'You have honoured my people and my work most delicately,' he said to me. 'I thank you for sending me the king's invitation to dinner to the Hôtel d'Angleterre. Too much public talk of this honour in the United States would do my people and myself much harm. I will make, in print, an acknowledgment of your courtesy, so effective and so agreeable. To have my work recognised in this manner by the most advanced Court in Europe is indeed worth while, and to have this honour without too much publicity is indeed agreeable.'
Mr. Washington's lecture had been a great success. It had helped, too, to do away with the impression that lynching is to the Americans of North America what bull fights are to those of South America. The most awkward question constantly put to me at Court and in society was, 'But why do you lynch the black men?'
Filled with satisfaction at the result of my machinations (a bad state of mind, as I have said), I was bending over my desk one morning when two correspondents of American newspapers were announced. They came from London; I had met them both before.
'Cigars?'
'Yes. We do not want to give you trouble, Mr. Minister; you were very decent to us all in the Cook affair, but we shall make a good story out of this Booker Washington visit, and we think it is only fair to say that we are going to 'feature' you. There is nothing much doing now, and we've been asked to work this thing up. We know on the best authority that the king will give a dinner to Booker Washington; you will respond with a reception; Mrs. Egan will be taken in to dinner by Mr. Washington; there will be lots of ladies there—in a word, we'll get as big a sensation out of it as the newspapers did out of the Roosevelt-Booker Washington incident. It will do you good in the North, and, as you're a Philadelphian, you need not care what the South thinks.'
These gentlemen meant to be kind; they were dropping me into a hole kindly, but they were letting me into a hole!
'It is not a question as to how I feel,' I said; 'it is a question of raising unpleasant discussions, of injuring the coloured people by holding out false hopes, which, hurried into action, excite new prejudices against them. President Roosevelt, when he invited Booker Washington to lunch, acted as I should like to act now, but I would regret the ill-feeling raised by discussions of such an incident as greatly as he regretted it; but,' I added, 'you have your duty to your papers, which must have news, although the heavens fall. If my wife is taken in to dinner by Mr. Booker Washington at Court, if I give the reception you speak of——'
'You will,' said the elder newspaper man, joyously; 'it is a matter of rigid etiquette. We have a private tip!'
'Very well, when I do these things, I shall not complain if you headline them.'
'Sensation in Denmark,' he read, from a slip. 'Wife of American Minister is taken in to Dinner by Representative Coloured Man. Perfect Social Equality Exemplified by Reception to Mr. Booker Washington at American Legation! London will like you all the better for that,' he said, laughing.