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!
XIII
The vacation sped as vacations will. Peter played in the awful cabaret, saved his money and adored Joanna. Joanna practiced trills, danced, thought of Peter and allowed him to adore her. As the early September days spread their golden haze over Harlem and Morningside Park, she actually shivered a little when she realized that when the month was over she and Peter would be miles apart.
It is hard to say just how much Joanna cared for Peter at this time. Certainly the boy worshipped her. He dreamed wordless dreams of her at night sitting in the noisy cabaret. His visit to her was the one objective point in his day. When the inexorable moment of separation came it cost him actual physical pain to bid her goodbye.
Joanna was hardly like that. She had a very real, very ardent feeling for Peter. But it was still small, if one may speak of a feeling by size. Her love for him was a new experience, a fresh interest in her already crowded life, but it had not pushed aside the other interests. At nineteen she looked at love as a man of forty might—as “a thing apart.” This was due partly to her hard unripeness, partly to her deliberate self-training. Joanna had read of too many able women who had “counted the world well lost for love,” until it was too late. “Poor, silly sheep,” she dubbed them.
She could not, it is true, bundle up her thoughts of Peter and say, “I’ll think of you tomorrow at three,” but she did achieve a concentration in her work that made it almost impossible for him to remain too long in her thoughts. And at nights when he tossed sleepless on his bed, dreaming fragrant dreams and seeing golden visions, she was sleeping the perfect sleep of healthy weariness.
The last days were hard for her, however, as they were for Peter. For Joanna was doomed by her very makeup to a sort of perpetual loneliness. Sylvia had her own interests, she had Brian and many, many friends. She was the most popular of all the Marshalls. Alec and Joanna had never been thrown much together. Philip, once her great confidant, was usually away from home. And on his return he was apt to relapse during these days into a rapt sadness.
It followed, then, that while Joanna was Peter’s sweetheart, his heart’s dear queen, Peter was at once her lover whom she didn’t need very much—at least she did not realize that need—and more than that her companion and friend whom she needed greatly. The prospect of the days stretched long and dreary before her. Even the concert tour, a remarkable booking for one so young, did not entirely console her.
The two talked about it on the day before Peter left for Philadelphia. They were in Van Cortlandt Park in a little tangled grove. It was noon and the September sun streamed down on them making the green wooden bench on which they sat pleasantly warm. But the leaves about them were going a little sere; in the shade the air felt chill, and the sunshine, though warm, was thin and white.
“ ‘The summer is ended.’ ” Joanna quoted softly; she sighed. Peter looked at her, there were tears in her eyes.
“Dear, beautiful Joanna,” said Peter, and his own beautiful face was full of the woe of parting, “how can I leave you tomorrow? Janna, don’t send me away, tell me I’m not to go.” He put his arms around her and she clung to him.
“Peter, you must go, you must, really. We—we can’t go on like this. We’ve got to prepare ourselves while we’re young for the future.”
“Yes,” said Peter and his ardor chilled a little at the touch of her cool practicality. But a moment later her light touch rekindled him.
“You love me, Janna? You know I love you?”
“Yes, Peter dear, but we mustn’t say anything more about it.”
“I know, Joanna, I’m not going to worry you any more just now, but you’ll let me speak sometime?”
“Yes, oh, yes!”
“Dearest girl! Kiss me, Joanna.”
She touched his lips with a light, lingering kiss. He looked at her, his face haggard with his gusty, boyish passion.
“Ah, Joanna, I’ll never forget that kiss.”
Neither would she, her heart told her. It was the first time she had ever kissed him.
They walked through the deserted park, their arms frankly about each other, like children. The dry grass and brittle leaves crackled beneath their feet, the air hung over them like a thin, misty veil. Joanna sang a bit from an old Italian song:
“If from Heaven we could but borrow
One day longer of fond affection
It would lessen then our sorrow,
Give fresh joys for recollection.”
She hummed a line here, then her voice rose again in the thin, shimmering air:
“—The future, dark and lonely!
Dearest Loved One, dearest Loved One
Parting makes these joys so dear!
Ah!—”
“Don’t, Joanna; it’s too sweet. You’ll make me cry.”
“I know it. Oh, Peter, go away and come back great and when you come back, speak to me.”
She went with him to the train next morning and to his amazement no less than her own, broke down and
