Matthew was talking in the darkness as they lay together closely entwined in each other’s arms.
“You will tell me, dear one, all about yourself? How came you here, masquerading as a trade union leader?”
“It must be a long, long story, Matthew—a Thousand Nights and a Night?”
“So short a tale? Talk on, Scheherazade!”
So Kautilya whispered, nestling in his arms:
“But first, Matthew, sing me that Song of Emancipation—sing that Call of God, ‘Go down, Moses!’ I believe, though I did not then know it—I believe I began to love you that night.”
Matthew sang. Kautilya whispered:
“When you left me and went to jail, I seemed first to awake to real life. From clouds I came suddenly down to earth. I knew the fault was mine and the sacrifice yours. I left the country according to my promise to the government. But it was easy to engineer my quick return from London in a Cunard second cabin, without my title or real name.
“And then came what I shall always know to have been the greatest thing in my life. I saw your mother. No faith nor religion, Matthew, ever dies. I am of the clan and land that gave Gotama, the Buddha, to the world. I know that out of the soul of Brahma come little separations of his perfect and ineffable self and they appear again and again in higher and higher manifestations, as eternal life flows on. And when I saw that old mother of yours standing in the blue shadows of twilight with flowers, cotton, and corn about her, I knew that I was looking upon one of the ancient prophets of India and that she was to lead me out of the depths in which I found myself and up to the atonement for which I yearned. So I started with her upon that path of seven years which I calculated would be, in all likelihood, the measure of your possible imprisonment. We talked it all out together. We prayed to God, hers and mine, and out of her ancient lore she did the sacrifice of flame and blood which was the ceremony of my own great fathers and which came down to her from Shango of Western Africa.
“You had stepped down into menial service at my request—you who knew how hard and dreadful it was. It was now my turn to step down to the bottom of the world and see it for myself. So I put aside my silken garments and cut my hair, and, selling my jewels, I started out on the long path which should lead to you. I did not write you. Why did I need to? You were myself, I knew. But I sent others, who kept watch over you and sent me news.
“First, I went as a servant girl into the family of a Richmond engineer.”
Matthew started abruptly, but Kautilya nestled closer to him and watched him with soft eyes.
“It was difficult,” she said, “but necessary. I had known, all my life, service, but not servants. I had not been able to imagine what it meant to be a servant. Most of my life I had not dreamed that it meant anything; that servants meant anything to themselves. But now I served. I made beds, I swept, I brought food to the table, sometimes I helped cook it. I hated to clean kitchens amid dirt and heat, and I worked long hours; but at night I slept happily, dear, by the very ache of the new muscles and nerves which my body revealed.
“Then came the thing of which your mother had warned me, but which somehow I did not sense or see coming, until in the blackness of the night suddenly I knew that someone was moving in my room; that someone had entered my unlocked door.”
Matthew arose suddenly and paced the floor. Then he came and sat down by the couch and held both her hands.
“Go on,” he said.
“I sat up tense and alert and held in my hand the long, light dagger with its curved handle and curious chasing; a dagger which the grandfathers of my grandfather had handed down to me. That night, Matthew, I was near murder, but the white man, my employer, slipped as I lunged, and the dagger caught only the end of his left eye and came down clean across cheek, mouth, and chin, one inch from the great jugular vein, just as the mistress with her electric torch came in.
“Instead of arrest which I thought I surely faced, the man was hurried out and off and the woman came to me in the still morning, worn and pale, and said, ‘I thank you. This is perhaps the lesson he needed.’
“She paid me my little wage and I walked away.”
“But, Kautilya, why, why did you go through all this? What possible good could it do?”
“Matthew, it was written. I went to Petersburg and worked in a tobacco factory, sitting cramped at a long bench, stripping the soft fragrant tobacco leaf from those rough stems. It was not in itself hard work, but the close air, the cramped position, the endless monotony, made me at times want to scream. And there were the people about me: some good and broken; some harsh, hard, and wild. Leering men, loud-mouthed women. I stayed there three endless months until it seemed to me that every delicate thought and tender feeling and sense of beauty had been bent and crushed beyond recognition. So I took the train and came to Philadelphia.
“I worked in two restaurants; one on Walnut Street, splendid and beautiful. The patrons usually were kind and thoughtful, with only now and then an overdressed woman who had to express her superiority by the loudness of her tones, or a man who was slyly insulting or openly silly. Only the kitchen and the corridors bruised me by their contrast and ugliness. Singularly enough in this place of food and plenty, the only proper food we waitresses could get to eat was stolen food. I hated the stealing, but I was hungry and tired. From there I went down to South Street to a colored restaurant and worked a long time. It was an easygoing place with poor food and poor people, but kind. They crowded in at all hours, They were well-meaning, inquisitive; and if a busy workingman or a well-dressed idler sought to take my hand or touch my body he did it half jokingly and usually not twice.”
“Servant, tobacco-hand, waitress; mud, dirt, and servility for the education of a queen,” groaned Matthew.
“And is there any field where a queen’s education is more neglected? Think what I learned of the mass of men! I got to know the patrons: their habits, hardships, histories. I was the friend of the proprietors, woman and husband; but the enterprise didn’t pay. It failed. I cried. But just as it was closing I learned of your release, and after but a year, suddenly I was in heaven. I thought I had already atoned.
“But I knew that yet I must wait. That you must find your way and begin to adjust your life before I dared come into it again. And so I went to New York, that my dream of life and of the meaning of life to the mass of men might be more complete.
“I discovered a paper box-making factory on the lower East Side. It was a nonunion shop and I worked in a basement that stank of glue and waste, ten and twelve hours a day for six dollars a week. It was sweated labor of the lowest type, and I was aghast. Then the workers tried to organize—there was a strike. I was beaten and jailed for picketing, but I did not care. That which was begun as a game and source of experience to me became suddenly real life. I became an agent, organizer, and officer of the union. I knew my fellow laborers, in home and on street, in factory and restaurant. I studied the industry and the law, I traveled, made speeches, and organized. Oh, Matthew it was life, life, real life, even with the squalor and hard toil.”
“Yes, it was life. And the Veil of Color lifted from your eyes as it is lifting even from my blindness. Those people there, these here they are all alike, all one. They are all foolish, ignorant, and exploited. Their highest ambition is to escape from themselves—from being black, from being poor, from being ugly into some high heaven from which they can gaze down and despise themselves.”
“True, my Matthew, and while I was learning all this which you long knew, you seemed to me striving to unlearn. Oh, how I watched over you! You came down to Virginia. Hidden in the forest, I watched with wet eyes. Hidden in the cabin, I heard your voice. I caught the sob in your throat when your mammy told of my coming. I knew you loved me still, and I wanted to rush into your arms. But, ‘Not yet—not yet!’ said your wise old mother.
“I was working busily and happily when the second blow fell, the blow that came to deny everything, that seemed to say that you were not self of my own self and life of the life which I was sharing in every pulse with you. You married. I gave up.”
“You did not understand, Kautilya. You seemed lost to me forever. I was blindly groping for some counterfeit of peace. If I had only known you were here and caring!”
“I went down again to Virginia and knelt beside your mother, and she only smiled. ‘He ain’t married,’ she said. ‘He only thinks he is. He was wild like, and didn’t know where to turn or what to do. Wait, wait.’
“I waited. You would not listen to my messengers whom continually I sent to you—the statesmen of Japan, the Chinese, the groping president of the Box-Makers. Like Galahad you would not ask the meaning of the sign. You would not name my name. How could I know, dearest, what I meant to you? And yet my thought and care hovered and watched over you. I knew Sammy and Sara and I saw your slow and sure descent to hell. I tried to save you by sending human beings to you. You helped them, but you did not know them. I tried again when you were sitting in the legislature down at Springfield. You knew, but you would not understand. You sneered at the truth. You would not come at my call.”
“I did not know it was your voice, Kautilya.”
“You knew the voice of our cause, Matthew—was that not my voice?”
Matthew was silent. Kautilya stroked his hand.
“We met in London, the leaders of a thousand million of the darker peoples, with, for the first time, black Africa and black America sitting beside the rest. I was proud of the Negroes we had chosen after long search. There were to be forty of us, and, Matthew, only you were absent. I looked for you to the last. It seemed that you must come. We organized, we planned, and one great new thing emerged—your word, Matthew, your prophecy: we recognized democracy as a method of discovering real aristocracy. We looked frankly forward to raising not all the dead, sluggish, brutalized masses of men, but to discovering among them genius, gift, and ability in far larger number than among the privileged and ruling classes. Search, weed out, encourage; educate, train, and open all doors! Democracy is not an end; it is a method of aristocracy. Some day I will show you all we said and planned.
“All the time, until I left for this great meeting I had expected that somehow, some way, all would be well. Some time suddenly you would come away. You would understand and burst your bonds and come to us—to me. But as I left America fear entered my heart—fear for your soul. I began to feel that I must act—I must take the step, I must rescue you from the net in which you were floundering.
“I remember the day. Gloom of fog held back the March spring in London. The crowded, winding streets echoed with traffic. I heard Big Ben knelling the hour of noon, and a ray of sunlight struggled dizzily on the mauve Thames. A wireless came. You were selling your soul for Congress.
“Before, you had stolen for others. You had upheld their lies—but your own hands were clean, your heart disclaimed the dirty game. Now you were going to lie and steal for yourself. I saw the end of our world. I must rescue you at any cost—at any sacrifice. I rushed back across the sea. Five days we shivered, rolled, and darted through the storm. Almost we cut a ship in two on the Newfoundland banks, but wrenched away with a mighty groan. I landed Friday morning, and left at two-fifty-five—at nine next morning I was in Chicago. That night I led your soul up from Purgatory—free!
“And here we are, Matthew, my love; and it is long past the hour of sleep; and you are trembling with apprehension at things which did not happen, at pits into which I did not fall, at failures over which we both have triumphed.”
The Princess paused, and Matthew started up. There was a loud insistent knocking at the door.
“Go,” said the Princess. “Have we not both expected this?”
Matthew hesitated a moment and then walked to the door and opened it. A colored police officer and two white men in citizens’ clothes stepped in quickly and started as if to search, until they saw the Princess sitting on the disheveled bed.
“Well?”
“We were hunting for you two,” said one of the plainclothes men.
“And you have found us?” asked Matthew.
“Yes, evidently. We wondered where you were spending the night.”
“We were spending the night here, together,” said Matthew.
“Together,” repeated the Princess.
The other man began to write furiously.
“You admit that,” said the first man.
“We admit it,” said Matthew, and the Princess bowed her head.
“Perhaps we had better look around a little,” said the other man tentatively. But the policeman protested.
“You got what you wanted, ain’t ya? Mr. Towns is a friend of mine, and I don’t propose to have no monkey business. If you’re through, get out.” And slowly they all passed through the door.