“Kautilya,” he sobbed. “Princess of India.”
“Matthew,” she answered, in a small frightened whisper.
There was a silence as of a thousand years, a silence while again he found her lips and kept them, and his arms crept along the frail, long length of her body, and he cried as he whispered in her ears. Perhaps some murmur from the further rooms came to them, for suddenly they started apart. She would have said the things she had planned to say, but she did not. All the greater things were forgotten. She only said as he stared upon her with wild light in his eyes:
“I am changed.”
And he answered:
“The Princess that I worshiped is become the working-woman whom I love. Life has beaten out the gold to this fine stuff.” And then with hanging head he said: “But I, ah, I am unchanged. I am the same flying dust.”
She walked toward him and put both hands upon his shoulders and said, “Flying dust, that is it. Flying dust that fills the heaven and turns the sunlight into jewels.” And then suddenly she stood straight before him. “Matthew, Matthew!” she cried. “See, I came to save you! I came to save your soul from hell.”
“Too late,” he murmured. “I have sold it to the Devil.”
“Then at any price,” she cried in passion, “at any price, I will buy it back.”
“What shall we do—what can we do?” he whispered, troubled, in her hair.
“We must give up. We must tell all men the truth; we must go out of this Place of Death and this city of the Face of Fear, untrammeled and unbound, walking together hand in hand.”
And he cried, “Kautilya, darling!”
And she said, “Matthew, my Man!”
“Your body is Beauty, and Beauty is your Soul, and Soul and Body spell Freedom to my tortured groping life!” he whispered.
“Benediction—I have sought you, man of God, in the depths of hell, to bring your dead faith back to the stars; and now you are mine.”
And suddenly there was light.
And suddenly from Matthew dropped all the little hesitancies and cynicisms. The years of disbelief were not. The world was one woman and one cause. And with one arm almost lifting her as she strained toward him, they walked shoulder to shoulder out into that blinding light.
And as they walked there seemed to rise above the startled, puzzled guests some high and monstrous litany, staccato, with moaning monotones, bearing down upon their whisperings, exclamations, movements, words and cries, across the silver and crystal of the service:
“I will not have your nomination.”
(What does he mean—who is this woman?)
“I’d rather go to hell than to Congress.”
(Is the man mad?)
“I’m through with liars, thieves, and hypocrites.”
(This is insulting, shameless, scandalous!)
“The cause that was dead is alive again; the love that I lost is found!”
(A married man and a slut from the streets!)
“Have mercy, have mercy upon us!” whispered the woman.
The company surged to its feet with hiss and oath.
Sara, white to the lips, her hard-clenched hand crushing the fragile China to bits, walked slowly backward before them with blazing eyes.
“I am free!” said Matthew.
The low voice of the Princess floated back again from the crimson curtains of the hall:
“Kyrie Eleison.”
The high voice of Sara, like the final fierce upthrusting of the Host, shrilled to a scream:
“You fool—you Goddamned fool!”
XXIV
The hall door crashed. The stunned company stared, moved, and rushed hurriedly to get away, with scant formality of leave-taking. It was raining without, a cold wet sleet, but the beautiful apartment vomited its guests upon the sidewalk while taxis rushed to aid.
The president of the Woman’s City Club rushed out the door with flushed face.
“These Negroes!” she said to the settlement worker. “They are simply impossible! I have known it all along, but I had begun to hope; such persistent, ineradicable immorality! and flaunted purposely in our very faces! It is intolerable!”
The settlement worker murmured somewhat indistinctly about the world being “well lost” for something, as they climbed into a cab and flew north.
The Republican boss, the state official, and the banker loomed in the doorway, pulling on their gloves, adjusting their coats and cravats, and hailing hurrying taxis.
“Well, of all the damned fiascos,” said the banker.
“Niggers in Congress! Well!” said the official.
“It is just as well,” said the boss. “In fact it is almost providential. It looked as though we had to send a Negro to Congress. That unpleasant possibility is now indefinitely postponed. Of course, now we’ll have to send you.”
“Oh!” said the banker softly and deprecatingly.
“It is going to cost something,” said the boss shrewdly. “You will have to buy up all these darky newspapers and grease Sammy’s paw extraordinarily well. The point is, buying is possible now. They have no comeback. Sammy may have aspirations, but I think we can make even him see that it will be unwise to put up another colored candidate now. No, the thing has turned out extraordinarily well; but I wonder what the devil got hold of Towns, acting as though he was crazy?”
The physician’s wife and the lawyer’s lingered a little, clustering to one side so as to avoid meeting the white folks; they stared and whispered.
“It is the most indecent thing I have heard of,” said the physician’s wife. The lawyer’s wife moaned in her distress:
“To think of a Negro acting that way, and before these people! And after all this work. Won’t we ever amount to anything? Won’t we ever get any leaders? I am simply disgusted and discouraged. I’ll never work for another Negro leader as long as I live.”
And they followed their husbands to the two large sedans that stood darkly groaning, waiting.
The physician snarled to the minister, “And with the streets full of women cheaper and prettier.”
The Labor delegation had pushed into
