There was a little court scene on State Street in April, 1927. It looked more like an intimate family party, and everybody seemed in high good humor. The white judge was smiling affably and joking with the Honorable Sammy Scott. Two or three attorneys were grouped about. Hats, canes, and briefcases were handy, as though no one expected to tarry long. Mrs. Sara Towns came in. Mrs. Towns was a quiet and thoroughly adequate symphony in gray. She had on a gray tailor-made suit, with plain sheath skirt dropping below, but just below, her round knees. There was soft gray silk within and beneath the coat. There were gray stockings and gray suede shoes and gray chamoisette gloves. The tiny hat was gray, and pulled down just a trifle sideways so as to show sometimes one and sometimes two of her cool gray eyes. She looked very competent and very desirable. The Honorable Sammy’s eyes sparkled. He liked the way Sara looked. He did not remember ever seeing her look better.
He felt happy, rich, and competent. He just had to tell Corruthers, aside:
“Yes, sir! She just got up of her own accord and gave me a kiss square on the beezer. You could ’a’ bowled me over with a feather.”
“Oh, she always liked you. She just married Towns for spite.”
Sammy expanded. Things were coming very nicely to a head. The new Mayor had just been elected by a landslide; at the same time the Mayor’s enemy, the Governor, knew that while Sammy had fought the Mayor in the primaries according to orders, he had nevertheless come out of the election with a machine which was not to be ignored. The pending presidential election was bound to set things going Sammy’s way. The Mayor’s popularity was probably local and temporary. The Governor had his long fingers on the powerful persons who pull the automata which rule the nation. These automata had been, in Sammy’s opinion, quite convinced that no one would do their will in Congress better than the Honorable Sammy Scott. Moreover, the Governor and Mayor were not going to be enemies long. They could not afford it.
In other words, to put it plainly, the slate was being arranged so that after the presidential election of 1928, the succeeding congressional election would put the first colored man from the North in Congress, and it was on the boards that this man was to be Sammy. Meantime and in the three years ensuing, the prospective Mrs. Sara Scott and her husband were going to have a chance to play one of the slickest political games ever played in Chicago. Above all, Sammy was more than well-to-do, and Sara was no pauper. He wasn’t merely asking political favors. He was demanding, and he had the cash to pay. Sammy rubbed his hands and gloated over Sara.
A clerk hurried in with a document. The judge, poising his pen, smiled benevolently at Sara. Sara had seated herself in a comfortable-looking chair, holding her knees very close together and yet exhibiting quite a sufficient length of silk stocking of excellent quality.
“Does the defendant make any reply?” asked the judge. And then, without pausing for an answer, he started to write his name. He had finished the first capital when someone walked out of the gloom at the back of the room and came into the circle of the electric light which had to shine in the office even at noontime.
Matthew came forward. He was in overalls and wore a sweater. Yet he was clean, well shaven, and stood upright. He was perhaps not as handsome as he used to be. His face seemed a bit weather-beaten, and his hair was certainly thinner. But he had an extraordinarily strong face, interesting, intriguing. He spoke with some hesitancy, looking first at the judge, then at Sara, to whom he bowed gravely in spite of the fact that after a startled glance, she ignored him. He only glanced at Sammy. Sammy was literally snarling with his long upper lip drawn back from his tobacco-stained teeth. He almost bit through his cigar, threw it away, and brought out another, long, black, and fresh. His hand trembled as he lit it, and he blew a furious cloud of smoke.
“I did not come to answer,” said Matthew, “but simply to state my position.”
(“My God!” thought Sammy. “I’ll bet he’s got that bag of diamonds!”)
“Have you got a lawyer?” asked the judge, gruffly.
“No, and I do not need one. I merely want to say—”
“What’s all this about, anyway?” snapped Sammy.
Sara sat stiff and white and looked straight past Matthew to the wall. On the wall was a smirking picture of the late President Harding. An attorney came forward.
“We are willing that the defendant make any statement he wants to. Is there a stenographer here?”
The judge hesitated and then rang impatiently. A white girl walked in languidly and sat down. She stared at the group, took note of Sara’s costume, and then turned her shoulder.
“I merely wanted to say,” said Matthew, “that the allegations in the petition are true.”
“Well, then, what are we waitin’ for?” growled Sammy.
“I ran away from my wife and lived with another woman. I did this because I loved that woman and because I hated the life I was living. I shall never go back to that life; but if by any chance Mrs. Towns—my wife needs me or anything I can give or do, I am ready to be her husband again and to—”
He got no further. Sara had risen from her chair.
“This is intolerable,” she said. “It is an insult, a low insult. I never want to see this, this—scoundrel, again.”
“Very well, very well,” said the judge, as he proceeded to sign the decree for absolute divorce. Sara and Sammy disappeared rapidly out the door.
Matthew walked slowly home, and as he walked he read now and then bits of his last letter from Kautilya. He read almost absentmindedly, for he was meditating on that singularly contradictory feeling of disappointment which he had. One has a terrible plunge to make into some lurking pool of life. The pool disappears and leaves one dizzy upon a bank which is no longer a bank, but just arid sand.
In the midst of this inchoate feeling of disappointment, he read:
“Are we so far apart, man of God? Are we not veiling the same truth with words? All you say, I say, heaven’s darling. Say and feel, want, and want with a want fiercer than death; but, oh, Love, our bodies will fade and grow old and older, and our eyes dim, and our ears deaf, and we shall grope and totter, the shades of shadows, if we cannot survive and surmount and leave decay and death. No, no! Matthew, we live, we shall always live. Our children’s children living after us will live with us as living parts of us, as we are parts of God. God lives forever—Brahma, Buddha, Mohammed, Christ—all His infinite incarnations. From God we came, to God we shall return. We are eternal because we are God.”
Matthew sat down on the curb, while he waited for the car, and put his back against the hydrant, still reading:
“My beloved, ‘Love is God, Love is God and Work is His Prophet’; thus the Lord Buddha spoke.”
The street car came by. He climbed aboard and rode wearily home. He could not answer the letter. The revulsion of feeling and long thought-out decision was too great. He had drained the cup. It was not even bitter. It was nauseating. Instead of rising to a great unselfish deed of sacrifice, he had been cast out like a dog on this side and on that. He stared at Kautilya’s letter. What had she really wanted? Had she wanted Sara to take him back? Would it not have eased her own hard path and compensated for that wild deed by which she had rescued his soul? Did not her deed rightly end there with that week in heaven? Was not his day of utter renunciation at hand? And if one path had failed, were there not a thousand others? What would be more simple than walking away alone into the world of men, and working silently for the things of which he and Kautilya had dreamed?