He walked up to Lombard Street, thinking. “That girl can certainly see along with you. Nice to meet someone with a disposition like that. Of course I’d rather be a surgeon. But I’m tired of this everlasting digging. I’ve been nothing but a slave for nearly seven years. And poor as the deuce in the bargain. Good Lord, when I think of all the money I might have made out of you!” He looked at his fine slender hands with their firm square-tipped fingers.
“Ideal surgeon hands,” Doctor Davenant had told his assistant.
An idea struck Peter. “I wonder what Joanna would say to that!” He rushed in the house, seized a piece of paper and a pen and told her about it.
“Of course, Jan, I don’t expect you to marry me if I can’t take care of you. You wouldn’t anyway, you’re not like Sylvia. That’s not a slam, dearest, that’s just a plain statement of facts. But I’m making a lot of money right now—guess how?—with my music, playing for ‘grand white folks’ at all the swell society functions. Of course it takes me out of my classes sometimes, but I don’t care, I’m fed up with all that. I’ve got such a Negro-loving bunch of professors, except my surgical men.
“What say, Joanna, if I quit this, and we get married and I go about the country with you as your accompanist? That ought to suit you, for I don’t suppose you ever dream of settling down.
“Did I tell you I met Maggie Ellersley? I see her very often. The fellow I play with lives in the same house she does. In fact, Maggie introduced me to him. She’s been no end kind to me. You’ll be interested to know she’s getting a divorce from that beast she married. See what Philip has to say when you tell him.
“Mind you write me right away what you think about this.”
The answer came posthaste.
“What I think about this,” [wrote Joanna, infuriated] “is that I don’t want and won’t have a husband who is just an ordinary strumming accompanist, playing one, two, three, one, two, three. Sometimes, Peter, I think you must be crazy.”
A number of irritable and irritating notes followed on both sides until a couple of weeks before Christmas, when both sank into a mutinous silence.
What Peter did not understand and what Joanna never knew he needed explained to him was that she wanted Peter to be somebody for his own sake. She was really paying him a sincere compliment when she told him that she did not want an accompanist for a husband. Like many a woman of strong and purposeful character, she hated a weak man. It followed then that the man who won Joanna must be even stronger, more determined than she.
She did not know much about marriage. She had not only the usual virginal ignorance of many American girls, she had also a remarkable lack of curiosity on the matter. But she knew vaguely that the man was supposed to be the head. How could she, Joanna Marshall, ever surrender to a man who was less than she in any respect? Her dominating nature craved one still more dominant. But neither Peter nor she knew this, she least of all. Youth, egotistic though it be, is notably free from this kind of introspection.
Since American customs of courtship give the girl largely the upper hand, Joanna was instinctively, if unanalytically, using Peter’s love for her, and her own desirability, as a whip to goad him on. It was hard for her, too, much harder than Peter knew, or than she realized. For she was beginning at last to feel the tug of passion at her heartstrings. It would never have occurred to her to marry Peter before he was in their common estimation “on his feet,” she would never have asked it of him, she did not expect him to ask it of her. But unconsciously she was yearning for the day when the two might join hands and enter the portals which lead to the house of life.
Very often she found herself vaguely glad that she had her work. Without it, what would she have done? What did girls do while they waited for their young men? Heavens, how awful to be sitting around listlessly from day to day, waiting, waiting! Anything was better than that, even pounding a typewriter in a box of an office. It was this lack of interest and purpose on the part of girls which brought about so many hasty marriages which terminated in—no, not poverty—mediocrity. Joanna hated the word; with her visual mind she saw it embodied in broken chairs, cold gravy, dingy linen, sticky children. She would never mind poverty half so much; she would contrive somehow to climb out of that. But ordinary tame mediocrity!
Besides, colored people had had enough of that. Not for Joanna!
It must not be thought that at this time she had any intention of relinquishing her work after marriage. But it was for that reason that she wanted Peter to come out of the herd. She saw the two of them together, gracious, shining, perfect! She heard whispers:
“That’s Peter Bye, the distinguished surgeon! His wife is unusual, too, she was Joanna Marshall. You must have heard of her. Why, she sings all over the country!”
And here was Peter offering her the vision of herself, standing glorious, resplendent in her stage clothes, while he trailed across to the piano, her music portfolio under his arm:
“That’s Peter Bye!”
“Peter Bye? Who’s he?”
“The husband of Joanna Marshall, the artist.”
She would never endure it.
“And I don’t thank Maggie Ellersley the least bit for introducing him to this music man, whoever he is,” she told herself after she had read the letter. “Tell Philip she’s getting a
