The house was finished complete with new and shining furniture, each piece standing exactly where it should. Matthew had particularly wanted a fireplace with real logs, He was a little ashamed to confess how much he wanted it. It was a sort of obsession. As long as he could remember, burning wood had meant home to him. Sara said a fireplace was both dirty and dangerous. She had an electric log put in. Matthew hated that log with perfect hatred.
The pictures and ornaments, too, he did not like, and at last, one day, he went downtown and bought a painting which he had long coveted. It was a copy of a master—cleverly and daringly done with a flame of color and a woman’s long and naked body. It talked to Matthew of endless strife, of fire and beauty and never-dying flesh. He bought, too, a deliciously ugly Chinese god. Sara looked at both in horror but said nothing. Months afterward when they had been married and had moved home, he searched in vain for the painting and finally inquired.
“That thing? But, Matthew, dear, folks don’t have naked women in the parlor! I exchanged it for the big landscape there—it fits the space better and has a much finer frame.” Sara let the ugly Chinese god crouch in a dark corner of the library.
The nomination went through smoothly. The “election of Mr. Matthew Towns, the rising young colored politician whose romantic history we all know” (thus The Conservator) followed in due and unhindered course, despite the efforts of Corruthers to knife him.
So in June came the wedding. It was a splendid affair. Sara’s choice of a tailor was as unerringly correct as her selection of a dressmaker. They made an ideal couple as they marched down the aisle of the Michigan Avenue Baptist Tabernacle. Matthew looked almost distinguished, with that slight impression of remote melancholy; Sara seemed so capable and immaculate.
Sammy, the best man, swore under his breath. “If I’d only been a marrying man!” he confided to the pastor.
The remark was made to Matthew’s young ministerial friend, the Reverend Mr. Jameson, formerly of Memphis. He had come with his young shoulders to help lift the huge mortgages of this vast edifice, recently purchased at a fabulous price from a thrifty white congregation; the black invasion of South Side had sent them to worship Jesus Christ on the North Shore.
“Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,” rolled the rich tones of the minister. Matthew saw two wells of liquid light, a great roll of silken hair that fell across a skin of golden bronze, and below, a single pearl shining at the parting of two little breasts.
“Straighten your tie,” whispered Sara’s metallic voice, and his soul came plunging back across long spaces and over heavy roads. He looked up and met the politely smiling eyes of the young Memphis school teacher who once gave him fifteen cents. She was among the chief guests with her fat husband, a successful physician. They both beamed. They quite approved of Matthew now.
“ ’Tis thy marriage morning, shining in the sun,” yelled the choir, with invincible determination. The bridal pair stepped into the new Studebaker with a hired chauffeur and glided away. Matthew looked down at his slim white bride. A tenderness and pity swept over him. He slipped his arm about her shoulders.
“Be careful of the veil,” said Sara.