The funeral did great credit to the Misses Darcys' experience in such
affairs. A crowded, beflowered church bore witness to the fact that
Darcy was still a name to be reckoned with in the community. Not only
the best people were there in quite sufficient numbers, but many of
those lesser folk whose duties bring them happily into touch with the
best people; milliners, modistes, clerks in the better shops, and so
forth.
As Mr. Florsheimer of the Gents' Furnishing remarked to Miss Murphy of
the Silks: "Such a loss to trade, ain't she?"
Among these humbler friends not a few genuine tears were shed, however,
for Effie May had scattered her kindness impartially.
Joan, in solitary state as chief mourner, with the Misses Darcy sadly
rustling in the pew behind her, was conscious of many curious glances
turned her way. Perhaps her husband was the only person there whose eyes
never turned in her direction. She was glad of her heavy veil, through
which she might study him unobserved.
He sat just opposite among the other pall-bearers, grave and quiet, with
the odd dignity still about him which had come at the time of his
disgrace. She noted new lines in his face, an unexpected touch of gray
in his boyish, curling hair. The ears, the freckles, the great, clumsy
hands were still much in evidence; but somehow Archie had lost forever
his slight touch of the ridiculous. Declining to run away from disgrace,
facing his music, humbly but unafraid, it occurred to Joan that her
husband was approaching rather nearly her own and her father's standard
of gentlehood.
"Blessings brighten," she reminded herself, grimly, "as they take their
flight!..."
She came presently under the soothing spell of the old cathedral, a
shabby, not very beautiful edifice left stranded in a neighborhood no
longer its own, but whose pews still bore the names of the town's first
citizens, gentlemen who had been her father's boyhood playmates, and
whose fathers had worshiped there with his father. Oddly enough,
considering how little time she had spent within its walls, the echoing
dimness of it gave Joan her first sense of home-coming. This old house
of God, that had witnessed so many ends and so many beginnings of human
endeavor, had gathered into itself the heart of a city.
A warm heart, it was, thought Joan; despite those speculative glances
fixed upon her. She recalled people's kindness to Archie in his trouble,
their quick response to any call upon their sympathy, their willingness
to give every stranger his chance. She remembered their invincible
hospitality, whether in wealth or poverty; the ardor with which they
entered into the interest of the moment, be it work or play, their
generous admiration for any fellow-citizen who made a success in the
world. A warm heart, she thought, and a loyal one.
She understood in that moment why it was that the people of this little
city rarely drifted too far away to come back again. Just as the human
body claims in the end its six feet of earth for a resting-place, so
must the human spirit claim its bit of the world for a resting-place, a
Neighborhood. The tragedy of a wandering life such as Nikolai's was, she
saw, in its detachment from common human interests, from a Neighborhood.
Better a tree, with its roots in friendly soil, as he had once said.
Cast her out though it might, Joan knew that her Neighborhood was here,
here among her father's people....
A trolley-car clanged past, and the challenge of the peanutman came
cheerfully in at the open door. "Pop-corn, Lady? Yere's your fine fraish
roasted peanuts, right off the hopper!"
The little lads in the choir stirred restlessly to this voice of the
summer outside. "Lead, Kindly Light," they warbled in a piercing young
treble, with now and then the Bishop's robust tones added in a
hospitable effort to make the thing go.
Joan's irrepressible fancy recalled the last occasion on which she had
heard this noble anthem. It was at the Country Club, where some
irreverent wag was playing it in rag-time; and Effie May had danced to
it merrily, Lightfoot Ef with her indulgent Major. Joan wondered whether
Lightfoot Ef might be remembering, too, and smiling perhaps in her
coffin....
But out at the cemetery her queer sense of elation vanished. Here, in
the shadow of her father's monolith, with Mary's modest headstone on one
side, a yawning grave on the other, at her feet two mounds so small as
hardly to be noticed, the aloneness of the human soul suddenly smote her
with such force that she could not stand under it. Was she never to know
again that human touch of hands and of lips? Was her only neighborhood
after all to be this quiet city of the dead?
She went quite dizzy and might have fallen, but for the quick arm that
supported her; whose in that bitter moment she neither knew nor cared.
But she was not surprised to find herself presently alone in a carriage
with Archie.
"I guess I oughtn't to have done this," he apologized, when he saw that
she could listen to him. "I just didn't think--out there. I'll go as
soon as you feel better, dear. Where do you want the driver to take
you!"
"Home," she said. It was no more than a whisper.
"You mean to Mrs. Darcy's house? Won't that be pretty gloomy for you
just now? Better let him take you to your cousins'--or to Miss Emily's.
How would that be? I know she'd he mighty glad to have you."
Joan gathered herself together for an effort. It seemed to her, faint as
she was, that much depended upon this moment. But for once her eloquence
failed her. She could only repeat that she wanted to go home.
Archie understood her trembling better than her speech, perhaps. He,
too, began to tremble.
"I--I haven't got any home now, Joan. Only the old attic-room in Poplar
Street--"
She cried out, painfully, "Archie! don't you _want_ me any more?..."
In his arms at last, her face pressed roughly against the familiar
roughness of his coat, words returned to her. She quoted her husband's
sole adventure into poetry:
"A book of verses underneath the roof,
A cup of coffee and an egg, in troof,
And Mrs Neal to cook it up for us--
Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof."
Archibald did his faithful best to laugh; but the effort was not
successful.
* * * * *
So it happened that they were received from a funeral as they had once
been from a wedding, into the portal of an ancient, friendly mansion
whose stairway still creaks to the tread of ghosts and broken people,
with now and then a happy footstep to remind it of its youth. And there
Ellen Neal, mounting stiffly and wearily with the aid of the curving
bannister, was hailed by a loud whisper from the floor above.
"Hsst! Come on up and look who's here."
A radiant Archie led her to his door, and exhibited the One and Only,
clad in his bathrobe, curled up asleep upon his bed.
"Humph!" gulped Ellen through her tears. "I _knew_ that woman'd manage
to fix things somehow!" Which was a final reluctant tribute to the force
of kindness that had been Effie May.
TWO YEARS LATER
A distinguished, foreign-looking gentleman with pointed gray beard got
off an interurban car in the vicinity of Louisville, and stood gazing
about him uncertainly. It was not the suburban neighborhood he had
expected to find, but a distinctly rural one. Here and there smoke was
visible above the tree-tops, but the only house within sight was a small
farm-cottage of red brick, which had doubtless stood there among its
gnarled fruit-trees at a time when the turnpike that passed it was a
postroad leading from the metropolis of Middletown (now half a hundred
houses strung along the pike) to the little port of Louisville on the
Ohio.
There was a big chimney at either end, in the picturesque but
impractical early fashion, and a bricked-up terrace across the front
overflowing with simple flowers: petunias, snapdragon, larkspur. Upon
the lawn grazed a rather stiff-kneed thoroughbred, apparently under
convoy of a pair of infants. One of these, the smaller, got about on all
fours with astonishing rapidity, and seemed imbued with the spirit of
investigation. The other, slightly larger, was extremely black as to
color and extremely capable as to manner.
"Tek keer, you Steffum!" Mr. Nikolai heard this one admonish. "Don't you
go so near his mouf, you heah me? Dat hawss could snap you up jes' as
easy as nippin' off a dandelium!"
The visitor leaned over the fence in sudden interest, "Can you tell me,
young person, whether Mrs. Blair lives here?"
At sound of his voice the investigatory infant, in an excess of
hospitality, rose to its legs and teetered eagerly toward him, only to
come to earth at Mr. Nikolai's feet. Nothing daunted, however, it gazed
up at him from this lowly position with a mixture of Archie's grin and
the droll, blue, wistful twinkle of Joan.
"Dar you goes, Steffum!" cried the guardian, in hot pursuit. "Dirtyin'
up anodder clean dress so's Miss Ellen gwinter whup me good--He's always
a-fallin' over on his face dataway," she complained, while maternally
repairing damages with the skirt of what appeared to be an only garment.
"I b'lieve he goes and does it a-purpose!"
"To gain experience, perhaps?" suggested the visitor.
"I reck'n," assented the other, doubtfully. "Yassuh, Mis' Blair she
_libs_ heah, but she's playin' on de type-writer dis mawnin'. Will I run
an' tell her comp'ny is came?"
"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed the gentleman. "Not if she is playing on a
typewriter."
"Mr. Archie, _he_ libs heah, too, when he ain't a trabelin' on de
railroad train," volunteered the black one, "He's out behine, makin' him
a little house to put a hawg in. Heah him?"
Mr. Nikolai nodded. There was a good deal of intermittent hammering and
whistling going on in the background.
"You need not announce me, thank you. Perhaps my namesake will lead me
to him?"
He held out a forefinger to the younger Stefan, who examined it, found
it good, and clasped a trusting fist about it. So linked, the two moved
off at a pace suitable to experimental footsteps.
In this slow progress they presently came upon a somewhat nondescript
figure at work in a potato-patch. It wore blue jeans overall trousers,
surmounted by what had once been a leghorn picture-hat, from which
straggled a lock or two of sparse gray hair.
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 passed 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," pronounced 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
competitions 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 masses."
"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 reassuring, 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 passing 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."
"Don't include me with yourself," she protested in quick deprecation.
"I'm not and never shall be 'literary.' Human nature is all I'm after,
Stefan. Villains who won't stay villains; heroes with fatal flaws of
character; good, fine, noble natures who spread havoc all about
'em--that's the sort of thing I want to do; never 'literature'!"
He smiled, nodding. "Spoken like a true Cobzar!--But at that rate you'll
find it difficult to escape literature, my dear." He rose to leave,
against protests. "No, no, I have no intention of sharing honors with a
Climax. Let me come back to-morrow, when the crisis is out of her
system. I know how that is!"
"You always know how things are," murmured Joan gratefully, pressing his
hand....
Archie walked with him to the car-station.
"You think she's looking well, sir?" he asked as soon as they were out
of earshot.
"Better than well, Blair. Content."
The husband sighed with satisfaction. "I think so myself--though of
course it's the kid who's done that, not me--Mr. Nikolai, I've got to
talk to you on business. How big a hurry are you in for that money you
lent me?"
"None at all," answered the other pleasantly. "I've accumulated a good
deal of moss for such a rolling-stone--a racial trait, perhaps! Take
your time. You've already paid me more than half, I think."
"Joan's book did most of that, not me," admitted Archie, flushing.
"Though of course I'm going to pay her back."
"Don't," said the other.
"_Don't!_ Why not?"
"Our only hold upon such as Joan is--our need of them."
Archie ruminated upon this in silence. "I get you," he said at last.
"Let 'em think we're sort of helpless, like--like children, eh? But it's
pretty hard accepting money from a woman!"
"Why? When we have consented to accept life itself from a woman--Where
there is love there is no debt, Blair!"
"I guess that's right," said Archie slowly. "What's mine is hers of
course; and so what's hers is mine--But speaking of the war--"
It happened that they had not been speaking of the war at all, though it
hung in the background of their talk, grim and menacing, as it hung in
the background of all talk just then.
"Yes, Blair?"
"We're getting into it at last, thank God! And as soon as we do, I'm
going."
"Of course," said Nikolai.
Archie turned to him eagerly. "You think I've got a right to go?"
"So much of a right that I've come out here largely to see how I can
help you--Of course you know," he added after a moment's hesitation,
"that anything I have will go some day to my namesake Stefan?"
"Say, that's great!" cried Archie, beaming. "That makes me mighty easy
about the future! And the present's all right, too. I'm pretty sure of
getting a commission, and Joan makes more money than I do now. The thing
that's been troubling me is wondering how _you'd_ ever get paid back....
I'm pretty tall for the trenches," he explained. "And I seem to get sort
of careless when I'm excited--the Irish coming out on me, I reckon. The
chances are against my coming back. And in that case all you'd get would
be--Joan."
A silence fell.
"And the kid, of course--He's a pretty nice little fellow," Archie added
tentatively. "I don't suppose he'd be much of a--drawback?"
"On the contrary," said Nikolai. "I think he might be considered
interest on the investment!"
Archie laughed with relief.
"I tell you, it makes me feel pretty comfortable to know that whatever
happens to me they'll be safe! And to know that you'll be taking care of
her, sir. She needs a good deal of taking care of, too--though she don't
know it. Thinks she's as independent as a little pig on ice. But they're
none of 'em independent, Mr. Nikolai--take it from me! They've got to be
humored, and teased, and exercised, and petted--and the smarter they are
the more petting they need. This high-brow business seems to leave
people sort of lonesome in their hearts--you know what I mean?"
"Yes," said Nikolai, "I know what you mean--I shall accept your legacy
gladly, Blair, if I am here to accept it. But--I am going to the war,
myself. Not into the trenches, no. Into Russia."
Archie protested as Joan had. "But I thought Russia was not safe for
you!"
"It is not. Nor for anybody else just now. There is something brewing
there. You will see. And I think perhaps I can do a little something for
both my countries, the new and the old. That is why I have come to
America; to arrange my affairs, and to--say good-by."
"I get you," said Archie, simply, and held out his hand. His face had
fallen. "Gee, supposing neither of us comes back? What will she do
then?"
Nikolai gravely smiled. "Listen!" he said.
Through the hush of the still afternoon came to their ears, faint but
distinct, the steady clicking of a typewriter.
"That is what she will do, my friend, with us or without. She has
graduated from you and me--from herself as well. She has turned from men
to Man; and of him the supply is inexhaustible."
Archie sighed, a little jealously. "You gave her that! You've given her
almost everything she values, sir, haven't you?"
"Not quite everything, Blair."
Archie's eyes brightened. He remembered then the thing the other had not
given her: their boy.
* * * * *
It was a scene that etched itself upon Nikolai's memory as he stood
there waiting for his car, one of those pictures the heart carries with
it into far places, and forever; the pleasant, homely cottage among its
flowers and gnarled apple-trees, children's voices prattling about, the
smell of cooking pickle in the air, Archie's cheery, retreating whistle,
and dominating all the eager clicking of a typewriter.
His eyes followed the broad shoulders of the younger man, swinging along
the road to the brisk, martial tread all young men have learned
latterly.... Nikolai's life had thrown him into contact with all phases
of the human problem, low and high. He knew how inextricably the two are
mingled. Heroism, self-sacrifice, he had found in the most unlikely
places, and thrilled to them as a fighting nature thrills to the drum.
It hurt him to realize that the finest heroism, the most exquisite
sacrifice, must always be hidden things, hidden often even from the eyes
of him who sacrifices. Archibald Blair, failure in all that the world
finds important, would have called himself undoubtedly a poor stick.
Only to the occasional eye did he loom a hero.
Nikolai looked after him sadly, listening to the steady click of that
typewriter. At last he quoted to himself, with a shrug,
"Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons."[1]
Between them, he knew, they would manage to serve Joan's needs to the
end.
THE END
[Footnote: 1 "Die, for I have need to sing of death in my songs."]