Why Joan? Part 27

She attempted to make him explain this peremptory point of view, but Archie was not very good at explaining. He was one of the people who know what they know without knowing why they know it (blood-brothers to those art-critics who are always aware of what they like when they see it). Such do not shine in debate. He could only shake his head and repeat his conviction that n.i.g.g.e.rs were the curse of the South.

She changed the subject rather impatiently. She would have liked to retort that well-bred people at least do not call them "n.i.g.g.e.rs." But somehow Archibald was not fair game.

She was seeing rather more than she had expected of her protege. In Louisville there is a certain catholicity in the matter of big entertainments. That portion of the population which possesses the inborn or acquired right to call itself "Society" is not large enough to supply a sufficient number of dancing-men to sustain the true belle's boast that she never dances more than once around a ballroom with the same partner. Indeed, in the matter of belles themselves there is a certain catholicity. Every pretty girl who grows up in the old town with any pretentious to grammar and respectability and polite behavior has one chance in her lifetime to foot it with the best. She may, if she so wishes, enroll herself among the season's debutantes.

If her family can afford a certain amount of entertaining to support this pretention, well and good. If not, she must manage as best she can with the friendly aid of the society column--no small power in the land.

Let the would-be debutante but supply herself with presentable dancing frocks and slippers, and Louisville will do the rest.--For one season.

During that brief time, however, she must make good her footing by means of matrimony or otherwise, or back to the chimney-corner for her, like Cinderella when the c.o.c.k crew. The town is full of disappointed little Cinderellas, comforting themselves with good works or a humble domesticity, dreaming who knows what dreams of the Might-Have-Been.

They do not all return to the chimney-corner, however. Sometimes they stay. Sometimes they fare forth joyously into a larger world, and their names lend l.u.s.ter to greater events than are chronicled in our society column. One, at least, trails gracefully through ducal halls, and the strawberry leaves are almost as becoming to her pretty hair as the rose she wore to her first Galt House ball.--Perhaps Louisville, with a reputation to sustain, is wise to give her unknown Cinderellas the benefit of the doubt.

The male Cinderellas, if they are not welcomed with quite the same interest, are at least not as soon thrust back into the limbo of things forgotten. Once their names appear in the list of presentable dancers, they may arrive year after year at the larger b.a.l.l.s, eat, drink and make merry, select such partners as please them, and retire into their lairs again until the next entertainment, with no further obligation on their part than perhaps a perfunctory handshaking with their host and hostess.

Not even that, if modesty forbids. Nor need anything bar the gates to them except age, conspicuous behavior, or the lack of a long-tailed coat.

Archibald Blair presently got used to the surprise of receiving frequently in his mail engraved invitations from people who did not know him, and began to look upon them as a special dispensation on the part of Providence to favor his pursuit of Miss Joan Darcy.--If anything so entirely self-effacing could be called a pursuit! His wish was merely to see her whenever possible, to listen to her whenever possible, and if absolutely necessary to talk to her till somebody more worthy came to take his place. And having made, a week apart, his two party-calls as suggested by her inexplicable but obliging step-mother, he would have been at a loss as to how to manage further encounters if it had not been for the a.s.sistance of these providential invitations.

Archie also, being quick to take a hint, made prompt party-calls on the providers of the invitations, a fact which set him apart among dancing men; so that presently he began to see Joan not only at large b.a.l.l.s but at smaller buffet suppers and the like, even at theater parties, when a hostess's need was desperate. All of which surprised Joan far more than it surprised him. He accepted the whole thing as a miracle, part of the incredible good luck which had begun to happen to him when he landed his first big order in Philadelphia, and got on to the train for home to find the One and Only sitting in the chair behind him.

"Whoops, my dear! I've got 'em locoed," said grateful Archie to himself; referring presumably to the Fates.

CHAPTER XXV

His luck did not confine itself to social matters. One day the president of the firm, a Mr. Moore, greatly admired in the office because of his hauteur with employees, sent for Archie for no apparent reason except to chat about life in general and business in particular. Now business was a thing which Archibald enjoyed as some men enjoy golf. Getting about among all sorts of people, making them like you whether they wanted to or not, persuading them that the varnish or glue or wax or what-not you happened to be selling was just a little better than any other on the market (which Archie certainly believed it was), overcoming the natural reluctance of human nature to try anything with which it is not familiar, and finally retiring with a fat little order in his vest-pocket--all this was as exciting to young Blair as the hazard of the highway may have been to earlier Knights of the Road. With the additional advantage of being honest. Archie always preferred, when it was possible, to be honest. So that he had a good deal to say to Mr.

Moore.

He liked the president, too--a stiffish old boy whom lately he had met around quite often at the Horse Show and such places and who seemed to eye his employee on such occasions with an oddly proprietary interest.

If Archie had ever chanced to read of Benjamin Franklin's discovery that the way to propitiate the enemy is to ask a favor of him, he might have understood this personal interest on Mr. Moore's part. But he had quite forgotten that he had once committed the solecism of asking that gentleman what to wear to the Horse Show.

Mr. Moore presently mentioned in the course of conversation that Smith, the sales manager of the varnish department, was about to leave the firm.

"Gee! What for?" said Archie sympathetically. "Is he sick?" It did not occur to him that any one who had attained so exalted a position would willingly leave it except for mortal reasons.

"He goes over to the Lidden people, who've offered him more money."

"Why, but--He's been with us since he was a boy!"

This comment pleased Mr. Moore. "Loyalty's as rare in business as elsewhere, Blair. I'm not sorry to let him go. He hasn't done what I hoped he would do to put that new polish of ours on the market. Rather fallen down there."

"It's a peach, too! One drop and your table-top shines like a reflector in the sun," murmured Archie perfunctorily, from sheer force of habit. A premonition had struck him of what was coming next.

It came. "How would you like to take charge of that end yourself?"

For a moment Archie was speechless. He, as sales manager!--He, one of the youngest men in the firm, put over the head of the good old boys who had taught him the business!--Very red as to the ears, he stammered something about lack of experience.

"You've had a good deal of experience, Blair," said Mr. Moore. "You were a salesman, and a successful one, at the age of--eight, wasn't it? Or six? And then you've a sort of a knack of getting on with people. That's as useful in handling men as in handling sales. In fact, Smith says you're one of the best we've got. Shouldn't be surprised if he tried to take you over to Lidden's with him."

"He needn't!" cried Archie hotly.

"Then you'll take the job?"

Archie's grin began to grow until it communicated itself to the president, to the interested stenographer, to the very clock on the wall behind him.

"Like a mice!" he murmured cryptically at last; but Mr. Moore appeared to understand him....

It was perhaps fortunate that Ellen Neal was at home when he came bounding up the stairs that evening, or he might have burst with his tidings. As it was she thought he had been drinking, and began to prepare surrept.i.tiously a good strong cup of black coffee. (She had had some experience with antidotes, had Ellen.)

"A salary _and_ commissions--do you get me, wench?" he repeated for the third time. "I'm to run the whole shebang, advertis.e.m.e.nts and all, and put what boys I like on the road with it, while I sit back in me office like a young Pierpont Morgan directing operations! La-la-laihoo!" he yodled, suddenly seizing Ellen about the waist and one-stepping her across the room, to the imminent peril of the chandelier below.

"Mr. Archibald, behave! Me, a respectable spinster woman--" she panted.

"True! ''tis pity 'tis, 'tis true!' Away with frivolity now! I must remember the dignity of me office!" he declaimed, releasing her and striking the att.i.tude of Napoleon crossing the Alps.

"It means better wages, don't it?"

"Wages, woman? A salary _and_ commissions! Ha!"

"And you'll be getting too rich and grand for the attic now, I suppose."

She sighed. "You'll be setting up at some swell boarding-house, maybe, or perhaps at that club where all the young society fellows live?"

(Since the Darcy debut into society, Ellen was almost as conversant with its inner life as were the Misses Darcy.)

Archie's eye glinted. "The club!--why not? I hadn't thought of that."

But then he grinned, "I can see 'em hailing me--'Yere's yer paper, sir!--yere's yer five o'clock edition! All about de mysterious moider on de Island!'--No, I guess it won't do. The little old Y. M. C. A.'s club enough for me. And as for leaving my attic, Mrs. Neal--" he shook his head. "Why, it's home to me. I reckon I'll be here till the roof falls in--which it's likely to do at any moment in a favorable breeze."

"Pooh! You'll be getting married before long, and you won't marry the sort of wife who'll want to live in a garret, neither!"

"Why not?

"A book of verses underneath the roof, A cup of coffee and an egg in troof, And Mrs. Neal to cook it up for us-- Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof!"

he warbled; and promptly encored himself amid peals of pleasure. It was his first attempt at composition, and he liked it. (One of the young ladies at the Library had recently introduced him, as may be suspected, to the Rubaiyat. Eduard Desmond was not the only young man who found in the Persian a kindred spirit.)

"Well, of all the crazy galoots!" muttered Ellen, deciding that coffee would do no good here. "You'll have to go now, Mr. Archie; I'm expecting company. Land sakes, six o'clock! and me without my biscuits in the pan."

He observed that the table was set for two, quite magnificently, with a celery gla.s.s containing five red carnations in its center.

"Floral decorations! A genuine entertainment--and I not asked! Who, who is the lucky fellow?"

"Go on with your impidence. 'Tain't a fellow. It's--Never you mind who it is! And you needn't think you're going to be discovered here by accident-like, either!"--She was pushing him toward the door as she spoke.

Light dawned upon Archie. "Mrs. Neal! Not _her_?" He knew that the One and Only sometimes dropped in to take tea with her old servant, a G.o.ddess descending to mortals; but he had never been lucky enough to catch her in the act.

"Yes, it is," replied Ellen, who needed no niceties of grammar to realize the ident.i.ty of Archibald's "her." "So now will you hurry?"

He hurried; but once in the hall he paused in the grip of a daring idea.