Why Joan? Part 57

"Shall you take it?" she asked, curiously. She herself could not have faced disgrace with any such meekness.

"Take it? Why, I jumped at the chance!"

Joan flushed.

"Archie," she said suddenly, "do you realize that there's a war going on over there in Europe! Do you realize that there is need in France for every able-bodied man that's got a life to spare?--Have you thought of that?"

She was startled by the change in his face. The veins stood out on his forehead, and his hands clenched. "Have I thought of it? G.o.d, girl, what else do you suppose I've been thinking about the past year? I'd give the soul out of my body to slip away from this--this grab-bag, and get into a good clean fight--Those d.a.m.ned baby-killers! Gosh!--fight? Just give me a chance at that dachshund of a Kaiser with my two bare hands!

But"--he made the little gesture that she realized was becoming characteristic of him--a gesture of renunciation--"I've got to stay here now. There isn't any money in soldiering."

Her flush deepened. "Money! I never want to hear the word again. Haven't you had enough to do with just 'money,' Archie?"

"Not on your life," he said doggedly. "I've got to make a heap of it before I'm through. Fifteen thousand dollars!--That reminds me," he went on in another tone. "You say they need able-bodied men over there--don't they need women, too? D'you suppose your friend Nikolai could find something for you to do in that unit of his?"

He caught the sudden gleam in her eye.

"That would please you, wouldn't it?" he said quietly. "Of course it would mean hard work, dangerous work, too, perhaps--but it's a great chance for you, for anybody! To sort of help make history.... Mr.

Nikolai was talkin' to us once about those two kinds of happiness, Huttengluck and Heldengluck--remember? Well, I don't believe you're the sort to be satisfied with any Huttengluck--nor I wouldn't want you to be. Take your chance, Joan--and don't lose it." His voice shook a little. "I'd like mighty well to have somebody of my name mixed up in this war somehow!"

She put her hand on his--almost her first demonstration of tenderness since the shock came; but the gleam had already died out of her eyes.

"That's dear of you, Archie--fine and generous. But if your place is here, mine is, too. I am not going to desert you. How can you think such a thing? I mean to be a better wife to you than I have been. We've got to start again, and start right. I want to help you...."

And then inexplicably, unbelievably, the worm turned. His nerves had strained too far. He shook off her hand as if it burned him.

"Help!" he said roughly. "Help? A h.e.l.l of a lot of help _you_ are! Going around like a martyr, with a don't touch-me, how-dare-you look on your face, as if I'd done the thing just to spite you! My G.o.d! A woman with any guts to her--"

"_Archie!_"

"Oh, yes, that shocks you--such a fine lady as you are," He seemed to be working himself up, like a woman in hysterics. "So grandly indifferent to money, too!--just so's you've got enough of it. Who spent the money, anyway?--tell me that! Was it me, who haven't bought myself so much as a new pair of pants in three years?"

She stared at him, mutely. "_So this_," she thought, "_is the real man!_" His ears, his great, coa.r.s.e hands--they meant something after all.

Her white look drove him into a further frenzy. "Oh, yes, glare at me, if I'm good enough for you to glare at!--Let me tell you something--if it's on my account you're staying, you needn't. That's all! It's a _wife_ a man wants at a time like this, not any marble image, not any tragedy-queen! Not any n.o.ble character that watches him out of the corner of her eye, and if he's real good--pats him on the hand! I've had enough of that!--Go on with your friend Nikolai," he cried violently.

"Try him out for six months or a year, and if he suits, and you don't want to come back here--by G.o.d, you needn't!"

"Archie," she said, trembling in every limb, "I shall leave your house to-morrow."

"Good!" he cried. "Good! And I'm going to beat you to it!"

He strode to the kitchen door and flung it wide. "Come here, Ellen Neal, and bear witness that I'm leaving this house first."

The front door banged behind him....

The two women stared at each other.

"Was that--was that _Mr. Archie_?"

"Yes," said Joan, still trembling, "it was!--Come upstairs and help me pack my trunk."

CHAPTER LIV

There is little to be said here about Joan's experiences in France. The story of those is better told in her own remarkable letters, which began shortly to appear in certain magazines; and in the book that followed.

Stefan Nikolai had found her shelter with a friend of his, Lady Arbuthnot, a clever old Englishwoman whose long horse-face and charming voice and odd combinations of tweed skirt and evening blouses were known and loved in every inst.i.tution of mercy about Paris. Under Lady Arbuthnot's guidance Joan found use for not only her Red Cross training but for everything else she had, whether by gift or acquirement.

Singing, story-telling, "play-acting," letter-writing, even dancing, all seemed as important a part of her equipment as the regulation sewing, bandage-making, and cookery. She tried an inexperienced hand at washing dishes and scrubbing floors. She also tried her hand at mending shattered nerves and even broken hearts; and at none of these things was she entirely unsuccessful. There was a certain power of concentration in Joan that made failure unlikely in whatever she undertook.

It was a wonderful time to her. She never got nearer the trenches than Paris; but there the trenches came to her, with all their horror, their sordid hideousness, their sheer, soul-stirring grandeur. She saw shattered men struggling back to life that they might offer it again, with eagerness; she saw philanthropists living in comfort on money that had been obtained to feed starving refugees; she saw girl-children, who had been forced to bear German babies, loving those babies with a pa.s.sion of maternity piteously beyond their years. Priests labored side by side with panders; women of the great world, such as Lady Arbuthnot, shared bed and board and ceaseless effort with W. C. T. U. workers from Kansas, with missionaries out of China, with ex-courtesans from the Paris streets, with those most sheltered of all aristocrats, the women of the upper French bourgeoisie.

It was humanity with all barriers down, all contacts clean and clear.

And Louisville, Kentucky, seemed as far away and negligible as the planet Earth may seem to possible dwellers on the moon.

Sometimes she had word from there--not often, for Ellen Neal was no letter-writer, and even Emily Carmichael's loyalty had been strained by Joan's unexplained desertion of her husband in his trouble. Once her cousin Miss Iphigenia Darcy wrote, and from her letter Joan gathered some impression of the effect of her sudden departure from Louisville.

In my day girls were taught that their first duty was to the _Home_, married or not. But I daresay this is a very old-fashioned notion, and with all those poor, unfortunate French needing help--Sister Euphie and Sister Virgie and I have frequently discussed offering our services. It is strange to have a war going on without any Darcys in it! (You haven't the _name_, you see, although a _true Darcy_ in every other particular.) However, it does not seem the place for _unmarried_ ladies just now, with so many men lying about in the hospitals not fully clothed, and those unfortunate Belgian victims (you know what I mean)! As I tell everybody, "Advanced young matrons like Joan are the ones really needed over there."

But you know how narrow people are, my dear! I sometimes think our city is growing a little _provincial_.

Joan smiled and sighed over this communication; and then forgot it.

From Archie she had no word, except an occasional line or two with the money-order that came regularly on the first of each month, and was as regularly returned. The magazine connections Stefan Nikolai had made for her provided what money she needed, and she had not yet sufficiently forgiven Archie to be willing to accept anything from him.

At first she wrote to him, not so much from any sense of duty, as from pity. She did not forget what had pa.s.sed between them, she made no attempt to ignore the fact that he had failed her utterly in every way.

But she no longer had time to brood upon her own affairs. In the vortex of life where she now found herself, personal troubles seemed somehow to disappear into the common whole. Constant a.s.sociation with others'

sorrow developed her quality of sympathy to an almost painful extent; and though she knew that Ellen Neal was making Archie comfortable enough in the old rooms on Poplar Street, his loneliness, his humble acquiescence in disgrace, hurt like a bruise on her heart. So she wrote to him, impersonally but kindly.

Since he so rarely replied, however, her letters gradually ceased.

Evidently Archie, like many others, found it difficult to forgive where he had wronged. Joan shrugged--a little gesture she had learned from Nikolai--and dismissed her husband as much as possible from her mind.

There was much else to occupy it: not only in the way of work but of pleasure. Paris, even in her grief, did not forget the human necessity for pleasure, nor did Stefan Nikolai. She saw rather less of him than she had expected to, for he was frequently absent for weeks at a time on unexplained journeys, about which Joan had learned to ask no questions.

But whether he was near her or not, she was always conscious of his enveloping care, his devoted watchfulness. He gave her, too, many friends besides Lady Arbuthnot.

Once Sacha, always left on guard over Joan during these absences of Nikolai's, betrayed the fact that his master had gone into Russia. Joan taxed him with it when he returned.

"Russia is not safe for you, Stefan!--you told me so yourself."

"Surely you would not have me at such a time seek only places of safety?" he smiled.

"Why can't you stick to the hospital work you came over for, instead of gallivanting about all over the place?" she demanded, with a petulance that concealed anxiety.

"One goes where one is useful," he replied quietly. "There are many who know more about medicine than I, but few who know more about Russia--except in Germany, perhaps! My countrymen are very susceptible to the spoken word."

It was his only explanation of his frequent disappearances; but Joan, understanding that wars must be won not only on the battlefield, uttered no more protests, and made the most of her friend when she had him.

For the first time in her life, she came near to the innermost meaning of the word happiness. It was not the placid content of her "pasture-time," nor the feverish, half-guilty ecstasy which had come to her for a brief hour through the unworthy medium of Eduard Desmond. It wrapped her round warmly like the consciousness of some beloved presence--which indeed it was, though Joan for once did not quite dare to a.n.a.lyze the sensation. She only knew that here, among strangers speaking a strange tongue, she was for the first time in her experience utterly at home. And she was curiously at the top of her powers. In that atmosphere, nothing seemed impossible of accomplishment. There was a sense of personal possession and being possessed--"By Paris," she told herself; but in her heart another name echoed.