There is, among the wives and mothers of what the
Misses Darcy were wont to call the polite world, a general conspiracy of
silence on the subject of honeymoons. The theory is allowed to go
unchallenged that a honeymoon is invariably a period of bliss and
romance unalloyed; the conspirators apparently subscribing to the ideas
of the stoical parent who teaches his child to swim by throwing him
unexpectedly into the water. If he manages to keep afloat, well and
good; if he drowns, regrettable; if he comes out alive but with a
shrinking cowardice with regard to water that never afterwards leaves
him, perhaps it is no concern of his parent's. And again, perhaps it is.
Joan and Archibald Blair returned from their honeymoon not quite as
close friends as when they embarked upon it. Joan's manner had gained a
certain kindliness, a gentle consideration that was akin to sympathy;
whereas Archie, with puzzled eyes and a smile that beamed rather
uncertainly, almost evinced his desire to propitiate by rolling over at
her feet and holding up four paws to heaven. (Which was no way to
propitiate our heroine.)
Honeymoons, however, do not last indefinitely; and by the time Ellen
Neal and her furniture and the results of Archie's "twigging" were moved
into a certain modest house that simply cried aloud to be purchased (on
the installment plan), Archie had grown almost accustomed to the sight
of the One and Only seated at his breakfast table _en negligee_, pouring
out his coffee, with a preoccupied word from him now and then as she
glanced through the morning paper. (It was characteristic of that
household that Joan was the one who read the morning paper.) He kissed
her whenever he liked without asking leave; and in return she rumpled up
his hair deliciously, and called him "Goose!", and reminded him to bring
oranges from downtown because the neighboring grocery had such poor
ones.
Joan entered upon the domestic role with her usual thoroughness.
At first she had been rather afraid of the expenditure the purchase of a
house involved. It sounded to her too much like the large and not very
practical ideas of her father. But when Archie pointed out to her that
even day laborers managed to own their cottages, thanks to
building-associations, and that purchase on this plan was merely a way
of saving money, she yielded without undue reluctance. After all, there
was not only his salary to be relied upon, but his commissions,
dependent upon his own energy, which seemed boundless. Like many poor
girls, she was quite ignorant of the value of money. Beyond the
purchasing power of a concrete sum, say one thousand dollars, money
meant nothing to her at all. Ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand
dollars--they seemed very much the same.
The house was its own best advocate; one of the charming English cottage
types that are beginning to make home life not only comfortable but
dignified for the small householder in our American cities. The
neighborhood was excellent, one of the pretty green courts she had long
ago coveted; and there was a small garden artfully arranged into vistas
and quite an air of privacy by means of shrubbery, and overlooked by a
secluded porch whose coolness seemed like paradise to Archie, hurrying
to it out of the hot city.
The garden was his part of the establishment; and there he might be
observed any morning shortly after sunrise, digging, pruning, whistling
tunelessly between his teeth, with one eye on a window whence would
presently issue the drowsy voice of Joan, calling, "Good-morning out
there, Adam!" Then with a rush Adam would disappear from his garden,
leaving spade or hose where he happened to drop them, lest Eve need
assistance with buttoning a blouse or tying a shoe.
It was a glorious time for Archie. He was almost painfully happy.
The Jabberwocks and others took a good deal of critical interest in
Joan's house. She had always been suspected of being a little odd, and
her house proved it indubitably. At a period when Louisville was
graduating out of the green-wall-and-mission-furniture period, through
Coloniality, into a more catholic appreciation of possessions which
express the personality of the possessor, Joan's house was still rather
a shock to all preconceived notions of decoration. There was none of the
white woodwork and panelled severity which sounded the correct and most
recent note. Joan's woodwork and walls were alike a soft, practical
gray--"Soot-color," she explained placidly--and the plaster had been
left rough-cast. Against it, instead of the accepted pictures of the
day, hung two or three rare prints, a cast of the Parthenon frieze, and
a fine strip of Persian embroidery. On the floor were black skin rugs. A
green vine, growing out of an ancient yellowed marble jar, wandered at
will across one wall and up the brick of the chimney-place.
"You got that idea in Italy," commented one visitor.
But the undoubted charm of Joan's house was that she had taken no ideas
from anywhere. She simply had about her the sort of things she liked.
There were ferns growing in the window-sills, and no curtains whatever
except two lengths of heavy pumpkin-colored silk which might be drawn
across the panes at will, but rarely were.
"People will be able to see in when the lamps are lighted," protested
her step-mother.
"What of it? They won't see much over those ferns," said Joan, "and I
always love to peep in at lighted windows myself, don't you? Haven't you
ever noticed how much nicer the houses in this part of the world look
when they're undressed for the summer? Personally, my taste has never
run to lingerie in household decoration."
Effie May, who was nothing if not receptive, went home and meekly took
down her point-lace curtains.
What troubled Louisville most about the Blair house was its lack of a
dining-room. There was no chamber held sacred to the rites of
nourishment, with chairs sitting primly against the wall and a center
table with a centerpiece upon it, bearing a fernery or--what was more
recently affected by the really up-to-date--a dish containing imitation
fruit. ("So much smarter than the real kind," explained her neighbor,
Mrs. Webster, who had quite a taste for the correct in art.) There was
no sideboard for the display of wedding-silver, no china-cabinet
containing the best glassware in glittering serried rows. What was the
use of having nice things, thought many a troubled housewife, if they
were to blush unseen in pantries?
But Joan did not understand, and frankly said so, why in a small house
one room should be set aside for use only three times a day. She needed
the extra wall space for her books. Besides if there was a dining-room
people seemed to feel obliged always to eat in it, instead of in the
garden or the porch, or on a table drawn close to the window, where one
might look out into the world while one ate, as in a pleasant
restaurant.
"I'm like the Irishman," she remarked, "who said that he was glad he
didn't like strawberries, because if he did he'd have to eat them, and
he hated the damn things.--Try having your meals served about in
different places, and see if you haven't a better appetite for them!"
Even the admiring Jabberwocks felt that this was carrying oddity to the
extreme. They always took strangers, however, to see Joan's little
house, and incidentally Joan herself. Mr. Nikolai had sent her recently
several Mandarin costumes, unique in the history of Louisville for
domestic wear, in which she appeared comfortable, piquante, and quite
exotically feminine.
"Fancy! Trousers on a bride! And at such a time, too," murmured the
ladies of the neighborhood among themselves.
But as Effie May pointed out to the Major, himself a trifle shocked by
this eccentricity of costume in a lady of his family, "She's slim enough
to wear 'em, Dickie, and those full silk pants are certainly becoming to
the feet. Wish I had some myself--Don't you worry," she added, chuckling
over the Major's expression, "I haven't! Pantaloons weren't meant for
the pincushion style of figger."
Archibald, of course, found the Mandarin costume adorable. He would have
found any costume of Joan's adorable, even a Mother Hubbard, or its
lineal descendant, the bungalow-apron.
Altogether, Joan had a rather happy aftermath to her honeymoon. "The
pasture-time," she called it, during which she was as placid and content
as a cow in a clover-field. For the first and possibly the last time in
her life she was quite free from worry. That was one of the things
Archie took completely out of her hands. He would have liked to take
everything out of her hands that might be irksome to her--her thinking,
her very sleeping and eating, had it been possible. But worry at least
was something he could take upon his own broad shoulders.
Her personal allowance and the allowance he made her for household
expenses were paid regularly into her account--an arrangement Joan had
insisted upon, despite his protest.
"Why should you be bothered with the paying of bills, darlingest?"
"But I _love_ to pay bills, Archie," she had replied, rather piteously
to one who had known anything of the earlier Darcy _menage_. "It's a
real pleasure to get them all out of the way before the tenth of the
month!" And it was a pleasure she attended to religiously, even after
she began to grow a little lax and indifferent about other household
matters. There were to be no "Indians" in the annals of the Blair
family.
Joan had never been so sluggish mentally as in these first months of
married life; yet she felt almost abnormally normal, close to the great
heart of existence, at one with the physical world about her, content
with the content of a cog which fits well into the wheel where it
belongs.
Long afterwards some would-be cynic asked her whether she believed that
marriage _per se_ was an experiment which paid.
"Yes!" she answered without hesitation. "If only for the moment when you
tell your husband that he is to have a child."