Why Joan? Part 8

But Joan's creed and confessional alike were contained in her troubled young head; and where a happier woman would have wept and said her prayers, she set herself sternly to the task of thinking. It seemed to her that throughout the past weeks she had been s.h.i.+rking an issue, deliberately drugging her wits with anything that came to hand. Now she faced conditions squarely. There must be no more drifting.

She focused an unsparing vision upon her father. Already there were changes apparent in him, signs of deterioration not entirely physical.

His features seemed slightly blurred from their fine chiseling, there was a relaxed look about the lips and chin, about the very poise of his figure. He had lost a little of that indefinable something which gave him distinction, even in the days when the women of his family tried in vain to keep him pressed and unspotted. Prosperity was not going to be good for Richard Darcy.

Joan p.r.o.nounced ruthless judgment upon her father:

"He's done for!"

And, as Ellen had warned her, it was none of her business.... What then was her business? Clearly, to keep from being "done for" herself.

She saw quite clearly that she had been in danger of this. There was something curiously enervating about the atmosphere of her step-mother's house, a _laissez-faire_ that was almost--the girl sought for the word and decided upon "lascivious." Luxury, ease, pleasure--these were the ends for which her step-mother strove--or rather accomplished without undue striving, an ability to which the girl gave full due. She knew that it must take more than mere money to keep so elaborate a household running without apparent effort. The servants were efficient and un.o.btrusive, the accounts scrupulously kept, every nook and cranny clean and in order. Even Ellen Neal, who knew whereof she spoke, admitted that the ex-Mrs. Calloway was a housekeeper of parts. But...

Joan tried conscientiously to fathom the meaning of her "but." She decided that the house was too like its mistress--over-bathed, over-perfumed and dressed and manicured--to be quite nice. The windows were too fluffy with lace, the drawing-room too pretty and satiny, the library too red. ("Why is it," she had written to Stefan Nikolai, "that people who never open a book invariably have a red library?")

A fantastic thought came to her. She wondered whether those strange houses which are sometimes whispered of even among convent girls, those palaces of horror where women's bodies are bought and sold, might not perhaps resemble this home to which her father had brought her ...

Then she smiled at herself. Vulgar, her step-mother might be; hopelessly underbred; doubtless in some previous manifestations a shop-girl, a dressmaker; possibly one of those anomalous beings known in race-towns as "race-horse women." But she was unmistakably respectable. There was not a picture on her walls, nor a novel on the shelves of the red library, which was not, as she herself once remarked to Joan complacently, "perfectly refined." The girl recalled her evident uneasiness when sometimes at the dinner-table the talk had waxed a little too free. She did her step-mother the justice to believe her a quite decent woman.

Perhaps the curious sense of enervation was due only to the heat of midsummer in a Southern city. Now and then the elder Darcys spoke vaguely of going away, only to decide that it was too much trouble. It was easier to stay where they were. In a Kentucky July, one follows the line of least resistance.

Joan, like the others, slept late into the mornings, and had her coffee in bed, or went down to the dining-room for it with a negligee over her nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligees, which at first startled him, accustomed as he was to the neat morning ginghams of his Mary.) Sometimes she found him departing reluctantly for the mysterious place he called the Office. Later, people would arrive connected with the rites of the toilet--the hair-dresser, the manicure, the ma.s.seuse--a chatty person who performed on Effie May what she called her "facial"; and other things. Cleopatra herself could have devoted no more time to the care of her body than did the ex-Mrs. Calloway.

"You've got it to do if you're risin' forty and like to eat," she explained once to Joan, simply.

After luncheon, which was brought on a tray--a large tray--to wherever it happened to be convenient, the ladies once more resumed nightgowns, if indeed they had ever discarded them, and napped and read until the sun was low in the sky; when the house like the city woke into animation, and they prepared to fare forth like fireflies to the evening revel. Then there were automobile drives to little beer-gardens, where they ate and drank and sat about among whitewashed tree-trunks, feeling Bohemian; pleasant moonlight excursions up the Ohio in launches, with a picnic provided which consisted largely of thermos-bottles; and the Country Club, always the Country Club. Joan wondered what people had managed to do with themselves in summer before the days of Country Clubs.

It was a life that somehow suggested the Orient, women of the harem coming forth at sunset to bask on the roofs of the houses; a placid existence; aimless, perhaps, but pleasant enough. Joan was puzzled to find the harm in it. Yet that harm was there, she knew. The touch of Puritanism in the girl told her that to live from day to day with no duty but pleasure made of pleasure something akin to vice.... And often in the midst of this harem life she remembered almost with pa.s.sion that out beyond her shuttered windows, beyond the clangor of trolley-cars and the hum and clatter of the dirty streets, was summer--summer, the loveliest of the year's phases; leaf-shadows on wimpling water, lush meadows sparkling with the sunrise dew, green-gold glades of the wood delicious with the smell of warm pine-needles; all the world at fullest bloom, open like the heart of a rose, waiting.

It was a sort of nostalgia that took her then for the country she had never known, not Country Club country, nor the conscious, well-kept wildness of the parks which give the old river town its only claim to beauty--but simple wood and meadow and field, where homely folk live close to the soil they till, concerned with crops and the breeding season. It was this country her father had meant when he bragged about Kentucky. It is this country which, deep down under the surface things, means home to all people of Saxon blood, no matter how far astray they wander....

And as she lay there, as if her wistful thoughts had conjured it into being, came a whisper of song from the leaves of the magnolia tree just outside her window; a murmur that died away, and began again, and rose and soared, melody on wings, above the clang of a trolley-car and the honk of pa.s.sing motors. It was a mocking-bird, that voice of the Southern summer, singing in the glare of the arc-lamps, mistaking it perhaps for moonlight.

Joan tiptoed to the window and listened, an aching lump in her throat.

It was her first mocking-bird; she had not known they sang at night.

"You lovely thing!" she whispered to it. "What are you doing in this place?... And what am _I_?"

Then and there she made her plans to get away.

The thought frightened her a little. She had, despite the ups and downs of her father's fortunes, led hitherto a very sheltered life.

Fortunately there was her mother's money, hers whenever she chose to ask for it. She would not be quite penniless. But where to go?

She thought first of the Misses Darcy, her father's cousins, who had been most affectionate and kind, particularly since her father's remarriage. Sometimes she wondered whether this was because they sympathized with her, or (with a touch of her new cynicism) because they did not. Effie May had been very generous to the Misses Darcy, remarking once that she knew what it was to be poor herself. They came frequently to dine at her lavish table; they appeared occasionally in _chic_ black costumes, as good as new, which Joan recognized as having served to mourn the late Mr. Calloway; the limousine was often at their disposal; and a limousine with a liveried chauffeur was a touch of distinction hitherto lacking to the Darcy fortunes, even at their palmiest.

Joan suddenly doubted whether her father's cousins would welcome her under their roof at the risk of alienating that limousine. She did not blame them--poor, anxious ladies to whom life had not been very kind.

She simply realized that they were of her father's blood, not her mother's.

Her mother's people she did not know. Mary Darcy had managed somehow in her wanderings to loosen all the ties that bound her to her youth. It was as if she had deliberately lost herself, hidden herself away with husband and child from the loving eyes that are too quick to see.... It was the sort of pride Richard Darcy was quite incapable of understanding, though pride was a word often upon his lips. But Mary's daughter understood. Never through her should the quiet tragedy of her mother's life be revealed to those from whom her mother had chosen to hide it.

She wished that Stefan Nikolai were not a man; or that, being a man, he had a home to which she might have invited herself. But he was a confirmed wanderer, and Joan felt that a young lady companion, desirable though she might be as a solace for his declining years, would undoubtedly hamper his movements.

It left only Ellen Neal to rely upon. Perhaps there would be enough money to take a little flat somewhere, with Ellen Neal for servant and chaperone. A bachelor maid, with a latch-key!--the prospect was rather alluring. But not in Louisville. She could not leave her father's home and set up an establishment of her own in the same town without creating "talk," and, to Joan's training, "talk" was the one thing impossible.

They would have to go away somewhere, she and Ellen. And study something, she decided vaguely. Music, art, social service--whatever it was people did study. Her eye began to kindle. She was the true child of Richard Darcy, rolling stone by nature and profession; and to such, "the gra.s.s is always greener down the road." New York, Boston, swam before her dreamy vision; even London, Paris, Rome....

She brought herself back to the ungrateful consideration of ways and means. She feared the money would not run to much in the way of travel.

"A mere pittance," her father had once scornfully called it. But she knew, or guessed, that all three of them had managed to live on the income from this pittance during many a period when the Major's star was not in the ascendant, and she thought that what had provided, however scantily, for three might be made to provide well for herself and Ellen.

She wished that she had asked questions at the time her mother's will was read to her. It had seemed so unimportant then. What was hers belonged surely just as much to her father, guardian for the little property until such time as she chose to ask him for it.

Now that the time had come, Joan faced it with some dread. How could they talk about money, she and he--about her mother's money? It seemed indelicate, unfeeling, a desecration of sacred things. Nevertheless she faced it. She solemnly promised herself that not another day should pa.s.s without a complete understanding between herself and her father.

Possibly she was the only one of Richard Darcy's creditors who ever managed to put this promise into execution.

CHAPTER X

In the heat of the following afternoon, while Effie May dozed unaware beneath an electric fan, with a box of chocolates convenient to her drowsy hand, Joan slipped out of the house very quietly and went down town. She had an odd feeling of exhilaration, as if she had already escaped--from what, it would have been difficult to say.

More than one glance of approval followed her slim figure as it flitted through the sweltering streets, the dark and grimy corridors of the office building which Richard Darcy had chosen to honor with his patronage. This, thought patient men as she pa.s.sed, was as a girl should look on a July afternoon, all in cool white from her silver-buckled pumps to the wide hat with a big lace b.u.t.terfly perched airily upon it.

Surely it was fitting, they thought, that men should slave at their desks through the endless summer days in order that visions such as this might flit about the world in dainty idleness; and forthwith applied gallant noses once more to the grindstone. In the South the idea of economic independence for women will never be popular.

Joan, under these friendly glances, was conscious of blossoming into real prettinees. It was not the first time she had got this pleasant little sensation out of so simple a matter as going down town. She wondered whether in any other city of the world it was possible for a girl to walk the streets alone, receiving from every man who pa.s.sed--be he gentleman, clerk, coal-heaver, or small, knowing news-boy--glances of commendation which were neither impertinent, nor bold, nor even personal, but simply, as it were expert; an appraisal which flattered without offense. It was as if, at the sight of a pretty woman, the town as one man lifted its gla.s.s to the toast:

"The Ladies, G.o.d bless 'em!"

It was this spirit, she thought, which had perhaps given Kentucky its reputation for feminine pulchritude. To be a beauty is not difficult where every one encourages the idea, where feminine charm is regarded as in itself an end and a purpose, to be fortified by every means at the command of art or nature.... Joan fluttered along with the best, modestly unconscious of the eyes that paid her homage, but aware nevertheless of her occasional reflection in plate-gla.s.s windows; and it should be recorded that before she went to her father's office she made the purchase of a stick of pink lip-pomade and a cake of solid face-powder, with a little puff and mirror included. Why these articles should have given her increased courage for an interview with her parent, is difficult to state; but the fact remains that they did.

She came presently to a doorway upon which was printed in large gold lettering: RICHARD DARCY. LOANS AND INVESTMENTS. Joan was secretly impressed. Perhaps the Office was not the mere figure of speech she had sometimes fancied it.

She knocked. No answer came. Listening, she heard inside the familiar whirr of an electric fan mingling with a sound she could not for the moment place--a buzzing as of many flies, but rising and falling at more rhythmic intervals.

She turned the k.n.o.b. Within, drawn by an open window through which might be glimpsed the broad Ohio rolling drowsily, stood a decrepit Morris chair which Joan recognized as an old friend; wherein lay sprawled at comfortable length the Major. At his elbow stood a bottle and a gla.s.s, both empty. His handsome nose, forgetting for the moment all acquaintance with the grindstone, was tilted at the angle of least resistance, and from it issued the rhythmic buzzing that had puzzled his child.

"Daddy!" she said reluctantly. Somehow the Major asleep, with a plump leg draped over the arm of his chair and his mouth slightly open, made up in disarming appeal what he lost in impressiveness. He was like a gray-haired little boy, tired out with playing.

But, "Father!" said Joan more loudly. "Wake up, please. I've come to see you on business."

He opened his eyes with a jerk. "Eh? What's that, what's that, what's that? Tut, tut! Must have dozed off. What's that?" The eyes tried to close again, but he was firm with them, and presently recognized his daughter. "That you, Dollykins? Well, well, well! Come down to pay Dad a visit, eh? That's nice, that's nice!"

Suddenly he got to his feet and brought her a chair, reaching at the same time for his coat. Richard Darcy could not possibly have remained in a lady's presence coatless, no matter what the temperature. Her attention was caught by the garment into which he struggled, muttering apologies the while.

"Why, Dad," she cried, "_what_ are you putting on?"

It was not the immaculate gray flannel in which he had started that morning for the marts of commerce, but a thread-bare, shapeless, densely spotted garment which Joan recognized with a pang.

"Your old second-best!" she exclaimed.