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 someone 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
