There was no answer to Matthew’s report. He had given the Princess a temporary address at Perigua’s place, and in this report he enclosed this room as a permanent one. He had sent the Princess’ letter to her bankers, as agreed on. Still there was no word or sign. Matthew was at first patient. After the second week, he tried to be philosophical. At the end of a month, he was disappointed and puzzled. By the first of December the whole thing began to assume a shape grotesque and unreal. They over there had perhaps succeeded in changing her mind. Perhaps she herself, coming and seeing with her own eyes, had been disillusioned. It would be hard for a stranger to see beneath the unlovely surface of this racial tangle. But somehow he had counted or this woman—on her subtlety and vision; on her own knowledge of the color line.
He did not know what to do. Should he write again? His pride said no, but his loyalty and determination kept him following up Perigua and remaining in touch with him. At least once a week they had conferences and Matthew reported. This week there was, as usual, little to report. He had seen a dozen men—three crazy, three weak, three dishonest, three willing but bewildered, dazed, lost. Broken reeds all. Perigua listened dully, hunched in his chair, chewing an unlit cigar—unkempt, unshaven, ill. His eyes alone lived and flamed as with unquenchable fire.
“Any money yet from abroad?” he asked.
“No.”
“Have you asked for any?”
“No.”
“So,” said Perigua. “You think it useless?” Hitherto Matthew had tried to play his part—to listen and study and say little as to his own thought. Suddenly, now, a pity for the man seized him. He leaned forward and spoke frankly:
“Perigua, you’re on the wrong tack. First of all, these people are not ready for revolt. And next, if they were ready, it’s a question if revolt is a program of reform today. I know that time has been when only murder, arson, ruin, could uplift; when only destruction could open the path to building. The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.”
Perigua glared. “And that time’s here, I suppose?”
“I don’t know,” said Matthew. “But I hope, I almost believe it is. It must be after that hell of ten years ago. At any rate, none of us Negroes are ready for such a program against overwhelming odds—”
“No,” yelled Perigua. “We’re tame tabbies; we’re fawning dogs; we lick and growl and wag our tails; we’re so glad to have a white man fling us swill that we wriggle on our bellies and crawl. We slave that they may loll; we hand over our daughters to be their prostitutes; we wallow in dirt and disease that they may be clean and pure and good. We bend and dig and starve and sweat that they may sit in sweet quiet and reflect and contrive and build a world beautiful for themselves to enjoy.
“And we’re not ready even to protest, let alone fight. We want to be free, but we don’t dare strike for it. We think that the blows of white men—of white laborers, of white women—are blows for us and our freedom! Hell! you damned fool, they have always been fighting for themselves. Now, they’re half free, with us niggers to wait on them; we give white carpenters and shop girls their coffee, sugar, tea, spices, cotton, silk, rubber, gold, and diamonds; we give them our knees for scrubbing and our hands for service—we do it and we always shall until we stand and strike.”
And Perigua leaped up, struck the table until his clenched hand bled.
Matthew quailed. “I know—I know,” he said. “I’m not minimizing it a bit. In a way, I’m as bitter about it all as you—but the practical question is, what to do about it? What will be effective? Would it help, for instance, to kill a couple of dozen people who, if not innocent of intentional harm, are at least unconscious of it?”
“And why unconscious? Because we don’t make ’em know. Because you’ve got to yell in this world when you’re hurt; yell and swear and kick and fight. We’re dumb. We dare not talk, shout, holler. And why don’t we? We’re afraid, we’re scared; we’re congenital idiots and cowards. Don’t tell me, you fool—I know you and your kind. Your caution is cowardice inbred for ten generations; you want to talk, talk, talk and argue until somebody in pity and contempt gives you what you dare not take. Go to hell—go to hell—you yellow carrion! From now on I’ll go it alone.”
“Perigua—Perigua!”
But Perigua was gone.
Matthew was nonplussed. All his plans were going awry. Still no word or sign from the Princess, and now he had alienated and perhaps lost touch with Perigua. What next? He paused in the smoky, dirty club rooms and idly thumbed yesterday morning’s paper. Again he inquired for mail. Nothing. He stood staring at the paper, and the first thing that leaped at him from a little inconspicuous paragraph on the social page was the departure “for India, yesterday, of her Royal Highness, the Princess of Bwodpur.”
He walked out. So this was the end of his great dream—his world romance. This was the end. Whimsically and for the last time, he dreamed his dream again: The Viktoria Café and his clenched fist. The gleaming tea table, the splendid dinner. Again he saw her face—its brave, high beauty, its rapt interest, its lofty resolve. Then came the grave face of the Japanese, the disapproval of the dark Indians, the contempt of the Arab. They had never believed, and now he himself doubted. It was not that she or he had failed—it was only that, from the beginning, it had all been so impossible—so utterly unthinkable! What had he, a Negro, in common with what the high world called royal, even if he had been a successful physician—a great surgeon? And how much less had Matthew Towns, Pullman porter!
A dry sob caught in his throat. It was hard to surrender his dream, even if it was a dream he had never dared in reality to face. Well, it was over! She was silent—gone. He was well out of it, and he walked outdoors. He walked quickly through 135th Street, past avenue and park. He climbed the hill and finally came down to the broad Hudson. He walked along the viaduct looking at the gray water, and then turned back at 133rd Street. There were garages and old, decaying buildings in a hollow. He hurried on, past “Old Broadway” and up a sordid hill to a still terrace, and there he walked straight into the young Atlanta minister.
“Hello! I am glad to see you.”
For a moment Matthew couldn’t remember—then he saw the picture of the church—the dinner and the Joneses.
He greeted the minister cordially. “How is Miss Gillespie?” he asked with a wry grin.
“Married—married to that young physician you met at the radical conference. Oh, you see we followed you up. They have gone to Chicago. Well, here I am in New York on a holiday. Couldn’t get off last summer and thought I’d run away just before the holidays. Been here a week and going back tomorrow. Hoped I might run across you. I feel like a man out of a straitjacket. I tell you this being a minister today is—is—well, it’s a hard job.”
“My experience is,” said Matthew, “that life at best is no cinch.”
The minister smiled sympathetically. “I tell you,” he said, “let’s have a good time. I want to go to the theater and see movies and hear music. I want to sit in a decent part of a good theater and eat a good dinner in a gilded restaurant, and then”—he glanced at Matthew—“yes, then I want to see a cabaret. I’ve preached about ballrooms and ‘haunts of hell,’ ” he said with a whimsical smile, “but I’ve never seen any.”
Matthew laughed. “Come on,” he said, “and we’ll do the best we can. The first balcony is probably the best we can do at a theater, and not the best seats there; but in the movies where ‘all God’s chillun’ are dark, we can have the best. That gilded restaurant business will be the worst problem. We’d better compromise with the dining-room at the Pennsylvania station. There are colored waiters there. At the Grand Central we’d be fed, but in the side aisles. But what of it? I’m in for a lark, and I too have a day off.—In fact, it looks as though I had a life off.”
They visited the Metropolitan Art Museum at the minister’s special request; they dined about three at the Grand Central station, sitting rather cosily back but on one side, at a table without flowers. Matthew calculated that at this hour they would be better received than at the more crowded hours. Then they went at six to the Capitol and sat in the great, comfortable loge chairs.
The minister was in ecstasy. “White people have everything, don’t they?” he mused, as they walked up the Great White Way slowly, looking at the crowds and shop windows. “These girls, all dressed up and painted. They look—but—are many of them for sale?”
“Yes, most of them are for sale—although not quite in the way you mean. And the men, too,” said Matthew.
The minister was a bit puzzled, and as they went into the Guild Theater, said so. It was an exquisite place and they had fairly good seats, well forward in the first balcony.
“What do you mean—‘for sale’?” he asked.
“I mean that in a great modern city like New York men and women sell their bodies, souls, and thoughts for luxury and beauty and the joy of life. They sell their silences and dumb submissions. They are content to do things and let things be done; they promise not to ask just what they are doing, or for whom, or what it costs, or who pays. That explains our slavery.”
“This is not such bad slavery.”
“No—not for us; but look around. How many Negroes are here enjoying this? How many can afford to be here at the wages with which they must be satisfied if these white folks are to be rich?”
“You mean that all luxury is built on a foundation of poverty?”
“I mean that much of the costliest luxury is not only ugly and wasteful in itself but deprives the mass of white men of decent homes, education, and reasonable enjoyment of life; and today this squeezed middle white class is getting its luxuries and necessities by inflicting ignorance, slavery, poverty, and disease on the dark colonies of European and American imperialism. This is the New Poverty and the basis of armies, navies, and war in Nicaragua, the Balkans, Asia, and African. Without this starvation and toil of our dark fellows, you and I could not enjoy this.”
The minister was silent, for the play began. He only murmured, “We are consenting too,” and then he choked—and half an hour later, as the play paused, added, “And what are we going to do about it? That’s what gets me. We’re in the mess. It’s wrong—wrong. What can we do? I can’t see the way at all.”
Then the play swung on: beautiful rooms; sleek, quiet servants; wealth; a lovely wife loving another man. The husband kills him; the curtain leaves her staring at a corpse with horror in her eyes.
The minister frowned. “Do they always do this sort of thing?” he asked.
“Always,” Matthew answered; and the minister added: “Why can’t they try other themes—ours for instance; our search for dinner and our reasons for the first balcony. Good dinner and good seats—but with subtle touches, hesitancies, gropings, and refusals that would be interesting; and that woman wasn’t interesting.”
They rode to Harlem for a midnight lunch and planned afterward to visit a cabaret. The minister was excited. “Don’t flutter,” said Matthew genially; “it’ll either be tame or nasty.”
“You see,” said the minister, “sex is curiously thrust on us parsons. Men dislike us—either through distrust or fear. Women swarm about us. The Church is Woman. And there I am always, comforting, advising, hearing tales, meeting evil ducking, dodging, trying not to understand—not understanding—that’s the trouble. Towns, what the devil should I know of the temptations—the dirt—the—”
“Look here!” interrupted Towns. They were in a restaurant on Seventh Avenue. It was past midnight. The little half-basement was tasteful and neat, but only a half dozen people were there. The waffles were crisp and delicious. Matthew had bought a morning paper. Glancing at it carelessly, as the minister talked, he shouted, “Look here!” He handed the paper to the minister and pointed to the headlines. The Ku Klux Klan was going to hold a great Christmas celebration in Chicago.
“In Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“But Chicago is a stronghold of Catholics.”
“I know. But watch. The Klan is planning a comeback. It has suffered severe reverses in the South and in the East; I’ll bet a dollar they are going to soft-pedal Rome and Jewry and concentrate on the new hatred and fear of the darker races in the North and in Europe. That’s what this meeting means.”
The minister frowned and read on. … Klansmen from the whole country will meet there. The grand officers and Southern members will go from headquarters at Atlanta on a luxurious special train and meet other Klansmen and foreign guests in Chicago; there they will discuss the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and prepare for a great meeting on the Rising Tide of Color, to be called later in Europe.
“And we sit silent and motionless,” said the minister.
“That’s it; not only injustice, oppression, insult, a lynching now and then—but they rub it in, they openly flout us. Is there any group on earth, but us, who would lie down to it?”
The minister was silent.
Then he said, “They may be rallying against Rome and liquor rather than against us.”
“Nonsense,” said Matthew, and added, “What do you think of violence?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose Negroes should blow up that convention or that fine de luxe Special and say by this bloody gesture that they didn’t propose to stand for this sort of thing any longer?”
The minister quailed. “But what good? What good? Murder, and murder mainly of the innocent; revenge, hatred, and a million ‘I told you so’s.’ ‘The Negro is a menace to this land!’ ”
“Yes, yes, all that; but not simply that. Fear; the hushing of loose slander and insult; the curbing of easy proposals to deprive us of things deeper than life. They look out for the Indian’s war whoop, the Italian’s knife, the Irishman’s club; what else appeals to barbarians but force, blood, war?”
The minister answered slowly: “These things get on our nerves, of course. But you mustn’t get morbid and too impatient. We’ve come a long way in a short time, as time moves. We’re rising—we’re getting on.”
But Matthew brooded: “Are we getting on so far? Aren’t the gates slowly, silently closing in our faces? Isn’t there widespread, deep, powerful determination to make this a white world?”
The minister shook his head; then he added: “We can only trust in Christ—”
“Christ!” blurted Matthew.