Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/56

 I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people, anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous, as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world's being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:

"Why, they thought it was right, of course."

He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint, elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered—it could not be! It was preposterous, absurd!

"Why?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," he said.