JOANNA was in agony. Her life, hitherto a thing of light and laughter
and pleasant work, became a nightmare of regret and morbid
introspection. She could not blame herself enough. Nothing that Sylvia
could say would make her speak unkindly of Peter.
“No, Sylvia, it wasn’t his fault, really, it was all mine. Of course I
think he was a little stupid not to see that my very interest in him, my
constant fault-finding grew out of my wish to have him perfect. And I
wanted him to be perfect because I loved him. But if I had ever dreamed
how much I was hurting him, I’d never have said a word to him. I’d
rather have had him exactly as he was, faults and all, than to lose him
altogether.”
She suffered intensely, too, from wounded pride. “Just think, Sylvia, he
didn’t, he couldn’t have loved me after all. He just wanted to get
married. See how easily he turned from me. Oh, if I had known that was
all he wished, I’d have been different. I’d have been just the kind of
woman he wanted.”
Her humble sincerity almost made Sylvia cry.
Another girl in Joanna’s place might not have suffered so intensely. But
Joanna, poor creature, was doomed by her very virtues. That same
single-mindedness which had made her so engrossed in her art, now proved
her undoing. Her mind, shocked out of its normal complacence, perceived
and dwelt on a new aspect of life, an entirely different and undreamed
of sense of values. For the first time in her life she saw the
importance of human relationships. What did a knowledge of singing,
dancing, of any of the arts amount to without people, without parents,
brothers, sisters, lovers to share one’s failures, one’s triumphs?
She remembered how interested, how faithfully interested all her family
had been in her small career. Even Brian Spencer, now that her own
brothers were away, felt responsible for her, shifted engagements to get
her to the station on time, met trains at ghastly, inconvenient hours of
the night. And Peter had been her slave, her willing, unquestioning
slave, eager to accomplish any task no matter how troublesome, for a
word of appreciation from her.
And without a thought she had taken all this as her due.
She had failed to realize happiness when she saw it. The bird had been
in her grasp and she had let it go. This was her constant thought. Of
course, she still had her own people. And she was considerate of them
now, painfully anxious to show her gratitude. She tried to stammer out
an apology to Sylvia for her past remissness.
But her sister threw an arm about her and strained her close. “Don’t be
so thoughtful, so good, Jan. You break my heart. I’d rather have you
your old thoughtless, impatient self.”
Of course, this expression of gratitude was really only a gesture to
life, to fate. “If Peter could come back to me now, he’d see how truly I
cared about him. God, couldn’t you let him come back?” Joanna, who had
hardly uttered a prayer outside of “Now I lay me,” spent most of her
thoughts at this time in communion with God—“You Great Power, you great
force, you whatever it is that rules things.” Walking, riding, any
action at all mechanical she utilized in concentrating on her “desire to
have everything come right.”
In the mornings, weak and spent with the wakefulness of her white night,
she picked up her little slim Bible and read portions of the Psalms. The
beautiful words not only soothed her but brought with them a wonderment
at the passion and pain which they revealed. “David, you, too, suffered.
Help me, help me now.” So intense was her thought that she would hardly
have been surprised if she had looked up and seen the Psalmist bending
over her.
She hated the mornings even more than the nights. In spite of her
wakefulness, she was sure that there were some moments when she lapsed
into unconsciousness. But the morning brought with it the promise of
another day of pain, of unprofitable preoccupation. Sometimes after she
had read her Psalm, despite the fact that she had been tossing, tossing
on her pillow, she yielded to an overwhelming sense of apathy and lay
there motionless for hours in the security of her bed.
Her mental agony was so great at times that it seemed almost physical.
Her condition surprised Sylvia greatly. “I never had any idea that Jan
cared so much for Peter,” she told Brian. She had had to share her
sister’s secret with him. Joanna’s persistent sleeplessness had led
Sylvia in her protecting eagerness to pretend to Harry Portor that she
herself was in need of a sedative and Harry had spoken to Brian about
it. There had to be explanations.
Brian was not at all surprised at Joanna’s suffering. “A girl like
Joanna would be bound to feel deeply or not at all. I knew she must have
really cared for Peter, else she’d have chucked him long ago. Joanna did
nag at him, but Peter is really the one to blame, for standing for it.
If he’d given her a piece of his mind now and then she’d have understood
whom she had to deal with; Joanna thought she could treat him as she
pleased. Then when he got tired of it he threw up the whole thing
without any warning, the silly ass.”
“Better not let Joanna hear you call him that,” Sylvia interrupted.
He went on unnoticing. “Of course, what Joanna doesn’t realize is that
she’s up against the complex of color in Peter’s life. It comes to every
colored man and every colored woman, too, who has any ambition. Jan will
feel it herself one day. Peter’s got it worse than most of us because
he’s got such a terrible ‘mad’ on white people to start with. But every
colored man feels it sooner or later. It gets in the way of his dreams,
of his education, of his marriage, of the rearing of his children. The
time comes when he thinks, ‘I might just as well fall back; there’s no
use pushing on. A colored man just can’t make any headway in this awful
country.’ Of course, it’s a fallacy. And if a fellow sticks it out he
finally gets past it, but not before it has worked considerable
confusion in his life. To have the ordinary job of living is bad enough,
but to add to it all the thousand and one difficulties which follow
simply in the train of being colored—well, all I’ve got to say, Sylvia,
is we’re some wonderful people to live through it all and keep our
sanity.”
Sylvia agreed soberly that he was right.
“Now, Peter,” said Brian, warming to his subject, “had a lot of natural
handicaps, he was poor, he had no sense of responsibility, he was never
too fond of work unless he had some one to spur him on to it. In
addition to that he falls in love with a girl who has everything in the
world which he lacks, especially comparative ease and overwhelming
ambition. Jan doesn’t see Peter and herself as two ordinary human
beings, she thinks they have a high destiny to perform and so she drives
Peter into a course of action which left to himself he would never
pursue. I’ll bet a month’s salary Peter had no intention of studying
surgery until he found out he had to do something extraordinary to win
Joanna. Now, just when each needs the most sympathy from the other, when
Joanna’s plans are, I suspect, going awry, and when Peter is suffering
most from his color complex, the two let their frazzled nerves carry
them into a jangle and bang, Peter flies to the first woman who promises
to let him take life easy! Maggie doesn’t see life in the large, she’s
too much taken up with getting what she wants out of her own life.
Perhaps she’s right.”
“I don’t see how you can say that, Brian.”
“Well, it all depends on one’s viewpoint. Personally, I think Peter will
get what he deserves if he marries Maggie. She’s the one that astonishes
me. Of course, if Peter and Jan really are through with each other, he’s
got a perfect right to marry whom he pleases, but I should think
Maggie’s old friendship for you two girls would have held her back
awhile.” A memory stirred vaguely within him. “Or—no, that would really
be too rotten.”
“What would?”
“Maggie, you know. Remember how suddenly she married Neal? I’ve always
thought Joanna had something to do with that. Just the Sunday before,
Maggie had given me a look-in on her feelings for Philip and I happened
to tell Jan about it. My, how she raved! A few days later Maggie married
her gambler.”
This was all news to Sylvia.
“Well, I won’t tell Joanna. She’s got enough to bear.”
Joanna was indeed bearing more than Sylvia could guess. She was feeling
the pull of awakened and unsatisfied passion. It is doubtful if she
could thus have analyzed it, for she had rather deliberately withheld
her attention from the basic facts of life. “Plenty of time for that,”
she had told herself gayly, a little proud perhaps of a virginal
fastidiousness which kept her ignorant as well as innocent. Yet bit by
bit she had built up the idea of a shrine into which, not unwillingly,
she should enter with Peter some day. She had never even vaguely thought
of any one else as a companion. Her whole concept of love and marriage
for herself centered about Peter Bye.
And now Peter was gone—and his departure had opened up this sea, this
bottomless pit of torment. This, this was life. “This is being grown
up,” she told herself through endless midnight watches.
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