Dark Princess
By W. E. B. Du Bois.
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To
Her High Loveliness
Titania XXVII
By her own grace
Queen of Faerie,
Commander of the Bath; Grand Medallion of Merit; Litterarum Humanarum Doctor; Fidei Extensor; etc., etc.
Of whose faith and fond affection
this romance
was surely born
Dark Princess
Part I
The Exile
August, 1923
Summer is come with bursting flower and promise of perfect fruit. Rain is rolling down Nile and Niger. Summer sings on the sea where giant ships carry busy worlds, while mermaids swarm the shores. Earth is pregnant. Life is big with pain and evil and hope. Summer in blue New York; summer in gray Berlin; summer in the red heart of the world!
I
Matthew Towns was in a cold white fury. He stood on the deck of the Orizaba looking down on the flying sea. In the night America had disappeared and now there was nothing but waters heaving in the bright morning. There were many passengers walking, talking, laughing; but none of them spoke to Matthew. They spoke about him, noting his tall, lean form and dark brown face, the stiff, curled mass of his sinewy hair, and the midnight of his angry eyes.
They spoke about him, and he was acutely conscious of every word. Each word heard and unheard pierced him and quivered in the quick. Yet he leaned stiff and grim, gazing into the sea, his back toward all. He saw the curled grace of the billows, the changing blues and greens; and he saw, there at the edge of the world, certain shining shapes that leapt and played.
Then they changed—always they changed; and there arose the great cool height of the room at the University of Manhattan. Again he stood before the walnut rail that separated student and Dean. Again he felt the bewilderment, the surge of hot surprise.
“I cannot register at all for obstetrics?”
“No,” said the Dean quietly, his face growing red. “I’m sorry, but the committee—”
“But—but—why, I’m Towns. I’ve already finished two years—I’ve ranked my class. I took honors—why—I—This is my Junior year—I must—.”
He was sputtering with amazement.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hell! I’m not asking your pity, I’m demanding—”
The Dean’s lips grew thin and hard, and he sent the shaft home as if to rid himself quickly of a hateful task.
“Well—what did you expect? Juniors must have obstetrical work. Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies?”
Then Matthew’s fury had burst its bounds; he had thrown his certificates, his marks and commendations straight into the drawn white face of the Dean and stumbled out. He came out on Broadway with its wide expanse, and opposite a little park. He turned and glanced up at the gray piles of tan buildings, threatening the sky, which were the University’s great medical center. He stared at them. Then with bowed head he plunged down 165th Street. The gray-blue Hudson lay beneath his feet, and above it piled the Palisades upward in gray and green. He walked and walked: down the curving drive between high homes and the Hudson; by graveyard and palace; tomb and restaurant; beauty and smoke. All the afternoon he walked, all night, and into the gray dawn of another morning.
II
In after years when Matthew looked back upon this first sea voyage, he remembered it chiefly as the time of sleep; of days of long, long rest and thought, after work and hurry and rage. He was indeed very tired. A year of the hardest kind of study had been followed by a summer as clerical assistant in a colored industrial insurance office, in the heat of Washington. Thence he had hurried straight to the university with five hundred dollars of tuition money in his pocket; and now he was sailing to Europe.
He had written his mother—that tall, gaunt, brown mother, hard-sinewed and somber-eyed, carrying her years unbroken, who still toiled on the farm in Prince James County, Virginia—he had written almost curtly: “I’m through. I cannot and will not stand America longer. I’m off. I’ll write again soon. Don’t worry. I’m well. I love you.” Then he had packed his clothes, given away his books and instruments, and sailed in mid-August on the first ship that offered after that long tramp of tears and rage, after days of despair. And so here he was.
Where was he going? He glanced at the pale-faced man who asked him. “I don’t know,” he answered shortly. The good-natured
