“I don’t think we have, dear,” he told her wistfully, “for with this happiness is the memory of that awful bitterness that lay between us. There was nothing like this that first time.”
He persuaded her to go to Philadelphia, to Bryn Mawr in fact. “I’ve got to give these pictures and the locket to Dr. Meriwether Bye and to Mrs. Lea. I’m so sorry for them. To think we’re alive and have each other—”
“And their Meriwether is dead. Oh, Peter, if it had been you!”
“Yet I used to long for death, Joanna. I used to wish I’d get done in at the Front. Did you pray for me?”
“Yes, sometimes. But I didn’t think you’d die. I used to think, though, that you’d never come back to me. I didn’t see how Maggie could ever let you go. She’s married Philip, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I told Vera, hoping it would get to you.” He mused over some mysterious memory. “Well, Maggie certainly is some girl. How’s Philip?”
“Better, oh, lots better. He has a fighting chance and it’s all due to her. He’s in a sanitarium and she’s with him. She should have married him long ago. It’s my fault she didn’t.” And she told him about the letter.
“Gosh!” Peter exclaimed inadequately, “don’t you do funny things when you’re kids? Well, here we are at Bryn Mawr. You want to wait here in the station? I don’t think I’ll be long. If I am I’ll send for you. I don’t mind going here myself, but I don’t want you to go in until I know how they’re going to treat you.”
“Oh, go along,” laughed Joanna, “I’ve been in a million of their homes. Thought you were all over that nonsense.”
He was back in a quarter of an hour, very serious. “The old gentleman is ill, got bronchitis and they’re afraid it might turn into flu. So I left a message and the pictures and my address. Your address, rather, Joanna dear, since I don’t know just when I’m going to move. Now we’ll go to Mrs. Lea’s. She’s just the next station up the line.”
They boarded the local. “I wish you could have seen that old butler, Janna. He knew my grandfather. And the moment he saw me, he knew I was a Bye. Gave me the funniest look. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘you’se the spit of both families!’ Funny, isn’t it, Joanna; those two families, the black and the white Byes, lived so long together that they developed similar characteristics, like husbands and wives, you know. And they say white and colored people are fathoms apart! Even I noticed that Meriwether Bye and I were built alike. I’m afraid we weren’t much alike spiritually. Well, here’s where we hop off again. I’m afraid I’ll be longer this time. Mind waiting for me, darling?”
“Never, if you’ll only promise to come back to me,” she whispered.
Nothing had been said as yet about a new engagement. But he kissed her in the Sunday quiet of the tiny station and held her close.
When he came back at the end of an hour she could see he was deeply stirred.
“Hard on you, wasn’t it, Peter?”
“Yes, and on her, too. Poor little thing. I don’t pretend to understand white people, Joanna, but I can’t imagine what Meriwether, that big, fine idealist, could have seen in that little ball of fluff. Self-centered, narrow and cruel—cruel, Joanna! Oh, such people! Do you know what she said?”
“I can’t imagine, Peter.”
“I gave her the locket, and she said with the tears streaming down her face, ‘To think that the Lord would let Meriwether Bye be killed and would let his nigger live!’ ”
Joanna fell back against the red plush seat. “She didn’t, she couldn’t!”
“You wouldn’t think so. And then she told me, ‘Go on, tell me every word he said.’ And I did, all I could remember. He had said to me one day, ‘I love her and she loves me,’ and I told her that and she leaned back and moaned—moaned, Janna. I wanted to pick her up in my arms and comfort her, and if I had, do you know what would have happened to me—”
“Don’t, Peter.”
“Well, this is Pennsylvania, so probably I’d have got off with imprisonment, here, but if it had been in Georgia, and I’d have dared to touch her—”
She put her hand over his mouth, “Peter, you shan’t say it.”
“Darling, all the time I was there I was thinking: ‘Suppose this were Joanna and I were Harley Alexander, or someone, telling her about Peter Bye!’ ”
They were very sober after that.
At the West Philadelphia station Peter remembered a restaurant on Market Street, where he had eaten in his student days. “I guess they’ll still accommodate us. Where do you think I’m going to take you after we eat?”
“I can’t imagine, Peter.”
“Out to the Park, darling. I used to dream of this in France, when I was in that hospital.”
Philadelphia, since the War, has changed for the worse in her attitude toward colored people. But these two contrived to get a decent meal after which they set out for the Park. It was October again, mellow and beautiful. Joanna, tingling with memories of the past, asked Peter nervously to tell her more of Meriwether Bye.
“He was a wonderful man, Joanna, a real, real man and he made me see life from an entirely different angle. He said white men in their fight for freedom in America had had tremendous physical odds to face and that black men had helped them face them. Now it was our turn to fight for freedom, only our odds were spiritual and mental obstacles, infinitely more difficult because less tangible. ‘And just as you black men helped us, Bye,’ he used to say, ‘there’re plenty of white men to help you. You don’t know it; for one thing, you’ve shut your mind to us. Oh, you’re not to blame, lots of us aren’t to be trusted; most of us, I’m afraid. But
