Still that had been a rare encounter. Life on the whole smiled on her. Yet she was not happy. But is anybody so? she wondered. She had forgotten to sorrow for her break with Peter, her life was too full for that, even for a new love. Vera Manning’s brother Tom, brought into her entourage by the flood of publicity and popularity that engulfed her, asked her to marry him. She liked him; found him charming and sympathetic, but he was too white and she did not want a marriage which would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes. What she did want, she decided, was to be needed, to be useful, to be devoting her time, her concentration and her remarkable single-mindedness to some worthy visible end. After all, she had worked hard and striven tremendously—to be what? A dancer.
“Is this really what you wanted me to be?” she asked her father abruptly. They were driving home from the theater, their nightly custom. “Is this your idea of real greatness?”
And Joel, his voice half glad, half sorry, told her that he, too, had hoped for something different.
XXIX
At first the war presented itself to Peter in a purely personal aspect. It was a long time before he envisaged the struggle as a great stupendous whole. Boyishly egotistic, he saw it simply as the next big moment in the panorama of his life following on his break with Joanna and his puzzling relationship with Maggie. And always he saw it in relation to the things which were happening to him like a series of living pictures against a great impersonal background.
Ignorant of Neal’s attack on Maggie he had returned to Philadelphia, completed his work and had gone to Des Moines. He sent his books to his Aunt Susan—all but one little black testament which bore written on the fly leaf his father’s and grandfather’s and his father’s names. There was another name, too, “Judy Bye.” But Peter could not recall this.
“More ancestors,” he said to himself, thinking ruefully of Maggie. He could not bear to think of their last talk: even the thought of his forgotten instruments could not induce him to write to her.
In Des Moines he had met Philip. And from that meeting resulted that first indelible picture. He had rushed forward to Philip, his hand outstretched.
“Marshall! Say, fellow, this is really great!”
He could hear his voice ringing even now. And then Philip’s contemptuous rejoinder: “I don’t shake hands with any such damned light of love.”
He thought he must have misunderstood at first. But there was the angry scorn in Philip’s eyes and there was his hand hanging clenched by his side.
The contemptuous epithet made him flinch. Of course, Philip’s bitterness and scorn arose from two sources. Peter had broken off with his sister and had taken up with the one girl in whom he had ever shown any interest.
“But hang it all,” Peter said to himself in angry bewilderment. “Why didn’t he try for Maggie himself, if he wanted her? But no, first he lets that gambler win her and then he leaves her to me.”
Here again ignorance was the cause. Philip did not know of Maggie’s divorce until she had become engaged to Peter. Joanna had never told him and he, considering her first marriage as an answer to his rather lackadaisical courtship, had not thought it worth while to make inquiries about her. His own liking for Maggie had taken possession of him so slowly that he had not realized himself until too late what she meant to him.
The result of the encounter was to drive Peter back on himself and to confuse his issues more and more. He did not know which way to turn. More than ever if Philip loved Maggie, he himself wanted to be freed of his obligation. Freedom—that was what he wanted—from obligations, from prejudice, from too lofty idealism. It seemed to him as though the last two years of his life had been spent in struggling to reconcile ideals. First his efforts to win Joanna and then his need to get away from Maggie. He went through the motions of the long days of drill and preparation, thinking incoherent, unrelated thoughts.
“Poor Maggie, I’ve got her into this. I can’t just chuck her.” Responsibility began feebly to awaken within him. “But what does she see in me? Yet she’ll die if I leave her. Joanna, you’ve messed up all our lives. Oh, damn all women! I hope to God I get killed in France!”
Still in a dream he left Des Moines for Camp Upton and left the camp for overseas. He was a good sailor and therefore was free to devote himself to men who were less fortunate than himself. On an afternoon he came on deck with Harley Alexander. The two had become “buddies” in the camp and now on the trip over the long days of inaction were awakening one of those strange intensive friendships between two people, in which each tries to bare his heart to the utmost before the other. Harley had told Peter about his disastrous courtship of Vera Manning and Peter had reluctantly, inevitably returned the confidence.
“Well,” said Harley, “I’ll be doggone. I suppose Joanna did use to queen it over you, but what’d you go make a doormat of yourself for? She gave you what you were biddin’ for. But now as far as this Miss Ellersley’s concerned—I can’t seem to remember her, Peter—she’s got no claim on you that I can see. If she’s any sense at all she knows that you came to her on sheer impulse. If you don’t love her, don’t you marry her. You’ll regret it all your life if you do. Gee, I’m sick of this boat. Don’t you s’pose we’re ever really goin’ to get into this man’s war?”
He lurched suddenly
