For the modern woman there lies, fortunately, a life between the two
extremes of domesticity and frivolity, both of which Joan had tried and
found wanting. Or rather she had not found domesticity wanting so much
as temporary--a period of tranquil suspense, as it were, leading up to
an inevitable climax which had somehow failed to come off. Even had her
babies lived, it is to be doubted whether Joan could have long satisfied
herself with domesticity pure and simple; and she could no more resume
it now than a cocoon may be resumed by a former occupant which has
sprouted wings.
As for frivolity, plenty of that offered itself to a young matron with a
charming house and a husband who was generally spoken of as a rising
young business man. ("Rising," Archie certainly was; he had to be, to
keep up with his rising expenditures.)
But Joan asked perhaps too much of frivolity. She had been heard to
remark that "nothing made the social game possible except flirtation and
real talk; neither of which were to be had in Louisville by people who
valued their reputations"; a rather sweeping comment, of the sort which
soon made Joan's tongue a trifle over-famous. Simple, unexacting folk
who liked a good dinner with a game of cards afterwards for modest
stakes, and now and then a little dancing with each other's spouses,
just to keep in touch with the new steps, began to be rather afraid of
young Mrs. Blair. And Joan was equally afraid of them. She had a morbid
suspicion that dullness might be catching.
There was something appalling to her, too, in what has been somewhere
called "the infinite littleness of social life." It seemed to have a
strangely flattening effect upon its devotees--promoting some, demoting
others, all to the same unstimulating level, while the wheels within
wheels shifted and reformed kaleidoscopically. These wheels within these
wheels puzzled Joan. "Climbers," such as her step-mother, she was able
to understand and even to sympathize with. It seemed to her quite
natural and thoroughly American for water to seek a higher level than
its own. That was merely progress, merely self-respect made visible. To
"get on" appeared a quite legitimate ambition; but to "get in"--that was
another matter. Snobbery, that word of many interpretations, meant to
Joan the extreme form of self-confessed vulgarity.
"If it were friends they were after, I could understand," she said to
Emily Carmichael. "Everybody wants friends--we're all lonely. But you
have got to select your real friends one at a time, not in assorted
clumps, like bananas. And one's real friends so rarely happen to be
friends with each other--you've noticed that? Why this passion for
organizing ourselves into group-formation, anyway?"
"For purposes of offense and defense," explained Emily. "So that we may
leave the Mrs. Websters out, and let the Joan Darcys in, of course."
They had been discussing Joan's near neighbor, a well-bred,
sweet-mannered, adaptable young woman who had recently laid siege to the
town, and with whom Joan was forming one of those propinquity
friendships which are destined not to last. None of Mrs. Webster's
friendships appeared to last. She had used acquaintance after
acquaintance gracefully as a stepping-stone to higher things, leaving,
however, not a single enemy behind her. It was the fashion in the
various circles through which she had passed to say how charming Mrs.
Webster was, even after she seemed done with them. And now, through
Joan, she was laying tactful but so far unsuccessful siege to the
Jabberwocks; cleverness (in moderation) having become quite the smart
thing nowadays.
"It is not our massive intellects which attract her, however," commented
Emily. "It is--well, modesty forbids me to say just what it is. The sign
_verboten_ is to some natures as a red rag to a bull. They simply must
have it to play with."
"Well, but why should anybody be _verboten_ to Kathy Webster?" defended
Joan. "She's charming, and perfectly intelligent, and unmistakably a
lady--which is more than one can say with confidence of some of our most
indefatigable social leaders. Look at Mrs. Gunther, for
instance!--didn't you tell me her father used to deliver meat at your
door out of his own cart?"
"Excellent meat it was, too. Father says we have never had a decent
butcher since."
"And lo, what house more exclusive than theirs?"
"Naturally! It has to be. People like that seem to develop a sort of
protective instinct which guards them from any possible contact with
vulgarity until such time as they shall have accumulated enough
refinement to be immune. Not for them the company of any chance newcomer
like Mrs. Webster! They have to be careful."
"But shouldn't you think they'd have a sort of fellow-feeling for the
new arrivals?"
"Dear me, no! What's the good of attaining a pinnacle if you're going to
share it with somebody who might push you off?"
Mrs. Webster's pursuit of Joan was not entirely opportunism. There was a
good deal of admiration in it, mixed with a sort of malice which the
larger nature had difficulty in comprehending. Joan found herself
entered most unwillingly into an undignified petty rivalry with her
neighbor. If she entertained some of her friends at luncheon without
Mrs. Webster, the other instantly retaliated by giving a luncheon
herself without Joan, sending in dessert and decorations afterwards to
press home the point. If the Blair house in Spring put out new awnings,
the Webster house erupted not only into awnings but into flower-boxes as
well, with a corresponding air of triumph in its mistress. If Joan
received some invitation which the other did not, there arose between
them a slight, unmistakable coolness; whereas, if the contrary occurred,
Mrs. Webster became modest and cordial again.
Yet when this unpleasant rivalry lay dormant, the two had many a
friendly, neighborly time together over their sewing and their
gardening; and once when Joan was taken suddenly ill the other showed
herself genuinely kind, quick with womanly help and sympathy.
Joan could never quite make up her mind whether it was the pettiness of
Society which makes the Mrs. Websters, or the Mrs. Websters who make the
pettiness of Society. In any case, she lost what little taste she had
for a purely social career. It was not good enough.
And so she turned the pent-up energies of her nature into those
activities which are summed up nowadays under the general title of
Clubwork. Investigations, commissions, agitations of all sorts came in
for their share of her attention. She soon created for herself quite a
following of less daring spirits, among them Emily Carmichael and others
of the Jabberwock group who had graduated from the cocoon. It became
known that whenever young Mrs. Blair undertook a thing, it went with a
rush, not so much through her own efforts as through those of her
henchmen. She was recognized in club circles, despite her youth, as
something more valuable than a mere worker; she was an executive--All of
which fed her vanity and her sense of usefulness; and left somewhere
within her an aching void of dissatisfaction.
Suffrage-work came nearer filling this void than had anything else, and
that, it must be confessed, for a rather ignoble reason. It gave her a
chance to make speeches. In the back of her mind, with the very real
conviction that the ballot is a necessity which women are unjustly
denied, lurked also the suspicion that the world is already aware of the
fact without any further need of agitation. Nevertheless she continued
to agitate, because she liked to exercise an ability which otherwise
might have remained forever undiscovered--There is no pleasure in life
equal to that of employing skillfully the talents that have been given
us.
She made the discovery of her gift quite by accident. At some woman's
meeting, a lady who was to have spoken on the subject of the Federal
Amendment failed to appear, and Joan, who had recently read up on the
matter (it may be remembered that she was what the actors call "quick
study"), volunteered to take her place, meaning simply to give the gist
of the matter and thus relieve a harassed chairman. But when she found
herself on the platform facing interested and expectant faces, something
happened that had occasionally happened before when she "play-acted" for
the girls at school. Joan left herself, and became a part of the
audience.
She listened to her voice going on and on, with amused approval. It was
a voice rather like her father's, carrying and flexible, and peculiarly
rich in its intonations.
"It doesn't really matter much what I say," thought Joan, listening to
herself; "it's how I say it. If I drop my voice a note here, they ought
to frown." (They did.) "Now I'll have them smile a little, perhaps
chuckle. After I stop, no applause, I think--just a nice, thoughtful
silence." (All of which came faithfully to pass.)
When she stepped down from that platform, her reputation as a public
speaker was made. Thereafter she delivered speeches whenever and
wherever she was asked, to the incredulous delight of Archie.
"Say, come over and hear the wife do her little spiel to-night!" he
would urge upon all his acquaintance. "It's a treat!--stands right up
and hands it to 'em hot off the reel, without a note or anything. You
can see her little old brain workin' while she talks--and lookin' pretty
as a picture all the time!"
His pride in her was such that he presented her with a successor to
Lizzie, a more pretentious member of the Lizzie family, in fact, in
which to get about to her numerous committee meetings.
"Of course we can afford it," he said in answer to her demur. "Haven't
all your friends got automobiles? Well, then!"
Joan accomplished much in the way of by-product to this satisfaction of
her vanity. Her youthful charm and her good breeding got her a hearing
frequently where more strenuous representatives of the cause had failed;
and through her many hitherto uncertain lambs were gathered safely into
the fold. On one occasion, to her astonishment, Joan discovered the
three Misses Darcy in her audience, wearing expressions of shrinking
alarm. But if they had come--not to scoff, they were too polite for
that: let us say to deprecate,--they remained to join.
"I declare it's _shameful_ the way we women have been treated all this
time!" cried Miss Iphigenia afterwards, truculently signing the card
which made of her a suffragette. "I'd no idea! Not allowed a word in
edgewise, the gentlemen spending all the money and making all the laws,
ordering us about like we were so many white slaves--"
"I don't recall that darling mama was ever treated in just that way by
dear papa?" interjected Miss Virginia, uncertainly.
"Pooh! Exceptions," snorted Miss Iphigenia (if one so gentle could be
said to snort). "Exceptions can be made to prove anything, can't they,
Joan? Why, we haven't even had a say-so as to whether we should marry or
not. Simply had to sit back and say 'Thank you, sir!' to any gentleman
who was kind enough to ask us!"
Here Miss Virginia was able thoroughly to concur. "And if nobody _was_
kind enough to ask us--Oh, my dears, I begin to think that if we could
have had the ballot in time--!"
"What's more," cried Miss Iphigenia, inspired, "I mean to bring our Susy
to hear you the next time you make a speech, Joan. Yes, I do! If they
try to keep her out, we shall say she is there as our maid. If we are
all to be allowed to vote about things, colored and white alike, it's
time for the colored women to be taught how!"--Which Joan justly
regarded as a signal victory.
But at the same time she chuckled inwardly over the mental vision of an
audience of colored lady voters, swaying to and fro with occasional
unctuous shouts of, "Bress us, dat's so! Um, yas, my Lawd! Come down,
come down and gadder us sinners into de fold!"
Occasionally, in the pursuance of her various public successes, Joan was
thrown into contact with people whom she classified under the heading of
Intelligentzia. There were plenty of these in Louisville, thinkers and
students and writers, a growing number of names which were rather better
known away from the city than in it. But of these Joan fought a little
shy. She cared more for books than for the making of them, had no wish
to peep behind the scenes for fear of losing her illusions. She got the
impression, too, that professional thinkers and writers were so busy
observing and interpreting the life about them as to have somehow lost
human touch with it. And Joan was nothing if not a humanist. She had a
youthful horror of being classified among the _bas bleux_.
"Men do so hate a bluestocking," she said once pensively to her friend
Emily.
"Men? Well, what of that? Yours doesn't!--and you don't want anybody
else's men, do you?"
"None that I have seen so far," admitted Joan. "But you never can tell.
They say it's in the dangerous thirties that we really begin to sit up
and take notice--Anyway, I shall _never_ be married and settled enough
to relish the idea of men running away from me as if I were something
catching!"
So she continued to avoid, rather than to cultivate, the company of the
Intelligentzia, thereby denying herself her birthright.
And at twenty-five, a leading citizeness of her community, with
engagements so thick on her calendar that there was barely time for an
occasional meal at home, she woke every morning with the thought, "If
something doesn't happen to-day, I shall scream!"