SYLVIA had written. “He doesn’t mean it, of course”——
But Joanna knew better. Even while dumbfounded she stood staring at the
note, trying to believe there must be some mistake, her heart, her every
sense was telling her it was too true.
Peter had given her up. He was going to marry Maggie. _He had given her
up._ That was the important thing. For if he was not to marry her, what
difference did it make whom he married?
She had never been religious, she had never been dramatic. Rather she
somewhat despised any emphatically emotional display. “People don’t
really act that way,” she told herself.
Yet she dropped on her knees beside the pine bedstead in the sparsely
furnished room. Her hands clutched at the counterpane. She could feel
her throat constricting. A scalding hotness seared her nostrils, her
mouth became dry, her eyeballs burned.
“Oh, God! Oh, Peter!” She repeated the two phrases again and again in a
sick agony.
“God, you couldn’t let it be true. You know I always loved him, I didn’t
hide it from you. You knew my heart.”
At first she thought she would go to him. Then the fear that he might
not want to see her, might even refuse to see her, overcame her. That
humiliation she could never endure.
She sat down and wrote him a long letter, her pen flying over the page
like something bewitched. It could not move fast enough to empty her
heart of all she had to tell. If she could only make clear to him that
she had “chastened” him because she loved him. How patronizing, how
silly she had been. She said aloud, “How he and Maggie must have laughed
at me, setting myself up above them and their ideas as though I were
some goddess! Oh, God, why did you let me do it? You knew what I really
meant.”
Her tears almost blotted out her words.
The post-office was a mile away but she trudged the distance
mechanically, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, absorbed and drowned in
the black sorrow which overwhelmed her.
Peter’s answer, which came in four days, brought no solace. She had
never dwelt on any pages as she did on those of his last letter. The
curt, stern phrases both cut her and awakened a new respect for him.
With a sense of responsibility which Joanna had never seen in him
before, he insisted on honoring the claim which Maggie’s complete and
unexacting love made upon him. “Even if I wanted to give her up,” he
wrote in a sort of anguished virtuousness, “I would not, she has been
too kind to me. But I don’t want to give her up, Joanna. Besides, I’ve
got to consider the public. She has told several people that we are
engaged.”
Joanna cried aloud: “If you had only been like this before, ever before,
only once, I’d have known I couldn’t trifle with you. Oh, Peter, you
deceived me.” The tears stood, great wells of water about her eyes.
She finished her engagement in the quiet Southern city before an
audience which wondered vaguely what had happened to make Joanna
Marshall different. Somehow she packed her trunk, thanked the persistent
youth who had constituted himself her cavalier, and boarded the Jim Crow
car. Her cavalier for all his persistence had been unable to obtain for
her Pullman accommodations. After Washington she fell to wondering what
it used to be like in other days, less than a year ago, when she would
be coming up this way, through Baltimore, Wilmington, past Chester,
secure in the knowledge that Peter would be waiting for her at West
Philadelphia. He would never be there again! How could she endure it? It
was not possible that anyone could stand this thing. No wonder people
“crossed in love”—she dwelt on the phrase distastefully—killed
themselves. She toyed with the idea. Of course _she_ couldn’t; that sort
of relief was not for her. In the first place it was cowardly. With her
usual mental clarity she visualized the colored papers of Harlem. There
would be notices telling how the “gifted singer, Joanna Marshall,
daughter of Joel Marshall, died by her own hand——”
Her mind lingered over it, painting in new details, consciously
withdrawing as far as possible from the real cause of her grief.
As the train slid into the long shed at West Philadelphia she pressed
her face against the window-pane and strained out into the dusk.
Sometimes miracles did occur. Perhaps he was there, perhaps none of it
was true. Her tears crept down the glass, the man behind her watching
curiously.
Sylvia met her in New York, got her home and finally to bed. Mr. and
Mrs. Marshall knew nothing of the matter and Sylvia had told even Brian
very little. The two girls said nothing about Peter directly.
“Help me to get to sleep, Sylvia,” Joanna said suddenly after a rambling
account of her trip. Her roving eyes and twitching hands had already
betrayed her need. “Help me to get to sleep or I think I shall go mad.”
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