IF she had only answered the letter, then, that very moment!
But she had said to her impulse: “No, I must wait. I can’t let him off
too easily.” Perhaps, too, there was a little sense of satisfaction at
having him again at her knees, suing for her favors, but this was
secondary. Joanna was really sick at heart to think that her beautiful
dreams of success for both of them might not be realized. She wanted to
be great herself, but she did not want that greatness to overshadow
Peter.
Somehow the week slipped by, quickly enough, too. There was always
plenty to do. Love,—the desire to give it and receive it was tugging
persistently at the cords of her being, but she had been too long the
slave of Ambition to listen consciously to that. Yet she found herself
lying awake nights thinking, thinking, more about Peter than about her
singing engagements during the New Year, or about her plan to make her
mightiest efforts just now to enter the dancing world. Yet whatever she
might ponder by night, she spent all her time and strength by day going
to see performances, practicing, inventing new steps and new rhythms.
Through Helena Arnold and indirectly through Vera Sharples she obtained
the promise of an interview with one of the season’s favorites.
“I’ll be able to see you early Thursday evening,” the famous woman
wrote. “You may expect either a note or a telephone call from me.” At
one time such a promise would have sent Joanna into the seventh ecstasy,
without impairing her confidence. But recent discouragements,
persistent—and for her unusual, phenomena—had rendered her timid. She
was nervous. Her assurance wavered. She spent the whole day going
through her repertory. Sometimes she danced like a mænad. Then she
adopted a slow Greek rhythm, posturing and undulating. She struck
attitudes before the mirror, standing in one position for long moments.
“For Heaven’s sake,” said Sylvia, putting her head inside the door on
one of these occasions, “go out and take a walk, Joanna.” She was as
nervous as her sister.
“Not a bad idea, Sylvia, I believe I will. You can answer the phone.
Have you seen my brown cape?”
She came back a little after five, refreshed and soothed.
“No phone message,” Sylvia told her, “but here’s a note. What’s she got
to say, Janna?” She came and looked over her sister’s arm.
“So sorry not to be able to see you to-night,” the noted _artiste_ had
written. “I’m halfway expecting an old friend of mine and must keep the
evening free. I shall try to arrange to have you call, just the same,
not this month I’m afraid, but certainly in February.” She ended with a
meaningless expression of “good wishes.”
“Mercy,” said Sylvia, “why didn’t she say next year?”
Joanna was bitter. “Or next eternity? Sylvia, I wonder if I’m not a darn
fool!” She walked upstairs trailing her long brown cape after her.
All her life she had known and seen success. When she was born her
father was a successful caterer, almost a wealthy man. It is true that
she had seen her own people hindered, checked on account of color, but
hardly any of the things she had greatly wanted had been affected for
that cause. She had had money enough to have her dancing and music
lessons—the very fact that she had had to take separate and special
lessons from Bertully meant to her that some special and separate way
would be arranged whereby she would become a dancer on the stage.
She did not know how to envisage disappointment.
Strangely enough, the defection of the _artiste_ struck home to her more
keenly than the reception which she had had from the stage-managers. She
refused Sylvia’s invitation to come back downstairs and spend the
evening with her and Brian.
“We might go to a movie,” Sylvia had said tentatively. But Joanna had
only made an impatient gesture of refusal, and walking into her room had
closed the door very carefully after her.
She did not cry or throw herself across the bed. It might have been
better for her if she had. Joanna’s creed was that one kept a stiff
upper lip even to oneself. She had not had many occasions to try out
that creed.
There she sat, stiffly, on the spindling chair in front of her small
flat-topped writing desk and brooded over the future which suddenly
stretched dull, stale, and uninvigorating before her. She would never be
able to stand it.
The thought of her marriage flashed across her mind.
“And Peter,” she said to herself aloud, “willing to be ordinary and
second-rate! Where is that letter of his? I might just as well answer it
now as at any other time.”
In spite of her ugly mood a little wave of tenderness welled up in her
heart as she read,—“Just tell me that you do love me still,——”
“Oh, Peter, Peter,” she murmured, “if I tell you that you’ll never
change, never push on. If only you could be strong and let me bring my
troubles to you.”
It would never do to let him know how completely she was discouraged.
And equally she could not let him know how dear, weakness and all, he
was to her. She would make her love conditional. “If you want me to love
you, Peter,——”
She hated that, but some day they would both be glad of it. She actually
cried for the two of them as she wrote her stern little fiction:
“DEAR PETER:
“No, I don’t love you as you are. The man I marry must be a man
worth while like my father or Philip. I couldn’t stand the
thought of spending my life with some one ordinary.
“But I want to love you, Peter. Write me soon and say you are
going to get to work in earnest. Happy New Year.
“Sincerely,
“JOANNA.”
She read it over and over, totally blind to its supreme egotism. Then
she sealed it and, sniffling a little—more like a child than like an
artist—went to bed.
In the morning she awoke with a sense of impending disaster. The phrase
is trite but so, alas, is disaster. At first, as she lay there, her
slender brown arms stretched above her tumbled head, she mused to
herself about it.
“Let’s see why I do feel so rotten? What’s the matter?”
She remembered her engagement with the _artiste_. “But that’s not what’s
making me sick,” she told herself after a momentary probing of her
self-consciousness. Then recalling the letter to Peter, she got up and
walked bare-footed across the room to the desk, shivering a little as
the chilly January morning air struck at her, billowing her thin
nightdress. She thought she would read it again, but the envelope was
sealed. It slipped out of her hand and she ran back to bed again,
cuddling luxuriously.
“Oh, well!” Afterwards when she rose and closed the windows she promised
herself: “If I do send it I’ll write him a sweet, sweet letter soon.”
After breakfast she posted it. It fell with a heaviness into the box
that made her uneasy. “I’ll write him again to-night,” she thought.
“Poor Peter! He’ll be disappointed, I suppose.”
But the night brought her several offers to sing in Southern schools
which she thought she might just as well accept. Apparently nothing was
to come of her dancing. She had about a week in which to get ready.
Just before she left, a little surprised that she had not already heard
from Peter, she wrote him a long letter, her first long love-letter.
“Dearest Peter [she began]
“You can’t think how awfully I want to see you. If you were here
to-night I shouldn’t quarrel with you one moment.”
She quoted lines from one of Goethe’s poems.
“Ein Blick von deinen Augen in die meinen,
Ein Kuss von deinem Mund auf meinem Munde:
She hesitated a moment, a little aghast at this disclosure of her
feelings. “But I might just as well, he deserves it. Dear, dear Peter,
if I could just see you!”
She ended, smiling shamefacedly at her own abandon——
“Mein einzig Glück auf Erden ist dein Wille”——
She might have stopped in Philadelphia on her way South, but she
couldn’t after that letter. In Richmond she received a note from Peter
which Sylvia had forwarded.
“My dear Joanna [she was surprised at the formality]
“I have both your letters. I cannot tell you how surprised I was
at receiving the first or how much I cherished the second.
Joanna, I would give ten years of my life if you had written the
second one first. I am very busy now but I am going to write you
a final letter very soon.
“Sincerely,
“PETER.”
“‘A final letter,’” she quoted to herself. “What a funny thing to say!
Oh, Peter! And I wanted, I needed a real letter, a love-letter!” Her
natural reasonableness helped her. “It’s my own fault. I suppose he
feels like I feel sometimes, don’t-care-y. But ‘a final letter.’ I
wonder what he meant!”
But she did not puzzle long. Richmond was appreciative and gay. Some one
wrote her from Hampton and asked her to do an interpretative dance.
Partly because of the interest and excitement, partly because she had
forced herself to do so often, she resolutely put Peter out of her mind.
“He’ll know when I write him again,” she told herself ruefully.
Two weeks, a month passed; she came into her room one day to find a
bulky letter from Sylvia. “He doesn’t mean it, Joanna, of course, but I
had to send it.” Thus her sister’s note. Puzzled, she read the
inclosure, which turned out to be a letter from Peter to Sylvia.
“DEAR SYLVIA:
“I am writing to let you know that I am to be married in June.
Joanna told me she didn’t love me and so I am going to marry
Maggie Neal; she’s crazy about me. Tell Joanna not to bother
sending back any of the things I’ve given her.
“Sincerely,
“PETER.”
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