"Let us be unashamed of soul ...Is it in our controlTo love or not to love?"
"Let us be unashamed of soul ...Is it in our controlTo love or not to love?"
It is always the body that suggests shame; and the body had ever been a negligible part of Joan's make-up. She felt as independent of it now as if she were already spirit, floating about in space—always with this certainty of meeting there another spirit, however, and mingling with it.
This spiritual mingling was a matter she never discussed with Nikolai—the only thing in the universe, perhaps, which they did not discuss. Theirs was an understanding too close for words, and beyond words.... But sometimes, when Joan remembered that she had once feared love, believing it one of those things that are better done without, she smiled to herself; an inner, brooding smile that gave the final touch of the chisel to her features, and made her much sought by painters.
Paris seemed more than usual that year the rendezvous for people who had won distinction in the arts and sciences, and who came to render their patron city in her hour of need what assistance was in their power. Among these people Nikolai was made welcome with an eagerness, and even a deference, which delighted Joan, and a little surprised her; for his simplicity made it easy to forget that he belonged among famous folk as a matter of right.
On his account, perhaps a little on her own as well, Joan also was welcomed by them. She was not at all abashed by the company of greatness, having inherited from Richard Darcy the naïve conviction that the best was good enough for her; and moreover she found among them the keen power of enjoyment that invariably accompanies high mental development. She had long since suspected, and now proved, that only thinking people know how to play.
It was a great relief to her, just then, to be with strangers who accepted her entirely at face-value, with neither curiosity nor demand. An unquestioning, simple freedom prevailed in these upper reaches which Joan fancied might be dangerous enough (unless it had the effect of putting people, as it were, on honor). Nobody enquired whether she had a husband, for instance, or where he was. It seemed quite sufficient that she was the young friend of Stefan Nikolai; "Spiritosa e simpatica," as a certain great Italian tragedienne pronounced her. Their relations were taken as a matter of course. The two were always included together in whatever plans were afoot, and Joan noticed other such companionships among them which passed equally unquestioned. She was nominally under the care of Lady Arbuthnot; but that widely experienced noblewoman displayed a carelessness of chaperonage that would have caused hair to rise on the head of, say, Mrs. Carmichael.
Joan was at perfect liberty to spend with her friend every hour that either could spare from the day's duties, and did so. "Why not?" appeared to be the attitude of a company which concerns itself more with matters of the spirit than of the flesh....
In Louisville speculation was once more rife and lurid, sharing interest only with the war headlines and with Joan Blair's latest letter to the magazines.
"We appear to have been nourishing Genius in our bosom unawares!" remarked the Jabberwocks to each other; not altogether pleased, as is the immemorial way of friendship.
"I don't know why you were unaware," commented Emily Carmichael, quietly. "She has always shown every earmark of genius, even to neglecting the best husband that ever lived!"
The Jabberwocks exchanged surprised and meaningful glances.
Into the busy abstraction of Joan's Paris life came presently one of her step-mother's rare letters. It was a round, childish, yet curiously firm scrawl written on lavender paper (Effie May having abandoned pink effects in honor of her widowhood), which for some reason brought home to Joan her father's little city so clearly that she could almost smell it; a distinctive summer smell compounded of hot asphalt, blossoming ailanthus trees, and a suggestion of the glue-factory.
Folks here are making bets as to whether you ever mean to come back again,
Folks here are making bets as to whether you ever mean to come back again,
(wrote Effie May).
And why should you? is what I say. I keep thinking how pleased Major would be to have you hobnobbing with lady earls and famous characters and high life generally. It's just where you belong, and so did he.Archie comes to see me real often, and he don't look so poorly as he did at first. He's got him up a regiment, mostly Y. M. C. A. fellows and a few old boys with stummicks and bald heads, and I hear they drill real cute. He goes horseback riding a good deal with the Carmichael girl, too, and I guess it does him good. Ellen says he seems more peckish for his meals.
And why should you? is what I say. I keep thinking how pleased Major would be to have you hobnobbing with lady earls and famous characters and high life generally. It's just where you belong, and so did he.
Archie comes to see me real often, and he don't look so poorly as he did at first. He's got him up a regiment, mostly Y. M. C. A. fellows and a few old boys with stummicks and bald heads, and I hear they drill real cute. He goes horseback riding a good deal with the Carmichael girl, too, and I guess it does him good. Ellen says he seems more peckish for his meals.
(Here Joan laid down the letter, thoughtfully. "Emily!—Well, why not? She always did like him. I'm glad," she mused. She certainly was not going to begrudge her husband the freedom she asked for herself.)
Ellen comes in every day to look after things for me, now that I'm laid up. She don't like me any better than she used to, and I expect she just thinks it's a family duty, but I'm glad to have her anyhow. I keep nigger help now, the white ones being so hard to get, and I'm not the hand with them your father was. I never saw any one get as much out of niggers as Major could!—out of white folks, too, for that matter, couldn't he?Of course I'm not so sick as the doctors make out (they got to earn the money somehow), but it's hard to sleep sitting up this way, and sometimes at night I get to thinking. So I made a will. I knew you'd never touch Calloway's money with a ten-foot pole, but I thought maybe you wouldn't mind seeing it got spent right. I want it to go to one of those shelters you told about in the magazine, for little French girls with babies and no husbands. Seems only fair, when I've had more than my share of husbands and no kids.Paris seems awful far away, and I guess I better let you off that promise you made me to see that I didn't get laid out with no corset on. They probably couldn't get a corset on me now, anyway, I'm that fleshy. Not that I'm ordering me a coffin for anytime real soon, dearie! but sometimes at night a person gets to thinking.
Ellen comes in every day to look after things for me, now that I'm laid up. She don't like me any better than she used to, and I expect she just thinks it's a family duty, but I'm glad to have her anyhow. I keep nigger help now, the white ones being so hard to get, and I'm not the hand with them your father was. I never saw any one get as much out of niggers as Major could!—out of white folks, too, for that matter, couldn't he?
Of course I'm not so sick as the doctors make out (they got to earn the money somehow), but it's hard to sleep sitting up this way, and sometimes at night I get to thinking. So I made a will. I knew you'd never touch Calloway's money with a ten-foot pole, but I thought maybe you wouldn't mind seeing it got spent right. I want it to go to one of those shelters you told about in the magazine, for little French girls with babies and no husbands. Seems only fair, when I've had more than my share of husbands and no kids.
Paris seems awful far away, and I guess I better let you off that promise you made me to see that I didn't get laid out with no corset on. They probably couldn't get a corset on me now, anyway, I'm that fleshy. Not that I'm ordering me a coffin for anytime real soon, dearie! but sometimes at night a person gets to thinking.
Joan was rather startled by this letter, and sent for Nikolai.
"What do you make of it, Stefan? That part: 'It's hard to sleep sitting up this way'—what does it mean?"
"I am afraid," he said gravely, "it means something serious—Advanced heart-disease, probably. A woman of her weight would be liable to it."
Joan gave an exclamation of dismay. In that moment she discovered that she not only did not dislike Effie May; she was fond of her. The thought of never again seeing the vulgar, cheery, friendly soul was unexpectedly distressing.
"Poor woman!—all alone there with her 'nigger help!' and Ellen sourly doing her duty—Or is itmyduty?" She was not thinking entirely of Effie May.... "Stefan"—her face blanched. "She was my father's wife. She tried her best to be a mother to me. I owe her a good deal. Has the time come to repay it? Does this mean—Oh, Stefan, do you think this means I ought to go back? I've been so happy here, so useful! For the first time in my life I have felt that I really 'belonged.' These people who are doing things—"
She gazed at him beseechingly. It gradually dawned upon her that what she dreaded so to leave was not these people who were doing things, not that larger, freer life to which Nikolai had given her the key; not even the Spirit that met her Spirit there in space. It was Nikolai himself, the man, the comrade—the lover.
Her whole being seemed to rush out to meet the need that suddenly gazed at her from Nikolai's eyes....
"Stefan," she said very low, "mustI go back?"
For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, his voice not quite under control "You expect me to decide that for you? My dear, you ask too much."
He took his hat and left; but Joan knew that he had decided.
They walked up and down thequaifor an hour or so before the gangway was drawn in. Joan always afterwards remembered what they said, as one recalls the least syllable of the dying. There was a sense of finality about this parting, against which she struggled in vain.
She filled her eyes with him as if she had never seen him before, and would not again. She noted little physical details which had hitherto escaped her—the fine cameo cutting of his features, the long, sensitive, expressive hands, the air he shared with many Europeans of belonging to an older, more finished race than her own. In his calm impassivity there was a suggestion of Slavic fatalism, combined with the tragic patience of the Jew. Only his eyes smoldered with an unquenchable spark that flamed to hers.
She knew that the Romance which had always eluded her was here at her side, in the person of this perfect comrade, this shadowy, insistent influence in her life which was about to withdraw into the shadows again. Perhaps she understood, too, that Romance to remain Romance must be elusive. Seized and held, it changes into something else. Yet she tried to cling to it.
"You will be right here waiting on this spot when I come back, won't you, Stefan?—For Iwillcome back," she exclaimed as he did not answer. "Say that you know I will!"
"I know that you will do whatever seems to you right."
She made a mutinous face at him. "That's more than I know! I'm much more likely to do whatever seems to me nice—Oh, Stefan, why will you persist in believing in me always, no matter how badly I behave?" Lightly as she spoke, her eyes were fixed on him, telling him consciously what her lips could not utter.
He answered at one of his usual tangents. "Do you not know that every splinter of a genuine Cremona violin vibrates to the bow on as true a tone as did the unbroken instrument?"
"You mean—Mother," she said. "Oh, but I'm not all Cremona! I think there's a good deal in me of the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned. It's notfairto be expected to live up to a self-sacrificing mother! If you don't, you have failed her; if you do, she gets the credit—Besides, I'm needed here just as much as I am in Louisville. More! Not only these poor people need me, but—you do, Stefan."
She had brought it into the open at last, the one thing which they had never yet discussed in their discussions of everything under the sun; that eternal human question of Thou-and-I. She was a little frightened, dreading yet eager for the answer.
It was long in coming. Nikolai understood the crisis they had reached. He knew that it was his to put out his hand and hold her, to keep forever in his life this one gift of the gods he craved, the fulfilled hope which had been his beacon through many a lonely year. Once before because of a mistake in judgment he had lost her, to her own unhappiness. There must be no more mistakes in judgment.
But the habit of truth in thought and word was too great for him.
"No," he said at last, "I do not need you."
He saw her wince.
"I do not need you," he repeated steadily, "and you do not need me, Joan. People like us get on quite well alone. Better, perhaps. It is not good for us to be too happy—Besides, what we already have of each other cannot be affected by time or space. You know that? The rest—is extraneous. Tell me this: Have you ever in any important moment of your life forgotten me, have you ever failed to be conscious of my presence, no matter what the distance between us?"
She looked deep into the luminous eyes fixed upon hers.
"Never, Stefan. Even in my unthinking school-days, even in that strange time after I lost my babies and could not write to you, I have counted upon you always. Everything that has come to me, good or bad, big or little, I have shared with you in my thoughts. Only—I did not realize it."
"That," he said quietly, "is marriage. Your mother realized it. She knew when you were only a child of the tie between us—But she and I thought that I must keep away from you until the accident of time corrected itself. You see we have been sent into this incarnation rather far apart."
"You kept away too long, Stefan!"
"I know. But what does it matter?" He spoke half to himself, with his little shrug. "This manifestation or the next—we shall not be apart always."
"No, no!" she cried, catching at his hand. "That is too ethereal, too mystic for me—I can't bear it, Stefan! I want the people I love with menow, in this 'manifestation,' as you call it, where I can talk with them, and touch them, and hold on to them—I am not all spirit. I thought I was, but—I'm not. Oh, my dear, aren't you humanat all?"
He did not reply; and Joan, looking at him through swimming tears, saw that it was because he could not.
She dropped his hand. "Forgive me!" she whispered. "I will try to climb up to you—since you will not come down to me.... But you must help me."
"I will help," said Nikolai.
They spoke a little later of Archie, who had been all the while at the back of their thoughts. Both knew it was to him she was returning, rather than to her step-mother.
"You expect too much of him, Joan—you always expect too much of people. Try to take them as you find them. He is one of the many who think better with their hearts than with their heads."
She commented with a faint smile, "My step-mother once told me that there was nothing in the world so dangerous as what she called 'bone-headedness.'"
"Exactly!—especially to the bone-headed—Your Archie is no fool, however. There are perhaps fewer convolutions in his gray matter than in ours, that is all. He has made mistakes with his head, and will again. But with his heart—never."
"You are not condoning," she asked slowly, "what Archie has done?"
He answered after a little pause, "To me there seems nothing unforgivable, nothing utterly vicious, except selfishness. There is no self in Archie Blair. Not enough self."
Joan told him then reluctantly of something she had never before mentioned: her final incredible scene with her husband. She was curiously ashamed of that scene, as though it were she who had betrayed herself, instead of Archie. "Should you not call that a mistake of the heart?"
But Nikolai did not appear to be particularly shocked by it. "I had no idea," he commented, "that Blair was so good an actor."
"An actor!—You think that scene was not genuine?"
"I think, in fact I know, that your husband would hesitate to sacrifice nothing to what he believed your happiness; even your respect—I love that man," he said simply. "And so do you, Joan. Otherwise he would have been powerless to hurt you."
Her eyes widened. She asked, as so many before her have asked, "Is it possible to love—two people at once?"
"Two? A dozen—a hundred! Does a mother love two children at once?—Surely that depends upon the stage of the soul's development."
"But always one best," she said quite fiercely.
"Always one best," he repeated....
The parting had come. Staring at him desperately, she saw in his eyes a depth of pain and loneliness that made her own for the moment insignificant. So much of his life was done; so much of hers, after all, only beginning.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she cried in a sort of bewilderment. "What is it all about? Is there a purpose somewhere in this muddle of things? Why do you say it is not good for people like us to be happy, when others go to the end of their days in calm security? I do not want any—wicked things, Stefan! I only want to be with you always. To take care of you if you are sick, to mend your clothes, and make you comfortable, and—love you. I want us to grow old together, not alone. Oh, my dear, all your life you have been alone; and I can't bear it!—What is the good of this thing that has waked in me at last, if I am not to use it?"
"You are," he said steadily. "Emotion to be safe must,musttranslate itself into action."
"But how, how? By doing for others, you are going to say—but it's such a thankless task, Stefan! A red-blooded woman like me to take to altruism, as some take to drugs!—Why must some of us live so intensely, so consciously, only to be denied again and again the fulfilment that we crave? Sinking our lives into those of lesser people, always of lesser people!"
He answered gently, "'Car je suis le Cobzar.'—It is time you understood.... You know what a Cobzar is?"
She shook her head; and he told her.
"In the more remote Magyar villages, news of the world comes to the people by means of a sort of minstrel who is called the Cobzar. He is to them not only newsbringer, but historian and poet and philosopher as well. He is treated with respect, they reward his singing with food and wine and a place beside the fire, for it is an honor to be born a Cobzar. But not always a happy honor, Joan. People do not listen to singing that comes out of an empty heart. It is the Cobzar's duty to tell them the story of themselves, and that is only the story of himself, wrought into many forms. Their fears and joys, their failures and their suffering and their hopes—he must be part of it all, and yet apart, that he may not only understand but watch, remembering always his mission to bring life to the knowledge of those who live."
He quoted for her then some lines which Joan never forgot:
"Aime-moi, parce que j'ai besoin de ton amour pour mes chansons,Va t'en, parce que j'ai besoin de pleurer pour mes chansons,Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons,Car je suis le Cobzar."
"Aime-moi, parce que j'ai besoin de ton amour pour mes chansons,Va t'en, parce que j'ai besoin de pleurer pour mes chansons,Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons,Car je suis le Cobzar."
The water widened between them....
All during her homeward journey Joan had the feeling that she was waking slowly from a long dream; such a dream as ether gives, more vivid than reality itself but impossible of recapture. As he came literally nearer, Archie grew to be the dominant figure in her thoughts rather than Nikolai, though Nikolai was always there; Archie under the new light her friend's parting words had shed upon him. It mortified her to realize that another, almost a stranger to him, should have read her husband better than she did. It occurred to her, too, that with Nikolai she had not left behind her all Romance. A man who was capable of such a sacrifice as Archie Blair's could not be entirely commonplace. Her eyes had been suddenly opened.
Perhaps this was part of the help Nikolai had promised.
Indeed, her sentiments toward her husband became rather puzzling, being composed so far as she could decipher them of a desire to comfort him for the loss of herself, combined with a desire to be comforted by him for the loss of Stefan....
Her fellow-travelers eyed Joan with more than the usual interest she invariably excited among strangers; but to no avail. It was a time when what few barriers exist on shipboard at best went down in the sharing of a common peril, the menace of the submarine. Not so with Joan, however. She seemed unaware of friendly advances or invidious criticism: wrapped in a curious aloofness, from danger and from her fellowman alike. Nor was it an aloofness that would pass.
She had her great renunciation to make, and faced it; a renunciation which took the most difficult form, of dedication. Loneliness was upon her, not loneliness as she had known it before, a groping restlessness, a dissatisfaction. There was nothing left to grope for. She knew quite well now what she wanted, had always wanted, and might never have; but she knew, too, that on this solitary road of life, the warm human clasp of hands is something, the warm human touch of lips.... Thinking of Archie as Nikolai thought of him, her heart seemed to be stretching, literally expanding, with growing-pains; so that there might be room in it for two—or for a dozen, a hundred, as he had promised.
And presently she was able to return in spirit to the first night of her marriage, when for a little interval of time she had lost Joan the individual, and become simply the woman, whose mission is to give....
She had thought so much of her husband that she was quite prepared to find him waiting at the dock for her, yellow boots, Derby hat, and all. But he was not there, nor yet at the station in Louisville, though she had wired him from New York the date and hour of her coming.
Only two of the Misses Darcy were there to meet her, in Effie May's limousine, their manner nicely adjusted between melancholy, importance, and theempressementdue a distinguished relative returning from foreign parts.
"Yes, my dear, she is low, very low! Restoratives have to be administered constantly," sighed Miss Virginia. "What a charming hat! Paris, I suppose? I always have maintained that the French touch—So that is why Sister Iphigenia is not here to meet you. We three take turns at watching with her. Your husband comes every night, and Ellen Neal makes herself useful, though why she should, with two nurses—No expense spared, of course. So pleasant to be able to die in such luxury, isn't it? She has been watching for you every day—seemed to be quite certain you were coming, even before she had your cablegram."
Joan interrupted this lugubrious chatter to ask the immediate whereabouts of Archie. The sisters exchanged uneasy glances.
"Cousin Effie May happened to mention that he was out riding this afternoon. Doubtless he had made some engagement before your letter came, or I am sure—" Miss Euphemia nudged her visibly into silence.
"I see," said Joan, flushing a trifle....
If Effie May was as "low" as reported, she showed little sign of it. She welcomed Joan in her usual loud and cheery tones, magnificent in a new lavender tea-gown, as pink-cheeked and carefully coiffed as ever. At her elbow was a box of chocolates.
"I knew that letter'd fetch you!" she chuckled. "Sort o' pitiful, wasn't it? People were mighty surprised to hear you were coming back. But not me. You're not so hard-shelled as you try to be, girlie!"
Like the Misses Darcy, she displayed immediate interest in the Paris hat.
"Chick as it can be," she pronounced approvingly. "I certainly am glad you're not high-brow enough yet to neglect your looks. No woman on earth is smart enough to be able to wear a hat that don't become her."
"There's a love of a hat in my trunk for you," laughed Joan, a weight lifting from her heart. (She decided that her hasty and dangerous journey had been a wild-goose chase so far as her step-mother was concerned. This was not her idea of a death-bed interview.) "A black crêpe poke with a white lining, Effie May. Paris still does her mourning 'chickly'—poor Paris!"
The invalid's eye gleamed. "I might be trying it on when the doctor comes.... Oh, yes, dearie, he's taking notice!" Her several chins quivered with mirth. "But nothing doing. My heart's in the grave with Major—And Calloway," she added, dreamily. "I been thinking about the two of 'em so much lately that I declare I get 'em sort of mixed in my mind!"
She made Joan sit down beside her and tell her at once all about Paris, and how many noblewomen she had met, and what they wore, and whether it was true that Frenchmen took more notice of married women, even of middleaged ones than of girls.
"Paris is the burg for me!" she sighed.
But in the midst of Joan's liveliest recital, her head dropped suddenly forward and she fell asleep. It was the other's first intimation that she had not come after all upon a wild goose chase.
She sat for a moment looking at this woman who had tried to be a mother to her, with her absurd golden head and beringed, puffy hands. Then, following an impulse rare with her, she stooped and kissed the painted cheek very tenderly. It was a pity that Effie May did not know.
She slipped away to the telephone and called up the Carmichael house. The maid told her that Miss Emily was at home.
("Soshe'snot out riding with him!" thought Joan.)
Emily appeared politely surprised by her friend's arrival.
"Yes, Archie tells me how ill your step-mother is. I am so sorry! You say you will be here some time before you go back? I shall hope to see you, then."
"I hope you may," replied Joan even more politely, "but unfortunately I shall be very busy.... Look here, Emily Carmichael, what's the matter with you anyway? Come right over here and explain."
Emily came.
When the two had had their talk out and parted, tear-stained but reconciled, Joan went once more to the telephone and called up her husband.
His familiar voice over the wire gave her an unexpected thrill. She had forgotten how big and warm it was, even when he sang out of tune.
"Archie," she asked directly, "why weren't you at the station to meet me?"
He stammered out some rather breathless excuse.
"Yes, I know all about that—Emily told me that she often gets you to exercise Pegasus for her when she hasn't time. But why to-day particularly, when you knew I was coming?"
His voice was under better control now. "Why, you see, I didn't think it would look well for us to be seen together just now—"
"Wouldn't look well!"
"Why, no, Joan. You've got a pretty good case of abandonment—I left the house first, you know—but if we were to be seen together the minute you get home, sort of friendly-like, it might get to the ears of the Judge and prejudice him. When the whole thing's settled, of course, then—"
Joan gasped.
"What do you mean," she interrupted, "by a case of abandonment?"
"You wouldn't care to bring suit on any other grounds, would you!" he asked anxiously. "The fact is I'm afraid you couldn't, Joan. Therearen'tany other grounds."
"Oh," she said blankly. "I understand.... Well, my dear, I'm sorry you feel that you can't come and say at least hello to me—'sort of friendly-like.'"
"So am I," he answered, gently....
Joan wandered back to her step-mother's room, feeling queer and dazed. She had never before realized that anything other than death might be irremediable.
During all her months in Paris she had not even contemplated the possibility of divorcing Archie. She was blindly content with things as they stood, and it had not occurred to her that Archie might be otherwise, that he had seriously meant, for his own sake, perhaps, the suggestion he had once made to her. She was so used to doing his thinking for him.
Divorce!—that refuge of the foolish, the frail, those so lacking in pride as to be willing to confide their failures to the world!
"It is so—so unnecessary," she protested aloud, wondering vaguely why the phrase was familiar to her. Then with a start she recognized it as one of Eduard Desmond's.
The hot blood rushed into her face. Did they—Emily, Effie May, even Archie himself—believe her capable of the sort of thing Eduard Desmond meant? Dropping one husband to take on another—or perhaps taking on another without dropping the first? Was this the interpretation that had been put upon her life abroad, her precious companionship with Nikolai?—She shivered. No wonder Archie had not cared to come to see her!
For once the thought of Nikolai was of no comfort to her. She put it from her almost with horror. It seemed to her that their relationship was irreparably smirched, degraded, by the touch of profane hands....
She hoped that Effie May had awakened from her doze, so great was her need just then of the shrewd, tolerant, entirely human counsel of her step-mother.
But Effie May had not awakened; nor did she wake again.
The funeral did great credit to the Misses Darcys' experience in such affairs. A crowded, beflowered church bore witness to the fact that Darcy was still a name to be reckoned with in the community. Not only the best people were there in quite sufficient numbers, but many of those lesser folk whose duties bring them happily into touch with the best people; milliners, modistes, clerks in the better shops, and so forth.
As Mr. Florsheimer of the Gents' Furnishing remarked to Miss Murphy of the Silks: "Such a loss to trade, ain't she?"
Among these humbler friends not a few genuine tears were shed, however, for Effie May had scattered her kindness impartially.
Joan, in solitary state as chief mourner, with the Misses Darcy sadly rustling in the pew behind her, was conscious of many curious glances turned her way. Perhaps her husband was the only person there whose eyes never turned in her direction. She was glad of her heavy veil, through which she might study him unobserved.
He sat just opposite among the other pall-bearers, grave and quiet, with the odd dignity still about him which had come at the time of his disgrace. She noted new lines in his face, an unexpected touch of gray in his boyish, curling hair. The ears, the freckles, the great, clumsy hands were still much in evidence; but somehow Archie had lost forever his slight touch of the ridiculous. Declining to run away from disgrace, facing his music, humbly but unafraid, it occurred to Joan that her husband was approaching rather nearly her own and her father's standard of gentlehood.
"Blessings brighten," she reminded herself, grimly, "as they take their flight!..."
She came presently under the soothing spell of the old cathedral, a shabby, not very beautiful edifice left stranded in a neighborhood no longer its own, but whose pews still bore the names of the town's first citizens, gentlemen who had been her father's boyhood playmates, and whose fathers had worshiped there with his father. Oddly enough, considering how little time she had spent within its walls, the echoing dimness of it gave Joan her first sense of home-coming. This old house of God, that had witnessed so many ends and so many beginnings of human endeavor, had gathered into itself the heart of a city.
A warm heart, it was, thought Joan; despite those speculative glances fixed upon her. She recalled people's kindness to Archie in his trouble, their quick response to any call upon their sympathy, their willingness to give every stranger his chance. She remembered their invincible hospitality, whether in wealth or poverty; the ardor with which they entered into the interest of the moment, be it work or play, their generous admiration for any fellow-citizen who made a success in the world. A warm heart, she thought, and a loyal one.
She understood in that moment why it was that the people of this little city rarely drifted too far away to come back again. Just as the human body claims in the end its six feet of earth for a resting-place, so must the human spirit claim its bit of the world for a resting-place, a Neighborhood. The tragedy of a wandering life such as Nikolai's was, she saw, in its detachment from common human interests, from a Neighborhood. Better a tree, with its roots in friendly soil, as he had once said.
Cast her out though it might, Joan knew that her Neighborhood was here, here among her father's people....
A trolley-car clanged past, and the challenge of the peanutman came cheerfully in at the open door. "Pop-corn, Lady? Yere's your fine fraish roasted peanuts, right off the hopper!"
The little lads in the choir stirred restlessly to this voice of the summer outside. "Lead, Kindly Light," they warbled in a piercing young treble, with now and then the Bishop's robust tones added in a hospitable effort to make the thing go.
Joan's irrepressible fancy recalled the last occasion on which she had heard this noble anthem. It was at the Country Club, where some irreverent wag was playing it in rag-time; and Effie May had danced to it merrily, Lightfoot Ef with her indulgent Major. Joan wondered whether Lightfoot Ef might be remembering, too, and smiling perhaps in her coffin....
But out at the cemetery her queer sense of elation vanished. Here, in the shadow of her father's monolith, with Mary's modest headstone on one side, a yawning grave on the other, at her feet two mounds so small as hardly to be noticed, the aloneness of the human soul suddenly smote her with such force that she could not stand under it. Was she never to know again that human touch of hands and of lips? Was her only neighborhood after all to be this quiet city of the dead?
She went quite dizzy and might have fallen, but for the quick arm that supported her; whose in that bitter moment she neither knew nor cared. But she was not surprised to find herself presently alone in a carriage with Archie.
"I guess I oughtn't to have done this," he apologized, when he saw that she could listen to him. "I just didn't think—out there. I'll go as soon as you feel better, dear. Where do you want the driver to take you!"
"Home," she said. It was no more than a whisper.
"You mean to Mrs. Darcy's house? Won't that be pretty gloomy for you just now? Better let him take you to your cousins'—or to Miss Emily's. How would that be? I know she'd he mighty glad to have you."
Joan gathered herself together for an effort. It seemed to her, faint as she was, that much depended upon this moment. But for once her eloquence failed her. She could only repeat that she wanted to go home.
Archie understood her trembling better than her speech, perhaps. He, too, began to tremble.
"I—I haven't got any home now, Joan. Only the old attic-room in Poplar Street—"
She cried out, painfully, "Archie! don't youwantme any more?..."
In his arms at last, her face pressed roughly against the familiar roughness of his coat, words returned to her. She quoted her husband's sole adventure into poetry:
"A book of verses underneath the roof,A cup of coffee and an egg, in troof,And Mrs Neal to cook it up for us—Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof."
"A book of verses underneath the roof,A cup of coffee and an egg, in troof,And Mrs Neal to cook it up for us—Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof."
Archibald did his faithful best to laugh; but the effort was not successful.
So it happened that they were received from a funeral as they had once been from a wedding, into the portal of an ancient, friendly mansion whose stairway still creaks to the tread of ghosts and broken people, with now and then a happy footstep to remind it of its youth. And there Ellen Neal, mounting stiffly and wearily with the aid of the curving bannister, was hailed by a loud whisper from the floor above.
"Hsst! Come on up and look who's here."
A radiant Archie led her to his door, and exhibited the One and Only, clad in his bathrobe, curled up asleep upon his bed.
"Humph!" gulped Ellen through her tears. "Iknewthat woman'd manage to fix things somehow!" Which was a final reluctant tribute to the force of kindness that had been Effie May.
A distinguished, foreign-looking gentleman with pointed gray beard got off an interurban car in the vicinity of Louisville, and stood gazing about him uncertainly. It was not the suburban neighborhood he had expected to find, but a distinctly rural one. Here and there smoke was visible above the tree-tops, but the only house within sight was a small farm-cottage of red brick, which had doubtless stood there among its gnarled fruit-trees at a time when the turnpike that passed it was a postroad leading from the metropolis of Middletown (now half a hundred houses strung along the pike) to the little port of Louisville on the Ohio.
There was a big chimney at either end, in the picturesque but impractical early fashion, and a bricked-up terrace across the front overflowing with simple flowers: petunias, snapdragon, larkspur. Upon the lawn grazed a rather stiff-kneed thoroughbred, apparently under convoy of a pair of infants. One of these, the smaller, got about on all fours with astonishing rapidity, and seemed imbued with the spirit of investigation. The other, slightly larger, was extremely black as to color and extremely capable as to manner.
"Tek keer, you Steffum!" Mr. Nikolai heard this one admonish. "Don't you go so near his mouf, you heah me? Dat hawss could snap you up jes' as easy as nippin' off a dandelium!"
The visitor leaned over the fence in sudden interest, "Can you tell me, young person, whether Mrs. Blair lives here?"
At sound of his voice the investigatory infant, in an excess of hospitality, rose to its legs and teetered eagerly toward him, only to come to earth at Mr. Nikolai's feet. Nothing daunted, however, it gazed up at him from this lowly position with a mixture of Archie's grin and the droll, blue, wistful twinkle of Joan.
"Dar you goes, Steffum!" cried the guardian, in hot pursuit. "Dirtyin' up anodder clean dress so's Miss Ellen gwinter whup me good—He's always a-fallin' over on his face dataway," she complained, while maternally repairing damages with the skirt of what appeared to be an only garment. "I b'lieve he goes and does it a-purpose!"
"To gain experience, perhaps?" suggested the visitor.
"I reck'n," assented the other, doubtfully. "Yassuh, Mis' Blair shelibsheah, but she's playin' on de type-writer dis mawnin'. Will I run an' tell her comp'ny is came?"
"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed the gentleman. "Not if she is playing on a typewriter."
"Mr. Archie,helibs heah, too, when he ain't a trabelin' on de railroad train," volunteered the black one, "He's out behine, makin' him a little house to put a hawg in. Heah him?"
Mr. Nikolai nodded. There was a good deal of intermittent hammering and whistling going on in the background.
"You need not announce me, thank you. Perhaps my namesake will lead me to him?"
He held out a forefinger to the younger Stefan, who examined it, found it good, and clasped a trusting fist about it. So linked, the two moved off at a pace suitable to experimental footsteps.
In this slow progress they presently came upon a somewhat nondescript figure at work in a potato-patch. It wore blue jeans overall trousers, surmounted by what had once been a leghorn picture-hat, from which straggled a lock or two of sparse gray hair.
Mr. Nikolai stared at this figure for a puzzled moment; and then burst out laughing.
"Why, Ellen Neal! I did not recognize you as a farmerette."
"Land sakes!" She sat down abruptly among the potato-plants, whether out of surprise or for purposes of concealment it is impossible to state.
But her welcome when it came was for once not grudging. Perhaps she recalled a certain timely offer of help; or perhaps this graybeard, with his slight, tired stoop and his lined eyes, no longer seemed to her a menace to the sheepfold. Be that as it may, her greeting was not outdone in warmth even by Archie's.
"I've simplygotto tell Joan!" cried Archie. "She'll never forgive me if I don't interrupt her just this once."
"Not when it is coming like that," forbade Nikolai, listening to the rapid click of a typewriter from the house beyond. "Neither battle, murder, nor sudden death must be allowed to interfere with a flow of thought that is coming a hundred words to the minute."
"Well, I suppose you know," conceded the husband, reluctantly—
An hour later, however, Ellen took matters into her own hands. She appeared at the kitchen door (dressed, Nikolai was flattered to observe, in a costume of purple crêpe with Battenburg touches), and loudly rang a dinner-bell.
"That'll fetch her! Joan ain't ever too much up in the clouds to hear a dinner-bell; and I don't mean to have my jelly-omelette kep' waitin' on no flows of thought," she remarked.
Joan came out to them, a little untidy as to dress and hair (why is it that the Muse can never be pursued in perfect neatness?) and moving vaguely, as if half in a dream. There was a faint vertical wrinkle between her brows which was new to Nikolai, but her pallor had given place to warm tan, and both face and figure showed a slight suggestion of fullness, a little matronly poise that was more charming than her Botticellimaigrehad been.
As she passed her son, she swooped down upon him and lifted him with a fine free swing onto her shoulder.
"Hi there, old Dirt-in-the-Face! Where's your Dada?"
Mother and child made a memorable picture as they approached, the long lifting lines of the woman's body, her laughing face upturned to the boy, who straddled her shoulder unafraid of his high position, chuckling and kicking fat legs as she tickled him.
The two men who loved Joan exchanged a sympathetic glance. "Mine!" said each in his heart; the one triumphantly, the other with the little shrug that was habitual to him.
Not until she was close upon them did she realize who waited for her there beside Archie. She stopped short. Then, without a word, she put down her child and went to Nikolai and kissed him.
If that kiss, so impulsive and without self-consciousness, was like a stab in Nikolai's heart, he did not show it. She had not dared to kiss him when they parted.
There came back to him in that moment an echo of a certain prophesy he had once made to Archie: "I must warn you that when she does find hermetier, you are more in danger of losing her to it than to me."
Was she lost to both of them, already?...
"Oh, but Stefan, dear, how tired you look!" ("And how old!" her thought finished.) "You've been working too hard over there!"
"One does. It seems the least one can do."
"Too much work and not enough exercise," pronounced Archie, casting a semi-professional eye over him. "Nothing ages a man so quick as to let his muscles sag on him—but you brainy people always forget you've got muscles except in your heads. I'll have to make you hoe the garden and put on the gloves with me now and then, like I do Joan."
"No wonder she is able to hoist fat sons about as if they were feathers!" commented Nikolai.
It was a happy luncheon they had together, and a garrulous one. The Blair family talked all at once, including the youngest, who had three words at his command and liked to practice them. Ellen also joined freely in the conversation as she waited upon them. Nikolai was the only quiet one, seeming content to look and listen.
He had to hear all about the finding of the Farm, as Archie called his two acres and a cottage. When the reunited Blairs had been looking about for a place they could afford to live in—"And raise a family," added Archie happily—they had come across the little place, weed-grown and deserted, and rented it for almost nothing.
"The chickens and the garden alone practically pay the rent," boasted Archie, "and this summer I'm going to set up a hog. Real money in hogs, Mr. Nikolai! Of course the house is pretty old-timey and plain,"—he indicated the low ceilings and deep-set, many-paned windows—"but Joan likes old-timey things. She says this is a country cousin to that old place I used to live in on Poplar Street. Says a house without any ghosts in it is as uninteresting as a house without any books in it." (Archie was always fond of quoting the sayings of his Joan.)
"You do not miss people?" Nikolai asked her, recalling how easily the young American had made her place in what is perhaps the most finished society in the world.
"I have no chance to. We have neighbors enough—nice country women who exchange patterns and recipes and cuttings with me, and even a book now and then. If I want another sort, it is easy enough to run into town—or even on to New York, now that I've the excuse of publishers to be seen! And lately the town has begun to come out to me. Not at first. Emily and the others had a good deal to say about the folly of burying oneself in the country. You see this is not Country Club or golf-course country. But now I notice that they're glad enough to come whenever I ask them—or even when I don't!—Oh, the peace of it, Stefan! At night you can positively hear the silence."