Joanne

“ I do wish we could keep you from getting so worked up.”
“But who wouldn’t be worked up, when a darling pony is thrust upon one?” argued Joanne.
“You’d be more liable to be worked down in such an event,” remarked her grandfather laughing. “Quiet yourself, Joanne, or I shall have to send you to bed with a hot water bottle.”
“I’m quiet, really I am,” protested Joanne.
“Of course it is an exciting thing for her, you must admit that,” put in Mrs. Selden, taking her granddaughter’s part. “She has every reason to be excited; you would have been at her age. ”

“ Joanne answered. “Cousin Ned often goes there when he is out fishing with his friends. They build a fire and cook the fish over the coals.”
“Dear me,” sighed Winnie, “there are so many lovely things to do one doesn’t know where to begin, and we’ll never get them all done.”
“Of course not,” returned Joanne, “not in one trip, but we mean there shall be more than one.”
“I devoutly hope so. Me, oh me! Joanne, but I am glad you joined our troop.”
Joanne laughed, then came the summons to supper and the girls trooped into the dining-room to be regaled upon the famous griddle cakes and honey. ”

“ Every little while some one is blown into nothing."
"I believe," said Joanne, "that I'd like to do something like that if I were a man. I'd want to be a man, not that preachers aren't men, Peggy, dear—but I'd want to do things, like blowing up mountains for instance, or finding buried cities, or"—she whispered, very, very softly under her breath—"writing books, John Aldous!" ”

“ With Joanne clinging to him, he led the way. Behind them all MacDonald growled loudly:
"There's got t' be something done with these damned beasts of furriners. It's gettin' so no woman ain't safe at night!"
Twenty minutes later they reached the bungalow. Leaving Joanne and Peggy inside, now as busily excited as two phoebe birds, and after Joanne had insisted upon Aldous sleeping at the Blacktons' that night, the two men accompanied MacDonald a few steps on his way back to camp. ”

“ For an hour after MacDonald left him he walked about in the neighbourhood of the Blackton bungalow smoking his pipe. Not until he saw the contractor drive up in the buckboard did he return. Joanne and Peggy were more than prompt. They were waiting. If such a thing were possible Joanne was more radiantly lovely than the night before. To Aldous she became more beautiful every time he looked at her. ”

“ When it gets to the point that I can’t stand it any longer I can fly at something else like the Morse alphabet or the semaphore one.”
So instead of spending the morning in a state of doleful dumps Joanne busied herself with a needle, and, though she did throw her work on the floor in a rage several times, at last she came to the point of being quite satisfied with her really presentable hem and decided that it was enough for one day. ”

“ This was the beginning and by Friday afternoon Joanne and Winifred were sworn friends, moreover Joanne knew most of the other girls, by name at least, and was in high favor with a number of them, being considered something of a heroine because of her travels and her somewhat unusual experiences.
“Just think,” said Betty Streeter to Esther Rhodes, “she speaks languages, French and Spanish, and she’s been to all sorts of queer places like Hawaii and the West Indies.”
“Yes, but she’s awfully backward in some of her studies; math. and Latin, for example.”
“Yes, but she’s very bright ”

“ Run along and tell your grandmother. I’m sure she won’t be left a leg to stand on in the way of an excuse.”
Joanne responded with a rapturous hug and flew off, returning very soon ready for the trip.
“Did you bring your sewing?” inquired Winnie.
“Why no. You didn’t say to bring it.”
“Didn’t I? I meant to. The Sunflowers are coming over and we are all going to do sewing tests. The more proficient ones will direct the inferiors, and so we’ll get along famously. I shall essay to make my first buttonhole.” ”

“ I must know how to make a buttonhole, or knit or crochet, sew a seam or hem a garment. The hemming sounded sort of easy, and I thought I’d begin on that. Will you show me how?”
“Indeed I will,” replied Mrs. Selden with a gratified air; “sewing is a very ladylike accomplishment and I [69] am delighted that you want to learn. You have always been so opposed to it that I have not insisted, as perhaps I should have done.”
“I suppose it will bore me to extinction,” responded Joanne, “but I mean to do it or die. ”

“ But now, I don't care—when I marry Joanna Godden I'll take root, I'll belong to the Marsh, I'll be at home. You don't know Joanna Godden, Lawrence—if you did I believe you'd like her. She's so sane and simple—she's so warm and alive; and she's good, too—when I met her to-day, she had just been to Communion. She'll help me to live—at last I'll be able to live the best life for me, body and soul, down here in the sea air, with no town rubbish ... ”

“ Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was he that sate upon it: but well Joanna knew that not the throne, nor he that sate upon it, was for her; but, on the contrary, that she was for them; not she by them, but they by her, should rise from the dust. Gorgeous were the lilies of France, and for centuries had the privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until, in another century, the wrath of God and man combined to wither them; but well Joanna knew, early at Domrémy she had read that bitter truth, that the lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. ”

“ The question presents itself to the mind whether Joanna was a conscious impostor, or whether she was self-deluded. With her dying confession and her will before us, it would seem that she knew that she was imposing on the credulity of men and women. She had seen a debauched and dissolute Methodist preacher in her master's house pose as an apostle and as inspired, and draw crowds and convince them that he was an oracle of God. She imitated him, and found that her imitation was successful, and also that it paid well. ”

“ The answer of Joanna moves a smile of tenderness, but the disappointment of her judges makes one laugh horribly. Others succeeded by troops, who upbraided her with leaving her father; as if that greater Father, whom she believed herself to have been serving, did not retain the power of dispensing with his own rules, or had not said, that, for a less cause than martyrdom, man and woman should leave both father and mother. ”

“ I should fear to injure, by imperfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears so unspeakably grand. Yet for a purpose pointing, not at Joanna but at M. Michelet,—viz., to convince him that an Englishman is capable of thinking more highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring countryman, I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits in Joanna's demeanor on the scaffold, and to one or two in that of the bystanders, which authorize me in questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firmness. ”

“ It was not wonderful that in such a haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna should see angelic visions, and hear angelic voices. These voices whispered to her the duty imposed upon herself, of delivering France. Five years she listened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave way; and she left her home in order to present herself at the Dauphin's court. ”

“ A queer feeling of sadness came to Joanna—queer, unaccountable, yet seeming to drain itself from the very depths of her body, and to belong not only to her flesh but to the marsh around her, to the pastures with their tawny veil of withered seed-grasses, to the thorn-bushes spotted with the red haws, to the sky and to the sea, and the mists in which they merged together....
"I'll get shut of Socknersh," she said to herself—"I believe folks are right, and he's too like a sheep himself to be any real use to them." ”

“ But Joan's crisis had passed. Even if on such occasions the mysterious voices remained silent and she began to look upon herself as a demented wretch, the next day, perhaps that very night, she again saw her beautiful saints approaching, adorned with their golden crowns draped in brocade, exhaling a celestial odor, [26] and, smiling, say to her: "Courage, Joan, daughter of God! You will deliver Gaul. Your King will owe his crown to you! The time approaches! Stand ready to fulfil your mission!" ”

“ MABEL. Poor little Joanna! Still, if a woman insists on being a pendulum round a man's neck ...
PURDIE. Do give me a chance, Mabel. If the dog-like devotion of a lifetime ...
(JOANNA comes through the curtains so inopportunely that for the moment he is almost pettish.)
May I say, this is just a little too much, Joanna!
JOANNA (unconscious as they of her return to her dinner gown) . So, sweet husband, your soul is still walking alone, is it?
MABEL (who hates coarseness of any kind) . How can you sneak about in this way, Joanna? Have you no pride? ”

“ Thus Joanna grew up under this schooling, and the teaching became the grain of her mind. There was natural aptitude to receive it, but the aptitude was that of an active, eager, intelligent mind, ready to assimilate any instruction given it, with daily opportunity for testing and exercising it.
She was entirely without sympathy with her fellows. She looked upon men as the prey on which the clever lived; they were fair game when brought within reach through necessity or imbecility. ”

“ Joanna remembered, with a pang, that she had laughed at the remark, mentally conjuring up Harry Jardine's athletic, sunburnt comeliness.
Joanna freed herself more quickly from this phantom than from the last, and, while she did so, called out his name, and stepped to his side, stooping down and even touching him. He was breathing, though he was very cold and stiff, and she did not rouse him. Oh, Joanna was very thankful! But what should she do next? Life must be very faint, and frozen in the muscular, active young man. ”

“ I must think of Rachel. Give me the paper.’ He drew the bill from Joanna, who had smoothed it out on the counter, ‘Kaminski! What a name! to change the beautiful Lazarus for an outlandish name like that, and she was Moses before I married her. To my mind, Joanna, our British aristocracy is like a scene on a stage, very beautiful to look at, but there is a lot hid away behind very shabby and very bad, of which most folk see and know nothing. You’ve looked on the grand Kingsbridge House like a young playgoer; all is beautiful, and innocence, and splendour. ”

“ Poor Joanna’s house was gone except the stones of its foundations, and there was little trace of her flower garden except a single faded sprig of much-enduring French pinks, which a great bee and a yellow butterfly were befriending together. I drank at the spring, and thought that now and then some one would follow me from the busy, hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland, which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with eternity well begun. ”

“ Those who like to trace the descent of fine qualities, will be interested to know that Joanna's mother—herself a beautiful and agreeable woman—was the only sister of those remarkable men, William and John Hunter; and that her father, a clergyman of respectable abilities, was of the same descent with that Baillie of Jarviswood who nobly suffered for the religion and independence of his country. ”

“ The woes and desolation of the land have kindled in Joanna's keen and fervent heart a fire, which the loneliness of her life, and her deep feelings of religion, have nourished and fanned into a holy flame. ”

“ Joanna, the thoughtful, imaginative, true, tender woman—a fair woman besides, with that one little blot which singularly appealed to him with a harsh sweet voice—a sufficiently rare woman, to stand quite distinct from her sisters and companions in the light of the practical, active, ardent, honest heart—became the one mistress in the world for Harry Jardine, coveted and craved by him as the best gift of God, without which the others were comparatively worthless, and for which he could have been willing to sacrifice them one and all. ”

“ Unlike Joanna, she had always been a diligent, attentive scholar; and unlike her also, was possessed of a remarkably retentive memory. In her companionship, and in the entire leisure of her six years' seclusion among the picturesque scenery of Long Calderwood, it may be supposed that Joanna's powerful intellect would have been awakened, and her wonderfully fertile imagination begun to assume some of those varied forms of truth and beauty which have since impressed themselves so vividly on the hearts and minds of her contemporaries. ”

“ What might be public good; myself I thought
Born to that end—
he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that should carry her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing itself that should carry her from the kingdom of France Delivered to the eternal kingdom.
When Joanna appeared, the dauphin had been on the point of giving up the struggle with the English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the south of France. She taught him to blush for such abject counsels. ”

“ Ogden, that's all; I think it will be Joan's ruin."
"Elizabeth!"
"Wait, I must speak. Joan is brilliant, you know that she's brilliant, and that she ought to do something with her life. You must surely feel that she can't stay here in Seabourne for ever? She must—oh! if I could only find the right words—she must fulfil herself in some way—either marriage or work, at all events some interest outside of and beyond you. She's consuming herself even now, and what will she do later on? Yet, how can she come to fruition if she's drained dry before she begins to live at all? ”