There Is Confusion/Chapter 34

Peter had seen her. His first free hours in New York were spent sitting segregated in the portion of the balcony set apart for colored people, watching Joanna in the "Dance of the Nations." And the result, of course, was to make her seem farther than ever out of his reach. She was more wonderful, more mysterious than he had conceived possible. "And why you should think she would look at you! What if she did write and tell you she didn't mean it? Look at the letter you sent her in reply. Do you suppose a woman like that would stand being thrown down and picked up again?"

He was living with his aunt until he could open an office. Fortunately, he had saved up his pay and his aunt had used very little of his allotment. As soon as possible he would get out his shingle. His first impulse on receiving his congé from Maggie had been to come back and have at least a talk with Joanna. But after seeing her on the stage he rejected that idea completely.

"But I'll work like fury. I'll really get ahead. And then I'll go to her and tell her I owe it all to her. And I'll explain to her, as Meriwether Bye said, that all my training and instincts have been against me. And then," he finished to himself lamely, "we'll always be friends."

He passed the state-board examinations with a flourish. Then to get an office. He thought it best to consult Harry Portor about this. The latter in his own office greeted him, he thought, none too cordially, ignored his hand.

​"Thought I'd look you up, Portor. Gee, what enthusiasm! Nice greeting to give a fellow who's just been making your home safe for democracy."

"Oh, can that stuff, Bye. What I want to know is this. It's none of my business but I happen to be interested. What are you going to do about Maggie Ellersley?"

"Wha-at! Well I'll be———" Had he been in her train, too? Was this why she had given him his freedom? His face clouded.

"You're right, Harry, it is none of your business. May I ask how you horn in on this?"

"Well, if you've got to know. I'm, I'm deeply interested in Miss Joanna Marshall and—and———"

"Hold on, I thought you were speaking of Miss Ellersley." Their politeness was wonderful.

"Now see here, Bye, tell me, are you going to marry Miss Ellersley?"

"I am not."

"Well, by God! you dirty cad, what do you mean by getting engaged to one woman after another and not having any intention of marrying either?"

Peter controlled his rising anger. "I don't want to quarrel with you, Portor. Miss Ellersley told me in Chambéry that she didn't want to marry me, she'd made a mistake."

"And Miss Marshall," said Harry, his face clearing, "have you told her yet?"

"No, I haven't. Miss Marshall found out she'd made a mistake three years ago. I don't make good with the ladies, Portor. And I'd like to know how the devil it concerns you?"

"It concerns me," said Harry miserably, "because I'm pretty sure Joanna loves you, and I want you to make her happy, or else get out of the way and let me try to do it." And he told Peter how Joanna, thinking him guilty, had yet declared herself Maggie's assailant.

Peter's natural surprise at Neal's attack on Maggie vanished ​into stupefied amazement at the news of Joanna's generosity. "She did that for me? Joanna?"

"Yes," Portor told him. "Where're you going, man?"

Peter had snatched up his cap. "You get into that little Ford I saw standing out there and drive me up to her house. I can't drive a Ford. Does she still live home?"

"Still with her father and mother. But they've moved on One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street. Joanna, I believe, wanted a whole floor for a studio, and as Sylvia's children are growing up, she and her parents got out. The kids are always over at Joanna's, though."

They were silent after that. Harry let him off at Joanna's corner. "Well, good luck, old man," he said insincerely.

Sylvia's boy, Roger, let Peter in. "I know who you are," said the tall lieutenant. "You are Brian Spencer's son."

"Yes, I am, but I don't know you. And you'll have to tell me your name if you want to see my Aunt Joanna. She might not be at home."

"Yes, that's what I was afraid of. See here, son, I knew your Aunt Joanna before you were born, and I'd like to surprise her. I've just got back from France. Understand, Buddy? I've got a German helmet around to my house———"

"Well," said Roger, shamelessly, "you go right up those stairs; 's that helmet got a plume on it?"

Joanna had been singing Tschaikowsky's "Longing." Now she was sitting still reading the words over and over:

She mused over the last line: "Peter, I'm afraid you never really knew me or loved me."

​He called to her softly from the door of the studio, "Joanna". She turned swiftly on the stool and saw him.

"Peter!"

What could they say? Does anyone believe that two people who have loved dearly and have been parted can say anything adequate at such moments? Certainly all the explanations, the pleas for forgiveness that Joanna had meant to utter if they should ever meet again, left her. She only sat and held his hand and called his name again and again. But he was silent.

Both became terribly self-conscious, indeed, were very near weeping. Peter told Joanna long afterwards that he did not dare speak for fear of bursting into tears. Peter, who had been in two terrible engagements, and had brought back Meriwether Bye from No Man's Land!

He told Joanna about Meriwether during those first incredibly beatific days after they had met again. But Joanna was too astounded at the happiness which flooded the very atmosphere about them. Almost as though she were taking a deep sea bath in bliss.

"I used to think," she told him, "even if Peter does come back, we never can

"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 we're ignorant and incredulous. Show us what manhood means, Bye.'"

"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."