Joan was not the judge of human nature she fancied herself if she believed that a disparity in age would render gossip innocuous. The disparity was not as apparent as she believed. Nikolai was, in his dark, impassive way, a singularly handsome man, and the stories of his early ghetto life and later experiences made of him a romantic figure to more eyes than Joan's. In vain the Jabberwocks rallied around her to a girl. In vain Effie May, whose shrewd ears heard usually whatever was to be heard, even in her retirement, casually spread abroad the story of Mr. Nikolai's devotion to the first Mrs. Darcy.
Joan's attitude was discouraging to her most loyal friends. She seemed quite unaware that she was being defended and rallied around. It rather relieved her when invitations began to dwindle in number; she was thus saved the trouble of declining them. She entered into their growing solitudea deuxwith the same single-mindedness she had brought to bear upon her frivolous period, her domestic period, and her brief career of publicity; being one of those natures which can do only one thing at a time, and that very hard.
When she thought about their relationship at all, it rather pleased her to fancy that she was playing Mrs. Thrale to Nikolai's Dr. Johnson. Unfortunately the people about her were for the most part unaware of this classic relationship; and had they known of it would have doubtless regarded it with one eye knowingly closed.
Much of the town's attention fastened itself upon Archibald. Scandals there had been before this, even in its upper circles; but they had maintained hitherto a decent surreptitiousness, had veiled themselves beneath a more or less transparent cover of secrecy, until some climax occurred in the way of pistol-shot or divorce-proceeding. Thetertium quid, acknowledged and accepted, was new to the experience of Louisville; and very interesting.
Meanwhile Stefan Nikolai, all unconscious of the stimulus he was offering to general conversation, spent all of his free hours with Joan, having long since faced and discounted the risk of it so far as he was concerned. The risk Joan herself might run appeared to his experience negligible. He had never even in his youth attracted women as less intellectual men attract them.
Doubtless even had he been aware of the town's talk it would not have troubled him. For all his knowledge of humanity, he was no man of the world, in the accepted sense of the term. He lived too much beyond it to attach great importance to its opinion. In only one person he recognized any right of criticism. That was Joan's husband, with whom long since he had come to an understanding.
It is a pity that neither Joan nor Joan's world ever came to know of this understanding, which would have added to the affair a distinct flavor.
Mr. Nikolai had taken a small apartment, where Joan and her husband and occasionally others dined with him, or dropped in for a glass of tea in the Russian fashion and an hour of two of music afterwards. Nikolai, true to the instinct of his race, never made even a temporary home without music in it. He had, in addition to a piano, various instruments collected in different lands, among them a balalaika upon which the servant Sacha could sometimes be induced to play a shy accompaniment to peasant ballads.
But Archie had never come there without Joan; and so one day when he dropped in alone, ostensibly to "hear the Rooshian pick his banjo," Nikolai felt a surprise that he was careful not to show. His trained eyes detected signs of distress in Archie which others, including his wife, had failed to notice. The beaming smile did not conceal from Nikolai a little anxious pucker between the brows, a nervous twitching of the big freckled hands.
The writer was not unused to being taken into the confidence of troubled people. It was one of the things that compensated for the enforced solitude of his life, such an occasional glimpse into the secret hearts of his fellow-men. It is an odd fact that writers and philosophers and even poets, all people who live necessarily a little apart from their kind, are frequently chosen as confessors by those who feel the need of confession.
So Nikolai asked no questions, sure that a friendly silence and a good cigar would produce results. Nor did he ring for Sacha and the "banjo." At length Archie blurted out without preliminaries:
"Joan isn't happy, Mr. Nikolai. I guess you've noticed that! She hasn't been for a long while. I'm not sure she ever was.—I s'pose I was a fool to think a man like me could make her happy."
"It is a large order for any one human being to make another human being happy, Blair."
"But you could have!"
Neither spoke for a few minutes. Nikolai made no pretense of not understanding. Only a slight flush came momentarily into his face, and left it paler by contrast. "I am not sure," he said at last. "But I should have liked to try."
"Of course! I knew that when you cabled us to wait till you came—But Joan don't know it yet. Funny, isn't it, when she's so smart? She thinks you feel toward her like a cross between a teacher and a fond father.—'Father'—my eye! She don't catch you lookin' at her sometimes the way I do!"
"Do I—look at her?"
Archie nodded expressively. "I suppose I understand, because I'm in love myself. And she don't"—he swallowed hard—"because she isn't."
"Not yet, perhaps," said the other slowly. "Give her time, my boy."
"Time? I've given her time." Archie heaved a great sigh. "Now I mean to give her something else. I mean to give her a chance. She never really had a chance before, Mr. Nikolai. I—I kind of got her off her guard, when she was takin' the count. It wasn't sporting of me."
The other, moved, laid a hand on his knee. In moments of emotion the foreign blood showed in such slight demonstrativeness. But Anglo-Saxon Archie stiffened, and the hand was at once removed.
"She's too fine for me, you see," he went on. "Too sort of delicate.—I read somewhere that china vases and brass vases couldn't float down a stream together without the china ones getting smashed (though why vases would be floating down a stream anyway,Idon't know!). But I'm brass, you see, and she's china. I thought it might be all right after the twinnies came. I still think it might have been, if they—" Again he swallowed hard.
Nikolai nodded.
"Their hearts are wildAs be the hearts of birds, till childer come."
"Their hearts are wildAs be the hearts of birds, till childer come."
But, my dear boy, you speak as if the twinnies had exhausted the available supply!"
Archie's eyes dropped. Then he lifted them again in a frank gaze. "I almost lost her, sir. Do you think I'd put her through a thing like that again? God!—her little frantic hands clutching at us! And her voice, hoarse as a fierce animal's—!" He jumped up and crossed to a window, where he stood with his back to Nikolai, his face working.
After a moment the other followed, and this time Archie did not stiffen under his touch.
"So," said the Jew, "in your love you would deny her the woman's privilege of suffering?"
"Yes! Suffering on account of me—yes! Every time. It ain't fair, women having to stand the whole business. If I could help, if I could bear one single pain of it—But I can't."
"No," said Nikolai, his lips twitching despite the sadness about them. "No, I am afraid you can't. But—"
"And it's not," interrupted Archie, reverting doggedly to his theme, "as if I were the right man, you see!"
They were silent again.
"You are so afraid of losing her that you will not give her children," mused Nikolai presently. "And yet if I understand you you are willing to lose her—otherwise?"
"To the right man," said Archie directly. "To you—Because I think you are the right man. She's been more contented since you've been here than I ever knew her to be. Of course you're twice her age, but that don't count with brainy people. And you could give her everything I can't—not justthings; you know what I mean! Travel, education, all that. She's in your class, sir, not mine.—Will you do it?"
Nikolai looked rather bewildered. "Do what, Blair?"
"Oh, I don't know. Be nice to her all you can, read poetry to her, get her to care for you. Make love to her, if you want!—You can bet I wouldn't say that to many men—" he laughed forlornly—"but you're different, somehow. I can trust you."
"Thank you." Nikolai's face lit with a very charming smile. "Yes, I think you can trust me—And in case your scheme were successful, if I should prove to be 'the right man'—what about you?"
"Oh, me? Why, I'd just naturally fade out of the landscape."
"How do you mean?"
"There're lots of ways. A cramp in swimming, or an accident when you're cleaning a gun, or a dose of the wrong medicine—"
Nikolai's brows met sharply. "You mean suicide?"
"Sure! Why not? It's done every day, and done so the insurance companies can't prove a thing, too."
Nikolai rose and stood beside him. "You, who say that you love her," he said sternly, "you who cannot bear that she should suffer even to obtain happiness—you would condemn her to a lifetime of grief and remorse? You might perhaps deceive others. Do you think you could deceive Joan? Happy or not, you know that she cares for you, Blair!"
The other's face softened. "Why, yes, I reckon she does, in a way. Once when I had a bad cold and she was scared for fear it was going to run into pneumonia she was awfully upset. I guess you're right," he mused. "It wouldn't do for me to do that. Why, her father's death almost killed her, and he was a mighty worthless old scamp, and she knew it, too! Joan's a deeper feeler than you'd think—Say, I might do something to make her get a divorce?" he suggested, brightening.
"What, for instance?"
"Oh, other women,"—he made a face of distaste. "I'd hate it—a low woman certainly does get my goat! Still—"
Nikolai smiled. "Do you think you could deceive Joan about that, either? You might succeed in hurting her, perhaps; but she would not admit it. Joan is proud."
"Lord, don't I know it? Proud as Lucifer! No, I've got to think of something to do that wouldn't be any reflection on her," he mused, "and yet that she wouldn't stand for. Actionable, as the lawyers say—"
Nikolai burst out laughing, and taking Archie by the shoulders shook him to and fro.
"My dear boy, I fear I cannot enter into this nefarious little plot of yours. I am not going to make love to your wife—I should not know how! Nor yet am I going to lure her from you with poetry and fine words. But—" he added, sobering, "I think with you that she has not yet found herself. There, perhaps, I can help. I can at least offer her my own recipe for happiness."
"You mean that formula thing?" said Archie doubtfully.
"No formula, Blair. Simply—work."
The other's face fell. "Joan never has been one of those idle society girls you read about," he said, defensively. "Sewing, and housekeeping, and civics, and suffrage, and going around giving advice to the poor—She's tried 'em all, Mr. Nikolai."
"And found them all other people's work, not hers.—But, Blair, I must warn you," he added gravely, "that when she does find hermetieryou are in far more danger of losing her to it than to—me, for instance."
"No danger of losing what you haven't got," sighed Archie.
People who know life only on its surfaces were apt to pronounce Joan Blair a rather hard young person. She would herself have admitted to a certain hardness, secretly aware, however, that it was a trait she had deliberately cultivated for protective purposes. Hers was one of the unfortunate natures that are more attuned to the minor than the major chords of life.
Once in her childhood she had confessed to her mother, with a burst of sobbing, that she never expected to be entirely happy because of all the stray dogs running about the world, hungry and lonesome. As she grew older she discovered that it is not only the stray dogs who go hungry and lonesome.
She often wondered impatiently why it was that every one with whom she came into close contact seemed soon or late to develop a marked quality of pathos: her futile father, the struggling Misses Darcy, gruff old devoted Ellen, Effie May, Archie—and now more than all Stefan Nikolai. Despite his renown, his wide experience, his phenomenal rise in life from so handicapped a beginning, her friend seemed nevertheless to her a rather tragic figure, belonging to nobody, product of two countries and native of neither, without even a race to which he could claim complete allegiance. For his mother had been a Christian girl of high birth, outcast by her family because of her marriage with a Jew; who had been in turn rejected by his own people because of her.
Both had been killed in apogrom, one of those appalling man-hunts that still take place in the Russian pale in the name of Christianity; and his father's sister, escaping to a land where there are nopogroms, had brought the child Stefan with her. It must have been a forlorn boyhood for a sensitive, gifted, half-alien lad, none too welcome in a poor and growing Jewish family of the slums; working his brilliant way through school and university, only to meet a crushing rebuff in this land of the free and equal at the hands of a girl who was afraid to marry him.
Joan understood why her mother had taken the hurt and lonely youth into her rare friendship. Aside from Nikolai's charm of companionship and her gratitude to him, she felt it an inherited duty to "make it up" to him for the sadness of his past. And where Joan gave, she gave unstintingly....
She did not pursue her headstrong course without receiving faint inklings now and then as to its effect upon the community. The warnings began with Ellen.
"I ain't sayin' he's not a quiet, pleasant-spoken enough gentleman, as free with his money as if he was a Christian—Mosttoofree, if you ast me! What's he want out of it all? After all, a Jew's a Jew."
"Even if he happens to be a Unitarian?" (Nikolai, during his college life, had chanced to adopt that creed.)
"More 'n ever then," muttered Ellen darkly, "because his Jewness is all bottled up in him, ready to burst out on you unexpected, like a Jack-in-the-Box—You needn't laugh, Joie—you kin see it all in that eye of his. The rest of him don't look so Jewy, but if ever I see a Sheenier eye—! I don't hold with an eye that shows all it feels that way, myself. Seems sort of shameless."
"Indecent exposure of the eye," murmured Joan, "does not confine itself to the Semitic race, Nellen. It seems common to all people who do a good deal of thinking. One can't seem to mask the eye. The more that goes on behind it, the more it reflects—As witness my own," she added complacently.
Her next warning came from a higher quarter. Happening to encounter Mrs. Carmichael in the shops one day, that lady invited her to drive home in her carriage, where she proceeded to catechise her with tongue and lorgnon.
"You are looking very charming, dear child—one wonders at not seeing you about more? I hear your interesting friend is still in town, however. Perhaps it is he who absorbs so much of your time."
Joan admitted the imputation.
"Oh, really? Your husband is very complaisant!—Still, Mr. Blair would naturally be democratic in his point of view."
"Democratic? I think I don't understand."
The older lady shrugged; an Anglo-Saxon shrug, portentous in effect. "Oh, these writing-people—it's so difficult to tell who they are, isn't it? But Emily tells me you've always been singularly courageous."
"It does not take a great deal of courage," said Joan, flushing, "to continue my mother's friendship with the most brilliant man I know. There even seem to be people who envy me the opportunity."
(This shot told, Mrs. Carmichael having been one of the first and most eager to entertain the visiting celebrity.)
"Doubtless he is brilliant as a writer," she conceded. "That is his profession. But even as a writer (I know nothing of him, of course, otherwise!) do you consider him quite safe, my dear? Those plays, for instance."
"Have you read them?" asked Joan bluntly.
"Why, not yet. I bought them, of course—one does. But one has so little time for reading. I am told, however, that in one of them a child is born practically on the stage. At least the characters converse about it quite openly."
"Shocking of them," murmured Joan. "Those things should be managed by means of asterisks. But it's so hard to find actors who play asterisks acceptably."
Mrs. Carmichael's lorgnon busied itself. "I should be sorry," remarked its owner, "to think that any friend of my daughter's would care to encourage indelicacy, whether in literature or—or in life."
"Dear me, yes!—life is indelicate enough anyway, without our encouragement, isn't it?" murmured Joan.
She felt, perhaps justly, that she had come out of this encounter with the honors of war. But Joan could ill afford to make enemies....
The finish of Nikolai's book postponed itself from week to week. Spring came, and early summer, that most witching of seasons in the middle South, languid with the scent of magnolia-blossoms, gay with the bright parasols and fragile muslins that flutter forth like butterflies at the first touch of sun. With Nikolai to share it, the gray old town regained something of its former glamour for Joan. She had many favorite spots to show him—a quiet tree-arched street of patriarchal mansions in the midst of warehouses, with all the charm and old-world dignity of a London square; a certain secluded nook low on the bank of the slow, yellow river, undiscovered save by an occasional working-girl and her shirt-sleeved "gentleman-friend," with whom Nikolai conversed as pleasantly as with old acquaintances. He had not the Major's elegant distaste for thecanaille.
Through his trained eyes, Joan began to note again certain picturesque touches which had charmed her when first she came to Louisville; a primitive, two-wheeled cart bobbing along a crowded street, drawn by mules hitched tandem-fashion, on one of which a dusky muleteer perched sidewise, singing. "That might be Spain," said Nikolai. Or perhaps two mulatto women, dressed in the extreme of fashion even to rouge and face-veils, greeting each other with lifted, outflung hand—a gesture as savage and typically African as if they were only a few weeks out of the jungle, instead of a few generations—Joan found that with Nikolai it was possible to do a good deal of traveling right at home.
Meanwhile the scandal of their association grew and spread; and at last Emily, distressed at the magnitude of the storm of which her friend was the center, decided to interfere. Not with words, however. Long social experience had given her tact, if not wisdom.
Thereafter it began to be noticed that Mrs. Blair and her distinguished friend were not to be seen so often alone together. There was usually a third on their expeditions, and frequently a fourth, whenever Archie could be pressed into service.
"Now that I've got some one to talk to myself, I don't feel so in the way," he confessed naïvely.
Emily formed a habit of dropping in at the Blairs' in the early afternoon (just at the finish of writing hours), so that she had naturally to be included in any plans that were afoot.
"I don't know what's come over you, dear," remarked Joan once, half laughing. "You're positively rushing me nowadays!—or is it Nikolai? I begin to suspect you of designs upon Stefan."
"And why not? He's perfectly eligible. We old maids have to keep a weather eye out, you know—But how do you know it isn't Archie I'm pursuing?" asked Emily calmly. "I appreciated him long before you did, you know."
"Emmy, Emmy, such indelicacy!" sighed Joan. "And him a married party, too! What would your mother say?"
"I'm feeding her Shaw lately in broken doses. She's prepared for almost anything—You don't really mind my trailing you about this way, do you, Joan?" she asked, sobering. "I love hearing you two talk. Am I in the way, if I just keep quiet as a mouse?"
"Mind? Of course not!" Joan kissed her. "You and Stefan are my two dearest friends, and Iloveto have you friends with each other. Besides, he says you have an 'interesting mind,' my dear. Welcome to our city!"
So Emily continued to make a courageous third in their walks and talks and studies; accepted by Nikolai with his usual courteous friendliness, and by the gossips with feelings which were not unmixed.
"It's the husband's doings—he's awake at last!" declared one faction.
"Men are so fickle. He's had a good deal of her—and Emily Carmichael is looking particularly well this year. Poor Joan!" murmured the other faction, composed of her more intimate acquaintances.
Joan's feelings on the matter were also not unmixed. She loved Emily; her presence was always a pleasure; she had assuredly nothing to discuss with Nikolai that could not be discussed before so devoted an audience. And yet—
Stefan came to take the other girl's company so much for granted that one evening, when Joan suggested a row up the river for their next day's outing, it was natural enough for him to say, "That sounds charming! and I think Miss Carmichael will enjoy it, too."
This innocent remark produced surprising results; as surprising to Joan as to himself. She jumped to her feet. "Look here, Stefan! If you want Emily so much, why don't you take her by yourself?" she cried, and bursting into tears she fled from the room.
Nikolai stared blankly at Archie.
"Will you tell mewhatI have said?"
For once the other was the first to understand.
"Don't you see?" he replied with his patient smile (and there is nothing sadder to see in life than patience on the face of a young man). "It's come about just as I thought it would, Mr. Nikolai. She's—she's jealous of you. That's all."
That night Stefan Nikolai, usually very regular in habit, sat so late by his open window that the servant Sacha emerged at intervals to investigate.
"Is Excellency ill, that he neither sleeps nor reads?"
"Not ill, Sacha. Go to bed."
There was a lilac-tree blooming below the window, and the scent of the young summer came in to him, flooding his heart, his senses—
The servant appeared again.
"Has Excellency sadness?"
"Not sadness, Sacha. I think—it is happiness."
"And yet he sighs?"
Nikolai stirred, and got to his feet.
"That is because our wandering begins again. The book is done. In a few days we go."
The servant took an eager step toward him. "Not alone?"
Nikolai started. He had forgotten, as so many forget, the watching eyes of those who serve us. "Certainly, alone!" he said sharply. "Am I not always alone?"
Sacha's eyes dropped. "In my country," he suggested gently, "when we see a woman which we need, we take her."
The other smiled. The two had been through much together. "And if she chances to belong to some one else?"
"Then"—with an eloquent thrust of the hand—"we kill!" But seeing that the hint was unlikely to bear fruit, he added dispiritedly, "Excellency is not, however, a peasant. Sometimes to be a peasant is good."
The storm which burst in August, 1914, had the effect of blotting out smaller storms into nothingness. It brought in its wake different things to different natures: to some apprehension, sheer personal terror, to others the quickening sense of high adventure, to others yet sick disillusionment with a world that was still capable of such gigantic folly.
To Joan, in the dead blankness that followed the departure of her friend, the great war seemed strangely like a godsend. It was as if she had cried in desperation to Providence. "What next?" and Providence had answered, "This!"
Perhaps she was not the only woman to whom the sudden extraneous demand for all that was in her came as a godsend.
She flung herself head, hand, and heart, into the organization of relief work. As the Germans pursued their incredible way through Belgium, it seemed to her that every frantic mother, every maimed child, every desperate father, the very roofless houses and ruined orchards, cried aloud upon her, Joan Blair, for help. She could not understand why others did not seem to hear the cry, how those about her could pursue the usual course of life unheeding—Joan was one of the first Americans to declare war upon Germany.
But those about her heard better than she realized. Gradually as the change came, it came. Hers was not the only blood in the old border State to thrill to the call of drums. And as in the earlier days, while the men got down their firearms to clean them, the women rolled up their sleeves and settled down to work.
Under the impetus of Joan and others like her, Bridge quickly gave way to bandage-making, the click of unaccustomed needles drowned the chatter of clubrooms and tea-table, and the Jabberwocks in a body abandoned the pursuit of culture for a course in hospital assistance. "So that we shall be ready by the time our own boys need us," explained Joan.
"But, Mrs. Blair, you ought to curb those firebrand sentiments of yours!" protested Judge Carmichael to her after one of her public utterances. "It is enjoined upon us Americans to be strictly neutral."
"Neutral?" cried the daughter of Richard Darcy. "Neutral? Have you ever seen a pit-terrier jump on a respectable little poodle-dog out in the front yard protecting his household—and were you able to remainneutral? I know my country better than that!"
In keeping up with Joan's new activities, the town quite forgot to look at her askance.
Nikolai, too, was making of the war a personal matter. He wrote that he, with other writers in New York, was financing a hospital unit with which he intended to go to France in any capacity where he would be useful. He had been in his youth, among other things, a student of medicine.
"Isn't it fine, Archie?" she cried, thrilling to this letter. "Oh, if we could only do something ourselves! I'd like to send him a contribution for his unit, anyway. May I?"
Archie hesitated. "How much, dear?"
Joan flushed. It was the first time he had failed to give her without question whatever she asked of him.
"Sorry to have to ask," she said, rather stiffly. "But I've given the last cent I had to the Red Cross. Could you spare me fifty dollars, say, and take it out of my next allowance?"
Archie silently got out his check-book.
It troubled her to notice in him something almost like apathy toward the war. The startling headlines, the growing report of horrors, even the eleventh-hour miracle of that stand upon the Marne, moved him to no more than a preoccupied attention. He appeared to concern himself far more with the uncertain state of the stock-market, which he studied assiduously. Joan could not accustom herself to the idea of an Archie commercialized: interesting himself at such a crisis in the world's history merely with money.
An explanation at last dawned upon her. "My dear," she accused him one day, "I believe you've been speculating!"
"Who—me? Oh, every man speculates, sweetheart. Business itself is a good deal of a speculation nowadays. Nothing to worry your precious head about, though."
"Would you like me to economize, Archie, more than I usually do?" she asked.
"Oh, no. You're never extravagant. A little more or less can't matter."
Preoccupied though he seemed, he was never too preoccupied to show her the special consideration and gentleness she had noticed ever since Nikolai left.
"As if he were trying to comfort me!" she thought uneasily. Her queer outburst of nerves with Stefan was something she never allowed herself to think of. She did not quite understand it; and Joan dreaded things she could not understand.
Archie seemed to be developing nerves himself of late. When the doorbell or telephone rang suddenly, he jumped as if he had been touched; and he went to his office almost every evening, coming home late and very tired.
"You're working too hard, old boy," protested Joan. "I'll be glad when the treasurer of your company feels well enough to come back from Saranac and take his old job again."
"He's back now. I expect to turn the books over to him in a few days."
"Good! I'm glad of it."
"Are you?" asked Archie, rather queerly.
"Of course!—though it means less salary, doesn't it? What do we care? We had enough before. You know, dear, money simply meansnothingto me, so long as the bills are paid."
"I know," he said soberly.
Perhaps if she had been less obsessed with the war, Joan might have been better prepared for what was coming....
One day, on her way home from the Red Cross rooms, she bought herself an early edition of an evening paper, and was looking over the headlines when she came across the following:
Farther down, aghast, incredulous, she read the name of her husband.
When she reached home, he was already there. Johnny Carmichael and Ellen were with him, both talking at once. They stopped as Joan came bursting in.
"Archie! This can't betrue?"
He had risen to go to her. Now he sank back in his chair, nodding.
"I been tellin' him he's got to git out while the gittin's good," muttered Ellen Neal, her language consorting oddly with the tense fear in her face. "Here's plenty of money"—she held out a battered pocket-book. "He can hop on the L. & N. train as it passes Fourth Street. They ain't a minute to waste! The main thing's to git him away before they—take him!"
"She's right!" insisted Johnny Carmichael, stuttering with excitement. "Once he's out of the way, my father'll get everything fixed. He's closeted with Moore now. We've stopped that beastly article in the paper—lots of people won't have seen the first edition. Father's taken on the case—Mrs. Blair, you've got to make Archiewake up!"
But Joan could not speak.
Archie rose to his feet again. He seemed invested with a new, quiet dignity. He put a hand on each of their shoulders.
"I'm not going to run, of course," he said. "Thank you just the same. Now cut along, will you? I want to talk to my wife."
Always afterwards, in thinking of that nightmare time, Joan remembered with a stab of remorse that when he held out his arms to her she had not gone to them—He did not make the mistake again.
In the hour they had together before others came, he made things as plain to her as he could. The sum was not large as defalcations go. Moore and Company would not suffer for it—they were a rich firm; and later when he had served out his term he would be able to pay them back. This he repeated over and over.
The trouble had commenced with the purchase of the house. It was too ambitious. Archie, struggle as he might, had begun shortly to fall behind with the payments, and had borrowed more money on it to meet them. (Joan recalled signing the papers, which meant nothing to her; merely "business.") Somehow, what Archie made never went quite far enough. Not through her fault!—this, too, he insisted upon again and again. How was she to guess how things were, so long as her own and the household allowances were paid to her regularly?
"Oh, but why didn't youtellme?"
"A fellow don't like to admit that he's bitten off more than he can chew, till he's sure."
So he had tried a little speculating, and won; a little more, and won again. (It was at this time that he bought Joan her modest automobile.) After that, the story is too trite to need repeating. There came the depression of 1913, later the cataclysm of the war; and Archie with the finances of Moore and Company at his disposal. He lost, heavily, and borrowed to protect himself; recovered enough to replace his borrowings; went in deeper—and was caught with no means of making good some $15,000.
"Our house?" suggested Joan, trembling.
"Mortgaged up to the eaves. Our equity in it wouldn't be a drop in the bucket."
"What about your stock in that Building Association!"
He laughed. "Swallowed up so long ago I'd forgotten I ever had any.... No, dear, I'm done. I took a long chance, and I took it once too often. Nothing for it but to serve out whatever term they give me, and then come back and—show 'em." His set jaw quivered a little.
"'Serve out'—Archie! You don't meanjail?"
He nodded, still with his amazing quietness. "I want to. It's coming to me. And I'm young yet. You'll see!... But that don't meanyou'reto be mixed up in it," he added, slowly. "When I go to the Pen, that lets you out, dear. You get your freedom. Nobody will expect you to—to stay married to a criminal."
He was watching her closely, and she stared back at him. He had proposed the monstrous idea seemingly in all seriousness, as if it were one to which he had given long consideration.
"Don't talk that way!" she said, with sudden sternness. "Of course you are not to go to jail. I'll fix that somehow—I'll get the money."
But still she could not go to him, could not offer him any comfort. She was too stunned. This did not seem to her Archie, this quiet stranger who spoke so casually of penitentiaries and criminals and divorce.
They were glad when people came to interrupt them.
And people did come, in a steady stream. It seemed as if half the town had read that hastily suppressed news-item, and were determined that Archie Blair should not go to prison.
"It's most worth while getting into trouble to see how many friends you've got you never knew about!" he sighed.
The rescuers began with Effie May, check-book in hand and panting with distress, so upset that she had forgotten to rouge her face; and it ended with Mr. Florsheimer of the Gents' Furnishing, who intimated that if a couple of thou' at the usual rate of interest would be of any use to Archie, they were his.
The offer that perhaps touched him the most deeply came from the Misses Darcy.
"We happen to be at the moment temporarily embarrassed for funds," explained Miss Iphigenia, at her stateliest, (and looking curiously like her Cousin Richard). "But it will be a simple matter to arrange another mortgage on our house. Dear papa did so frequently, I remember. And of course in a—an accident of this sort—Why, my dear boy, that is what houses are for!"
But to all these suggestions Archie was able gratefully to explain that his wife had already arranged matters. For as soon as she collected her numbed faculties, she had telegraphed to Stefan Nikolai, and he had replied within the hour: "Draw on me to any amount."
"There," she remarked to the weeping Ellen. "That's the Jewness coming out in him, just as you said it would!..."
Ellen did all the weeping that was done in the Blair household during this crisis. The shock seemed to have quite broken her, so that it was the mistress who had to comfort the servant.
"I'd ought to have known," she wailed, "with him lookin' so peakid and all! But I thought it was—something else. Oh, why couldn't he havetoldme? I could have kep' the bills down more, had pot-roasts instead of fancy-cuts, and hearts—you know how tasty beef-hearts can be, Joan, when I set my mind to 'em! 'T aint as if I wasn't an old hand at makin' things do. But you always had such rich ways, just like your father. And I let it fool me.... Oh, the poor boy, the poor, scairt, lonesome boy, tryin' to go ahead all by himself!"
Joan's heart ached for her husband, too, as much as a heart can ache that seems turned into stone. She felt physically numb all over, except in her brain, and that worked mercilessly as ever—merciless not only to him but to herself. She did not hesitate to put the blame where much of it belonged.
"I have been utterly selfish, one of the vampires that sap a man's strength, his ability, his very decency, and give nothing in return. Yet—does any one but a fool yield to vampires?"
She tried to make for him every excuse he had not made for himself.
"It was all for me, to give me what he thought I wanted, the things my friends have. He could not bear to deprive me of anything."
Yet he had deprived her of the thing she valued most in life: her pride. He had committed the sin unpardonable. He had, as the English put it, "let her down." She, Joan Darcy, in whom pride was the dominant trait, pride of race, of intellect, of character—she was the wife of a defaulter, a common thief!
Despite people's marked kindness and consideration toward her, she fancied she knew what they were saying: "An extravagant wife. A woman who neglected her home and her husband."
But of the charge of extravagance at least she was able to acquit herself. The iron of poverty had entered too early and too deep into her soul for that. She knew that dressing, for instance, cost her far less than it cost any woman of her acquaintance. She had always made taste and skill take the place of money there, and in other ways. Much that was unusual in her little house she had done herself, staining walls, painting woodwork, covering furniture. Where her neighbors employed several servants, she did very well with one; and if she left much of her household management in Ellen's hands, it was because she knew them to be more experienced than her own.
"No," she told herself, puzzling the thing over, "we have simply cut our coat according to other people's cloth—And how was I to know?"
It is the cry of many a startled wife whose husband has tried to keep on his shoulders the burden two should share: How was I to know?
She was comforted to think that no tradespeople at least were suffering from their catastrophe; she owed not a dollar in the world.... Here Joan winced, recalling her determination that there should be no "Indians" in the annals of the Blair family. Archie, in order that she might pay bills promptly, had allowed her to pay them with other people's money!
His own attitude was incredible to her. He seemed not particularly ashamed, nor even down-cast; if anything, rather relieved that the strain was over. The enormity of the thing he had done did not appear to impress him. He was more like a man who has bet too heavily at the races, but means to show himself a good loser. For the first time Joan considered seriously the mystery surrounding his birth. Emily Carmichael had been right—it was "brave" to marry a man of such doubtful antecedents. Who knew what handicaps were his to fight, what heritage of moral obliquity?
There was after all a certain safety in good birth, she thought—forgetting that traditions and fine breeding had not sufficed to keep her own father from a slight moral obliquity, such as had permitted him to speculate with trust-funds. (Of the Major's earlier misadventure she never learned.)
And then a sudden rush of reaction came over her. Archie—and moral obliquity! It was as impossible to associate the two as to associate a fine dog with treachery. He had simply, for her sake, chosen to take his long chance and abide by the consequences. An act more gallant, more blindly, foolishly, needlessly sacrificial, had never been laid upon the altar of love. And yet—she could not forgive him for it.
"It must be because I do not care for him," she told herself stonily; and was glad in her heart that his children had not lived.
But if she could not offer Archie the tenderness he craved, she gave him at least all the other assistance in her power. Her executive ability stood them both in good stead.
It was she who interviewed Mr. Moore, far more successfully than Judge Carmichael had done, persuading him not only to hush the matter up but to retain Archie in his employ. "If I can afford to take another chance on him, surely you can?" she insisted; an argument which the dazzled old gentleman found quite unanswerable.
Within a week she had procured an excellent tenant for the house, furnished, with privilege of sale at a month's notice. She had disposed of her little car at a good price, and placed Pegasus for the time being in the Carmichael stable.
"I can't sell her, of course, nor give her away—it would be like selling or giving away Ellen Neal! But if you'll just ride her, Emily, and play with her sometimes? She's used to a good deal of attention."
"I'll probably spoil her to death," promised Emily, deeply touched by this first sign of sentiment she had seen in her friend during that tragic time.
Joan moved about her pretty house, cleaning, packing, getting things in order for the tenant, as calmly as if she were not leaving it forever. Even in the nursery she was perfectly composed, until she came upon the toys Ellen had hidden there. Then she locked the door for awhile, and neither Emily nor Ellen dared go to her.
"But what are we going to do ourselves?" moaned Ellen, rocking helplessly to and fro in her kitchen. All her self-reliance had deserted her. She was suddenly an old woman.
"I haven't decided yet, dear. One thing at a time," replied her mistress, steadily....
But in the end it was Archie who decided.
He had acquiesced without comment in all Joan's arrangements. Only once had he protested. It was when she telegraphed Stefan Nikolai for the money.
"Not that, Joan—not that,please!" he said, with a quick flush. "I'd rather go to the Pen than that—Really, the Pen will be quite a rest for me," he added, piteously.
"Nonsense!" she replied; and he said no more.
But for all his acquiescence, he did not seem to be numbed by the thing, as Joan was. Though she often heard him walking up and down his room at night, and suffered for him, at times he appeared almost happy.
"I can't get over howgoodpeople are!" he said once. "Think of Mr. Moore being willing to take me back! Not as manager, of course—the boys wouldn't be wanting to take orders from me yet awhile. Nor I couldn't expect to handle money. But he sent for me, and said I was the best salesman he'd ever had, and offered me the old job back on a commission basis! Pretty nice, what?"
"Shall you take it?" she asked, curiously. She herself could not have faced disgrace with any such meekness.
"Take it? Why, I jumped at the chance!"
Joan flushed.
"Archie," she said suddenly, "do you realize that there's a war going on over there in Europe! Do you realize that there is need in France for every able-bodied man that's got a life to spare?—Have you thought of that?"
She was startled by the change in his face. The veins stood out on his forehead, and his hands clenched. "Have I thought of it? God, girl, what else do you suppose I've been thinking about the past year? I'd give the soul out of my body to slip away from this—this grab-bag, and get into a good clean fight—Those damned baby-killers! Gosh!—fight? Just give me a chance at that dachshund of a Kaiser with my two bare hands! But"—he made the little gesture that she realized was becoming characteristic of him—a gesture of renunciation—"I've got to stay here now. There isn't any money in soldiering."
Her flush deepened. "Money! I never want to hear the word again. Haven't you had enough to do with just 'money,' Archie?"
"Not on your life," he said doggedly. "I've got to make a heap of it before I'm through. Fifteen thousand dollars!—That reminds me," he went on in another tone. "You say they need able-bodied men over there—don't they need women, too? D'you suppose your friend Nikolai could find something for you to do in that unit of his?"
He caught the sudden gleam in her eye.
"That would please you, wouldn't it?" he said quietly. "Of course it would mean hard work, dangerous work, too, perhaps—but it's a great chance for you, for anybody! To sort of help make history.... Mr. Nikolai was talkin' to us once about those two kinds of happiness, Hüttengluck and Heldengluck—remember? Well, I don't believe you're the sort to be satisfied with any Hüttengluck—nor I wouldn't want you to be. Take your chance, Joan—and don't lose it." His voice shook a little. "I'd like mighty well to have somebody of my name mixed up in this war somehow!"
She put her hand on his—almost her first demonstration of tenderness since the shock came; but the gleam had already died out of her eyes.
"That's dear of you, Archie—fine and generous. But if your place is here, mine is, too. I am not going to desert you. How can you think such a thing? I mean to be a better wife to you than I have been. We've got to start again, and start right. I want to help you...."
And then inexplicably, unbelievably, the worm turned. His nerves had strained too far. He shook off her hand as if it burned him.
"Help!" he said roughly. "Help? A hell of a lot of helpyouare! Going around like a martyr, with a don't touch-me, how-dare-you look on your face, as if I'd done the thing just to spite you! My God! A woman with any guts to her—"
"Archie!"
"Oh, yes, that shocks you—such a fine lady as you are," He seemed to be working himself up, like a woman in hysterics. "So grandly indifferent to money, too!—just so's you've got enough of it. Who spent the money, anyway?—tell me that! Was it me, who haven't bought myself so much as a new pair of pants in three years?"
She stared at him, mutely. "So this," she thought, "is the real man!" His ears, his great, coarse hands—they meant something after all.
Her white look drove him into a further frenzy. "Oh, yes, glare at me, if I'm good enough for you to glare at!—Let me tell you something—if it's on my account you're staying, you needn't. That's all! It's awifea man wants at a time like this, not any marble image, not any tragedy-queen! Not any noble character that watches him out of the corner of her eye, and if he's real good—pats him on the hand! I've had enough of that!—Go on with your friend Nikolai," he cried violently. "Try him out for six months or a year, and if he suits, and you don't want to come back here—by God, you needn't!"
"Archie," she said, trembling in every limb, "I shall leave your house to-morrow."
"Good!" he cried. "Good! And I'm going to beat you to it!"
He strode to the kitchen door and flung it wide. "Come here, Ellen Neal, and bear witness that I'm leaving this house first."
The front door banged behind him....
The two women stared at each other.
"Was that—was thatMr. Archie?"
"Yes," said Joan, still trembling, "it was!—Come upstairs and help me pack my trunk."
There is little to be said here about Joan's experiences in France. The story of those is better told in her own remarkable letters, which began shortly to appear in certain magazines; and in the book that followed.
Stefan Nikolai had found her shelter with a friend of his, Lady Arbuthnot, a clever old Englishwoman whose long horse-face and charming voice and odd combinations of tweed skirt and evening blouses were known and loved in every institution of mercy about Paris. Under Lady Arbuthnot's guidance Joan found use for not only her Red Cross training but for everything else she had, whether by gift or acquirement. Singing, story-telling, "play-acting," letter-writing, even dancing, all seemed as important a part of her equipment as the regulation sewing, bandage-making, and cookery. She tried an inexperienced hand at washing dishes and scrubbing floors. She also tried her hand at mending shattered nerves and even broken hearts; and at none of these things was she entirely unsuccessful. There was a certain power of concentration in Joan that made failure unlikely in whatever she undertook.
It was a wonderful time to her. She never got nearer the trenches than Paris; but there the trenches came to her, with all their horror, their sordid hideousness, their sheer, soul-stirring grandeur. She saw shattered men struggling back to life that they might offer it again, with eagerness; she saw philanthropists living in comfort on money that had been obtained to feed starving refugees; she saw girl-children, who had been forced to bear German babies, loving those babies with a passion of maternity piteously beyond their years. Priests labored side by side with panders; women of the great world, such as Lady Arbuthnot, shared bed and board and ceaseless effort with W. C. T. U. workers from Kansas, with missionaries out of China, with ex-courtesans from the Paris streets, with those most sheltered of all aristocrats, the women of the upper French bourgeoisie.
It was humanity with all barriers down, all contacts clean and clear. And Louisville, Kentucky, seemed as far away and negligible as the planet Earth may seem to possible dwellers on the moon.
Sometimes she had word from there—not often, for Ellen Neal was no letter-writer, and even Emily Carmichael's loyalty had been strained by Joan's unexplained desertion of her husband in his trouble. Once her cousin Miss Iphigenia Darcy wrote, and from her letter Joan gathered some impression of the effect of her sudden departure from Louisville.
In my day girls were taught that their first duty was to theHome, married or not. But I daresay this is a very old-fashioned notion, and with all those poor, unfortunate French needing help—Sister Euphie and Sister Virgie and I have frequently discussed offering our services. It is strange to have a war going on without any Darcys in it! (You haven't thename, you see, although atrue Darcyin every other particular.) However, it does not seem the place forunmarriedladies just now, with so many men lying about in the hospitals not fully clothed, and those unfortunate Belgian victims (you know what I mean)! As I tell everybody, "Advanced young matrons like Joan are the ones really needed over there." But you know how narrow people are, my dear! I sometimes think our city is growing a littleprovincial.
In my day girls were taught that their first duty was to theHome, married or not. But I daresay this is a very old-fashioned notion, and with all those poor, unfortunate French needing help—Sister Euphie and Sister Virgie and I have frequently discussed offering our services. It is strange to have a war going on without any Darcys in it! (You haven't thename, you see, although atrue Darcyin every other particular.) However, it does not seem the place forunmarriedladies just now, with so many men lying about in the hospitals not fully clothed, and those unfortunate Belgian victims (you know what I mean)! As I tell everybody, "Advanced young matrons like Joan are the ones really needed over there." But you know how narrow people are, my dear! I sometimes think our city is growing a littleprovincial.
Joan smiled and sighed over this communication; and then forgot it.
From Archie she had no word, except an occasional line or two with the money-order that came regularly on the first of each month, and was as regularly returned. The magazine connections Stefan Nikolai had made for her provided what money she needed, and she had not yet sufficiently forgiven Archie to be willing to accept anything from him.
At first she wrote to him, not so much from any sense of duty, as from pity. She did not forget what had passed between them, she made no attempt to ignore the fact that he had failed her utterly in every way. But she no longer had time to brood upon her own affairs. In the vortex of life where she now found herself, personal troubles seemed somehow to disappear into the common whole. Constant association with others' sorrow developed her quality of sympathy to an almost painful extent; and though she knew that Ellen Neal was making Archie comfortable enough in the old rooms on Poplar Street, his loneliness, his humble acquiescence in disgrace, hurt like a bruise on her heart. So she wrote to him, impersonally but kindly.
Since he so rarely replied, however, her letters gradually ceased. Evidently Archie, like many others, found it difficult to forgive where he had wronged. Joan shrugged—a little gesture she had learned from Nikolai—and dismissed her husband as much as possible from her mind.
There was much else to occupy it: not only in the way of work but of pleasure. Paris, even in her grief, did not forget the human necessity for pleasure, nor did Stefan Nikolai. She saw rather less of him than she had expected to, for he was frequently absent for weeks at a time on unexplained journeys, about which Joan had learned to ask no questions. But whether he was near her or not, she was always conscious of his enveloping care, his devoted watchfulness. He gave her, too, many friends besides Lady Arbuthnot.
Once Sacha, always left on guard over Joan during these absences of Nikolai's, betrayed the fact that his master had gone into Russia. Joan taxed him with it when he returned.
"Russia is not safe for you, Stefan!—you told me so yourself."
"Surely you would not have me at such a time seek only places of safety?" he smiled.
"Why can't you stick to the hospital work you came over for, instead of gallivanting about all over the place?" she demanded, with a petulance that concealed anxiety.
"One goes where one is useful," he replied quietly. "There are many who know more about medicine than I, but few who know more about Russia—except in Germany, perhaps! My countrymen are very susceptible to the spoken word."
It was his only explanation of his frequent disappearances; but Joan, understanding that wars must be won not only on the battlefield, uttered no more protests, and made the most of her friend when she had him.
For the first time in her life, she came near to the innermost meaning of the word happiness. It was not the placid content of her "pasture-time," nor the feverish, half-guilty ecstasy which had come to her for a brief hour through the unworthy medium of Eduard Desmond. It wrapped her round warmly like the consciousness of some beloved presence—which indeed it was, though Joan for once did not quite dare to analyze the sensation. She only knew that here, among strangers speaking a strange tongue, she was for the first time in her experience utterly at home. And she was curiously at the top of her powers. In that atmosphere, nothing seemed impossible of accomplishment. There was a sense of personal possession and being possessed—"By Paris," she told herself; but in her heart another name echoed.
Unaware, the great experience, the thing for which she had blindly groped, had come upon her; not with a sudden leap to which her nature leaped in response, but with a slow, quiet, irresistibly gathering force, like a great stream that bore her upon its breast, without volition, without struggle, toward some bourne of which she had no knowledge. And no fear.
Joan might have said with Browning: