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............