Anne might have counteracted Ariel’s consciousness of her peculiar position at Wild Acres but for the fact, which Ariel had discovered for herself quite soon, that Anne was not here in her home, in any true sense at all. She might look at you and speak to you, even turn up her lips in a smile in your direction, but she was no more conscious of you, really, or of her surroundings, than the grotesque dolls of which she had at first reminded Ariel. She was alive and conscious in her relations with one other person only,—Prescott Enderly. It was his voice and look and touch which controlled the beating of her heart and pulled the strings of her mechanism. Ariel saw this, and it was rather frightening to see it.
As a matter of fact Anne had few opportunities for making Ariel feel at home. She was off with Enderly skiing or teaing or dancing, all day and most of the nights. They were even included in one or two parties at Holly. This was plainly very gratifying to Anne, in spite of her dislike of Joan Nevin, for never before had she even hoped to meet the celebrities who fluttered around Holly’s hospitality. To become intimate with such a brilliant and well-known group of people, even though most of them were, from her point of view, quite aged, was something to talk about after vacation, back at college. That she owed the privilege of these contacts to Prescott Enderly only added to the headiness of it. Already his fame had given Anne a glamour with undergraduates and even faculty at Smith.
Glenn spent very little time with his friend or any one else. He was deep in Spengler, adventuring with his own mind, this vacation. He had expected Prescott, when he invited him to Wild Acres, to read Spengler with him part of the time and write the rest of the time on that novel he ought to be getting done. But from the first hour of their arrival Glenn had seen that opportunity for such occupations was not precisely the lure which had brought Prescott to the country. That was all right with Glenn. If Prescott preferred Anne’s company to his, well, he was fond enough of Prescott to want him to have what he wanted. Besides, Spengler was enough for Glenn. He felt no need of further stimulation. Ariel, with whom he would play chess for an hour or two after dinner, was less a girl to him than an atmosphere, at first. He felt her as one feels the clear depths of a stream one may be sitting near, or music one isn’t intellectually following, but which creates a mood all the same.
Mrs. Weyman, those evenings of Hugh’s absence, was deep in books on psychoanalysis. It was a recent interest with her and apparently absorbing. She was so occupied just at this time with finding explanations for the things which had hitherto baffled her in her children, her friends and even in herself, that she was saved from too much concern over the stranger under her roof.
“Grandam is coming down for lunch. I’m glad we all happen to be at home, now that she’s able to join us again. You haven’t met her yet, have you, Prescott? And Ariel hasn’t.”
It was the third day of Hugh’s absence and Ariel’s loneliness.
Anne laughed. “Well, neither have I, if it comes to that, Mother. Not this vacation. Do you realize? Each time I’ve tried to go up to say ‘Howdy,’ that old Peters of hers has come across with some excuse or other. She was asleep. Or away on a journey....”
“Come, now!” Enderly interrupted. “Your grandmother isn’t a heathen god, is she? You’ve made her pretty mysterious, you and Glenn,—but this is the first time you’ve been so definite in your implications.”
“Sheismysterious. And I didn’t know you knew your Bible, bright boy! But you might think she’d care to see her only granddaughter, who hasn’t been at home since Christmas, wouldn’t you? She’s getting so exclusive there’s no living with her—literally.”
Mrs. Weyman was looking at the clock. Rose had come in to the library some minutes ago to announce luncheon, and if Grandam was joining them at last, it did seem as if she might take a little trouble to be on time. “My mother-in-law is not very strong,” she explained for Enderly’s benefit. “She’s forced to spend her strength very circumspectly. And people tire her.”
Glenn shut his book. “Don’t soft pedal so, Mother! We all know that it’s the people who happen to bore Grandam that tire her. She’s an everlasting snob.”
Anne laughed again. “You can’t insult your friend, the famous novelist, if that’s your aim, sonny. Grandam wouldn’t know whether Pressy bored her until she met him, would she? No. This time health will have to be accepted as Grandam’s alibi.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Prescott, of course. Of you, dear sister. But we’re both in the same boat. Mother too. I think every last one of us bores Grandam, except Hugh. When he gets back, you’ll notice she’ll be down for lunchanddinner rather frequently.”
“Well, it’s five minutes past now. And Rose sounded the gong in the back hall, so they know up there that lunch is waiting. Perhaps Grandam has changed her mind, after all. I think we’ll go in.” Glenn, bringing up the rear of the procession dining-roomward called out, “Perhaps it’s Ariel Grandam’s shy of.Sheisn’t a famous novelist or anything else famous. She’s not even a member of an old New York family. Grandam may feel that it’s too much of a chance—”
“Hush, Glenn!” his mother expostulated. “I’m tired of all this rudeness. Besides, we all know perfectly well that Grandam is more democratic than any other member of this family.”
Ariel’s face was flushed as Glenn pulled out her chair for her. But it was Mrs. Weyman, not Glenn, who had hurt her. Glenn, noticing the flush, was conscious for a minute of Ariel as a girl as well as an atmosphere. “I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. “It was my fault. Mother doesn’t mean a thing. She’s just gauche.”
They were hardly seated when a woman dressed in a gray-and-white semi-uniform appeared, carrying some violet pillows and with a wide scarf of violet gossamer floating incongruously from one arm. This was Miss Peters, Grandam’s attendant. She was neither a nurse nor a maid, but a combination of the two. For the attendant of a mystery she was commonplace-looking enough,—strong, wholesome, with pleasantly regular features and becomingly marcelled hair. She was middle-aged and middle everything else, one surmised. She went to the foot of the table—Hugh’s vacant place—and put the cushions one on the seat, two at the back of the big armed chair there. Now it had the look of a throne. It was very impressive.
Every one was looking toward the door, even Miss Peters, expectantly. And Ariel, strangely, experienced again a touch, at least, of the sense of spring coming, the imminence of personal happiness, she had experienced and lost again her first morning at Wild Acres. She remembered the leaf mold where the children had rolled up the snowball and how she had danced across it into the center of spring-happiness. Now, while Miss Peters’ sensible profile was turned away toward the door, and the others waited, napkins half unfolded in their hands, Ariel looked for veils to blow aside—and wonder to appear. Strange, when it was just an old lady who was coming, so old and so feeble that she had to be comforted in her chair with pillows.
Grandam was in the doorway, and every one rose, except Mrs. Weyman. Introductions were made, and then Mr. Enderly and Miss Peters were both holding out the throne chair. When Grandam was established, Miss Peters dropped the scarf over the high back of the throne where it hung like a trailing wing and quietly withdrew.
Grandam was beautiful.... But Ariel had known she would be all the time, though no one had ever hinted it, just as she knew that summer in Wild Acres woods would be beautiful, though it was hidden now from sensible knowing under snow and rain, and no one spoke of it. She was no age at all. To think “well preserved” of her would be too stupid. Here was nothing static, but something glamorously in the process of creation. Hugh’s mother, whom until now Ariel had thought so surprisingly young, was flattened and dulled by contrast with her mother-in-law. It was not Grandam’s clothes or make-up that made her young. They had nothing to do with it but were merely exquisite accessories to the exhilarating, lovely person herself. Her eyes, when she met them, took Ariel’s breath. They were violet, long and enchantingly shaped, under finely drawn, dark eyebrows, and fringed with straight, dense lashes. Her hair was both beautiful and strange. It was cut short and dressed into a close-curling crown that looked like wrought silver in its arbitrary design, a close-fitting crown, worn low. It was a frame for the exquisite small face, with its short straight nose, its lovely, poignant mouth, and those breath-taking, violet, dark-fringed eyes. She was wearing a red-violet frock—or perhaps it was more the color of fireweed than of violets—with long deep sleeves like a nun’s, but unlike a nun’s they were chiffon, and folded her arms like half-spread wings.
Prescott Enderly was as enthralled as Ariel. No one had happened to tell him, any more than her, that Grandam was beautiful.
Mrs. Weyman was saying, “It’s pleasant, having you down again, Mother Weyman. The vacation ends in another two days, and Mr. Enderly wanted to meet you. You will enjoy each other. Mrs. Weyman is a great reader, Prescott. She knew about your book, from the reviews, before I did, and said it must be Glenn’s friend.”
Grandam’s violet eyes rested on the young novelist briefly, but she did not follow her daughter-in-law’s lead and begin speaking of his work. Instead she passed him by for Anne. “I’m sorry you haven’t come up at a time when I could see you, Anne,” she said in a voice which surprised only by being so fitting—a low voice, but light, and casual as a bird’s flight is casual. “I’m glad you’ve had such a jolly vacation. It isn’t often, is it, that Smith’s and Yale’s spring vacations coincide?” Nothing that Grandam said was remarkable, or by the greatest stretch of the fascinated onlooker’s imagination could be thought important. It was all talk of the most everyday things—the weather, Glenn’s and Anne’s plans for the long summer vacation, her daughter-in-law’s plans for some serious landscape gardening at Wild Acres; and Hugh’s protracted absence.
She could not have had a very vital interest in any of these things she talked about and heard talked about during this meal. Yet, when she spoke to any one or listened to any one in particular, that person had a sense of vital contact, of swift, actual sympathy. This was not because Grandam was insincere. Quite the contrary. She was, even in these casual contacts, as sincere as the flight of a bird is sincere, direct, absolutely unstudied, intuitional. As it happened that she looked or listened to Glenn, Mrs. Weyman, Anne, or Prescott, then Glenn, Mrs. Weyman, Anne or Prescott quickened, grew alive—behaved the way those Japanese toy flowers behave when dropped into water; their personalities expanded, took form and pattern. Ariel saw this, and the simile of the Japanese flowers was hers.
As for herself, Ariel was aware that Grandam was aware of her even when she seemed most absorbed in the others. Several times the violet eyes had swept her, lightly but not blindly. And with dessert, when Mrs. Weyman had succeeded in an attempt she had intermittently been making to draw Enderly out, during the meal, and show Grandam how much of a person this guest of theirs really was, and he was in the middle of an anecdote which had to do with a recent party in a famous New York studio—an anecdote studded and aglitter with famous and near-famous names—Grandam suddenly turned to Ariel, and without any real impoliteness to Enderly, for after all he was sitting beside Mrs. Weyman at the other end of the table, and had her undivided, individual attention, said, “They tell me that your father was a painter. Do you care about that? Do you paint or want to?”
“No. I haven’t talent—of any sort. That is the trouble. (One instinctively told this lady the trouble, because, no matter what that casual, low voice of hers actually said, the violet eyes said, ‘Here is sympathetic understanding of the most poignant, rarest kind. Snatch it. It has winged your way. Snatch it on the wing.’) But, if one didn’t have to have a high-school education first, I’d like to get hospital training as a nurse. That is what I’d like to do, of the things by which one earns money.”
“And of the things by which one does not—earn money?”
Well! Ariel was plunging now through ether on a very swift flight, beside Grandam’s flight. Careless flight. So she answered with truth as winged-casual as Grandam’s own, “A mother. I’d like to have children. (But she saw them as the age of Nicky and Persis, dancing with her out of winter into spring.) Or be a lover. Or be a sailor.”
“If you have genius for any one of those three occupations you have something that will keep you alive all your life. Children. Passion. Adventure. And you have fairy-tale eyes. Has any one ever told you that?”
The flight was very swift, very sure. At its height it must burst into a fountain of song.
“Father has. And he didn’t mind their being narrow and green. Oh, Grandam! Why didn’t you come down sooner?”
So she might have cried, “Oh, I have been lonely! And you have taken that away, absolutely.”
No one had heard what they had been saying or noticed anything except that Grandam had not listened to that amusing anecdote of Enderly’s so bedecked with famous names. And they were preparing to rise now. Luncheon was over.
“The sun’s out for the first time in days,” Mrs. Weyman exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you like Glenn to take you out in Hugh’s car for a while, Grandam? Anne will run up and bring down your things. Later we’re all going to a tea-dance over at Holly. Joan’s being very nice to us! But now I know Glenn would be glad—”
The sun was shining,—windy, gold afternoon sunlight. They all went out under the portico together to watch Grandam and Glenn off, in Hugh’s roadster. Anne’s arm was linked carelessly in Ariel’s. As they turned back into the hall Enderly cried—now that Grandam was out of hearing, he was the brash young novelist again—“But she’s magnificent, that woman. Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t have managed it any better! (He meant old age, of course.) Some one should have prepared me for her beauty, though. Once she must have been almost too beautiful.”
“Her hair’s always been like that, pure silver ever since I remember,” Anne told him. And Mrs. Weyman enlarged upon it. “Ever since Anne’s grandfather died, a few days after Anne’s father was born, it’s been gray. Grandam was young then, hardly twenty. It happened as it happens in romances but never supposedly in real life. Her hair went white in a night.”
“Silver,” Enderly corrected. “There’s nothing white about it. It’s silver, like bubbles in the sun. Not silver like Ariel’s. Ariel, you’ve got queer hair. But it’s nice. It’s the color of copper wire to-day. What turnedyourhair?”
Ariel laughed, and her fairy-tale eyes squinted to green slits with merriment. She laughed with them all. She could have danced. Was she going to be really happy again? Was happiness a wave, buoying up the whole of her life, a wave thatwouldn’tbe kept out, thatwouldflood and make a freshet of her heart—even with her father dead? And buried? Oh, but he was buried in the wave, not in the earth. That was the secret.
She started up to her room to get her coat. She would get out quickly. With the sun shining like this, Persis and Nicky must be somewhere near their playground. She would find them. She couldn’t help finding them, now when she was so happy.
But she did not open the door to her room. With her hand on the knob, it came to her: of course Grandam had “Noon.” It was hanging all this time in her attic apartment. Hugh adored Grandam, and he would never be so selfish as not to insist that she have the picture up there, where she lived so constantly alone. How dull Ariel had been not to have guessed sooner! But no wonder she had looked up at those windows from the woods day after day with a sense that there was relief from loneliness if she could only reach up to it. “Noon” had been there, with Grandam, waiting for her all the while. The beach. The sunlight. The green water. And Gregory Clare’s love of his daughter made visible, dancing. That is what herself in her father’s paintings meant to Ariel,—not a picture of herself, but a picture of his love for her. She saw herself no more when she looked at his painting than she saw herself when she looked into his eyes.
But must she wait until Grandam and Glenn get back from their drive to go up and make sure that, after all her disappointments, “Noon” was there, safe with Grandam? Miss Peters would let her in.
She had forgotten that Grandam’s first words to her at luncheon had been “They tell me that your father was a painter.” “Noon” would have made that speech impossible, if Grandam had the picture. But their flight together into understanding had followed that opening too swiftly for Ariel to remember it now.
How did one get to the attic? Were there stairs? She had heard mention of an elevator. But she wouldn’t know how to run an elevator. There must be stairs as well. She hurried away to look.
Ariel found the attic stairs in the wing opposite hers at the other end of the house. At the top she came out into a long hall. It was almost dark up here, the only light coming through two low little dormer windows at the farthest end. Ariel had never in real life been in an attic, but she had been in plenty of them in books, and this long, dim hall with narrow doors in its walls somehow did not seem like her imagined attics.
Behind which of the several doors would she find Grandam’s living room? And above all, through which door would she come to “Noon”? No wonder the dim hall was as fascinating as a fairy-tale’s beginning.
She tried first the door on her right, knocking tentatively. When there was no answer she opened the door and looked in. Transparent cubes of gold, which were sunlight aureoling dust, slanted between her and the low chain of windows out at the base of a far-away sloping roof. This was the real attic, all that Grandam had left of it, after making her own apartment. It covered more than half the big house, and trunks, discarded furniture and files of old magazines were stored here, much as in all attics. There was the smell of dust and of leather, a glimmer of cobweb curtains. Spaces. Shadows.
This was, no doubt of it, an attic. And had Ariel expected the lovely Grandam to live here, in such an environment? To tell the truth, deep in her heart, though not with her mind, she had. For Grandam had become to her imagination, even before seeing her this noon at luncheon, and more vividly since then, a fairy-like, spiritual entity, twin sister to that other fairy or spirit (who knows which?) the great-great-great-great-grandmother who was so loved by the princess in George MacDonald’s true and beautiful allegory, “The Princess and the Goblins.” So, with her heart, but perhaps not her eyes, Ariel sought for her here, dreaming her visible, if one only had eyes of the seeing kind, in a cloud of invisibility.
Hadn’t she seen, a few minutes ago, Grandam driving off with Glenn in Hugh’s roadster? But that didn’t matter. It was the real, the hidden Grandam she might find here—the one who would never be out if you needed her.
But after a minute she turned away from dreams. The next door she knocked at, got no response, and opened, led into an elevator cage, about as big as a small closet. So that was the way Grandam and Miss Peters ascended and descended between the two worlds.
And then her third try brought her to Grandam’s apartment. But no one answered here either, and so Ariel went in and stood alone, uninvited, but she felt welcomed, in Grandam’s own place.
It was a big, dove-gray room with a darkly oiled floor of old, wide boards. Four dormer windows reached from the floor to the raised roof at one side, and two smaller and higher windows faced the west. On the baby grand piano near the door Ariel noticed a shallow bowl with hothouse anemones standing up in it, every flower separate, outlined on the air with glass-like precision,—mauve, pink, purple, blue, cream.
A low daybed of ivory-colored wood carved all over with flower designs was drawn up before one of the dormer windows, heaped with violet-red and silver cushions. Close to the bed, within easy arm’s reach, there was a bench of the same carved ivory-white wood, with a few books scattered on it, a crystal lamp with a wide, pale gold shade, and a glass bowl of hothouse violets. Several bouquets of violets like the one Hugh had intended for Ariel but given to Joan must have gone into this bunch in the glass bowl. Their sweetness was almost palpable. Scent came falling through the air onto Ariel’s eyelids and onto her lips, as if the very petals of the violets themselves were wings and filling space.
After the anemones and the violets the wood fire blazing away in a small grate was next alive, throwing rosy shadows over black marble tiling, and flickering them up onto tiers of books whose backs gave the effect of rich tapestry hung from ceiling to floor on either side of the fireplace. The fire seemed to Ariel like another cluster of flowers. “Roses!” she thought.
Then she closed the door,—and in closing it shut herself into the room. For it had not entered her head to go away and leave this place until its mistress should return. She was already welcomed by the flowers, the fire, and the aura of Grandam herself, which even in her absence seemed as palpable in the atmosphere here as the scent of the violets. Ariel stood looking at the door she had closed. On this side it was not a door; it was a long mirror, crystal clear, and framed with a paneling of faintly colored flowers and leaves painted on silver. In the mirror, almost clearer than when looked at directly, was the view from the windows, the tops of Wild Acres’ trees, the Hudson, the purple Palisades, and closer—startlingly close and clear—the carved daybed with its colored cushions, the bowl of violets and, closer and clearer yet, two upstanding, mauve anemones....
And there, in that reflected world, Ariel looked for “Noon.” For there was the place to find it, in that crystal unearthly clearness.
She was amazed not to see it at once. Yet she turned about with confidence only a little dimmed to survey, in order, the four walls, concrete. But the four walls of Grandam’s room might have been the four walls of a nun’s cell, they were so bare of decoration, washed with their dove gray. There was only one small picture in an ebony frame which hung at the side of the window where the daybed stood. It was a drawing, in pencil, of a man’s hands, palms meeting, raised in prayer or adoration. They were arresting hands, beautiful in austerity, the hands of a great saint—or an archangel. They were life size, and so vivid in their presentation that one might think, by looking more keenly, to see the arms and shoulders—the very head itself—of the saint or archangel outlined against the dove-gray wall.
One piece of wall was obscured by a screen, silver silk stretched on an ebony frame and embroidered with the same faint flowers as framed the mirror. Ariel crossed to it and found that it had concealed a door which was standing open. She went through it and found herself in a dressing room: Grandam’s, of course, because of the scent and feeling of violets,—and sostill. This was a very small, oblong room, the size of a big closet. A long, low dressing table surmounted by a mirror extended the length of one wall, and a window filled the other. On the table’s top crystal-stopped bottles stood in rows. Ivory and jade and silver boxes clustered everywhere. And bright liquids glowed in vials. The dressing chair was ivory-colored like the daybed and the bench in the first room. Over its low back lay, spread out, a swansdown robe with very wide sleeves. It seemed to stir and come alive in violet scent as Ariel bent above it.
And out at the far corner of the table lay a silver crown. No, it was a wig! A replica of Grandam’s curled, short hair. So that too had been a wig. But Ariel was not repelled. Quite the contrary. She shivered with a kind of understanding, a delight. It had come to her that this was Grandam’s materialization room. Or no, it was no room; it was too small and narrow to be anything but a passageway. It was the passageway through which Grandam retained her access to the world of time and space. It was here, sitting in this chair, looking into this mirror, that she made herself up to become visible, palpable to everyday touch and sight.
Ariel herself slipped into the chair. Elbows on the table, chin in her hands, she looked at herself as she appeared in this passageway. And she saw, for the first time, the Ariel her father had always seen. Green eyes. Pointed chin. Silver skin. Thin cheeks, beautifully fine in their drawing. Her heart was beating. Thud—thud—thud.... She turned hurriedly away from the mirror and the first realization of her peculiar beauty. It had almost frightened her.
Out of the dressing room, and several times larger, opened the bathroom. It was green like a pool in deep woods. The door beyond was closed. Ariel knocked. A voice said “Come.”
As Ariel opened the door in response to the voice which had startled her, for she had begun to think herself very much alone up here in Grandam’s “attic,” Miss Peters turned about from a desk where she had been writing a letter and stared at Ariel as at a ghost. And Ariel stared back.
“But Miss Clare! It is Miss Clare, isn’t it? Where did you come from?”
“I was looking for—” No, she could not say “Noon”!... She had not betrayed her expectations and disappointments to any one else at Wild Acres and she was not going to begin with Miss Peters. So she finished, after a perceptible pause—“I was looking for something. But it isn’t here. I’m afraid it isn’t up here at all.”
“Something of your own?” But Miss Peters colored as she asked it. She hadn’t meant to be insulting to this guest of the Weymans about whom she knew nothing at all and had heard nothing,—since she was not on gossiping terms with the two servants. But “the old lady” was away, out driving with Glenn. It was very odd of Miss Clare, to say the least, to come prowling through the rooms in her absence. No one, not even Miss Anne and the two young men and their mother, ever came into the apartment uninvited.
Ariel realized Miss Peters’ perturbation. She said “No. It isn’t mine, the thing I hoped to find. And anyway, it’s not up here at all. It isn’t anywhere at Wild Acres. If it were at Wild Acres itwouldbe here, though.”
“If I can help you—”
Ariel shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll just go back.”
“You may use my door, then. You must have come through Mrs. Weyman’s whole apartment. This goes into the hall.”
Miss Peters was moving toward her door, expecting Ariel to take the hint. But Ariel was too abstracted to realize. “I’ll go back the way I came,” she murmured. And Miss Peters knew nothing to do about it.
But back in Grandam’s big room she decided to wait quietly up there for Grandam’s return from her outing. She was drawn to the daybed, with its wide view across woodlands to the Palisades. She sat down on the edge of the bed and absently gathered a scarf which was lying there up into her beauty-loving fingers. After a minute, she rose to her knees on the bed and wrapped the scarf about her. It was a silver wing, a silver cloud which draped her. One could dance in a scarf like this, even in the house. She wished that Persis and Nicky were here. She would dance for them, if they were, over the dark floor; she would feel that she was dancing, really, out in the golden snowy air, because of the magic of this scarf of Grandam’s. She began to hum,—low humming, with no tune in it. And she did not hear the door from the hall open and the quick step that followed. But she heard Mrs. Weyman’s voice when it came. Yet she did not start. One does not start out of such quiet happiness as had come to Ariel up here in Grandam’s environment. She looked up quietly into Mrs. Weyman’s astounded face.
“But, my dear! Has Mrs. Weyman returned?”
“No. Grandam is motoring with Glenn.” But such literalness was childish and Ariel knew it even as she spoke.
She hurried on, suddenly embarrassed. “I just came up to look for something. But it isn’t here. Then—the view—”
“But the scarf! Really, Ariel—”
“Would she mind?”
“I think she would. More than most people.”
Ariel unwound herself from the lovely scarf. And in spite of its gossamer delicacy and the tough texture of her own green jersey frock, she felt that in coming out of the scarf she was coming out of a sure protection into a kind of nakedness. She folded the scarf very carefully, very softly, and laid it on a pillow. As she did this she murmured, “If it had been Grandam who came in just now instead of you—”
Mrs. Weyman laughed, not unkindly. “My dear girl! If she onlyhadcome in! Found you kneeling on her precious bed, dressing up in her own precious scarfs! You’d have felt like—about two cents. It’s a gift she has. You’re lucky it was I!”
Then she grew serious. “Ariel, I don’t want to offend you or hurt your feelings. I know things must be very strange and difficult for you these days. But there are a few very simple things I can help you with, I think. ‘Grandam,’ for instance. Just the family call my mother-in-law that. It’s a pet name made up by the children when they were little, you see. You had better call her ‘Mrs. Weyman.’ And then, to simplify things, you may call me ‘Mrs. John.’ People do, quite often, when there’s need to distinguish. And let’s both run along now before she appears. She’d be no more charmed with finding me here than you, even if I did come up withthisscarf which Miss Peters neglected to bring. And they’ll be back any minute—”
Grandam did not come down to dinner that night. But Mrs. Weyman said that she rarely did appear for two meals in the same day, even when she was feeling her best. Ariel suspected that Mrs. Weyman, in emphasizing this point, was indirectly intending to reassure her and make her feel that Grandam’s absence had nothing to do with her own visit uninvited to the attic apartment.
They gathered in the library after dinner. Glenn and Ariel were at one end of the divan in front of the fire engaged in setting up the chessmen. Anne and Prescott Enderly were at the other end, waiting for Mrs. Nevin, who was taking them, that evening, to a dance at the house of friends of hers in Scarsdale. Mrs. Weyman occupied a low chair near by, and she was smoking an after-dinner cigarette.
Enderly looked both handsome and distinguished in his evening clothes. “Much more the accredited novelist than the college boy,” thought Mrs. Weyman, looking at him through the spiraling smoke of her cigarette, which was mostly held in her fingers and very rarely in her lips, since she smoked only to put other smokers at their ease, including her daughter Anne,—and to keep young. “He’s changed since he came. Seems more manly, somehow. Firmer. And exhilarated about something too. I wonder, is it Joan? That she’s almost ten years older wouldn’t necessarily make any difference. Probably she’s the first woman of the world he has ever met,—at any rate seen so much of. She would be a revelation, a dream come true, to a young man of his background.” For Enderly’s family was totally undistinguished socially. Glenn had told his mother this, and added that Enderly boasted of the fact, and was more glad than otherwise not to belong to the “bloated bourgeoisie.”
So, looking rather keenly at the young man through the smoke spiraling up through her fingers, Mrs. Weyman exclaimed with assumed casualness, “It’s rather sweet of Mrs. Nevin to be so nice to you young things! Having you to meet Michael Schwankovsky this afternoon and all! But I suppose, Prescott, you have unclassed yourself as a young thing by having produced ‘Stephen’s Fall’ and got famous. Glenn and Anne, of course, are merely being included along with you. Don’t you find her very charming?”
Enderly was holding Anne’s hand, for all the decorum of their appearance, as it lay between them on the divan, under a fold of her outspread skirt. “Oh, very charming,” he answered, with casualness as assumed as his hostess’. “Beauty, brains and magnetism, all working together, make a very high-powered charm. And she must have used the full force of it on her bootlegger. We don’t get the chance to buy that quality from ours, do we, Glenn!”
Mrs. Weyman crushed out her cigarette on a tray at her elbow. For the first time she felt definitely jarred by Enderly’s personality. “You’re quite wrong,” she said coldly. “Anything that Mrs. Nevin serves would be legal. Her cellar was stocked by her husband before the war, and it will last her a lifetime, the way she uses it. She doesn’t drink and give drinking parties as some society women do. She entertains with the same dignity and reasonableness that all of our kind of people did before prohibition. It’s the same with us. Anything you are served here is legal.” It was important for even a famous novelist to be aware of impeccability, when he was being entertained by it.
Enderly’s fingers had closed about Anne’s wrist, stifling her heart, while her mother took such pains with his social education. But he answered with disarming candor, “Oh, I took that quite for granted, about you, I mean. But I couldn’t know about Mrs. Nevin, could I? So many different sorts of people know her, or claim to, and boast of being entertained at Holly! And although she’s obviously a lady, she’s even more obviously a person of temperament, genius. I hadn’t associated her with Puritanism.”
“I didn’t mean you to! Mrs. Nevin is as far removed from anything Puritanical or priggish as I am. But she hascharacter. Aristocracy, if you like. Self-respecting people must draw the line somewhere, even to-day. But they needn’t be bigoted. Look at me. I let Anne smoke. I even smoke with her. But that sort of tolerance doesn’t change one’s fundamental principles. In things that really matter, our kind of people are not changed at all. We keep our standards for ourselves and our associates pretty definite. And Mrs. Nevin is one of us, very much so.”
Glenn had just captured Ariel’s queen, but for all that his smile as he barged into the conversation at this point was a sardonic smile. “Hadn’t you got Mother doped out for yourself, Scribbler?” he asked his friend. “Pity to make her do it for you! Bad commentary on your analytical powers. Couldn’t you see, at first sight, that she is one of those simple souls who believe that this jazz-ridden world is as sound at bottom, possibly sounder, than the lost world of the Good Queen Vic? It has invented virtues, not lost them. Who ever heard of frankness, honesty, hatred of shams before our somber decade? We’re less prudish, of course, but all the more wholesome for precisely that reason. And though somewhat obscured by the camouflage of ‘petting,’ purity still reigns supreme in girlish hearts, and honor in manly breasts. At least in the best families—like ours. Your own novel is only an example, Prescott. Its obscenity is healthy obscenity. By showing up the visible and ugly, you suggest all the more vividly the lovely idealism lurking under it all, invisible. Didn’t Stephen, in the end, after his diverting but possibly sordid passional experiences, fall in love, in the last chapters, with a nice girl? He seduced her, of course, but it woke her stupid parents up to the facts of—er—life. It’s a very idealistic book. Even the old folks got saved. They saw how narrow they’d been—”
“Oh, chuck it, Glenn! I’m in perfect sympathy with your mother. And I believe—in fact, I believe it passionately—that she is right. What is moderation and self-control but aristocracy? Our Bohemian pose is too cheap, too easy. What do you think, Anne?”
What Anne thought no one but Enderly discovered, however, for it was conveyed to him very simply by the throbbing of a pulse in a delicate, blue-veined wrist.
At that moment Miss Peters surprisingly made an appearance in the library door. “Mrs. Weyman Senior would be charmed if Miss Clare would care to come up to her for a little while this evening.”
Ariel sprang from the divan. “Oh, do you mind, Glenn? I do want to go.”
“Mind!” Glenn exclaimed. “That wouldn’t matter. The Queen has sent her command. And the elevator waits without. I say! I thought you enjoyed chess, though!”
Mrs. Weyman beckoned Ariel to her side. “I’m afraid Miss Peters has told Grandam about—our being in the apartment this afternoon, and that is why she has sent for you. I’m sorry. Don’t do anything to excite her unnecessarily, will you, and come away as soon as you can.” Then, turning to Miss Peters, who stood waiting to escort Ariel to the elevator, she asked, “How is Mrs. Weyman to-night? I hope the drive didn’t tire her too much.”
“She is a little tired. But I don’t think it was the drive.” Miss Peters was looking curiously at Ariel. “I don’t think she’ll keep Miss Clare long. She ought to be in bed this minute.”
The elevator was waiting for them at the end of the back hall. Miss Peters ran it very nonchalantly by a mere touching of buttons.
“Oh! That’s the way it works? Next time I can take myself up,” Ariel said, as they stepped out into the attic hall. Miss Peters, meticulously closing the sliding door of the cage, remarked, “Oh, the family never use the elevator. Mrs. Weyman has heart disease, you know, and Mr. Hugh put it in for her. Then it’s a convenience in carrying trays up and down, of course. I couldn’t take care of Mrs. Weyman if I had to climb two flights of stairs each meal.”
The attic hall, by night, was unromantically lighted by ordinary electric-light bulbs. Ariel regretted the afternoon’s mysterious twilight. But when Miss Peters had opened Grandam’s door, announced Ariel, and gone on her way, leaving them alone together, all the romance of the afternoon poured back, with Grandam added.
Curtains of dim flower pattern were drawn across the windows. But they did not give the effect of shutting in the room. They were caressing, as night’s own starry curtains, and they brought distance near. Tall wax candles glimmered their light down on the piano, over the ivory keys and the glossy rosewood, and the dish with the anemones. But the anemones themselves stood up dark in the dusk, their colors lost. At the edge of the area of light shed by the crystal lamp on the bench, across the room, lay Grandam, her head elevated, among her pillows. She was wearing the silver scarf in which Ariel had been discovered by Mrs. Weyman.
A chair was drawn up conveniently near to the daybed in preparation for Miss Clare’s visit. But Ariel ignored it, or perhaps did not see it. She went straight to the daybed and sat down on the edge of that, face to face with Grandam.
Grandam did not waste words. “Miss Peters says you were up here this afternoon, Ariel, looking for something in my apartment. I have the liveliest curiosity to know what it was.”
“I was looking for ‘Noon,’ the painting Hugh bought of my father. I can’t find where they’ve hung it. I couldn’t ask Hugh, since Father himself wouldn’t,—and anyway, he went away the very first day. But after you came to lunch I thought Hugh must have given it to you,—that it would be here. But it isn’t here. Can you tell me where it is? I don’t mind asking you. Father wouldn’t mind.”
Pity woke in Grandam’s face. Things she had at different times heard of Ariel and her father and this picture of Hugh’s all suddenly fitted themselves together into a human pattern. She knew a great deal, all at once. She was silent.
Ariel, during the silence, noticed that Grandam was not wearing her wig. This was her own hair, cut short, clipping her small head like a knight’s helmet. It was even lovelier than the wig, Ariel thought. WhatwasGrandam? She was not an old lady with heart disease. She was not a grande dame of a civilization outworn. She was not even Ariel’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. Whatever she was, she was a friend of Ariel’s and would have been even more a friend of her father’s, if he had only known her.
Grandam at last said, “I think I must have been away from Wild Acres, abroad, when Hugh came back with that picture. And I never have seen it. But very recently, since you came, in fact, Hortense has mentioned it to me, told me where it is. You shall have it to-night.”
Ariel was on her feet. “Now?”
“No. Wait. Let’s talk a few minutes first. Sit down again, my dear. Why are you so—so wild to see this picture? Didn’t you bring any other of your father’s pictures with you?”
Ariel sat down again on the edge of the bed. Now that Grandam had promised her a sight of “Noon” she could wait patiently forever, so long as she waited here with Grandam. “No. I didn’t bring a single canvas,” she answered. “You see, they are all quite big. But I am keeping out five for myself. Not letting them be sold—although they will be in the exhibition, of course. Father thought ‘Noon’ the very best of them all. And seeing it again now,—well, it will be like going home.”
“Yes, I can understand that. But you look as though you were seeing a vision, Ariel. What is it?”
Ariel was looking at the picture in the ebony frame beyond Grandam’s shoulder. “Those hands,” she said. “They make me think of Father’s to-night, though they didn’t this afternoon when I was up here. And they aren’t like his really. Father’s hands aren’t so long, and the fingers aren’t nearly so pointed. Are those an angel’s hands? Or a saint’s?”
Grandam’s expression was veiled. Yet it was not a secretive look that came into her features, making them enigmatical; it was an illuminative glow.
“A very fine artist drew those hands,” she said. But her voice was concealing as much as was her face, and Ariel knew it. “He is dead now. Piccoli. An Italian. And he had an earthly model, not an angel. At least he thought so, I suppose. The hands themselves—are the hands of a friend of mine. He, too, is dead.... How is it with you here at Wild Acres, Ariel? Are you lonely?”
Ariel bent quickly forward and picking up an end of Grandam’s silver scarf, kissed it. “I am not lonely now,” she said. “Who could be! And I’m never really lonely in the woods.” Then she told Grandam about sensing violets behind the snow that first day at Wild Acres and how she had found Persis and Nicky in the woods and danced her happiness for them.
“But at lunch you were saying you had no talent. What about dancing for a profession, Ariel? Have you thought of that?”
Ariel shook her head. “My dancing is like those hands there in their adoring. Adoring, and dancing, and loving,—they aren’t professions.”
“Still, dancing can be as much a conscious and cultivated art as painting. Seriously, Ariel, hadn’t this occurred to you? Or to your father?”
“No. But, then, I never saw a real dancer. Father has told me about Isadora Duncan and her wonderful dancing. And there’s Ruth St. Denis, too! But he liked Isadora better.” She went on then to tell Grandam how her father had put her, dancing, into all of his pictures. “I’m in ‘Noon’ too,” she said. “But they’re not pictures of me, you understand. Not portraits. You do understand?”