Why Joan? Part 11

She opened Ellen's door without knocking. "h.e.l.lo, there! Who's that I met on the stairs, and why does he call you 'Mrs.,' you giddy old fraud?"

A spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter as Ellen turned, beaming.

"Land sakes! You might as well kill a person as scare her to death," she complained, far too pleased to admit it. "What you doin' down town this time o' day, all dressed up like lady-come-to-see? What do you want, eh?"

"Pancakes," explained Joan, ripping off her long gloves. "I'm going to stay to supper, Nellen, so get me an ap.r.o.n and let's begin."

Ellen's smile widened. "Pancakes! On a hot night like this?"

Joan nodded. "Um-humm! And lemonade," she said, "and anything else you can think of that's indigestible. Got any pickles?"

"What would a lone woman be doin' keepin' house without pickles?"

replied Ellen scornfully, producing them. "And there's a batch of cinnamon rolls in the oven this minute, just as if I was expectin' you."

With a sigh of content, the girl reached down a yellow crockery bowl out of the cupboard--she was on quite intimate terms with Ellen's cupboard--and tying a gingham ap.r.o.n about her neck, proceeded to stir batter. It was the same crockery bowl, and perhaps the same gingham ap.r.o.n, in which she had stirred batter so long ago that she had been obliged to stand on a footstool in order to reach the kitchen-table.

There was something substantial and fixed and unchangeable about Ellen Neal and her possessions, something that spelled home, though it was only home for other people.

"But you haven't distracted my mind," said Joan judicially, "from the fact that a young man of your acquaintance calls you 'Mrs.' without correction. You haven't eloped or anything lately?"

Ellen Neal bridled. "How you do go on, Joan! It makes it look better for a lone woman to be livin' by herself if she's called 'Mrs.' Men ain't so apt to get fresh with her."

"No?" murmured Joan. She gazed at Ellen's gaunt unloveliness with twinkling eyes. "Don't tell me men have been getting fresh with you, Nellen!"

The other's jaw snapped. "They have not, and they better not try it."

"Don't you think it's rather a risk darning their socks, then?" murmured the girl wickedly. "It might give them false ideas."

"I only do it for one of 'em, and he pays me good. Anything's proper so long as you get paid for it."

Joan laughed aloud. "Why, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Neal, you shock me! What a perilous idea!"

"You're awful smart, guyin' me, but I'd be ashamed to think the kind of thoughts you're thinkin' now," said Ellen Neal, unsmiling. "And you a spinster yourself! Thoughts are as bad as deeds, any day--worse, 'cause they come easier. That's one thing I've noticed about you lately, Joan.

You seem to know about things that ain't ladylike, somehow. Something's happened to you, child. You ain't the nice little girl you used to be."

"No," admitted Joan, "I'm not. And the world's not the nice little world it used to be, either." She went over and laid her head on her friend's bony shoulder. "Don't scold me to-day, dear. You're right, but--Oh, Nellen, father's lost our money! And there's nothing in the world I can call my own. Just absolutely nothing!"

A silence fell. "So," said the old woman. "You've found out, at last, have you? I've wondered how long it would take. And now what you goin'

to do about it?" she demanded suddenly. "Are you goin' to law?"

Joan shook her head. "You know what Mother would say to that."

Ellen sighed. "I suppose she wouldn't hear to it." It was a curious fact that when these two spoke of Mary Darcy, they always spoke as if she were still alive, and near them. "Anyway, you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip--though I must say I'd like to see _somethin'_ squeezed out of them kind of turnips, if it's only insides!" she added quite blood-thirstily. "Oh deary me, deary me! How often I've begged your ma to sneak what there was left out of his reach and put it away where I keep mine."

"Where's that, Nellen?"

"In an old stockin'-fut under my bedtick, where you can bet no man on earth ever laid eyes on it, or ever will!"

The smell of scorching bread suddenly filled the room. "Land sakes, my cinnamon-rolls! And I'd promised that boy to save him some for breakfast."

"Breakfast?" exclaimed Joan, glad enough of a diversion from discussing her undiscussable father. "You mean to tell me you're not only keeping your young man darned, but breakfasted? Nellen, I'm positively jealous!"

"You wouldn't be if you could see him eat," said the other seriously.

"Acts like he ain't had enough food to fill him sence he was born. He was gettin' all his meals out to a restaurant before I come, a place he calls 'The Sign of the Dirty Spoon.' Jokin', I suppose--he's a great one for jokes. But he looked so skinny, and was always takin' something for dyspepsy, so I told him I'd give him a good breakfast anyway, just to start the day on. Say, Joan, you ought to see him put it away! He says once, 'I 'spose this is what you call home-cookin', ain't it?' 'Land, sakes,' says I, 'don't you know home-cookin' when you see it?' 'I ain't never seen it before!' he says, laughing."

While she talked Ellen was bustling capably about, laying a cloth, getting out dishes, dropping Joan's batter into a sizzling saucepan, from whence arose dense, pleasing vapors.

"Here, Joan, mix some cinnamon in that sugar, 'less you'd ruther have mola.s.ses on 'em. You ought to see the room he's got. Nothin' but books, all over the tables, piled up on the floor, even on the window-sills--"

"Books?" said Joan, p.r.i.c.king up an ear. She had not imagined the wide-eared young man in his dapper clothes a student.

"Whatever people want all them books around for I can't see," said Ellen. "Dust collectors, I call 'em; but he says they're his college career. Always will have his joke! And the dirt--! He had a colored woman in to do for him before I come, and guess what she used to do with her dust?" She paused dramatically, arms akimbo.

Joan admitted her imagination unequal to the task.

"Swept it under the bed and left it there! Land!" said Ellen Neal, "how I do hate a n.i.g.g.e.r! You can bet I got that place to rights in a jiffy."

"I can indeed," murmured Joan, "and I can also bet he couldn't find a thing belonging to him for a week afterwards."

Ellen grinned. "You've the truth of it. There wasn't a morning for about a week but what he'd thump on the floor and yell down the chimney, 'Mrs.

Neal, _oh_, Mrs. Neal! For heaven's sake where is my blue necktie?' or, 'In the name of Jehoshaphat, what have you done with my other pair of pants?' It kind of reminded me of your pa," she said, sighing. "I been lookin' after him ever sence. There now, ain't you goin' to eat your pancakes now you've got 'em?"

Joan drew up her chair to the oil-cloth covered table, and, despite the heat and her troubles, made such a meal as she had not eaten for weeks at her step-mother's elaborate board. Ellen sat opposite her, with no servant-and-mistress nonsense to complicate the pleasure of hospitality.

Sometimes the old woman waited on Joan, and sometimes Joan waited on Ellen, all in a friendly democracy that would have caused Major Darcy's hair to rise on end. It had been his conscientious effort for years to keep Ellen Neal "in her place." The difficulty was in the ups and downs of the Darcy menage to know just what might be considered Ellen's place.

Not troubling themselves with any such niceties of status, the two ate their pancakes and drank their lemonade and otherwise courted indigestion contentedly, meanwhile chatting about the young man from upstairs, who for some reason began to appeal to Joan's imagination. His name, it appeared, was Archibald Blair.

"Archibald Blair! Nellen, how romantic! Like an English novel. Young Lord Toodledeboots ruined at Monte Carlo, hiding his poverty and a broken heart in lodgings. I suppose these might be called lodgings? If only his ears had been made to fit him!"

She no longer thought of him as a necktie drummer. The books made a difference. It seemed unlikely that necktie drummers would be on terms of first-name intimacy with Shakespeare. Moreover, his awkward yet somehow easy and una.s.suming air, like that of a friendly young dog who takes for granted that the world will be glad to see him, marked him as one not belonging to what her father called "the canile." No, he was a student and a gentleman, stranded by some freak of fortune in this near-slum, a youthful Beloved Vagabond. (It was the year when Locke's great book cast a glamour over all strange men in shabby clothing.) Although Archibald Blair was by no means shabby; on the contrary, rather appallingly dapper.

"I wonder how he happens to be living in a house like this?" she ruminated aloud.

"And why wouldn't he be living here?" demanded Ellen tartly. "It's cheap and decent, and there's some folks that don't like to go forever hoppin'

from one place to another, like fleas on a dog's back. He's lived in that same room upstairs ever since he can remember."

"Oh, has he?" Joan's eye kindled. It occurred to her that the young man's history might have some connection with the history of the house itself. "Ellen, I have it! It's the old family mansion, belonged to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and _of course_ he wants to go on living in it. I would myself!"

Ellen grinned. "If there's a romantical notion to be found, trust you for finding it. But if you really want to know, folks do say--" She hesitated, under the hallucination (which many virtuous women share) that she disliked to repeat gossip.

"Yes, yes? Do go on, Nellen!"

"Well, they do say that if he's got a father at all it's more than he knows, let alone a grandfather, and great-grandfather. I had it from a woman downstairs (her that curls feathers, and she got it straight from somebody who used to live in the neighborhood when this was a actors'

boardin'-house), that he got left here when he was a little boy, by his mother, in hock for her board-bill. And she never come back for him."

Joan gave a gasp. "Oh," she cried. "Oh! poor woman!"

Ellen eyed her curiously. "Poor _woman_? I should think you'd say 'poor child'!"

"Poor both of them! But can't you see how much greater the tragedy must have been for the woman, who knew--who was to blame? Imagine how she must have dreamed of that pitiful little boy with his nose pressed against the window-pane watching for her--and she not able to come for him! Ellen--That's what he's doing here now! Waiting for his mother to come back!"