ONE of the mysteries of the ages will be solved with the answer to the
question: Why do men consider women incalculable? Peter had been hurt by
Joanna’s indifference again and again, she had refused a dozen times to
marry him, she had scolded him, teased him, slighted him. Yet she had
always come back to his eager arms. In spite of this he had been unable
to see in her attitude at Christmas and in the unkind letter which she
had written the logical outcome of her earlier acts—all of which by
enduring he had tacitly indorsed.
He read the letter in a maze of anger and wounded pride. Before he knew
it he had caught up his cap and started for Maggie’s house. By the time
the long, yellow, crawling car had jolted him over the uneven reaches of
Lombard Street and set him down at Fifteenth he was in a fever of
bitterness, resentment and self-pity. Maggie hardly knew him when he
entered her little sitting-room.
“Oh, Peter,” she went up to him swiftly, “something awful has happened.”
He showed her the letter, striding up and down the room as she read it.
She lifted her head to say to him: “She doesn’t mean it; you know
Joanna, always making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Instead she heard herself saying: “How could she possibly write such
things to you—you’ve always been so kind.”
“Too kind,” he muttered. “I tell you what, Maggie, Joanna’s got no
heart, she’s all head, all ideas and if you don’t see and act her way,
she’s got no use for you.”
“I do think she thinks herself a lot better than any one else,” Maggie
said slowly, remembering Joanna’s letter to her about Philip.
“Well, she is, you know,” he put in unexpectedly. “Oh, Lord, what am I
going to do without her!”
Genuinely touched, she sat down on the little box-couch beside him and
slid her arm around his shoulder. “After all, you’ve still got me,
Peter.”
He looked up at her, feeling the surge of a new idea in his heart. If he
could only punish Joanna—no not punish exactly, you couldn’t punish her,
she was always too remote for that—but shock her, let her see, as his
boyhood’s phrase would have had it, that she was not the only pebble on
the beach. Besides, what a revenge to cut loose altogether from the
influence of her ideals and ally himself with one whom she would have
characterized as having no ideals at all.
Before the thought was even shaped in his brain he was speaking:
“Of course I always have you, Maggie. How—how would you like to spend
your future with me?”
“What do you mean, Peter?”
“I mean, Joanna’s chucked me. You and I get along famously, you’ve got
your divorce from Neal. Why not marry me?”
It was plain that though surprised she liked the idea. She saw herself
suddenly transformed in this inhospitable snobbish city from Maggie
Neal, alone and _déclassée_, into Mrs. Peter Bye, a model of
respectability.
That he had no money, no accepted means of making a livelihood she
understood would mean nothing. He was a Bye and she as his wife could go
anywhere. She would show Alice Talbert! And afterwards when he got his
degree!
But because she had once loved Philip she could judge what Peter might
mean to Joanna. To her credit she hesitated.
“Joanna probably doesn’t mean to let you go, Peter, she’s just angry and
disappointed. She takes things harder than Sylvia or I. You know she
really cares about you, and so do you about her.”
But he assured her that he did not. “She’s too exacting. Now there’s one
thing about you, Maggie—maybe it’s because you’ve already been
married—you know how to treat a man. Joanna makes you feel as though you
were in a strait-jacket all the time. I always feel ordinary when I’m
with you.”
Neither of them noticed the doubtfulness of the compliment. In the end
she accepted him. After all, she owed nothing to Joanna, who certainly
had not considered her. How surprised she would be to think that Peter
could so quickly find solace in her—Maggie’s—arms! And Joanna should
learn, too, that he could become a success without everlastingly being
pushed and prodded.
Hard on this thought came another. “Peter, you won’t have to work so
hard now to get through school. I’ll help you. You know I’m doing very
well with the hair-work.”
He dismissed the theme airily, one hand on her shoulder, the other
fumbling for a cigarette.
“Oh, I’m going to give medicine up. I’ll just keep on with Tom and the
music. Heavens, it’s so nice to know you won’t mind, Maggie. Can’t think
why I’ve stuck to the old school as long as I have, when here I am all
set with this nice easy job to my hand. Might as well get along with as
little trouble as possible. The world owes me a living.”
* * * * *
Afterwards, back in his room with the green iron bedstead and the Bye
Bible, he felt a difference, a sense of let-down-ness. He threw himself
across the bed and groaned.
“Joanna, how could you?”
She could, that was evident. He was stupefied at the turn in his
affairs. Five hours ago he had expected some day to be a physician and
to marry Joanna Marshall. Now it seemed that he was going to be a
musician and marry Maggie Neal.
“It isn’t true,” he told himself, fiercely. But it was true. There on
the dresser were some cookies wrapped up in a red and white fringed
napkin, Maggie’s gift when he left her.
“I made them for you, hoping you would come in. Now you’ll be in often,
often, won’t you? Oh, Peter, I’ll be good to you. I’ll be as unlike
Joanna as possible.” He did not want her to be unlike Joanna. In fact,
he did not want her at all.
He might as well take her, though, for Joanna did not want him. That was
it, no matter how many women he unaccountably married, Joanna might be
shocked but she would never really care. Or suppose she did care a
little while, she would soon forget it with her singing and dancing.
Still, he supposed he must tell her. He would write her a gay, mocking
letter. “I hope you’ll be as happy with your art as I feel I shall be
with Maggie. She suits me perfectly.”
After he had littered his desk and the floor beside it vainly with a
veritable snow-storm of torn bits of paper, he let his head drop on his
lean brown hands and went to sleep. Perhaps it would not be exact to say
he cried himself to sleep, but there were certainly tears that burnt and
scalded behind his eyelids.
His landlady complained of the torn paper the next morning. “’Tisn’t as
though you didn’t have a nice waste-paper basket ready and waitin’, Mr.
Bye.” As she finished speaking she handed him Joanna’s letter containing
Goethe’s poem. The tenderness, the real love that blazed in the
beautiful lines overwhelmed him. He could not tell her the truth after a
letter like that. So he wrote her, postponing but hinting, he fondly
believed, at the news which he must soon break to her. A month later,
finding himself still unequal to the task, he wrote to Sylvia.
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