Why Joan? Part 31

"Do tell us what he looks like!" demanded the Jabberwocks in unison. "Is he handsome?" (From which it may be gathered that the club did not devote itself to things intellectual, exclusively.)

"Why, yes--yes, I suppose he is," said Joan, pausing to reflect. "He's distinguished-looking, quite foreign, you know; with very expressive eyes and a fine, sensitive sort of face. He's not like our men exactly--and yet he doesn't look Jewish. You know his mother was a Christian. But his father was born in the Ghetto, somewhere in Russia, and Stefan actually worked in a sweat-shop when he first came to this country.--He was the son of a rabbi, though."

"They always are," murmured Emily _en pa.s.sant_. "Rabbis always seem to have such large families. Rabbis and rabbits--did you ever notice?"

The Jabberwocks sprung upon her tooth and nail. "Don't be coa.r.s.e!" "Yes, Em, it's really too bad of you!--you're always spoiling things with your sarcasm." "Do go on, Miss Darcy!--It's so romantic."

One little placid-faced girl, st.i.tching on a baby-dress, said quietly, "We ought to be nicer to Jews than we are, I think, girls. They're really wonderful!--so clever, you know."

"Yes," agreed Joan, "they are rather wonderful. There seems to be an intellectual force about them, a curious inner fire, that nothing can dampen, not even sweat-shops--I sometimes wish I were a Jew myself."

They stared at her in utter astonishment. "Wish you were a Jew? Why, Miss Darcy! Haven't you any prejudice against them at all?"

"Prejudice--against a race of several billion people?" Joan was astonished in her turn. A singularly tolerant mother, and later, life in a little conventual world which had its own standards and viewpoints, had sheltered her from much of the contagion of current opinion. "That _would_ be a large order!" she smiled. "No, I can't seem to do my prejudicing in wholesale lots. But of course I have seen Jews one could cheerfully do without--the oily sort. And Christians too--haven't you?"

She dismissed the subject with a shrug. "Since you're so interested in Stefan Nikolai, I wonder if you'd like to hear a letter from him.

There's one in my m.u.f.f that the postman brought just as I started."

The Jabberwocks were enchanted.

"You won't mind if it's quite personal? They sometimes are."

"So much the better!..."

It seemed to be distinctly personal, as Joan realized after she had got well into it. Mr. Nikolai wrote to thank her for the little picture of the furs and the ringless hand.

The fox who rendered up his life to furnish forth a tippet would cry, "O death, where is thy sting?" if he could see himself now!--By the way, what color have your eyes become? Do they still match my aquamarine, or must it be gray sapphires the next time?

("Dear me," murmured Joan, "perhaps I'd better skip!"

"Not a word!" breathed the Jabberwocks, sitting forward.)

She read manfully on, wondering what had come over her friend to make him so particularly--well, personal was the word. The ringless hand seemed especially to take his fancy. He referred to it several times, and Joan could not well explain these references to her audience. She left them to draw their own conclusions; which they did, with some exchanging of glances.

There was an audible breath after she had finished. Emily Carmichael voiced the Jabberwocks when she asked casually, "Did you say he was young, Joan?"

"Oh, dear, no! Quite old. Forty or fifty, or thereabouts. An uncle-ish sort of person."

"Goodness," murmured somebody. "Fancy having an uncle like that!..."

Joan was asked to meetings of the club again. In fact, she was shortly invited to become a Jabberwock herself, having, without quite realizing why, been promoted from the rank of mere debutante to that of Interesting Person. In this way she came into contact with a phase of Louisville society strange to her father, strange even to the Misses Darcy, expert as they were in the ways of the best people. She learned that lately many little groups such as this club had come into existence, formed of women who had grown tired of more superficial forms of amus.e.m.e.nt, and had come together in the vague pursuit of something better.

"Do you know, I think we're rather in a transition state nowadays,"

explained Emily Carmichael. "It's as if we were waiting for something real to happen, marking time. The town's growing up, just as people grow up, and getting tired of childish games--Of course there's always been plenty of intellectual life here, as there is in most old Southern places where people have had leisure for books. We've even produced our share of literature."

(Joan nodded, recalling her poet at the Country Club, and remembering several names which are usually a.s.sociated less with Louisville than with the world of letters.)

"But heretofore the intellectual people have been privileged characters, set apart and labeled, and expected to be a little odd about their clothes and hair--_you_ know! It's only lately that we ordinary folk have concerned ourselves with--well, culture, I suppose it is, though one hates the word! And there is something almost pathetic in the way we herd together to pursue it, as if to give each other countenance!"

"Not half as pathetic as trying to pursue it alone," said Joan, who knew.

"Anyway, it's distinctly smart nowadays to read and have opinions and know something, even in our most frivolous circles--thank heaven!"

"'Business of being a high-brow,' as Archie Blair would say," smiled Joan.

"Oh, Archie Blair! Isn't he absurd?"

Joan suddenly found herself on the defensive. It was all well enough for her to laugh at her protege, but she did not intend to extend the privilege to others.

"I like him very much," she said, with decision. "He's honest and nice.

I believe I like him better than any man I know."

"So do I," said Emily Carmichael unexpectedly. "But that doesn't keep him from being funny!--Do you know, Joan, often as we have him to dinner, and promptly as he pays his party-calls (who taught him that, I wonder?) he has never once set foot in this house just casually, of his own accord! I believe he thinks it wouldn't be 'respectful' of him. And yet I don't seem to awe him particularly, and it certainly isn't Mother's lorgnon--he positively teases her, and she likes it! The big house and that sort of thing wouldn't impress him--he's not enough of a sn.o.b. And yet he will not come to see me. Queer, isn't it?"

Joan admitted the queerness, though she was conscious of a slight feeling of gratification. She believed she understood, having once heard Archibald express rather forcibly his opinion of the sort of man who "went with" more than one girl at a time. While he could hardly be said to be "going with" herself, he had made little concealment of the fact that he was entirely at her disposal. She liked him the better for not being at Emily's as well.

"So you've been having him to dinner?" she murmured. "He never told me that!"

"Oh, no, he wouldn't. Haven't you noticed that for all his artlessness, he never really does tell much about himself? Or about anything else!

That's one reason he's so popular with Johnny and all of them, I think.

He's a sort of confidential agent to the crowd. I know that when Father can't find Johnny sometimes" (she blushed, and Joan nodded sympathetically) "he always calls up Archie Blair, who presently produces him. Sometimes he doesn't bring him home for several days, and telephones that he's got him at his rooms--recuperating, I suppose.

Johnny swears by him, of course. I've heard of the wonderful Archie for years, but never saw him until that night at your ball.... It was splendid of you to have him there, Joan!--one of the things that made me want to know you better."

Joan waived this compliment. One would suppose him Emily's discovery instead of her own!

"How did your brother happen to know him?"

"Oh, boys always know each other--they're so much more democratic than girls. Horrid little snips we used to be, remember?--turning up our noses at any other children who didn't go to dancing school?"

"I did not go to dancing school myself," remarked Joan quietly. "My mother taught me."

"Then your mother must have been Queen of the Fairies!" said her friend, rather prettily. "Johnny and Archie first met, I believe, upon the field of battle. There used to be a continuous warfare on in this neighborhood between what were known as the Alley Gang and the Av'noo Kids. We expected Johnny to be brought in any day a mangled corpse--he being the leader of the Av'noo Kids. One day the Alley Gang caught him and his cohorts rather depleted as to numbers, and were naturally engaged in wiping them off the face of the earth, when the paper-boy came up on his wheel. With a whoop he dropped wheel and papers and joined in the fray.

The Alley Gang were getting the worst of it when policemen arrived--it seems some windows had been smashed. The other boys scattered, but the rescuer dared not desert his papers and so got caught; and Johnny came panting home to get Father to bail him out of jail. That's the first we heard of Archie Blair."

"Odd that he didn't side with the Alley Gang, wasn't it?" commented Joan.

"Why, don't you see?--the Av'noo Kids were getting the worst of it.

That's Archie!..."

Joan decided to be a little kinder to her protege the next time she saw him. It is an odd fact that we frequently do not appreciate our possessions until others appear to value them unduly.

CHAPTER XXIX

Their next meeting occurred at the Carmichael house at dinner. Emily, with the approach of the Easter season, had one day announced her intention of giving a dinner in Joan's honor, greatly to the younger girl's pleasure. It meant that she had won not only the friendship of Emily, but that of her mother as well; a rather more difficult feat.