CHAPTER XXXIV
There is a certain period of the year when all its widely scattered children home to Kentucky as surely as bluebirds home to the hollow stumps in March. It is the season of the May race meet.
All her life Joan had heard of the Kentucky Derby, and she looked forward to it with almost as much eagerness as her father. Derby Day means more to the Kentuckian than the running event that has become classic. It means the reunion in street and club and hotel-lobby of neighbors from the various towns of a State where neighborliness is cultivated to the point of a fine art; of men who have been boys together; of friends whose ways have drifted far apart (for your Kentuckian is a great wanderer), and who have years to make up over the clinking glasses. During the spring race meet, Louisville ceases to be merely Louisville, and becomes Kentucky, the great old mother-home that leaves its stamp upon its children even into the third and fourth generation.
There is a good deal of sentiment about the Derby, a good deal of tradition; and there is as well a certain spirit of carefree, sporting, joyous bonhomie whose like is not to be found perhaps on any other race-course in the world.
Joan, who loved crowds, got much pleasure out of the streets at this time. She took appreciative note of self-conscious belles from up-State, in picture-hats and peek-a-boo blouses, with a predilection for wearing long-stemmed roses pinned to their belts. She noted the young farmers who accompanied them, big-shouldered, square-chinned, clear-eyed, crimson with the sun—a sturdy, virile type, clumsy in their country-made clothes, but with well-stuffed wallets bulging their hip pockets. There is no poverty in the farming regions of Kentucky.
She learned to recognize the professional racing people, men in loud-checked clothes talking an incomprehensible jargon; shabby touts offering confidential tips to anybody who would listen; women wearing diamonds as large as peas, overdressed, coarse-voiced, not easily distinguishable from their sisters of the underworld, except that their men accompanied them openly.
People of the larger world there were, too. The narrow streets were congested with great touring-cars bearing unfamiliar license tags; New York, Michigan, California. Once, hearing crisp Eastern voices at her elbow, Joan turned just in time to see some people she had met at Longmeadow disappearing into a hotel. For a moment her heart stood still. She thought Eduard Desmond was among them. But it proved to be another man, and Joan mingled hastily in the crowd, relieved that they had not noticed her.
In all this preparatory excitement Major Darcy was, as his wife put it, "busy as a bird dog." There were kinspeople from the Bluegrass to be welcomed, cousins from Paducah, Maysville, Fayette County. Joan, who did not altogether share her father's enthusiasm for the ties of kinship, rather admired her step-mother's skill in side-stepping the Major's abounding sense of hospitality. Effie May had taken the precaution to fill her house with paper-hangers.
"What a shame! You'll have to take your cousins and things to the hotel, Dickie, or put 'em up at the Country Club, won't you? If I'd only thought!—" she murmured innocently; but catching Jean's suspicious eye upon her, she winked.
Joan returned the wink. She remembered her mother's patience under the constant influx of Darcy relatives. She had also seen the unfortunate Misses Darcy almost turned out of doors by the daily increasing numbers of their kith and kin. The bookcase in their parlor had become, surprisingly, a bed; and Miss Euphemia, the plump, as the one best fitted by nature for this ordeal, was spending her nights on a packing-box sparsely mitigated by pillows.—Not that the Misses Darcy complained, however. They were long inured to the hospitalities of Derby week.