“Really, Joanna, you ought to treat me better. You know I’m staying in
New York just on account of you!”
“How do you want me to treat you, Peter?”
“Oh, hang it all. Why can’t you be nicer to me? When Brian comes to see
Sylvia she runs to meet him, puts her arms about his neck.”
“But Sylvia and Brian are engaged. You and I are just friends.”
“Just friends! Joanna, have a heart. What do you think I spend all my
spare time with you for? You know how I feel.”
Joanna raised a slim, protesting hand. “None of that, Peter! You come to
see me because both of us are interested in the same things. Each of us
is going to be an artist in different ways. What other girl is there in
New York who would let you talk to her about the joys of surgery?”
“What other girl would want me to?”
Joanna, looking at the long brown figure lying full length on the grass,
thought it highly improbable that any other girl would. She had seen
other girls in the company of Peter, and watched quite without jealousy
their ways with him. She rather prided herself on her own aloofness from
such tactics. Of course, some day she might let Peter talk to her about
things other than work and art, and she might answer him, but at present
the big things of life must be arranged. Love was an after
consideration, she felt, and as far as she knew she meant it.
It was a Saturday afternoon in July and the two were in Van Cortlandt
Park. Peter was to go to school in Philadelphia in the fall, and it was
important for him to earn as much money as possible for his expenses. He
might have gone with a group of other boys to one of the watering places
and worked in a hotel. But that took him too far away from Joanna.
Ragtime was coming into vogue then, and Peter proved himself an adept at
it. The butcher shop was of course a thing long since of the past.
“Here’s where I put my gift of strumming to some use,” he laughed to
Joanna. “You ought to see how glad they were to take me on at that
cabaret.”
“I hope you won’t learn anything you shouldn’t in that atmosphere,” she
had answered primly.
“Oh, of course I won’t,” he returned, thinking how amazed she would be
if she ever looked down from her pinnacle long enough to understand what
life really was. He would have liked her to see that cabaret with its
jostling crowds and blaring lights, and the host of noisy good-hearted
dancing girls. He tried to give her some description of it. But Joanna
turned away.
“Men and women are like that, just the same,” he protested. “Everybody
isn’t living on the mountain-tops like you, Janna. I can’t live there of
my own accord myself. That’s why I haunt you so because you do keep me
on the heights, dear.” She liked that.
“But just the same,” he resumed, rolling over on the short grass like a
lithe handsome animal, “all the big things of life smack of the earth.
Your poet has to eat, or he can’t write poetry. Well, so does the
commonest laboring-man. The queen has children, in agony, Janna, just
like the poorest charwoman. And love is the—the driving force for both
of them.” He mused a little. “Love is the most natural and ordinary
thing in the world.”
But Joanna didn’t believe that. “Love is a wonderful, rare thing, very
beautiful, very sweet, but you can do without it.”
“Not much you can’t. Better not try it, Joanna. You have to found your
life on love, then you can do all these other things.”
“Don’t talk like a silly, Peter. You know perfectly well that for a
woman love usually means a household of children, the getting of a
thousand meals, picking up laundry, no time to herself for meditation,
or reading or——”
“Dancing! That’s through poor management. Marry a man who understands
you, Janna, and he’ll see that you have time for anything you want.
Where is such a man? Behold him!” He struck his chest dramatically.
“Peter Bye! How you talk!”
“All right, I’ll choose something else. Tell me why is it that though
I’ve elected to stay in New York in all this hot weather just to be at
your side, I see less of you than at any time since I’ve been coming to
your house.”
“Does seem queer, doesn’t it? It must be because I have so much work to
do. I am taking extra singing lessons from Brailoff now. And my dancing
takes up a lot of my time; my classes come at such inconvenient hours,
7:30 to 10:00 three times a week.”
“That _is_ bad. Funny time to give dancing lessons. Where’d you say you
took them?”
“At Bertully’s.”
“Bertully’s! That’s in Twenty-ninth Street, isn’t it? How’d you ever
make it? I didn’t suppose a colored girl got a chance to stick her nose
in there.”
“She wouldn’t ordinarily. Bertully refused Helena Arnold last year. ‘I’m
sorry, Mees, but the white Americans like not to study with the brown
Americans. Vair seely, but so. I am a poor man, I must follow the
weeshes of my clients!’” Joanna shrugged her shoulders, spread her
hands.
“You’re a born impersonator, Jan. I can see that little Frenchman now.
How’d you ever get in, then?”
“Helena and I went back this year and asked if he would take a separate
class of colored girls, if we got it up for him. He was very decent,
said he’d be glad to. So we got up a class of eight, he only asked for
six. Of course, we had to take his hours.”
“Who are in it besides you and Helena?”
“Oh, all our crowd.” She named the daughters of several prominent
colored men, a physician, a lawyer, a journalist, a real-estate man
among them. “There’s Gertrude Moseley, Vera and Alice Manning, Elizabeth
Beckett, Sylvia, Helena, and I.”
“That’s seven.”
“Oh, yes, Sylvia meant to ask Maggie Ellersley.”
“H’m, she had other things in her head without bothering about fancy
dancing, hadn’t she? Funny how she went off and married without telling
any of us about it, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Joanna uneasily.
“You’d have thought she’d have let old Phil in on it. I wonder if they
had a falling out of any kind! Philip seemed rather hard hit when he
heard the news.”
“Not a bit of it. Why should he be?” Joanna spoke stoutly. But her tone
belied her convictions. She hadn’t forgotten Philip’s expression the day
Sylvia had come rushing in with the astounding news:
“What do you think? I just met Mrs. Ellersley. Maggie’s
married—married—think of it! She ran away with that man at her house,
that Mr. Neal. And they’re going to live in Philadelphia.”
Philip’s haggard face had turned a trifle more wan, Joanna had thought.
“Has she written to you, Sylvia?” he asked her quickly.
“Not a word. I can’t imagine why she said nothing to me about it. She
must have planned it for ages. If that isn’t the funniest!”
Later Joanna heard Philip asking his mother if she were sure she had
given him all the mail that had come for him while he was in
Philadelphia. Still later he had announced his intention of teaching
summer school in South Carolina.
“Fellow whose place I’m going to fill is sick. They’ve been at me a long
time to come. I think I ought to go, father. It will give me a chance to
see the South.”
Joanna’s throat constricted a little at the thought of Philip’s look,
his general listlessness. She wished she hadn’t written that letter.
Though that couldn’t have brought about the marriage. People don’t
arrange to be married over night. As Sylvia said, it must have been on
Maggie’s mind long since. And then, anyway, Philip couldn’t really have
cared for a girl like Maggie.
“I don’t believe Philip was the least bit interested in Maggie,” she
voiced her thought to Peter. “Well, anyway, Mr. Bye, that’s why my
company is so scarce. Goodness, what are you frowning about?”
“Well, I’m mad to think you swallowed that Frenchman’s insult. To think
of your taking lessons from him after that!”
“But, Peter, he didn’t insult us. He can’t help this stupid prejudice.
‘In my country, Mademoiselle Maréchal,’—he always calls me that—‘you’d
be an honor to any class.’ He says I’ve got a great future. That if
there’s anything that will break down prejudice it will be equality or
perhaps even superiority on the part of colored people in the arts. And
I agree with him.”
“But to be set apart like that!”
“What do I care?” asked Joanna, the practical. “You’ve got to take life
as you find it, Peter. The way I figure it is this. If all I needed to
get on the stage was the mastery of a difficult step, I’d get there,
wouldn’t I? For somehow, sometime, I’d learn how to overcome that
difficulty.”
“You bet you would.”
“Very well, then. Now my problem is how to master, how to get around
prejudice. It _is_ an awful nuisance; in some parts of this country it
is more than a nuisance, it’s a veritable menace. Philip says he’s going
to change all that some day. First, I’m going to get my training up to
the last notch, then I’m going to watch for an opportunity and squeeze
in.”
“You’ll never get it.”
“Oh, yes, I will. Some white people are kind, some of them are so truly
artistic that they’ll put themselves to great trouble for the sake of
art. Look at Bertully. It works him much harder than it does us to hold
those extra classes.”
“Bertully’s one man in a thousand. Besides, he’s a foreigner. Where’ll
you find a white American like that?”
“You blessed pessimist. I know of people like that already. That’s how
Helena Arnold got to Bertully in the first place. A Miss Sharples—why,
they’re the people your Aunt Susan works for, aren’t they? Your aunt
told Miss Sharples about Helena, and Miss Sharples took her, herself, to
Bertully.”
“That was awfully decent, I must say. Of course, the Sharples are
Philadelphia Quaker stock. Not that that makes much difference. The
white Byes were Quakers, and see how they left us stranded, though my
father told me old black Joshua Bye practically coined them their money.
Not many people like those Sharples.”
“There doesn’t need to be. The point is there’s _one_. Miss Sharples’
family, by the way, may have been Quakers, but there’s nothing Quakerish
about her. Helena says she goes with the Greenwich Village group all the
time, and for all their craziness, they’ve got some mighty big ideas.”
“Can’t get anything to eat, if you’re colored, down in their dinky old
restaurants.”
“Awful, isn’t it? Well, we’ll let some other colored person pound away
at that side of it. Me, I’m going to break into art. The public wants
novelty, and _I_ want fame. I’ve got to have it, Peter.”
“You talk about going on the stage as though you had a signed contract
in your hand. How’ll you get the stage-presence?”
“I’m to go on a recital tour next fall among colored people. I’m used to
singing in the choir. If I can stand before them I can stand before any
audience in the world.”
“Yes, we are mighty critical.”
“I should say so. Get up, Peter Bye. We’ve got to go home.”
They started on the long trip back.
“But see here, Joanna,” Peter pleaded when they reached the house, “you
will give me a little more time, won’t you? I don’t have to work in the
morning, you know. And I don’t work Wednesday nights. Promise me that,
won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, her heart warming to his glowing beauty. “We’ll
remember this summer, Peter, the last before we go off trying our wings
for further flights.”
That was an enchanted season. Peter used to call for her in the morning,
and the two would go off exploring. Joanna liked the foreign quarters,
but she had never cared to stand around too long in those teeming,
exotic streets. She was too conspicuous, attracted too many inquiring
glances. With Peter she felt safe to stand for long moments watching the
children play, to enter queer dark shops, to taste strange messes.
Sometimes she spoke to the women about their dresses, their headgear.
One Spanish woman, grown used to the sight of this dark American girl
and the good-looking boy at her side, took them into her quarters one
day and showed Joanna how she dressed her hair. Another time she taught
her an intricate Spanish dance.
“I’m going to do a dance representing all the nations, some day,” Joanna
told Peter.
They planned for Wednesday nights very carefully at first, but gradually
as the torrid weather increased, Joanna’s desire for the theater and
other indoor forms of amusement yielded to the desire to be cool at any
cost. Central Park claimed them then, and later Morningside, since it
was just a few moments’ stroll from the Marshalls’ new house.
Morningside was usually crowded. The seats were always taken when they
arrived.
“I wonder what time the people come,” Joanna murmured. But they didn’t
mind. The grass, the sloping hillside, was good enough for them. Joanna
would sit down, her dainty summer dress spread around her, her
splendidly poised head turned at first so she could see the passers-by.
She was forever studying types, and eyed them with a grave deliberation.
“You’ll get your head knocked off yet, Joanna,” Peter would remonstrate,
“staring at people so.”
He liked it better when later on in the evening she turned toward the
slope of the hill and looked down at the city, laughing in its myriad
twinkling lights. Her face at that time took on a grave wistfulness
which he could not analyze. Joanna herself could not define the feeling
which prompted that expression.
Peter, leaning on his elbow, would lie beside her, his curly black head
bent toward her, one slender brown hand touching her dress ever so
lightly. He would have given the world to believe she was thinking about
him, but he knew she was not. He would have been astounded if he could
have dreamed of the maze of her thoughts. Joanna was really most human
at moments like these. Through her mind was floating a series of little
detached pictures. She saw a glittering stage, Peter, herself, some
little children. She felt a hazy, nebulous, mystical joy.
Peter adored her at moments like these, but he was afraid of her, too.
One night she astonished him. “Peter,” she said suddenly, “sit up. So.
I’m tired. I’ve had a hard day. Do you mind if I rest my head on your
shoulder?”
Would he mind if she offered him a king’s estate?
He was too ecstatic, too—yes—scared, to speak. He sat as she directed,
he stretched his thin tense arm around her fine young body. He even put
up one hand and pressed her head closer against his shoulder, touched
her hair, let his fingers trail ever so lightly over her cheek. Joanna
in his arms! Joanna!
She felt him trembling. “Am I too heavy, Peter?”
He could hardly articulate, but she heard his ardent “no” and moved
imperceptibly closer.
His breath stirred her thick, dark hair. He let it caress his chin. Its
soft heaviness was a revelation to him, a rapture.
She lay so quietly against him he thought she must be asleep. So he
whispered, “Are you asleep, Joanna?”
“No,” she whispered back, “only very, very tired.”
“Oh, Joanna, Joanna,” he breathed, “be tired forever.”
Somewhere out of the heavenly silence, a girl’s voice, a foreign voice,
broke into song high and shrill. Russian, Peter thought. It was just a
snatch, poignant and sweet, that died away leaving a faint lingering
sadness.
She put her head back then. She opened her dark eyes and looked full
into his.
Their lips were so near, so near. In a second he had pressed his against
hers, briefly yet with passion. She sat up and drew a little away from
him, dazed. But he put his arms around her and held her close. Presently
they walked home, speechless. When they came to an arc-light, they
looked at each other’s faces, eager to study and to reveal these new
selves. Their glances met and clung with a sweet enchantment. Something
leaped, something fluttered within their hearts, like a fettered,
struggling wing. And it was beautifully, it was magically, first love!
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