There Is Confusion/Chapter 17

They enjoyed the opera and sang snatches of it coming home as they walked to the subway. Once in the express train, however, Joanna lapsed into sadness.

"I don't think my voice is as big as that prima donna's, but those dancing girls! I should have been right up there with them! Oh, Peter, I believe I'm the least bit discouraged."

She told him of her trips with Bertully. "I didn't mind those girls calling me 'nigger.' That was sheer ill-breeding. Remember what we used to say when we were children when they called us names?" She recited it: "'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.' What I minded was that they couldn't dream of my being accepted. Thought I had a nerve even to ask it."

She mounted the steps. "Come in, Peter."

After dinner they sat in the back parlor and Joanna went on with her story, Peter listening closely.

"I'm glad you're telling me about this, Joanna," he said seriously. "Now you'll understand my case better. You know how I feel about white people and their everlasting unfairness. As though the world and all that in it is belonged to them! I tell you, Jan, I'm sick of the whole business,—college, my everlasting grind, my poverty, this confounded prejudice. If I want to get a chance to study a certain case and it's in a white hospital you'd think I'd committed a crime. As though diseases picked out different races! I'm a good surgeon, I'll swear I am, but I've got so I don't care whether ​I get my degree or not. You can't imagine all the petty unfairness about me. Only the other day the barber refused to shave me in the college barber-shop. Your own cousin, John Talbert, is a Zeta Gamma man if ever there was one—that's the equivalent to Phi Beta Kappa in his school, you know. Do you think he got it? No, they black-balled him out."

Joanna sat silent, stunned by this avalanche. And to think she had precipitated it!

"Arabelle Morton's sister, Selma," Peter went on morosely, "took her Master's degree last year. The candidates sat in alphabetical order. Selma sat in her seat wondering whom the chair on the left of her belonged to—it was vacant. At the last moment a girl came in, a Miss Nelson, who had been in one or two of her classes. Selma knew she was a Southerner. 'Oh, I just can't sit there,' Selma heard her say, not too much under her breath. And some friend of hers went to the Professor in charge of the exercises and he let her change her place, though it threw the whole line out of order."

He paused, still brooding.

"Another colored girl—can't think of her name—paid for a seat in one of the Seminary rooms. The white girl next to her, apparently a very pleasant person, had her books all over her own desk space and this one, too. They were the best seats in the room. The colored girl asked her to move them. She just looked at her. Then this Miss—Miss Taylor, that was her name, took it from one authority to another, finally to the professor in charge of the Library. He assigned her another seat. Said the girl had been there four years, and that anyway, she—the white girl—resented the colored girl's manner toward her. The damned petty injustice!"

"But, Peter," Joanna argued, "you wouldn't let that interfere with your whole career, change your whole life?"

"Why shouldn't I? There're plenty of pleasanter ways to ​earn a living. Why should I take any more of their selfish dog-in-the-manger foolishness? I can make all the money I want with Tom Mason. If you aren't satisfied for me to be an accompanist, I could go into partnership with him and we could form and place orchestras. It's a perfectly feasible plan, Joanna. Why shouldn't I pick the job that comes handiest, since the world owes me a living?"

He frowned, meditating. "Isn't it funny, I felt just then as though I'd been through all this before. It's just as though I'd heard myself say that very thing some other time. Well, what do you say, Joanna?"

"That I don't want a coward and a shirker for a husband. As though that weren't the thing those white people—those mean ones—wanted! Not all white people are that way. Both of us know it, Peter. And it's up to us, to you and me, Peter Bye, to show them we can stick to our last as well as anybody else. If they can take the time to be petty, we can take the time to walk past it. Oh, we must fight it when we can, but we mustn't let it hold us back. Buck up, Peter, be a man. You've got to be one if you're going to marry me."

He shrugged his shoulders. "May I light a cigarette?" But she noticed he did it with trembling fingers. "Just as you say, Joanna."

She rose and faced him, this new Peter—this old Peter if she did but know it, with the early shiftlessness, the irresoluteness of his father, Meriwether Bye, the ancient grudge of his grandfather, Isaiah Bye, rearing up, bearing full and perfect fruit in his heart. Both rage and despair possessed her, as she saw the beautiful fabric of their future felled wantonly to the ground. For the sake of a few narrow pedants!

"Peter, Peter, we've got to make our own lives. We can't let these people ruin us." She felt her knees trembling under ​her. "We're both tired and beside ourselves. Come and see me to-morrow, will you?"

What should she say to him now, she wondered next day after a long white night. And once she had only to raise her finger and he was willing, glad to do her bidding. Could it be that after all these years she had failed to touch his pride, worse yet that he had no pride? She had been longing so for a cessation from all this bickering, so that they might have time for a touch of tenderness. But she could not afford that now. His love for her was her strongest hold over him. She was sure she could bring him back to reason. Perhaps she had been a little severe last night, calling him a coward.

"I musn't lose my temper," she told herself. Yet that was the very thing she did. The matter took such a sudden, such a grotesque turn.

He came in about eleven, his handsome face haggard, his eyes bloodshot. She was astounded at his appearance.

"Peter, you look dreadful!"

He glanced over the top of her head at his reflection in the mirror, lounged to the sofa, threw himself in the corner of it.

"Guess I'm due to look a fright after staying up all night. Didn't get to bed till five this morning."

She thought he'd been worrying over their quarrel. "You poor boy, you didn't need to take it that hard."

He stared at her. "Take what, that hard? Oh, our talk! That didn't keep me awake. I spent the night at 'Jake's.'"

"Jake's" was the cabaret, a cheap one, in which he had played years ago.

She couldn't understand him. "I thought you had plenty of money without playing there."

"I have. I didn't play there. I was a visitor like anybody else, like Harry Portor; he spent the night there, too. There was a whole gang of us."

​Clearly she must get to the bottom of this. While she had been tossing sleepless, he had been in a cabaret, dancing with cheap women, laughing, drinking perhaps.

"You mean you deliberately went there to have a good time and stayed all night? You and Harry Portor and the rest drank, I suppose?"

"I don't think Portor did. He's a full-fledged doctor now, though he's hardly any practice yet. But the rest of us did. There's nothing in that, Joanna, fellow's got to get to know the world."

Her anger rose, broke. She lost her dignity.

"I suppose Maggie Ellersley taught you that, too."

"What's that?" His handsome face lowered. "Say, how'd Maggie Ellersley get into this? No, she never taught me anything. But I can tell you what, if a fellow were going with her and went during his holidays to have a spree at a cabaret she wouldn't nag him about it, like you nag me. Yes, about that and about a thousand other things."

She turned into ice. "I'll never nag you again. Here, take this thing!" She drew off the little ring. "I don't want it."

A pin dropping would have crashed in that silence.

His voice came back to him. "You don't mean this, Joanna,—you can't."

"I do. Here, take it."

"You—you mean the engagement is broken?" He ignored her outstretched hand.

She dropped the ring in his pocket. "I mean I can't consider a man for a husband who throws away his career because of the meanness of a few white men. Of a man who sits all night in a low cabaret where every loafer in New York can point him out and say, 'That's the kind of fellow Joanna Marshall goes about with.'"

"Oh, I see, it isn't for my sweet sake, then!"

​She pushed him toward the door. "Go, Peter! Go!"

On New Year's morning he came back, humble, contrite. "I was a fool, Joanna. I must have been mad. Please forgive me."

"Of course I do, Peter."

He fumbled in his pocket, held out the ring. "Will you take this back?"

"I can't do that."

"When will you?"

"I don't know if ever."

There was a long silence. He came over and put his hand on the back of her chair, afraid to touch her.

"Joanna, I don't deserve your love. But you still do love me?"

She nodded slowly.

His face brightened at that. "But you won't take back the ring?"

"No, Peter, I can't take back the ring."

He knelt and kissed her hands.

"Good-by, sweetheart, I must go to Philadelphia to-day. Happy New Year, Joanna."

She let him go then. None of their other partings had ever been like this. Safe in her room she cried herself sick. "Oh, Peter," she murmured to herself, "come back like the boy I used to know." She wished now that she had been easier with him.

"And yet if I were, he'd let go entirely. Well, it must come out all right." But her heart was heavy.

The very next day she got a letter. Peter must have written her as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia.

"Joanna, I was wrong," he had written contritely, "I confess had got away somewhat from your manner of thinking, and I suppose I was a little sore, too,—your life seems ​so full. Sometimes I think there is nothing I can bring you. But I do love you, Joanna. You must always believe that and I think you love me, too. We were meant for each other. I am sure life would hold for us the deepest, most irremediable sorrow if we separated. Whether we are engaged or not, just tell me that you love me still and I can be happy."