“No, but I’m glad of it, glad of it. How’d you know all this, Vera?”
“Peter told me, of course. I’ve seen him. He’s the most perfect darling in his uniform! You ought to hear him raving about France, but silent as the tomb about the War. He says the colored soldiers were all sold—fighting for freedom was a farce so far as they were concerned. But France is all right if the white Americans don’t get in too much propaganda. I’ve been meaning to write to you, to tell you you’d better go over there. No end of chances for you on the French stage. You might even get in French opera. Are you sure you haven’t seen Peter, sly thing?”
“Of course I’m sure. There was really no reason why I should. Mr. Bye and I haven’t seen or heard from each other for three years, now.”
“Mr. Bye! Well, good evening, Miss High and Mighty. If I see him I’ll tell him I saw you.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind. Stop all this raving, Vera, and explain to me about Harley. Are you going to France, too?”
Vera looked at her with a too perfect astonishment. “I going? Joanna, how did you ever get credit for being so brilliant, you’re really quite thick-witted. Don’t you see Harley’s and my ways are going to lie separate forever? He is going East and I am going—South.” Her gayety forsook her. “Joanna, don’t let me cry in this awful place. I got it out of Peter. I made him tell me. He says Harley is bitter and cynical. He says, over and over, Peter told me: ‘Look at these little French girls, they’re really white and they don’t seem to hate me. And yet a girl of my own race hesitates to marry me merely because she looks like white.’ She pressed her hand hard against her quivering mouth. “It seems he can’t forgive me. Peter told me so I could be prepared for anything I might hear. Oh, Janna, this terrible country with its false ideals! So you see why I’m glad there’s the South to go to—I’ve got to choose between life and death. Even if I should lose my life in Georgia or in one of those other terrible places where they lynch women, too, I’ll save it, won’t I? I must go. Kiss me goodbye, dear Janna.”
She was off in a moment in her pretty, modish costume, leaving Joanna in a maze of pity and tenderness for her friend, and of sick bewilderment for herself.
Peter was free; he was, presumably, home, and he had not come near her. Some of the old pain surged up. She was walking presently along teeming Lenox Avenue. Some young girls passing turned and stared. “That’s Joanna Marshall. You know, the dancer.” A dark colored girl wearing Russian boots and a hat with three feathers sticking up straight, Indian fashion, came along. Lenox Avenue stared, pointed, laughed and enjoyed itself, Joanna’s admirer with the rest.
This, this was fame—to be shared with any girl who chose to stick feathers, Indian fashion, in her hat. An empty thing—different, so different from what she had expected it to be. It had not occurred to her that it would be the only thing in her life. Probing relentlessly into an evasive subconsciousness she evolved the realization that in those other days she had expected her singing, her dancing—her success in a word—to be the mere integument of her life, the big handsome extra wrap to cover her more ordinary dress—the essential, delightful commonplaces of living, the kernel of life, home, children, and adoring husband.
This was too much like examining the bones, the skull and skeleton of living and then every day tricking it out with the one thing which could lend it the semblance of flesh and color, though always with the vivid knowledge that death lay hidden beneath.
If her gift were only something useful! Even Vera Manning, a mere butterfly, had turned the trick, had used her one specialty, her absence of color, to the advantage of her people. But she—of course it did mean something to prove to a skeptical world the artistry of a too little understood people—but she could do that only in New York. After the season closed here she was to have a brief showing in Boston, in Philadelphia and in Chicago. Even there, as here, she would have to appear in independent theaters. The big theatrical trusts refused her absolutely—one had even said frankly: “We’ll try a colored man in a white company but we won’t have any colored women.”
Her manager, who liked and respected her, had told her only last week that he had nothing in view for her after the brief tour. He felt there was money in the South, but the southern newspapers had started to editorialize against her already. “A negress,” a Georgia newspaper had said, “in the role of America. Shameful!”
“We might get a showing among colored patrons, Miss Marshall. But the South is in an ugly mood just now. Those hoodlums might break the show up. I’d hate to expose you to it. God, what a country!”
It was just possible that she might get a booking in a high-class vaudeville house. “And later on we’ll write a play around you. It would take mighty little to make a fine actress out of you. That’s a fact, Miss Marshall. And after we’ve had a run here we could cross the pond.”
This, this, was her great success. She loved and hated it. But she would not have been human if she had not wished for Peter to see her in her triumph, empty though it might prove to be.
XXXIV
Peter had seen her. His first free hours in New York were spent sitting segregated in the portion of the balcony set
