Why Joan? Part 48

But Joan asked perhaps too much of frivolity. She had been heard to remark that "nothing made the social game possible except flirtation and real talk; neither of which were to be had in Louisville by people who valued their reputations"; a rather sweeping comment, of the sort which soon made Joan's tongue a trifle over-famous. Simple, unexacting folk who liked a good dinner with a game of cards afterwards for modest stakes, and now and then a little dancing with each other's spouses, just to keep in touch with the new steps, began to be rather afraid of young Mrs. Blair. And Joan was equally afraid of them. She had a morbid suspicion that dullness might be catching.

There was something appalling to her, too, in what has been somewhere called "the infinite littleness of social life." It seemed to have a strangely flattening effect upon its devotees--promoting some, demoting others, all to the same unstimulating level, while the wheels within wheels s.h.i.+fted and reformed kaleidoscopically. These wheels within these wheels puzzled Joan. "Climbers," such as her step-mother, she was able to understand and even to sympathize with. It seemed to her quite natural and thoroughly American for water to seek a higher level than its own. That was merely progress, merely self-respect made visible. To "get on" appeared a quite legitimate ambition; but to "get in"--that was another matter. Sn.o.bbery, that word of many interpretations, meant to Joan the extreme form of self-confessed vulgarity.

"If it were friends they were after, I could understand," she said to Emily Carmichael. "Everybody wants friends--we're all lonely. But you have got to select your real friends one at a time, not in a.s.sorted clumps, like bananas. And one's real friends so rarely happen to be friends with each other--you've noticed that? Why this pa.s.sion for organizing ourselves into group-formation, anyway?"

"For purposes of offense and defense," explained Emily. "So that we may leave the Mrs. Websters out, and let the Joan Darcys in, of course."

They had been discussing Joan's near neighbor, a well-bred, sweet-mannered, adaptable young woman who had recently laid siege to the town, and with whom Joan was forming one of those propinquity friends.h.i.+ps which are destined not to last. None of Mrs. Webster's friends.h.i.+ps appeared to last. She had used acquaintance after acquaintance gracefully as a stepping-stone to higher things, leaving, however, not a single enemy behind her. It was the fas.h.i.+on in the various circles through which she had pa.s.sed to say how charming Mrs.

Webster was, even after she seemed done with them. And now, through Joan, she was laying tactful but so far unsuccessful siege to the Jabberwocks; cleverness (in moderation) having become quite the smart thing nowadays.

"It is not our ma.s.sive intellects which attract her, however," commented Emily. "It is--well, modesty forbids me to say just what it is. The sign _verboten_ is to some natures as a red rag to a bull. They simply must have it to play with."

"Well, but why should anybody be _verboten_ to Kathy Webster?" defended Joan. "She's charming, and perfectly intelligent, and unmistakably a lady--which is more than one can say with confidence of some of our most indefatigable social leaders. Look at Mrs. Gunther, for instance!--didn't you tell me her father used to deliver meat at your door out of his own cart?"

"Excellent meat it was, too. Father says we have never had a decent butcher since."

"And lo, what house more exclusive than theirs?"

"Naturally! It has to be. People like that seem to develop a sort of protective instinct which guards them from any possible contact with vulgarity until such time as they shall have acc.u.mulated enough refinement to be immune. Not for them the company of any chance newcomer like Mrs. Webster! They have to be careful."

"But shouldn't you think they'd have a sort of fellow-feeling for the new arrivals?"

"Dear me, no! What's the good of attaining a pinnacle if you're going to share it with somebody who might push you off?"

Mrs. Webster's pursuit of Joan was not entirely opportunism. There was a good deal of admiration in it, mixed with a sort of malice which the larger nature had difficulty in comprehending. Joan found herself entered most unwillingly into an undignified petty rivalry with her neighbor. If she entertained some of her friends at luncheon without Mrs. Webster, the other instantly retaliated by giving a luncheon herself without Joan, sending in dessert and decorations afterwards to press home the point. If the Blair house in Spring put out new awnings, the Webster house erupted not only into awnings but into flower-boxes as well, with a corresponding air of triumph in its mistress. If Joan received some invitation which the other did not, there arose between them a slight, unmistakable coolness; whereas, if the contrary occurred, Mrs. Webster became modest and cordial again.

Yet when this unpleasant rivalry lay dormant, the two had many a friendly, neighborly time together over their sewing and their gardening; and once when Joan was taken suddenly ill the other showed herself genuinely kind, quick with womanly help and sympathy.

Joan could never quite make up her mind whether it was the pettiness of Society which makes the Mrs. Websters, or the Mrs. Websters who make the pettiness of Society. In any case, she lost what little taste she had for a purely social career. It was not good enough.

And so she turned the pent-up energies of her nature into those activities which are summed up nowadays under the general t.i.tle of Clubwork. Investigations, commissions, agitations of all sorts came in for their share of her attention. She soon created for herself quite a following of less daring spirits, among them Emily Carmichael and others of the Jabberwock group who had graduated from the coc.o.o.n. It became known that whenever young Mrs. Blair undertook a thing, it went with a rush, not so much through her own efforts as through those of her henchmen. She was recognized in club circles, despite her youth, as something more valuable than a mere worker; she was an executive--All of which fed her vanity and her sense of usefulness; and left somewhere within her an aching void of dissatisfaction.

Suffrage-work came nearer filling this void than had anything else, and that, it must be confessed, for a rather ign.o.ble reason. It gave her a chance to make speeches. In the back of her mind, with the very real conviction that the ballot is a necessity which women are unjustly denied, lurked also the suspicion that the world is already aware of the fact without any further need of agitation. Nevertheless she continued to agitate, because she liked to exercise an ability which otherwise might have remained forever undiscovered--There is no pleasure in life equal to that of employing skillfully the talents that have been given us.

She made the discovery of her gift quite by accident. At some woman's meeting, a lady who was to have spoken on the subject of the Federal Amendment failed to appear, and Joan, who had recently read up on the matter (it may be remembered that she was what the actors call "quick study"), volunteered to take her place, meaning simply to give the gist of the matter and thus relieve a hara.s.sed chairman. But when she found herself on the platform facing interested and expectant faces, something happened that had occasionally happened before when she "play-acted" for the girls at school. Joan left herself, and became a part of the audience.

She listened to her voice going on and on, with amused approval. It was a voice rather like her father's, carrying and flexible, and peculiarly rich in its intonations.

"It doesn't really matter much what I say," thought Joan, listening to herself; "it's how I say it. If I drop my voice a note here, they ought to frown." (They did.) "Now I'll have them smile a little, perhaps chuckle. After I stop, no applause, I think--just a nice, thoughtful silence." (All of which came faithfully to pa.s.s.)

When she stepped down from that platform, her reputation as a public speaker was made. Thereafter she delivered speeches whenever and wherever she was asked, to the incredulous delight of Archie.

"Say, come over and hear the wife do her little spiel to-night!" he would urge upon all his acquaintance. "It's a treat!--stands right up and hands it to 'em hot off the reel, without a note or anything. You can see her little old brain workin' while she talks--and lookin' pretty as a picture all the time!"

His pride in her was such that he presented her with a successor to Lizzie, a more pretentious member of the Lizzie family, in fact, in which to get about to her numerous committee meetings.

"Of course we can afford it," he said in answer to her demur. "Haven't all your friends got automobiles? Well, then!"

Joan accomplished much in the way of by-product to this satisfaction of her vanity. Her youthful charm and her good breeding got her a hearing frequently where more strenuous representatives of the cause had failed; and through her many hitherto uncertain lambs were gathered safely into the fold. On one occasion, to her astonishment, Joan discovered the three Misses Darcy in her audience, wearing expressions of shrinking alarm. But if they had come--not to scoff, they were too polite for that: let us say to deprecate,--they remained to join.

"I declare it's _shameful_ the way we women have been treated all this time!" cried Miss Iphigenia afterwards, truculently signing the card which made of her a suffragette. "I'd no idea! Not allowed a word in edgewise, the gentlemen spending all the money and making all the laws, ordering us about like we were so many white slaves--"

"I don't recall that darling mama was ever treated in just that way by dear papa?" interjected Miss Virginia, uncertainly.

"Pooh! Exceptions," snorted Miss Iphigenia (if one so gentle could be said to snort). "Exceptions can be made to prove anything, can't they, Joan? Why, we haven't even had a say-so as to whether we should marry or not. Simply had to sit back and say 'Thank you, sir!' to any gentleman who was kind enough to ask us!"

Here Miss Virginia was able thoroughly to concur. "And if n.o.body _was_ kind enough to ask us--Oh, my dears, I begin to think that if we could have had the ballot in time--!"

"What's more," cried Miss Iphigenia, inspired, "I mean to bring our Susy to hear you the next time you make a speech, Joan. Yes, I do! If they try to keep her out, we shall say she is there as our maid. If we are all to be allowed to vote about things, colored and white alike, it's time for the colored women to be taught how!"--Which Joan justly regarded as a signal victory.

But at the same time she chuckled inwardly over the mental vision of an audience of colored lady voters, swaying to and fro with occasional unctuous shouts of, "Bress us, dat's so! Um, yas, my Lawd! Come down, come down and gadder us sinners into de fold!"

Occasionally, in the pursuance of her various public successes, Joan was thrown into contact with people whom she cla.s.sified under the heading of Intelligentzia. There were plenty of these in Louisville, thinkers and students and writers, a growing number of names which were rather better known away from the city than in it. But of these Joan fought a little shy. She cared more for books than for the making of them, had no wish to peep behind the scenes for fear of losing her illusions. She got the impression, too, that professional thinkers and writers were so busy observing and interpreting the life about them as to have somehow lost human touch with it. And Joan was nothing if not a humanist. She had a youthful horror of being cla.s.sified among the _bas bleux_.

"Men do so hate a bluestocking," she said once pensively to her friend Emily.

"Men? Well, what of that? Yours doesn't!--and you don't want anybody else's men, do you?"

"None that I have seen so far," admitted Joan. "But you never can tell.

They say it's in the dangerous thirties that we really begin to sit up and take notice--Anyway, I shall _never_ be married and settled enough to relish the idea of men running away from me as if I were something catching!"

So she continued to avoid, rather than to cultivate, the company of the Intelligentzia, thereby denying herself her birthright.

And at twenty-five, a leading citizeness of her community, with engagements so thick on her calendar that there was barely time for an occasional meal at home, she woke every morning with the thought, "If something doesn't happen to-day, I shall scream!"

CHAPTER XLVI

At that stage of life, something usually does happen....

Joan, coming home from a late committee-meeting one afternoon, realized with a sort of pang, as she turned into the court where she lived, that Indian summer had come and almost gone without her being aware of it.

The golden rain of leaves falling about her, the oddly wistful smell of autumn smoke in the air, gave her a twinge of something like homesickness; of sorrow because so many such evenings had come and gone unnoticed. Words of Fiona McLeod came to her mind.

"We are a peris.h.i.+ng clan among the sons of G.o.d, because of the slow waning of our joy, of our pa.s.sionate delight, in the Beauty of the World."

"How _can_ one enjoy the Beauty of the World alone?" asked Joan suddenly of herself....

Through the windows of some near-by house came a man's voice singing a little Russian lullaby that she had not heard in many years. Her mother had once made an English version of it:

"Hush, my dear one, hush, my baby, (Byushky, byu), Smiles the moon upon thy cradle, Smiles thy mother, too.

"Cossack art thou in thy dreaming,-- (Byushky, byu).

Blood and tears and fear and glory Shall I know through you.

"But to-night thou art my small one, (Byushky, byu), With the moon to bless thy slumber, And thy mother, too."