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 windowpane 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.”
XXI
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 faultfinding 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
