Dark Princess

people and my work. I tried to hide, but I was sent back. I worked as a porter, and I tried to be a good porter. And all the time I wanted to help⁠—to do a great thing for freedom and strike a great blow. I met a man. He was a fanatic; he was sinking into sin, and worse, he was planning a terrible deed. I sensed it and tried to dissuade him from it. I pointed out its impossibility and futility. But he cursed me for a coward and went on. I could have run away; I could have betrayed him. I did instead an awful thing⁠—an awful deed which the death of an innocent man spurred me to. I do not know whether I was right or wrong, but I resolved to die on the train that my brave friend was resolved to wreck⁠—and then⁠—” Matthew paused, and the audience almost sobbed in suspense. “And then on the rushing train, Something would not let me do what I had planned. The credit is not mine. Something hindered; I stopped the train, but I did not betray my terrible friend. I went to jail. My friend⁠—died⁠—” He paused and groped; what was it he must say? What was it to which he must not forget to allude? He stood in silence and then remembered: “And, tonight, through the efforts of Sammy Scott I am free.”

That minute the Honorable Sammy Scott reached the apex of his career. The next day Matthew got a job, and Sara Andrews a diamond stickpin.

V

In jail Matthew Towns had let his spirit die. He had become one with the great gray walls, the dim iron gratings, the thud, thud, thud which was the round of life, which was life. Bells and marching, work and meals, meals and work, marching and whistles, Even, unchanging level of life, without interest, memory, or hope.

This at first; then, disturbing little things. As the greater life receded, the lesser took on exaggerated importance. The food, the chapel speaker, this whispered quarrel over less than a trifle; the oath and blows of a keeper.

“When I get out!”

Ten years! Ten years was never. If such a space as ten years ever passed, he would come back again to jail.

“They all do,” said the keepers; “if not here, elsewhere.”

The seal of crime was on him. It would never lift. It could not; it was ground down deep into his soul. He was nothing, wanted nothing, remembered nothing, and even if he did remember the trailing glory of a cloudlike garment, the music of a voice, the kissing of a drooping, jeweled hand⁠—he murdered the memory and buried it in its own blood.

Then came the miracle. First that neat and self-reliant young woman who tried to make him talk. He was inclined to be surly at first, but suddenly the walls fell away, and he saw great shadowed trees and rich grass. He was bending over a dainty tea-table, and he talked as he had talked once before. But he stopped suddenly, angry at the vision, angry at himself. He became mute, morose. He took leave of Sara Andrews abruptly and went back to his bench. He was working on wood.

Then came the pardon. In a daze and well-nigh wordless, he had traveled to Chicago. He sat in the church like a drowning swimmer who, hurled miraculously to life again, breathed, and sank. He had no illusions left.

He knew Sara and Sammy. They wanted to use him. Well, why not? They had bought him and paid for him. All his enthusiasm, all his hope, all his sense of reality was gone. He saw life as a great, immovable, terrible thing. It had beaten him, ground him to the earth and beneath; this sudden resurrection did not make him dizzy or give him any real hope. He gave up all thought of a career, of leadership, of greatly or essentially changing this world. He would protect himself from hurt. He would be of enough use to others to insure this. He must have money⁠—not wealth⁠—but enough to support himself in simple comfort. He saw a chance for this in politics under the command of Sara and Sammy.

He had no illusions as to American democracy. He had learned as a porter and in jail how America was ruled. He knew the power of organized crime, of self-indulgence, of industry, business, corporations, finance, commerce. They all paid for what they wanted the government to do for them⁠—for their immunity, their appetites; for their incomes, for justice and the police. This trading of permission, license, monopoly, and immunity in return for money was engineered by politicians; and through their hands the pay went to the voters for their votes. Sometimes the pay was in cash, sometimes in jobs, sometimes in “influence,” sometimes in better streets, houses, or schools. He deliberately and with his eyes closed made himself a part of this system. Some of this money, paid to master politicians like Sammy Scott, would come to him, some, but not much; he would save it and use it.

He settled in the colored workingmen’s quarter of the Second Ward⁠—a thickly populated nest of laborers, lodgers, idlers, and semi-criminals. In an old apartment house he took the topmost flat of four dilapidated rooms and moved in with an old iron bed, a chair, and a bureau.

Then he set out to know his district, to know every man, woman and child in it. He was curiously successful. In a few months scarcely a person passed him on the street who did not greet him. The November elections came, and his district rolled up a phenomenal majority for Scott’s men; it was almost unanimous.

He deliberately narrowed his life to his village, as he called it. One side of it lay along State Street in its more dreary and dilapidated quarter. It ran along three blocks and then back three blocks west. Here were nine blocks⁠—old, dirty, crowded⁠—with