“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
