Why Joan? Part 62

Mr. Nikolai stared at this figure for a puzzled moment; and then burst out laughing.

"Why, Ellen Neal! I did not recognize you as a farmerette."

"Land sakes!" She sat down abruptly among the potato-plants, whether out of surprise or for purposes of concealment it is impossible to state.

But her welcome when it came was for once not grudging. Perhaps she recalled a certain timely offer of help; or perhaps this graybeard, with his slight, tired stoop and his lined eyes, no longer seemed to her a menace to the sheepfold. Be that as it may, her greeting was not outdone in warmth even by Archie's.

"I've simply _got_ to tell Joan!" cried Archie. "She'll never forgive me if I don't interrupt her just this once."

"Not when it is coming like that," forbade Nikolai, listening to the rapid click of a typewriter from the house beyond. "Neither battle, murder, nor sudden death must be allowed to interfere with a flow of thought that is coming a hundred words to the minute."

"Well, I suppose you know," conceded the husband, reluctantly--

An hour later, however, Ellen took matters into her own hands. She appeared at the kitchen door (dressed, Nikolai was flattered to observe, in a costume of purple crepe with Battenburg touches), and loudly rang a dinner-bell.

"That'll fetch her! Joan ain't ever too much up in the clouds to hear a dinner-bell; and I don't mean to have my jelly-omelette kep' waitin' on no flows of thought," she remarked.

Joan came out to them, a little untidy as to dress and hair (why is it that the Muse can never be pursued in perfect neatness?) and moving vaguely, as if half in a dream. There was a faint vertical wrinkle between her brows which was new to Nikolai, but her pallor had given place to warm tan, and both face and figure showed a slight suggestion of fullness, a little matronly poise that was more charming than her Botticelli _maigre_ had been.

As she pa.s.sed her son, she swooped down upon him and lifted him with a fine free swing onto her shoulder.

"Hi there, old Dirt-in-the-Face! Where's your Dada?"

Mother and child made a memorable picture as they approached, the long lifting lines of the woman's body, her laughing face upturned to the boy, who straddled her shoulder unafraid of his high position, chuckling and kicking fat legs as she tickled him.

The two men who loved Joan exchanged a sympathetic glance. "Mine!" said each in his heart; the one triumphantly, the other with the little shrug that was habitual to him.

Not until she was close upon them did she realize who waited for her there beside Archie. She stopped short. Then, without a word, she put down her child and went to Nikolai and kissed him.

If that kiss, so impulsive and without self-consciousness, was like a stab in Nikolai's heart, he did not show it. She had not dared to kiss him when they parted.

There came back to him in that moment an echo of a certain prophesy he had once made to Archie: "I must warn you that when she does find her _metier_, you are more in danger of losing her to it than to me."

Was she lost to both of them, already?...

"Oh, but Stefan, dear, how tired you look!" ("And how old!" her thought finished.) "You've been working too hard over there!"

"One does. It seems the least one can do."

"Too much work and not enough exercise," p.r.o.nounced Archie, casting a semi-professional eye over him. "Nothing ages a man so quick as to let his muscles sag on him--but you brainy people always forget you've got muscles except in your heads. I'll have to make you hoe the garden and put on the gloves with me now and then, like I do Joan."

"No wonder she is able to hoist fat sons about as if they were feathers!" commented Nikolai.

It was a happy luncheon they had together, and a garrulous one. The Blair family talked all at once, including the youngest, who had three words at his command and liked to practice them. Ellen also joined freely in the conversation as she waited upon them. Nikolai was the only quiet one, seeming content to look and listen.

He had to hear all about the finding of the Farm, as Archie called his two acres and a cottage. When the reunited Blairs had been looking about for a place they could afford to live in--"And raise a family," added Archie happily--they had come across the little place, weed-grown and deserted, and rented it for almost nothing.

"The chickens and the garden alone practically pay the rent," boasted Archie, "and this summer I'm going to set up a hog. Real money in hogs, Mr. Nikolai! Of course the house is pretty old-timey and plain,"--he indicated the low ceilings and deep-set, many-paned windows--"but Joan likes old-timey things. She says this is a country cousin to that old place I used to live in on Poplar Street. Says a house without any ghosts in it is as uninteresting as a house without any books in it."

(Archie was always fond of quoting the sayings of his Joan.)

"You do not miss people?" Nikolai asked her, recalling how easily the young American had made her place in what is perhaps the most finished society in the world.

"I have no chance to. We have neighbors enough--nice country women who exchange patterns and recipes and cuttings with me, and even a book now and then. If I want another sort, it is easy enough to run into town--or even on to New York, now that I've the excuse of publishers to be seen!

And lately the town has begun to come out to me. Not at first. Emily and the others had a good deal to say about the folly of burying oneself in the country. You see this is not Country Club or golf-course country.

But now I notice that they're glad enough to come whenever I ask them--or even when I don't!--Oh, the peace of it, Stefan! At night you can positively hear the silence."

"Amid the darkness that we feel is green,"

he said.

She nodded. "And no formal callers to interrupt, and no ridiculous compet.i.tions with Mrs. Websters--I think people are more themselves in the country, somehow. Kentucky people, at any rate. Your Kentuckian does not run quite true to type herded in ma.s.ses."

"Hear the wise authorine!" beamed Archie.

"Perhaps that is true of all Anglo-Saxons," she went on, unheeding.

"They need to get their roots into the soil."

"Not only of Anglo-Saxons, Joan--of Semitic people, of all people, I think," said Nikolai. "Humanity began in a garden, if we may believe our myths. And with all races the dream of the ultimate Paradise is a garden."

"Why don't you put some roots out yourself?" asked Archie, eagerly.

"There's a lot of good land about here for sale cheap. Why don't you buy some and settle down near us?"

"Oh, do!" urged Joan. "What a splendid idea!"

He looked from one to the other, the slight flush that had risen to his face dying away.

"Thank you," he said quietly. "Thank you, my friends. Perhaps--some day."

Joan remembered that he had spoken once of his intention to settle down near her and grow up with her children, "when he was old enough."

Surely, she thought (quite unaware of any cruelty in her thought) he was old enough now!

Her eyes had been making their usual running commentary on the conversation, quick blue flashes, grave or merry or rea.s.suring, that always spoke to Nikolai more clearly than her words. But presently he noticed in them a return of the preoccupation, the vague dreaminess, that had been about her when she first appeared.

"Your mind is at that typewriter," he accused her suddenly.

"Of course it is," complained Archie. "She'd be at the thing all day long, if I didn't drag her out in the fields occasionally to work!"

"Archie thinks writing is not work," she interpolated, "merely an elegant way of pa.s.sing a lady's leisure, like embroidery or crocheting!--But I'm not always as bad as this, Stefan," she apologized.

"It's just that a crisis is on the way, and thoughts seem to come faster than I can get them down.--Luckily for you I've got a public now to spill them onto, instead of you!"

"Do you find the public as responsive?"

"_Does_ she!" cried the proud husband. "Letters in every mail, and requests for autographs--why, she's a public character! The other day in a street-car--Tell him what happened the other day in the street-car, Joan."

She pulled his hair, laughing. "Ain't I the most wonder-fullest boy?--Well, the other day in a street-car, Stefan, a perfectly strange man came up to me and said, 'Aren't you the Mrs. Blair who writes? Say, what business have _you_ got knowing how scared a man is of his grown son? You're only a girl.'"

"I congratulate you," said Nikolai. "Yes, that is response. Taking the world into your circle of intimates--that is the thing that makes the game worth while for people like you and me."