Into the busy abstraction of Joan's Paris life came presently one of her
step-mother's rare letters. It was a round, childish, yet curiously firm
scrawl written on lavender paper (Effie May having abandoned pink
effects in honor of her widowhood), which for some reason brought home
to Joan her father's little city so clearly that she could almost smell
it; a distinctive summer smell compounded of hot asphalt, blossoming
ailanthus trees, and a suggestion of the glue-factory.
Folks here are making bets as to whether you ever mean to come
back again,
(wrote Effie May).
And why should you? is what I say. I keep thinking how pleased
Major would be to have you hobnobbing with lady earls and
famous characters and high life generally. It's just where you
belong, and so did he.
Archie comes to see me real often, and he don't look so poorly
as he did at first. He's got him up a regiment, mostly Y. M. C.
A. fellows and a few old boys with stummicks and bald heads,
and I hear they drill real cute. He goes horseback riding a
good deal with the Carmichael girl, too, and I guess it does
him good. Ellen says he seems more peckish for his meals.
(Here Joan laid down the letter, thoughtfully. "Emily!--Well, why not?
She always did like him. I'm glad," she mused. She certainly was not
going to begrudge her husband the freedom she asked for herself.)
Ellen comes in every day to look after things for me, now that
I'm laid up. She don't like me any better than she used to, and
I expect she just thinks it's a family duty, but I'm glad to
have her anyhow. I keep nigger help now, the white ones being
so hard to get, and I'm not the hand with them your father was.
I never saw any one get as much out of niggers as Major
could!--out of white folks, too, for that matter, couldn't he?
Of course I'm not so sick as the doctors make out (they got to
earn the money somehow), but it's hard to sleep sitting up this
way, and sometimes at night I get to thinking. So I made a
will. I knew you'd never touch Calloway's money with a ten-foot
pole, but I thought maybe you wouldn't mind seeing it got spent
right. I want it to go to one of those shelters you told about
in the magazine, for little French girls with babies and no
husbands. Seems only fair, when I've had more than my share of
husbands and no kids.
Paris seems awful far away, and I guess I better let you off
that promise you made me to see that I didn't get laid out with
no corset on. They probably couldn't get a corset on me now,
anyway, I'm that fleshy. Not that I'm ordering me a coffin for
anytime real soon, dearie! but sometimes at night a person gets
to thinking.
Joan was rather startled by this letter, and sent for Nikolai.
"What do you make of it, Stefan? That part: 'It's hard to sleep sitting
up this way'--what does it mean?"
"I am afraid," he said gravely, "it means something serious--Advanced
heart-disease, probably. A woman of her weight would be liable to it."
Joan gave an exclamation of dismay. In that moment she discovered that
she not only did not dislike Effie May; she was fond of her. The thought
of never again seeing the vulgar, cheery, friendly soul was unexpectedly
distressing.
"Poor woman!--all alone there with her 'nigger help!' and Ellen sourly
doing her duty--Or is it _my_ duty?" She was not thinking entirely of
Effie May.... "Stefan"--her face blanched. "She was my father's wife.
She tried her best to be a mother to me. I owe her a good deal. Has the
time come to repay it? Does this mean--Oh, Stefan, do you think this
means I ought to go back? I've been so happy here, so useful! For the
first time in my life I have felt that I really 'belonged.' These people
who are doing things--"
She gazed at him beseechingly. It gradually dawned upon her that what
she dreaded so to leave was not these people who were doing things, not
that larger, freer life to which Nikolai had given her the key; not even
the Spirit that met her Spirit there in space. It was Nikolai himself,
the man, the comrade--the lover.
Her whole being seemed to rush out to meet the need that suddenly gazed
at her from Nikolai's eyes....
"Stefan," she said very low, "_must_ I go back?"
For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, his voice not quite under
control "You expect me to decide that for you? My dear, you ask too
much."
He took his hat and left; but Joan knew that he had decided.
* * * * *
They walked up and down the _quai_ for an hour or so before the gangway
was drawn in. Joan always afterwards remembered what they said, as one
recalls the least syllable of the dying. There was a sense of finality
about this parting, against which she struggled in vain.
She filled her eyes with him as if she had never seen him before, and
would not again. She noted little physical details which had hitherto
escaped her--the fine cameo cutting of his features, the long,
sensitive, expressive hands, the air he shared with many Europeans of
belonging to an older, more finished race than her own. In his calm
impassivity there was a suggestion of Slavic fatalism, combined with the
tragic patience of the Jew. Only his eyes smoldered with an unquenchable
spark that flamed to hers.
She knew that the Romance which had always eluded her was here at her
side, in the person of this perfect comrade, this shadowy, insistent
influence in her life which was about to withdraw into the shadows
again. Perhaps she understood, too, that Romance to remain Romance must
be elusive. Seized and held, it changes into something else. Yet she
tried to cling to it.
"You will be right here waiting on this spot when I come back, won't
you, Stefan?--For I _will_ come back," she exclaimed as he did not
answer. "Say that you know I will!"
"I know that you will do whatever seems to you right."
She made a mutinous face at him. "That's more than I know! I'm much more
likely to do whatever seems to me nice--Oh, Stefan, why will you persist
in believing in me always, no matter how badly I behave?" Lightly as she
spoke, her eyes were fixed on him, telling him consciously what her lips
could not utter.
He answered at one of his usual tangents. "Do you not know that every
splinter of a genuine Cremona violin vibrates to the bow on as true a
tone as did the unbroken instrument?"
"You mean--Mother," she said. "Oh, but I'm not all Cremona! I think
there's a good deal in me of the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned.
It's not _fair_ to be expected to live up to a self-sacrificing mother!
If you don't, you have failed her; if you do, she gets the
credit--Besides, I'm needed here just as much as I am in Louisville.
More! Not only these poor people need me, but--you do, Stefan."
She had brought it into the open at last, the one thing which they had
never yet discussed in their discussions of everything under the sun;
that eternal human question of Thou-and-I. She was a little frightened,
dreading yet eager for the answer.
It was long in coming. Nikolai understood the crisis they had reached.
He knew that it was his to put out his hand and hold her, to keep
forever in his life this one gift of the gods he craved, the fulfilled
hope which had been his beacon through many a lonely year. Once before
because of a mistake in judgment he had lost her, to her own
unhappiness. There must be no more mistakes in judgment.
But the habit of truth in thought and word was too great for him.
"No," he said at last, "I do not need you."
He saw her wince.
"I do not need you," he repeated steadily, "and you do not need me,
Joan. People like us get on quite well alone. Better, perhaps. It is not
good for us to be too happy--Besides, what we already have of each other
cannot be affected by time or space. You know that? The rest--is
extraneous. Tell me this: Have you ever in any important moment of your
life forgotten me, have you ever failed to be conscious of my presence,
no matter what the distance between us?"
She looked deep into the luminous eyes fixed upon hers.
"Never, Stefan. Even in my unthinking school-days, even in that strange
time after I lost my babies and could not write to you, I have counted
upon you always. Everything that has come to me, good or bad, big or
little, I have shared with you in my thoughts. Only--I did not realize
it."
"That," he said quietly, "is marriage. Your mother realized it. She knew
when you were only a child of the tie between us--But she and I thought
that I must keep away from you until the accident of time corrected
itself. You see we have been sent into this incarnation rather far
apart."
"You kept away too long, Stefan!"
"I know. But what does it matter?" He spoke half to himself, with his
little shrug. "This manifestation or the next--we shall not be apart
always."
"No, no!" she cried, catching at his hand. "That is too ethereal, too
mystic for me--I can't bear it, Stefan! I want the people I love with me
_now_, in this 'manifestation,' as you call it, where I can talk with
them, and touch them, and hold on to them--I am not all spirit. I
thought I was, but--I'm not. Oh, my dear, aren't you human _at all_?"
He did not reply; and Joan, looking at him through swimming tears, saw
that it was because he could not.
She dropped his hand. "Forgive me!" she whispered. "I will try to climb
up to you--since you will not come down to me.... But you must help me."
"I will help," said Nikolai.
They spoke a little later of Archie, who had been all the while at the
back of their thoughts. Both knew it was to him she was returning,
rather than to her step-mother.
"You expect too much of him, Joan--you always expect too much of people.
Try to take them as you find them. He is one of the many who think
better with their hearts than with their heads."
She commented with a faint smile, "My step-mother once told me that
there was nothing in the world so dangerous as what she called
'bone-headedness.'"
"Exactly!--especially to the bone-headed--Your Archie is no fool,
however. There are perhaps fewer convolutions in his gray matter than in
ours, that is all. He has made mistakes with his head, and will again.
But with his heart--never."
"You are not condoning," she asked slowly, "what Archie has done?"
He answered after a little pause, "To me there seems nothing
unforgivable, nothing utterly vicious, except selfishness. There is no
self in Archie Blair. Not enough self."
Joan told him then reluctantly of something she had never before
mentioned: her final incredible scene with her husband. She was
curiously ashamed of that scene, as though it were she who had betrayed
herself, instead of Archie. "Should you not call that a mistake of the
heart?"
But Nikolai did not appear to be particularly shocked by it. "I had no
idea," he commented, "that Blair was so good an actor."
"An actor!--You think that scene was not genuine?"
"I think, in fact I know, that your husband would hesitate to sacrifice
nothing to what he believed your happiness; even your respect--I love
that man," he said simply. "And so do you, Joan. Otherwise he would have
been powerless to hurt you."
Her eyes widened. She asked, as so many before her have asked, "Is it
possible to love--two people at once?"
"Two? A dozen--a hundred! Does a mother love two children at
once?--Surely that depends upon the stage of the soul's development."
"But always one best," she said quite fiercely.
"Always one best," he repeated....
The parting had come. Staring at him desperately, she saw in his eyes a
depth of pain and loneliness that made her own for the moment
insignificant. So much of his life was done; so much of hers, after all,
only beginning.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" she cried in a sort of bewilderment. "What is it
all about? Is there a purpose somewhere in this muddle of things? Why do
you say it is not good for people like us to be happy, when others go to
the end of their days in calm security? I do not want any--wicked
things, Stefan! I only want to be with you always. To take care of you
if you are sick, to mend your clothes, and make you comfortable,
and--love you. I want us to grow old together, not alone. Oh, my dear,
all your life you have been alone; and I can't bear it!--What is the
good of this thing that has waked in me at last, if I am not to use it?"
"You are," he said steadily. "Emotion to be safe must, _must_ translate
itself into action."
"But how, how? By doing for others, you are going to say--but it's such
a thankless task, Stefan! A red-blooded woman like me to take to
altruism, as some take to drugs!--Why must some of us live so intensely,
so consciously, only to be denied again and again the fulfilment that we
crave? Sinking our lives into those of lesser people, always of lesser
people!"
He answered gently, "'_Car je suis le Cobzar._'--It is time you
understood.... You know what a Cobzar is?"
She shook her head; and he told her.
"In the more remote Magyar villages, news of the world comes to the
people by means of a sort of minstrel who is called the Cobzar. He is to
them not only newsbringer, but historian and poet and philosopher as
well. He is treated with respect, they reward his singing with food and
wine and a place beside the fire, for it is an honor to be born a
Cobzar. But not always a happy honor, Joan. People do not listen to
singing that comes out of an empty heart. It is the Cobzar's duty to
tell them the story of themselves, and that is only the story of
himself, wrought into many forms. Their fears and joys, their failures
and their suffering and their hopes--he must be part of it all, and yet
apart, that he may not only understand but watch, remembering always his
mission to bring life to the knowledge of those who live."
He quoted for her then some lines which Joan never forgot:
"Aime-moi, parce que j'ai besoin de ton amour pour mes chansons,
Va t'en, parce que j'ai besoin de pleurer pour mes chansons,
Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons,
Car je suis le Cobzar."
The water widened between them....