Why Joan? Part 7

"Oh, I know on the surface you're a demure, well-behaved young miss, but underneath--good gracious! You'd shock these people to death!"--he indicated certain hilarious couples who had waltzed onto the terrace near them. "Yes, you're quite untamed, my dear. Wild as a--chipmunk."

Joan leaned toward him, "How did you guess?"

"I've watched you dance. And then--well, I've never quite got used to the cage myself, perhaps." He began to hum under his breath a tuneless little ditty:

"It is a very dreadful thing To be so fat a child, To have to sit around all day And yet to feel so wild."

"At least," laughed Joan, "I'm not fat!"

"No!" he said soberly, "never get fat. It is the beginning of the end.... By fat I mean old. And cautious. Ugh!"

How the conversation came about to apple-trees, Joan never was sure; but he told her about one he had discovered somewhere in the deep woods, all in bloom, a little old gnarled affair hidden among giant first growth sycamores and elms and beeches.

"An apple-tree lost in the woods! How do you suppose it got away from civilization?" wondered the girl.

"Some bird, perhaps; or Johnny Appleseed."

"Who was he?"

"Fancy living in Kentucky without knowing about the first and greatest of our pioneers! He was a daft old creature--an innocent, as the kind phrase goes--who used to wander away from the settlement where he lived into the wilderness, scattering apple seeds. All over this Ohio Valley he journeyed, sowing his orchards for the benefit of those who were to follow. The Indians let him pa.s.s, the wild animals did not harm him; only his friends locked him up whenever they could catch him, because it seemed such a silly thing to do. Friends are that way ... Years later, when the pioneers fought their way at last over the mountains to stay, they found here and there apple-trees blossoming and fruiting in the great, lonely wilderness; and wherever that happened their wives made them build cabins and settle down, for of all things that grow an apple-tree most suggests home. So mad old Johnny Appleseed was the founder of many cities."

"And yet there is no monument to him!"

"Except the cities...."

Here a young man appeared to claim Joan for the next dance--the blond young man with whom she had commenced her dancing career, and who had formed quite a habit of looking for her whenever the music played.

She rose with reluctance. "I wish _you'd_ come in and dance with me,"

she said to her new friend. "I'm sure you could!"

"I'm sure I could, too," he replied, "if I hadn't my body with me. As it is, I'll just sit out here and make believe I'm dancing with you--In a starlit glade. With the other young nymphs and dryads..." the whimsical voice followed her.

The blond young man stared. "Of all the a.s.sorted nuts!" he remarked, when they were out of earshot.

"Yes--but who is he?" demanded Joan eagerly.

"Something on the stock exchange. I see him there every day."

"The stock exchange!"

"Yes. Oh, he writes poems and things for the papers, too, I think. Quite a literary guy." He mentioned the name.

It is a name known and remembered wherever there are moonrises and fireflies, smoke against the sunset, apple-trees in bloom--all the everyday lovely things people forget to see unless there are poets to remind them...

It gave Joan quite a new zest in living to realize that at any moment, even at Country Clubs, it is possible to run across a poet.

CHAPTER IX

Richard Darcy was accepting the change that had come into his life much as he had accepted others of a less fortunate trend. He had become at last what Nature had always intended him to be, one of the world's chosen, a rich man--or, what was even better because less troublesome, the husband of a rich woman. He was also once more an honored citizen of his native commonwealth--where he had not always been entirely an honored citizen, owing to one of the unfortunate mistakes to which youth is liable. There had been some disagreement with an early employer about the right of employees to divert the firm's funds, temporarily of course, to private uses. Only family influence had prevented this misunderstanding from resulting in truly disastrous consequences, which he shuddered to this day to contemplate. But it had prevented; and the early employer was dead (as Richard Darcy had taken pains to ascertain before returning to Louisville), and the few who knew of this painful episode at the time appeared to have forgotten it.

Very good! He was quite willing to forget it himself. It was Richard Darcy's creed that a gentleman takes whatever comes in his stride, without too many backward glances; and his stride was just now adapting itself gracefully to the one-step.

Joan, watching her father sometimes with a faint recrudescence of pride in his sheer good looks, decided that he was the only stomached person she had seen who could perform the one-step without loss of dignity. He footed the measure indulgently, as a bishop or a cardinal might have footed it, with an air of spiritual detachment, as it were, while yet seeming to receive and to bestow a priceless privilege. Even lively young girls liked to dance with the Major. It made them feel uplifted.

If he pressed the hand or the waist of his prettier partners more closely than necessary, the pressure seemed almost impersonal, a mere tribute to a s.e.x which he could not but regard with tenderness, being himself a husband and a father.

In addition to this valuable social acquirement, the Major further fortified his popularity by inventing and promoting (uncommercially, of course) a beverage which shortly bade fair to make him famous, and which was christened by grateful habitues of the Country Club the "d.i.c.k Fizz."

Its ingredients were--but that is a secret not at the author's disposal.

Suffice it to say that the "d.i.c.k Fizz" achieved results that were all and more than could be expected of it. (Among others, the Major's election to a certain gentlemen's club which had hitherto remained annoyingly unaware of him. So much for the power of the Tie that Loosens!)

It was thanks to the "d.i.c.k Fizz," too, that there presently came about between Richard Darcy and his daughter that heart-to-heart interview which had been postponing itself from week to week, with the tacit consent of both parties; an interview dreaded by Joan perhaps even less than by her father.

They were returning one night from one of their most successful evenings; Joan as usual on the front seat beside the chauffeur, where she might enjoy the rush of the cool night air upon her face, and hear as little as possible of the billing and cooing of the honeymooners in the tonneau behind. There seemed more of this than usual, little giggling exclamations and audible embraces which made the girl wince and the chauffeur grin surrept.i.tiously.

"Really, Father!" protested Joan over her shoulder. There was something physically nauseating to her in those amorous echoes from the tonneau.

No wonder servants laughed! It made of love a travesty and a mocking.

She was glad when they reached home. The Major stepped out gallantly to a.s.sist the ladies, but miscalculated his impetus, and after a series of complicated maneuvers brought up seated upon the curbstone. The chauffeur burst into an uncontrollable guffaw, in which his mistress heartily joined.

"Oh, you d.i.c.k Fizz!" she laughed, wiping her eyes. "I knew it would get you yet. _Look_ at your funny papa, dearie! Lit up like a Christmas-tree!"

The Major murmured something reprovingly about the duties of hospitality, which he found some difficulty in p.r.o.nouncing; but once upon his feet, he gave an arm to each of them and managed the steps without further mishap.

In the hall Joan, who had not laughed, said to her step-mother in a low voice, "Is he--drunk?"

"Oh, not enough to hurt," replied the lady, still laughing. It occurred to Joan that she herself was a little flushed and expansive. "I can handle him, all right. Don't you worry! I always know a gentleman by the way he carries his liquor."

"Do you?" said Joan.

"Sure thing! And Major's a perfect gentleman always. Don't you fret."

Joan mounted quietly to her room, and undressed in the dark. She did not want to see her face in the mirror, afraid of the disgust, the loathing, that must be reflected there--Her father--drunk! The man to whom her mother had given her love and her life, tipsily furnis.h.i.+ng amus.e.m.e.nt for a woman who judged gentlemen by the way they carried their liquor!...

She recalled one other time when she had seen her father in his present condition. She remembered her mother's stricken, tragic face as she hurried him out of sight, explaining tremulously, "Daddy's ill, darling.

No games with Daddy to-night--he's ill."

"But he wants to play! Look, mamma, he _wants_ to play!" the small Joan had insisted, to no avail.

And when this strangely interesting Daddy was safe in bed, with Ellen Neal mounting guard, Joan had been hurried out to the nearest church (which happened to be a Catholic one, for Mary's was a casual sort of religion that boasted neither creed nor prejudice); and there, before a statue where little lamps burned, the child had prayed hard, as she was bid, that her father might never be ill in just that way again.

"G.o.d may listen to you, even if He's tired of listening to me!" the mother had whispered, desperately.

It was because G.o.d had listened that Joan was sent later to a Catholic convent. Mary Darcy's was not the nature to forget favors; and it occurred to her that there might be worse protectors for a girl who must one day be motherless than Our Lady of Sorrows. Not every faith is strong enough to go through life without some creed to cling to. Mary had offered her child what she could.

Lying there in the darkness, Joan understood. She wished that she might have been able to take what her mother offered. She yearned for the anodyne of simple, unquestioning prayer, for the mesmeric comfort that comes to the believing from the slipping of rosary beads between the fingers; above all, for the right to kneel unrecognized in a quiet confessional and learn from some priest wiser than she in the ways of men where her duty lay and how she was to follow it. The confessional is perhaps the secret of the hold the oldest of Christian churches keeps upon a world which would seem to have outgrown it. That is a self-reliant nature indeed which does not sometimes feel the need of guidance at once human and detached.