THE 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 Cleveland
_Plain Dealer_ or 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 method of 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 fact that 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 to a 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 painful _faux 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 is
_declassé_ to 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.