“He must have been wonderful, indeed, Peter.”
“Yes. And yet the queerest chap. You know I told you he had made up his mind to die. That was the difference between us. I wanted to, but he had made up his mind to it. And he told me: ‘I knew as soon as I saw you on the ship that my job was finished, but you would have to carry on. You’ll have to finish up my life, Peter.’ ”
Joanna felt tears in her eyes.
“Darling, he told me something else. He said I was a fool ever to have let you go. My dear, I’m going to try to finish up Meriwether Bye’s life, to be the man that he would have been. But I can do nothing without you, Joanna.” Suddenly they were back in the full tide of their love of long ago. He knelt beside her, kissing her hands. “Sweetest Joanna, will you take me and make a man out of me? All that is decent in me already is your work. Are you going to marry me, Joanna?”
An ineffable solemnity hung around them.
“Tell me, Joanna.”
“Of course, I’ll marry you, Peter. Dear, don’t think I don’t understand how hard things have been for you. I was such a stupid, before, when we were young. I didn’t allow for the difference in our temperaments. Why, nothing in the world is so hard to face as this problem of being colored in America. See what it does to us—sends Vera Manning South and Harley overseas, away from everybody they’ve ever known, so that they can live in—in a sort of bitter peace; forces you to consider giving up your wonderful gift as a surgeon to drift into any kind of work; drives me, and the critics call me a really great artist, Peter, to consider ordinary vaudeville. Oh, it takes courage to fight against it, Peter, to keep it from choking us, submerging us. But now that we have love, Peter, we have a pattern to guide us out of the confusion. When you left me for Maggie, I used to lie awake at night and think of all the sweet things I might have said to you. Oh, if you’ve suffered half as much as I have, you’ve suffered horribly. I learned that nothing in the world is worth as much as love. For people like us, people who can and must suffer—Love is our refuge and strength.”
He kissed her reverently. “Yes, thank God, we’ve got Love. That is the great compensation. We’ve tried everything else, dear: you, your career; and I, my self-indulgence. And we’ve found what we wanted was each other. But you’re right, Joanna, it is frightful to see the havoc that this queer intangible bugaboo of color works among us. Vera and Harley, you and I, aren’t so badly off. We’re intelligent, we can choose our own native land and prejudice, or freedom and a strange, untried country. We see clearly just what we’re keeping and what we’re letting go. But when I think of the millions of Negroes, not as lucky as we—there’s Tom Mason, remember the fellow I used to play with in Philadelphia? I heard from him this morning. He’s made his pile and he wants to leave the country. But his sister can’t and won’t stand the idea of taking up a new life with strange people and a new language. ‘Why should I give up my country?’ she wails. ‘It is my country even if my skin is black?’ ”
“ ‘Entbehren, sollst du,’ ” Joanna quoted softly. “If you’re black in America, you have to renounce. But that’s life, too, Peter. You’ve got to renounce something—always.”
“Yes, you do. Unless, like Meriwether, you renounce life itself. Of course, that is the great burden of being colored in this day. You’ve got to make the ordinary renunciations which life demands, and you’ve got to make those involved in the clash of color. …
“I’m afraid you’ll have to give up your career, dear Joanna—”
“Of course, of course, I know it.”
“For, if there should be children, I want, Oh, Joanna, I hope—”
“You want them to be different from both you and me, Peter.”
“Not so different from you. You were always so brave, so plucky. But, Joanna, if they are like me they’ll have so much to fight, and they’ll need you to help them.”
“We can do anything together, Peter.”
“And, Joanna, of course you know we will be poor at first—”
She broke out crying then. “Oh, Peter, you won’t ever say again that I’m different from Sylvia.”
XXXV
Maggie and Philip had returned from the sanitarium to New York, but Philip undoubtedly was dying. Peter and Harry Portor were at his bedside every day, but not because of their ability to help him. They were simply three friends together. Philip never spoke to Peter of the incident at Des Moines, though it is probable that he thought of it many times, but the young doctor seemed so serenely unaware of any former misunderstanding that Philip, with a deep sense of relief, let the whole incident slide out of his mind.
Joanna, meanwhile, was experiencing a little private purgatory of remorse and grief. As she saw Philip’s joy in Maggie, his complete and unbounded satisfaction in her presence, she became more and more overwhelmed with the awfulness of that old unconsidered act of hers, the sending of the letter which had caused Maggie to marry Henderson Neal. Maggie had never told her this, but she was pretty sure that such was the case. The mere fact that Maggie had never spoken about it to Peter, even in the days of their engagement, led her to suspect that her sister-in-law had attached more significance to it than she had cared to show. There was only one thing for her, if she was ever to know any peace, and that was to confess to Philip.
She went to see him
