The hall door crashed. The stunned company stared, moved, and rushed hurriedly to get away, with scant formality of leave-taking. It was raining without, a cold wet sleet, but the beautiful apartment vomited its guests upon the sidewalk while taxis rushed to aid.
The president of the Woman’s City Club rushed out the door with flushed face.
“These Negroes!” she said to the settlement worker. “They are simply impossible! I have known it all along, but I had begun to hope; such persistent, ineradicable immorality! and flaunted purposely in our very faces! It is intolerable!”
The settlement worker murmured somewhat indistinctly about the world being “well lost” for something, as they climbed into a cab and flew north.
The Republican boss, the state official, and the banker loomed in the doorway, pulling on their gloves, adjusting their coats and cravats, and hailing hurrying taxis.
“Well, of all the damned fiascos,” said the banker.
“Niggers in Congress! Well!” said the official.
“It is just as well,” said the boss. “In fact it is almost providential. It looked as though we had to send a Negro to Congress. That unpleasant possibility is now indefinitely postponed. Of course, now we’ll have to send you.”
“Oh!” said the banker softly and deprecatingly.
“It is going to cost something,” said the boss shrewdly. “You will have to buy up all these darky newspapers and grease Sammy’s paw extraordinarily well. The point is, buying is possible now. They have no comeback. Sammy may have aspirations, but I think we can make even him see that it will be unwise to put up another colored candidate now. No, the thing has turned out extraordinarily well; but I wonder what the devil got hold of Towns, acting as though he was crazy?”
The physician’s wife and the lawyer’s lingered a little, clustering to one side so as to avoid meeting the white folks; they stared and whispered.
“It is the most indecent thing I have heard of,” said the physician’s wife. The lawyer’s wife moaned in her distress:
“To think of a Negro acting that way, and before these people! And after all this work. Won’t we ever amount to anything? Won’t we ever get any leaders? I am simply disgusted and discouraged. I’ll never work for another Negro leader as long as I live.”
And they followed their husbands to the two large sedans that stood darkly groaning, waiting.
The physician snarled to the minister, “And with the streets full of women cheaper and prettier.”
The Labor delegation had pushed into the library as Matthew and Kautilya left, and entered the reception room. They stood now staring at the disheveled room and the guests rushing away.
“What’s happened?”
“Has he told them what’s what?”
“Are they deserting us? Are they running away?”
But the colored club women walked away in silence in the rain. They parted at the corner and one said:
“I’m proud of him, at last.”
But the other spit:
“The beast!”