“Can I make you realize how I was dazed and blinded by the Great White World?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “I quite understand. Singularly enough, we black folk of America are the only ones of the darker world who see white folk and their civilization with level eyes and unquickened pulse. We know them. We were born among them, and while we are often dazzled with their deeds, we are seldom drugged into idealizing them beyond their very human deserts. But you of the forest, swamp, and desert, of the wide and struggling lands beyond the Law—when you first behold the glory that is London, Paris, and Rome, I can see how easily you imagine that you have seen heaven; until disillusion comes—and it comes quickly.”
“Yes,” sighed Kautilya, with a shudder, “it came quickly. It approached while I was in France in 1917. Suddenly, a bit of the truth leapt through. There, at Arras, an Indian stevedore, one of my own tribe and clan, crazed with pain, bloody, wild, tore at me in the hospital.
“ ‘Damn you! Black traitor. Selling your soul to these dirty English dogs, while your people die—your people die.’
“I hurried away, pale and shaken, yet heard the echo: ‘Your people die!’
“Then I descended into hell; I slipped away unchaperoned, unguarded, and in a Red Cross unit served a month in the fiery rain before I was discovered and courteously returned to England.
“Oh, Vishnu, Incarnate, thou knowest that I saw hell. Dirt and pain, blood and guts, murder and blasphemy, lechery and curses; from these, my eyes and ears were almost never free. For I was not serving officers now in soft retreats, I was toiling for ‘niggers’ at the front.
“Sick, pale, and shaken to my inmost soul, I was sent back to the English countryside. I was torn in sunder. Was this Europe? Was this civilization? Was this Christianity? I was stupefied—I—”
Shuddering, she drew Matthew’s arms close about her and put her cheek beside his and shut her eyes.
Matthew began to talk, low-voiced and quickly, caressing her hair and kissing her closed eyes. The sun fell on the fiery land behind, and the waters darkened.
“We must go now, dearest,” she said at length; “we have a long walk.” And so they ate bread and milk and swung, singing low, toward the burning city. At Hyde Park she guided him west out toward the stockyard district. In a dilapidated street they stopped where lights showed dimly through dirty windows.
“This is the headquarters of the Box-Makers’ Union,” he said suddenly and stared at it as at a ghost.
“Will you come in with me?” she asked.
It was a poor, bare room, with benches, a table, and a low platform. Several dozen women and a few men, young and old, white, with a few black, stood about, talking excitedly. A quick blow of silence greeted their entrance; then a whisper, buzz, and clatter of sound.
They surged away and toward and around them. One woman—Matthew recognized the poor shapeless president ran and threw her arms about Kautilya; but a group in the corner hissed low and swore. The Princess put her hand lovingly on the woman who stood with streaming eyes, and then walked quietly to the platform.
“I am no longer an official or even a member of the international union. I have resigned,” she said simply in her low, beautiful voice. A snarl and a sigh answered her.
“I am sorry I had to do what I did. I have in a sense betrayed you and your cause, but I did not act selfishly, but for a greater cause. I hope you will forgive me. Sometime I know you will. I have worked hard for you. Now I go to work harder for you and all men.” She paused, and her eyes sought Matthew where he stood, tall and dark, in the background, and she said again in a voice almost a whisper:
“I am going home. I am going to Kali. I am going to the Maharajah of Bwodpur!”
She walked slowly out, but paused to whisper to the president: “That bag—that little leather bag I asked you to keep—will you get it?”
“But you took it with you that—that night.”
“Oh, did I? I forgot. I wonder where it is?” and Kautilya joined Matthew and they walked out.
Behind them the Box-Makers’ Union sneered and sobbed.
IV
“I do not quite understand,” said Matthew. “You have mentioned—twice—the Maharajah of Bwodpur. Did he not die?”
“The King is dead, long live the King! But do not interrupt—listen!”
They were sitting in his den on one side of a little table, facing the fire that glowed in the soft warmth of evening. They had had their benediction of music—the overture to Wilhelm Tell, which seemed to picture their lives. Together they hummed the sweet lilt of the music after the storm.
Before them was rice with a curry that Kautilya had made, and a shortcake of biscuit and early strawberries which Matthew had triumphantly concocted. With it, they drank black tea with thin slices of lemon.
“I think,” said Kautilya, “that there was nothing in this century so beautiful as the exaltation of mankind in November, 1918. We all stood hand in hand on the mountain top, upon some vaster Everest. We were all brothers. We forgot the horror of that blood-choked interlude. I forgot even the front at Arras. I remember tearing like a maenad, cypress-crowned, through Piccadilly Circus, hand in hand with white strangers.
“I had just had an extraordinary conversation with an Englishman of highest rank. He had bowed over my hand.
“ ‘Your Highness,’ he said, ‘when the Emperor saw fit to urge your stay in England, he had hopes that your influence and high birth would do much to win this war for civilization.’ I was thrilled. England! Actually to be necessary to this
