“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 anyone 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.
XXII
Ten months later Tom Mason leaned back against the red plush of the car seat and jingled some coins in his pocket.
“Tell you what, Bye, we really are cleaning up. I hadn’t expected anything like this run of engagements. Now suppose you beat it along to Mrs. Lea’s and find out what special arrangements she wants made for the musicians tonight and I’ll go on to Mrs. Lawlor and see about tomorrow.”
Peter stared moodily at the flying landscape. “I wish you’d come yourself, Mason. I hate to talk to these white people. Their damned patronizing airs make me sick.”
“What do you care about their patronizin’? All I’m interested in is gettin’ what I can out of them. When I’ve made my pile, if I can’t spend it here the way I please, Annie and me can pick up and go to South America or France. I hear they treat colored people all right there.”
“Treat colored people all right,’ ” Peter mimicked. “What business has anyone ‘treating’ us, anyway? The world’s ours as much as it is theirs. And I don’t want to leave America. It’s mine, my people helped make it. These very orchards we’re passing now used to be the famous Bye orchards. My grandfather and great-grandfather helped to cultivate them.”
“Is that so? Honest?” Tom showed a sudden respectful interest. “How’d they come to lose them?”
“Lose them? They never owned them. The black Byes were slaves of the white Byes.”
“Oh, slaves! Oh, you mean they worked in the fields? Well, I guess that’s different. Come on, here we are.”
Peter flung himself out of the car after Tom and followed him up a tree-lined street. The suburban town stretched calm, peaceful and superior about them. Clearly this was the home of the rich and wellborn. It is true that a few ordinary mortals lived here, but mainly to do the bidding of the wealthy. A group of young white girls, passing the two men, glanced at them a little curiously.
“Entertainers for the Lea affair,” one of them said, making no effort to keep from being overheard.
Peter stopped short. “That’s what I hate,” he said fiercely. “Labeled because we’re black.”
“Ain’t you got a grouch, though!” Tom spoke almost admiringly. He told his sister afterwards: “Bye’s got this here—now—temper’ment. Never can tell how it’s goin’ to take him. Seems different since he started keeping company with Maggie, don’t you think so?”
Annie admitted she did.
At present Tom patted Peter on the shoulder, and starting him up the driveway which led to Mrs. Lea’s large low white house, went on himself to Mrs. Lawlor.
Mrs. Lea received Peter in a small morning-room. She was pretty, a genuine blonde, with small delicate features and beautiful fluffy hair. But as Peter did not like fair types, his mind simply registered “washed-out,” and took no further stock of her looks. What he did notice was that she was dressed in a lacey, too transparent floating robe, too low in the neck, and too short in the skirt.
“Something she would wear only before someone for whom she cared very much, or someone whom she didn’t think worth considering,” he told himself, lowering.
Mrs. Lea, leading him into the ballroom beyond, barely glanced at him. “See, the musicians are to sit behind those palms and the piano will be completely banked with flowers. I’m expecting the decorators every moment. Your men will have to get here very early so as to get behind all this without being seen. I want the effect of music instead of perfume pouring out of the flowers. Do you get the idea—er—what did you say your name was?”
“Yes, I understand,” said Peter shortly. “My name is Bye.”
“I meant your first name—Bye—why, that’s the name of a family in Bryn Mawr, who used to own half of the land about here. There’re a Dr. Meriwether Bye and his grandfather, Dr. Meriwether Bye, living in the old Bye house now. Where do you come from?”
“I was born in Philadelphia like my father and grandfather and his father before him.”
She stated the obvious conclusion: “Probably your parents belonged to the Bryn Mawr Byes.”
“So my father told me,” replied Peter, affecting a composure equal to her own. “His name was Meriwether Bye.”
She did not like that. She decided she did not like him either—eyeing his straight, fine figure and meeting his unyielding look. These niggers with their uppish ways! Besides this
