XX

Sylvia had written. “He doesn’t mean it, of course”⁠—

But Joanna knew better. Even while dumbfounded she stood staring at the note, trying to believe there must be some mistake, her heart, her every sense was telling her it was too true.

Peter had given her up. He was going to marry Maggie. He had given her up. That was the important thing. For if he was not to marry her, what difference did it make whom he married?

She had never been religious, she had never been dramatic. Rather she somewhat despised any emphatically emotional display. “People don’t really act that way,” she told herself.

Yet she dropped on her knees beside the pine bedstead in the sparsely furnished room. Her hands clutched at the counterpane. She could feel her throat constricting. A scalding hotness seared her nostrils, her mouth became dry, her eyeballs burned.

“Oh, God! Oh, Peter!” She repeated the two phrases again and again in a sick agony.

“God, you couldn’t let it be true. You know I always loved him, I didn’t hide it from you. You knew my heart.”

At first she thought she would go to him. Then the fear that he might not want to see her, might even refuse to see her, overcame her. That humiliation she could never endure.

She sat down and wrote him a long letter, her pen flying over the page like something bewitched. It could not move fast enough to empty her heart of all she had to tell. If she could only make clear to him that she had “chastened” him because she loved him. How patronizing, how silly she had been. She said aloud, “How he and Maggie must have laughed at me, setting myself up above them and their ideas as though I were some goddess! Oh, God, why did you let me do it? You knew what I really meant.”

Her tears almost blotted out her words.

The post-office was a mile away but she trudged the distance mechanically, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, absorbed and drowned in the black sorrow which overwhelmed her.

Peter’s answer, which came in four days, brought no solace. She had never dwelt on any pages as she did on those of his last letter. The curt, stern phrases both cut her and awakened a new respect for him.

With a sense of responsibility which Joanna had never seen in him before, he insisted on honoring the claim which Maggie’s complete and unexacting love made upon him. “Even if I wanted to give her up,” he wrote in a sort of anguished virtuousness, “I would not, she has been too kind to me. But I don’t want to give her up, Joanna. Besides, I’ve got to consider the public. She has told several people that we are engaged.”

Joanna cried aloud: “If you had only been like this before, ever before, only once, I’d have known I couldn’t trifle with you. Oh, Peter, you deceived me.” The tears stood, great wells of water about her eyes.

She finished her engagement in the quiet Southern city before an audience which wondered vaguely what had happened to make Joanna Marshall different. Somehow she packed her trunk, thanked the persistent youth who had constituted himself her cavalier, and boarded the Jim Crow car. Her cavalier for all his persistence had been unable to obtain for her Pullman accommodations. After Washington she fell to wondering what it used to be like in other days, less than a year ago, when she would be coming up this way, through Baltimore, Wilmington, past Chester, secure in the knowledge that Peter would be waiting for her at West Philadelphia. He would never be there again! How could she endure it? It was not possible that anyone could stand this thing. No wonder people “crossed in love”⁠—she dwelt on the phrase distastefully⁠—killed themselves. She toyed with the idea. Of course she couldn’t; that sort of relief was not for her. In the first place it was cowardly. With her usual mental clarity she visualized the colored papers of Harlem. There would be notices telling how the “gifted singer, Joanna Marshall, daughter of Joel Marshall, died by her own hand⁠—”

Her mind lingered over it, painting in new details, consciously withdrawing as far as possible from the real cause of her grief.

As the train slid into the long shed at West Philadelphia she pressed her face against the windowpane and strained out into the dusk. Sometimes miracles did occur. Perhaps he was there, perhaps none of it was true. Her tears crept down the glass, the man behind her watching curiously.

Sylvia met her in New York, got her home and finally to bed. Mr. and Mrs. Marshall knew nothing of the matter and Sylvia had told even Brian very little. The two girls said nothing about Peter directly.

“Help me to get to sleep, Sylvia,” Joanna said suddenly after a rambling account of her trip. Her roving eyes and twitching hands had already betrayed her need. “Help me to get to sleep or I think I shall go mad.”