Why Joan? Part 6

"Sure you will," encouraged she who had been called Lightfoot Ef, patting his cheek maternally.

CHAPTER VIII

The Darcys' social career appeared to be well launched. Each Sat.u.r.day night found them at the Country Club, and no longer dining in loneliness. Effie May speedily collected about her a group of congenial spirits, for the most part young people, among whom she was extremely popular--far more so than was Joan, who sometimes felt as if she were the only elder present. Theirs was usually the most hilarious table in the room. Corks popped freely, and there was much horse-play, and throwing about of bread, and at a certain stage of the evening rather frank persiflage in which, to Joan's relief, her step-mother took no part. She laughed her cheery, plump laugh, and made no comment; but more than once with a glance at her step-daughter, she managed quite deftly to steer the conversation into other channels. Joan came to the gratifying conclusion that her father's wife was afraid of her.

The Major at his end of the table devoted himself a.s.siduously to his duties as host, seeing that gla.s.ses were filled, distributing gallant remarks among the ladies, constantly signing tickets. He was in his element; expanding, positively glowing, with hospitality.

"Another cigar, my boy? Try this brand! Take several! Fill your pockets with them. I can recommend them personally!"

There came to be several brands which he could recommend personally, several vintages as well. The waiters hovered about him like cherubim about the throne of grace, and he knew them all by name, and took an interest in their families.

This lavish generosity, Joan reflected, was the spirit which gave the old South its glamour, its traditions--to say nothing of its consequent poverty. There was something rather fine and large about the Major's apparent obliviousness of the fact that the money he spent so royally did not belong to him.

"If Effie May does not worry, why should I?" argued his daughter with herself. Her father's affairs were no longer her concern; if indeed they had ever been. But she could not help taking a certain uneasy interest in them.

"How do you happen to know enough people to invite to all these parties of yours?" she asked Effie May, aware that the Darcy family was doing rather more than its share of entertaining.

"Oh, you don't have to know people well to ask 'em to parties,"

explained the other innocently. "And once they eat with you, they're your friends."

"That depends upon what you give them to eat!" interjected the Major, chuckling.

It seemed a primitive conception of social relationships, but not on the whole a false one. Joan thought of the Arab and his salt....

"Food," she wrote to Stefan Nikolai, "appears to be the Tie that Binds."

"What about drink?" he inquired on a post-card. (They did a good deal of this staccato correspondence, Joan liking to exchange deep thoughts with him, as she expressed it, "while they were hot.")

"Drink," she replied on another, "is the Tie that Loosens!..."

Stefan Nikolai was the only one of her friends with whom she had found courage to discuss her father's marriage. Writing things out to him was almost like writing them out to herself. It served somehow to clear her mind. It is probable that Mr. Nikolai, a student of various phases of the human problem, got a good deal of valuable vicarious experience out of young Joan's letters. Certainly he encouraged them.

It was to him that she confided her discovery that social life is far more pleasing after dinner than before. She was learning to count, as surely as does many an experienced hostess, upon the help of the Tie that Loosens. While she herself had not as yet developed her father's palate for c.o.c.ktails and fine vintages she appreciated their effect upon her partners--for to her men so far were merely partners.

It was after dinner that Joan's part of the evening began. Then, thanks to the Tie that Loosens, there was no longer need to make ba.n.a.l conversation nor to listen to it, no need to pretend friendly interest in young men to whom she was incurably a stranger, no need of anything but to yield herself to the music and the first pair of arms that offered, and float away into Dreamland.

There was something curiously sensuous to Joan about dancing. It acted like a drug upon her fancy, stimulating, soothing. She was hardly aware of whom she danced with, if he could dance. If he could not, she stopped. This odd impersonality of hers was rather piquant to her partners. Many a youth who was afraid to talk to "that quiet Darcy girl--you never know what she's thinking about!"--was not afraid to dance with her, whenever he got the chance.

At such times Joan had her rare moments of beauty. With flushed face, loosened hair, and wide, dreaming eyes, she was as graceful as one of the three circling maidens in the Primavera--the one who looks wistfully over her shoulder at the oblivious youth. Unfortunately her lot was cast among people who did not think in terms of Botticelli. Her step-mother wondered sometimes whether curling-tongs and perhaps a little rouge would make her look more like other girls....

Sometimes people came to the club who attracted Joan's attention--quieter people than Effie May's friends, more simply dressed, who never seemed to join in the accentuated hilarity after dinner. Once in such a group she recognized the girl who had eyed her aloofly on the train coming home from boarding school. Joan suddenly yearned to do some aloof eyeing on her own account, now that she was no longer shabby but wore a frock as smart as any in the room.

She watched her opportunity, and followed the stranger into the dressing-room with some such truculent idea in view; but was disarmed by the courtesy with which the other made room for her at a mirror, where they powdered their noses side by side in amity. As she was leaving the room, however, she heard the aloof one murmur to a friend: "What a lot of strange people one sees at this club nowadays! I wonder where they all come from? It's getting very mixed."

Joan went white with anger. She struggled with the temptation to explain proudly that she was not a strange person, that her name ent.i.tled her to any society she chose to enter, that it was her step-mother who was "mixed," not she....

And then she remembered that it was only thanks to her step-mother that she happened to be there at all.

For the moment this encounter with the enemy took away Joan's heart for dancing. Crowd-loneliness got her by the throat. Was there always to be just one of her, and so many of everybody else?

She slipped out on to a terrace that overlooked a valley with the great river gleaming far off, still holding some faint glow of the sunset's aftermath. There was a bench at the far end, lost in shadow, and she was about to seat herself there when she saw that it was already occupied.

"Oh," she said, drawing back. "I didn't notice you!"

"Women rarely do," remarked a plaintive voice with a smile in it. "I'm used to that. And yet I notice them, dreadfully!"

Joan laughed a little, and retreated. "I won't disturb you," she murmured; but the voice held her.

"Oh, please! Please do. I want to be disturbed. I simply came here to see my moonrise." A shadowy arm pointed out a dim glow over the trees to eastward.

"Why _your_ moonrise, especially?"

"By right of discovery. I seem to be the only person aware of it.... May I share it with you?"

"You are sure you wouldn't rather see it alone?"

"Goodness gracious!" cried the voice quite querulously, "what human being ever wanted to watch a moonrise alone?"

Joan chuckled, and sat down to the first conversation she had enjoyed since her last one with Stefan Nikolai--one of the few real conversations, she thought afterwards, in her life.

Yet it was difficult to remember the many things they talked about.

Smoke, for one. He pointed out the dim loveliness of the city below, towers and battlements and the airy span of a bridge against the gray-gold sky.

"'Many-storied Camelot town,'" he said, musing. "Without the shrouding smoke, what would it be? Factory chimneys, iron smoke-stacks, a filtration plant--Ugliness, ugliness! Yet there are people in that town who want to rid themselves of those billowing mists of rose and violet and silver."

"I suppose," said Joan, "the beauty of smoke depends upon whether you're down in it, getting s.m.u.ts on your nose, or looking on from a hilltop."

"A question of perspective, you think? Hmnn--yes. Well, then" he said reasonably, "by all means _get_ your perspective. Stick to the hilltop--especially at sunset."

"We haven't all got wings to reach a hilltop with, you see. Nor yet automobiles."

"I haven't, myself," he said. "I use trolley-cars.... Did it ever occur to you what a marvel the trolley-car is? For a nickel--or at most a dime--all Nature is yours to command; beechwoods in their autumn field of the cloth of gold; little whispering streams breaking their winter silence, fireflies dancing--to the tune of the 'Merry Widow' waltz," (as that melody of the moment made itself audible from the house beyond).

"What a twilight! Fireflies, an afterglow, and the moonrise set to music, all at once," he said under his breath. "And some one to share them with!"

Joan was silent, flattered by the knowledge that this whimsical gentleman was letting her into his thoughts.

"The beauty of such a moment is that one never loses it," he mused. "One puts it away as people press flowers in books, to be looked at when--when pleasant things need remembering. I thank G.o.d for a mind well stocked with beautiful occasions!"

"Wild Evenings I Have Known," murmured Joan, frivolously, because for some reason she was rather touched.

He nodded, "With wild people in them. Like you."

"Me! Wild?"