The Darcys' social career appeared to be well launched. Each Saturday
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 assiduously to his
duties as host, seeing that glasses 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 cocktails 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 banal
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 entitled 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 smuts 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 God 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?"
"Oh, I know on the surface you're a demure, well-behaved young miss, but
underneath--good gracious! You'd shock these people to death!"--he
indicated certain hilarious couples who had waltzed onto the terrace
near them. "Yes, you're quite untamed, my dear. Wild as a--chipmunk."
Joan leaned toward him, "How did you guess?"
"I've watched you dance. And then--well, I've never quite got used to
the cage myself, perhaps." He began to hum under his breath a tuneless
little ditty:
"It is a very dreadful thing
To be so fat a child,
To have to sit around all day
And yet to feel so wild."
"At least," laughed Joan, "I'm not fat!"
"No!" he said soberly, "never get fat. It is the beginning of the
end.... By fat I mean old. And cautious. Ugh!"
How the conversation came about to apple-trees, Joan never was sure; but
he told her about one he had discovered somewhere in the deep woods, all
in bloom, a little old gnarled affair hidden among giant first growth
sycamores and elms and beeches.
"An apple-tree lost in the woods! How do you suppose it got away from
civilization?" wondered the girl.
"Some bird, perhaps; or Johnny Appleseed."
"Who was he?"
"Fancy living in Kentucky without knowing about the first and greatest
of our pioneers! He was a daft old creature--an innocent, as the kind
phrase goes--who used to wander away from the settlement where he lived
into the wilderness, scattering apple seeds. All over this Ohio Valley
he journeyed, sowing his orchards for the benefit of those who were to
follow. The Indians let him pass, the wild animals did not harm him;
only his friends locked him up whenever they could catch him, because it
seemed such a silly thing to do. Friends are that way ... Years later,
when the pioneers fought their way at last over the mountains to stay,
they found here and there apple-trees blossoming and fruiting in the
great, lonely wilderness; and wherever that happened their wives made
them build cabins and settle down, for of all things that grow an
apple-tree most suggests home. So mad old Johnny Appleseed was the
founder of many cities."
"And yet there is no monument to him!"
"Except the cities...."
Here a young man appeared to claim Joan for the next dance--the blond
young man with whom she had commenced her dancing career, and who had
formed quite a habit of looking for her whenever the music played.
She rose with reluctance. "I wish _you'd_ come in and dance with me,"
she said to her new friend. "I'm sure you could!"
"I'm sure I could, too," he replied, "if I hadn't my body with me. As it
is, I'll just sit out here and make believe I'm dancing with you--In a
starlit glade. With the other young nymphs and dryads..." the whimsical
voice followed her.
The blond young man stared. "Of all the assorted nuts!" he remarked,
when they were out of earshot.
"Yes--but who is he?" demanded Joan eagerly.
"Something on the stock exchange. I see him there every day."
"The stock exchange!"
"Yes. Oh, he writes poems and things for the papers, too, I think. Quite
a literary guy." He mentioned the name.
It is a name known and remembered wherever there are moonrises and
fireflies, smoke against the sunset, apple-trees in bloom--all the
everyday lovely things people forget to see unless there are poets to
remind them...
It gave Joan quite a new zest in living to realize that at any moment,
even at Country Clubs, it is possible to run across a poet.