about in places like this where I could see people and think about it.
Incidentally I wanted to think about government and the growth of cities and the value and charm of different professions, and whether my own somewhat enforced profession (since I had no cunning, apparently, for anything else) was to be of any value to me. I was just at the age when the enjoyment of my life and strength seemed the most important thing in the world. I wanted to live, to have money, to be somebody, to meet and enjoy the companionship of interesting and well placed people, to seem to be better than I was. While I by no means condemned those above or beneath, nor ignored the claims of any individual or element to fair and courteous treatment, still, materialist that I was, I wanted to share on equal terms with the best, in all the more and most exclusive doings and beings. The fact that the world (in part) was busy about feasts and pleasures, that there were drawingrooms lighted for receptions, diningrooms for dinner, ballrooms for dancing, and that I was nowhere included, was an aching thorn. I used to stroll about where theatres were just receiving their influx of evening patrons or where some function of note was being held, and stare with avid eyes at the preparations. I felt lone and lorn. A rather weak and profitless tendency, say you? Quite so; I admit it. It interests me now quite as much as it possibly could you. I am now writing of myself not as I am, but as I was.
We gained the information that the best road to Fort Wayne was not via the lake shore, as we wished, but through a town called Elyria and Vermilion, and so on through various Ohio towns to the Indiana line. I did not favor that at all. I argued that we should go by the lake anyhow, but somehow we started for Elyria—or “Delirious,” as we called it.
In leaving Cleveland I urged Franklin to visit the region where originally stood the house in which I had stopped, and to my surprise I found the place entirely done over—cleared of all the old tracks, houses and docks which, from the formal point of view, once marred the waterfront. In their stead were several stately municipal buildings facing the wide bosom of the lake and surrounded by great spaces of smooth grass. It was very imposing. So the spot I had chosen as most interesting to me had become the civic centre of the city! This flattered me not a little.
But Elyria and Vermilion—what about them?
Nothing. Just Ohio towns.
At Elyria we found a stream which had been diverted and made to run a turbine engine in order that the town might have light; but it was discovered afterward that there wasn’t enough water power after all to supply the town, and so extra light had to be bought and paid for. The works were very picturesque—a deep, craggy cave, at the bottom of which was the turbine engine room, cut out of the solid rock apparently, the water pouring down through it. I thought what a delightful place it was for the town boys to play!
But this inland country was really too dreary. All the uncomfortable experiences of my early youth began to come back as I viewed these small cottages set in endless spaces of flat land, with nothing but scrubby trees, wire fences and occasionally desolately small and bare white churches to vary the landscape. “What a life!” I kept saying to myself. “What a life!” And I still say it, “What a life!” It would require endless friends to make such a landscape endurable.
Before reaching the lake again, we traversed about twenty miles of a region that seemed to me must be devoted to the chicken raising business, we saw so many of them. In one place we encountered a huge natural amphitheatre or depression which could easily have been turned into a large lake—the same hollowed out by a stream known as the Vermilion River. In another we came toa fine threshing scene with all the implements for the work in full motion—a scene so attractive that we stopped and loafed a while, inquiring as to the rewards of farming in this region. In still another place we passed a small river pleasure ground, a boating and bathing place which was probably patronized by the villagers hereabout. It suggested all sorts of sweet, simple summer romances.
Then Vermilion came into view with a Chautauqua meeting announced as “coming soon,” and a cove with a lighthouse and pretty launches and sailboats at anchor. Speed announced that if we were going to idle here, as usual, he would stop at the first garage and get oil and effect certain repairs, and there we left him, happy at his task, his body under the machine, while we walked on into the heart of the village. It being noontime, the hope of finding a restaurant lured us, as well as that possibility of seeing something different and interesting which the sight of every new town held out, at least to me. Here we had lunch then, and quite a good one too, with a piece of cherry pie thrown in for good measure, if you please, and then because the restaurant was conducted by a Japanese by the name of B. Kagi, and because the girl who waited on us looked like an Americanized product of the Flowery Kingdom, I asked her if she was Japanese.
I never got a blacker look in my life. For a moment her dark eyes seemed to shoot sparks. Her whole demeanor, which hitherto had been pleasant and helpful, changed to one of deadly opposition. “Certainly not,” she replied with a sting in her voice, and I saw clearly that I had made a most painfulfaux pas. I felt called upon to explain or apologize to Franklin, who heard and saw it all. He was most helpful.
“I suppose,” he commented, “in these small middle West towns it isdeclasséto be Japanese. They don’t discriminate much between Japanese and Chinese. To suggest anything like that probably hurts her feelings dreadfully.If people here discover it, it lowers her in their eyes, or that is what she thinks.”
“But she looks Japanese to you, doesn’t she?” I queried, humbly.
“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.