Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.”
But then she noticed Ariel’s face, and was silenced as if by a thunder-clap, although Ariel’s face was as quiet as a stone and shut like a stone. Still, Anne was awed or frightened—she didn’t know which—into sudden silence.
After a while Ariel begged, as if Anne hadn’t so carefully shut up, as if she had gone right on with this subject of Hugh and Joan for the last completely silent half mile or so, “Don’t say such things about Hugh. They aren’t so at all. But, oh, Anne! Let us never try to break through and lose ourselves in any one—unless God. That’s the way to be free. Let’s run.—Let’s never be slaves—”
Hand in hand the two girls went plunging along the road until they staggered to a stop, winded. Then, laughing, breathlessly, they kissed each other on the mouth, kissed through the snow, their faces soaked and cold with the snow-flower blobs.
Hugh, who had failed in an effort to discover Ariel’s whereabouts on her first “Saturday off” and make a real holiday for her in New York as he had intended, spoke for the following Saturday by the middle of the week. But he was too late. It was already promised to Joan. This surprised him and made him uneasy. He had lost his hope for Joan’s sympathy with Ariel days ago, and now he was past desiring it. For Ariel and Joan, he had come to see, were essentially antithetical. Ariel had been wiser than he in knowing it from the beginning. So it gave him no particular pleasure to learn that Joan was taking Ariel to a Boston Symphony concert, and afterwards to dine at Michael Schwankovsky’s.
Even in Grandam’s apartment it was not easy to see much of Ariel. For when he went up there, evenings, she tactfully left him alone with his grandmother. Monday night when he had protested, “But I’ve come to see you too,” she had surprisingly explained that she wanted to write a letter to Anne and would come back if she finished it. But she had not come back. And why was she writing to Anne? So far as Hugh knew, Anne had paid literally no attention to Ariel at all when Hugh had wanted her to, during the holidays.
Of Joan these days it appeared that he could see as much as he liked, but in most unsatisfactory ways. He found himself hovering on the edges of her hospitality to watch her dance and gossip with her kaleidoscopically shifting groups of intimates. From an entire evening spent in thus shadowing her he might be the richer for only one or two alluring but enigmatical glances, or if he was supremely lucky, a few minutes of one-sided intercourse, when Joan drew him out about his business and his own progress, and he waked too late to realize that he had not entered into her world of interests nor been encouraged to do so.
To stay away from her altogether would be best. How often he had come to this conclusion! But he was incapable of counting the cost of his love; or at least incapable of acting frugally, once he had counted it. If Joan wanted his friendship, she should have as much of it as she requested. And who would not rather die of starvation one day than go all one’s life without an appetite?
While hungering for Joan, Hugh thought much of Ariel. The time when she had been a responsibility peculiarly his seemed passing. For Grandam, Schwankovsky, and now even Joan appeared, suddenly, all inside of a few days, ready, even eager, to assume it on their own accounts. And twice already since Monday Hugh had seen Anne’s writing on envelopes addressed to Ariel.
One morning in the next week, Hugh called Brenda Loring on the telephone from his office to invite her to lunch with him. This girl, who from his first meeting with her had made it plain that he interested her, was an interior decorator with an astonishing vogue, considering her age and experience. It was only two or three years since she had graduated from Vassar, and already she had palatial offices of her own on Fifth Avenue, a dozen or more eager assistants, and an income which must be several times the size of Hugh’s. Joan had had a hand in her success. But Miss Loring had been worthy of that patronage, and now she was beyond need of it.
Hugh could not fail to be gratified by the pleasure which colored Miss Loring’s voice when she discovered what he wanted of her, and by her quick acceptance of his luncheon invitation, given in spite of the fact that she must break a previously made engagement. He had been rather driven to seeking feminine companionship to-day because he was feeling particularly lonely and at loose ends. The reasons were various and not all of them plain even to himself. The uppermost one seemed to be, however, that it was Ariel’s birthday and that everybody appeared to have known it, except himself. Joan had, at any rate, and she had bargained with Grandam for Ariel to have a half-holiday in which to celebrate it. A party had been arranged and Hugh not been included. Joan had made an attempt at explaining this anomaly by telling him that the party was really Schwankovsky’s whole plan and expense, and that she was not in a position to suggest the guests.—And now Hugh was taking Miss Loring to lunch.
He went to her offices to pick her up and suggest that she choose the restaurant. At once she said, “The Jade Swan.” It was in the Village, she explained, but rather beyond anything the Village had ever produced before.
“Magnificent, in fact. Every one’s trying it, but it will be my first try, Hugh. I’m going to call you Hugh, now that you’ve at last begun to bother about me, and of course I’m Brenda. And let’s have a table in the balcony where we can see the whole circus. There’ll be plenty of celebrities to stare at. Writers—artists—editors. But just the terribly successful ones. The other sort couldn’t afford it, poor dears!”
There were only half a dozen tables in the balcony, and Hugh and his guest were lucky in securing the last of these. It stood against the railing and afforded a view of the entire main floor of the restaurant. All the tables down there were already occupied in spite of the newness of the place, except one in the very center, which had the appearance of being reserved for some particularly festive occasion. For while the other tables all had their centerpieces of poets’ narcissus, this table flaunted a big shallow jade bowl filled with orchids and white roses.
“That little bouquet cost somebody a fortune,” Brenda murmured. “And it’s not only expensive. It’s lovely. It’ll be interesting to see whom it’s to honor.”
And almost simultaneously Hugh knew who had ordered it and in whose honor, for Schwankovsky’s big voice boomed under the balcony beneath their feet, and he and his party entered from the street. Ariel and Joan, and a frail blond young man, made up the group.
“I didn’t know. Honestly I didn’t know they were coming here,” Hugh exclaimed.
His companion laughed merrily. “But of course you didn’t. Did you think I was suspecting you of shadowing Joan Nevin, dear fellow? Wasn’t it I who chose the place?”
Joan had seated herself facing the balcony; but in spite of the concentrated gaze of all the balcony lunchers on herself and her friends she did not look up or appear to be aware that there was a balcony. Hugh realized, as freshly, almost, as if he had never done so before, how distinguished and unusual as well as beautiful Joan was. Her face glowed with a purpose and light no other face in that crowded room possessed. Perhaps it was the effect of the brilliant large eyes set wide under the coppery-winged sweep of her brows. To-day the burnished hair was concealed under a purple hat soà la modethat not a glimmer of it showed at brow or cheek. Few women could wear a hat so daring as that and preserve at the same time a radiant and feminine beauty. And when Joan spoke, leaning across the table toward Ariel, her lips moved with such beauty of precision that one, without need to hear, knew that her enunciation was perfect.
“Heavens! Joan Nevin is a stunning creature,” Brenda ejaculated, all her special gift of taste behind the generous words. “So it’s the great Michael Schwankovsky who invested in the floral piece. Well, if any one in New York can afford it with the stock market what it is, I suppose he can. Big blustering Midas! And it’s Joan he’s blustering around to-day. But that’s quite on the books, isn’t it? The little man, the poor dear, is Charlie Frye. Nobody of any importance, but amiable, and surprisingly often seen in company with the great. The other person—” Brenda assumed her lorgnette, a property she used with discretion and undeniable distinction for one so young,—“The other person—Lady? Child? Flapper? Russian Princess? Can’t make outwhatshe is, and I don’t know who she is. Funny.”
“That’s Ariel Clare. And the party’s in her honor, not Joan’s. Because it’s her birthday,” Hugh informed his companion—diffidently.
Ariel, thin of cheek and shoulders, emerging with Frye’s help at this instant from her coat of a princess, was pale and small in contrast with the radiant Joan. Meager. Thin. Grandam was certainly—Hugh was sure of it—letting her work far too hard. And so this was Charlie Frye!
But what was Brenda Loring saying with so much animation as she waved a presumptuously impatient waiter back from Hugh’s elbow. “Not really! Ariel Clare! The dancer! But how too deliciously interesting to have this early view of her, ahead of the mob. Getting within radius of Joan, though, is as good as being behind the scenes, isn’t it! She’s so frightfully in on everything! But this time you’ve beat Joan. You know the model intimately. She works for you, doesn’t she? Joan’s awfully entertaining on the subject. She declares it’s so typical—your keeping the girl on in that position at Wild Acres now that Schwankovsky himself is her patron, and the exhibition’s going to make her famous. Joan thinks your Philistinism delightful. But of course you’re not so insensible as Joan fondly imagines! I should see through you!”
Joan was talking to the blond young man, while he visibly gloried in her radiance. “But the radiance is all in herself,” Hugh thought, looking down on the scene, and for once in his life thinking about Joan objectively, as a stranger might. Ever since she had come into the restaurant it had been as if he were at a play, and the four people sitting around the center table down there the players, to criticize impersonally and make what one could of. “Yes, that radiance is all enclosed. It doesn’t light Frye’s way to her, help him forward. It’s not sympathy. Not really. Now Ariel, although she’s silent and no one is looking at her, throws a radiance out from herself, all about her. She stays dim. One hardly thinks of her. But if Frye turned now from Joan to her, he’d find an illumination in the air between them.Sympathy.”
He speculated about Schwankovsky. Had he tenderness for Ariel’s self, which was so poignantly accessible? Or was it merely self-dramatization in the big creature that had thrown him to his knees at her feet when she came into the drawing-room at Wild Acres that Sunday afternoon? Well, if he had been genuine then—and Hugh thought he was probably much too egocentric for that to be possible—his enthusiasm seemed to have dwindled since, for he had looked only at Joan all this time, listened to her speaking first to Ariel, then to Frye, openly absorbed in her and proud of her. Hugh wondered what he meant to do with Ariel the rest of the afternoon, now that he had usurped her birthday, if this was the extent of his interest in her. “I’ll excuse myself and go down and find out,” he decided. “Perhaps they’ll hand her over to me after lunch. She’ll like seeing the office, I think, and our view of the Battery. She can wait while I finish up the absolutely necessary business, and then we can walk in the Park, or go to an exhibition, or do anything she’d like. Joan and Schwankovsky can’t, after all, enjoy playing around with any one so simple and outside all their interests! My taking her on will be a relief to them, I imagine.”
But with the next breath his plan and his hope were shattered. For Schwankovsky suddenly turned to Ariel, until now so unnoticed beside him, and put his great, hairy hand close down on hers, which lay on the white cloth, and they smiled at each other. It was over in an instant but it told Hugh all that he had doubted of understanding and sympathy between those two. Hugh perceived now—turned almost clairvoyant for the instant—that although Schwankovsky might look at Joan and listen to her, world without end, Ariel was all the while in his heart, and that he was as aware of her as—yes, as a mother is aware of the child in her arms while she converses with a caller.... So again Ariel had no need of Hugh.
He returned his attention to Miss Loring, and tried to respond to something she had been saying. “I don’t exactly see why Joan should be amused at Ariel’s having a job and sticking at it, until the exhibition, anyway,” he exclaimed. “What’s funny about that, Miss—I mean Brenda?”
“Nothing, if it were a respectable job, of course. But the idea was, you see, her being a maid. An odd coat, that, for a maid to be wearing!”
“Oh, but she isn’t a servant. She’s my grandmother’s companion-nurse, and doing it very well too! You misunderstood Joan.”
“Perhaps.” Brenda had turned around in her chair, and continuing to pretend that the impatient waiter did not exist, looked down at Ariel with clever, narrowed eyes. Then she laughed, a keen little ripple of pure pleasure, and continuing to squint through her lorgnette at the unconscious Ariel, cried softly, “But I do begin to see—something in her, anyway.The dancer.A cerise veil, a straight, very short purple tunic. Sheer. Neck, arms, legs, bare. That clean line of shoulder blade and thigh.... The face doesn’t matter, you know, in dancing.It’s the body.”
“The dancer!What do you mean?” Hugh was suddenly as much revolted by Brenda’s narrowed, discerning eyes taking Ariel in from her head to her feet as he had been revolted a minute ago by Schwankovsky’s hand swallowing Ariel’s on the white tablecloth.
Brenda dropped her lorgnette and looked across at Hugh, surprised by his tone. “Of course. The dancer. Why not? Joan’s crowd are saying it now. But soon all the world will be shouting it,—if Schwankovsky is right, and the Clare pictures are all that he thinks them. Isn’t this Ariel in every one of them, dancing? Isadora Duncan stuff? May Morning stuff? Well, there’s all the publicity she needs, if she wants to go on the stage, whether she has any actual talent or not. They say she’s untrained. But a few weeks of hard work would fix that. Æsthetic dancing doesn’t require the technique that ballet requires, you know, or even the vaudeville dancing stunts. All that is necessary is a reasonably pretty body, some gracefulness, and a lot of feeling. Given these, and a cerise veil, that girl down there can go as far as she likes—providing her father’s paintings make a big enough stir. Haven’t you even thought of that, Hugh? After all, the girl’s in your house, no matter in what capacity. You might get just a little interested, I should think!”
Hugh peremptorily beckoned the waiter, by now almost hopeless, and took up the matter of their lunch with him. After the business was settled to Brenda’s complete satisfaction, and even more to the waiter’s, whose respect for Hugh showed to almost a shocking degree in his face as he received his orders, Hugh asked, “Did Joan put this nonsense into your head, or Schwankovsky? Anyway, it is utterest nonsense.” He could not disguise from himself, and even less from Miss Loring, that he was angry and uncomfortable.
“What? About Ariel Clare? Really, I don’t remember. Why, it’s so obvious I may even have thought of it myself,” Brenda retorted, laughing.
“Is it true, Hugh,” she went on, still teasingly, “that you yourself have had one of these Clare pictures for years, the best one at that, the gem of them all, according to Schwankovsky, in your attic? And did Schwankovsky and Joan and Ariel go on a still hunt for its recovery? And is it now hanging in your grandmother’s bedroom, because there’s no other place you want it at Wild Acres? Or are they only making a good story?”
“It’s quite true,” Hugh replied seriously. “Except that Ariel got the picture out herself when she came to us, without help. By the time Schwankovsky had looked her up at Wild Acres, it was hung over my grandmother’s mantel. But it belongs to Ariel now, because I’ve given it to her.”
Brenda stopped laughing. She looked at Hugh with new seriousness and exclaimed, “Do you know, I’m really, in my heart of hearts, quite different from Joan and from most of the women she plays with. I’m willing to have all the cultivation myself, and not expect my men friends to play up to all that.... Art, you know. Taste. It doesn’t matter so much as one thinks! And I don’t believe that we so-called artistic people have all the imagination, either. Men like you, business men, your imagination is the real thing. You create something out of nothing. Fortunes out of ideas. Skyscrapers out of thin air. Who am I to laugh when you show bad taste in judging a painting or prefer jazz to Debussy? One can’t have things both ways. And your way looks to me to be the biggest, truly.
“Schwankovsky, for instance, is an entertaining person, and he certainly has cultivated his taste to an extraordinary and sure degree, and he’s done a whole lot for art in our benighted country. But he inherited his millions. His imagination never had to go into the making ofthem. Only in the spending. He uses his imagination in the spending, you in the making. Nobody would have time to do both.
“I’d be willing to bet quite a lot, Hugh, that you in this particular case are the one who’s right. Not about the picture. Schwankovsky’s more likely to be right about that. But about the girl. Your genius must be in sizing up people. All business men, successful ones, have to be able to size up people. That’s obvious. And if you see that Ariel Clare is just a simple, wholesome girl who happened to have an artist for a father, but herself is a type to make a good nurse or maid, something practical and useful, then I think you’re right in sticking to it and being disgusted at the idea of Joan and her friend Schwankovsky thinking they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.... I’d accept your judgment on a person much quicker than anybody’s down there.”
She waved her cigarette in its long holder in the direction of the Schwankovsky party.
“Have youeverin your life tasted such onion soup?” she murmured after a minute of rather stunned silence on Hugh’s part. “How old is she, by the way? To become a dancer one should start very young.”
“Ariel, you mean? Yes, the soup is very good. She’s twenty to-day. It’s her birthday.”
As Hugh said this, Ariel caught sight of him for the first time, and smiled up at the balcony. He bowed to her, and his own smile was rather constrained. But he felt that a finger of sunshine had suddenly traversed his heart. He said again, not realizing that he was repeating himself, “To-day is her birthday. She is twenty.”
Joan telephoned Hugh the next morning early and asked him to pick her up at Holly if he was driving to town that day. This was not an unusual request, but for all its usualness Hugh never failed to be delightedly surprised to the point of suddenly being able to eat no more breakfast. To-day, however, its effect on him was unusual. He was delighted, it is true, and decided instantly that hewasdriving, of course, although he had intended going in by train and leaving the car for his mother. The sudden change in plan necessitated hiring a car and driver from a Tarrytown garage by telephone, writing a note of explanation to his mother, who was still asleep, and arriving an hour or so late at his office. This meant nothing to him, or ordinarily would have meant nothing, compared with the felicity of having Joan’s company on the long drive. But to-day, on returning from the telephone, he finished his whole breakfast and told himself that if he drove fast perhaps he needn’t be much more than an hour late in town. He’d try, anyway.
It had been a long winter. But to-day not so much as a wispy trace of it was left in the Wild Acres woods. As he drove down the avenue he marveled how the last patches of snow had melted from the hollows over night. The woods glistened with red and purple and gold leaf-buds. To-morrow, or the next day—or the day after that, at the latest,—it would be a golden-green blaze through here.
Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold—
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold—
That was the beginning of a poem of Robert Frost’s. Anne had quoted or read it to Hugh sometime in the winter. He remembered her coming to him where he sat at the piano, tentatively searching for some theme he had heard,—keeping it soft and just for his own ear. He had not wanted to share his music. But Anne had wanted to share her poem. And how had he responded? He had listened, his hands raised waiting above the keys, to that much:
Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold—
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold—
and beyond that he remembered nothing. Perhaps his indifference and self-absorption had discouraged Anne. In any case, she hadn’t gone on with the poem. But it wasn’t so much his music she had interrupted with her poetry, that far-away afternoon in winter. It was his thoughts. And those thoughts, his whole preoccupation, had been Joan ... Joan ... Joan.... His music was only a path, winding through his preoccupation, a path through, not a path out.
But now, this morning, noticing the swelling purple and red and gold of the budded trees which almost before his eyes were rushing upon spring, the beauty Anne had failed to share so many weeks ago pierced through to him. And it came to him, as a matter of fact, that things in general lately had been piercing through to him with more and more persistence. He saw, felt, tasted, smelled the world this spring as he had not done for many springs. Joan was in his mind more or less, for he was still in love with her. But she no longer tinged his perceptions of everything else as well. Anne, Glenn, his mother, Brenda Loring, his friends at the office, spring coming,—these held vital places of their own in his new, sharpened attention.
And Ariel and Grandam? Grandam had never given way to Joan in his thoughts, any more than she gave way to her in actuality. As for Ariel, she did not so much enter into as hover about the outer edges of Hugh’s consciousness, her feet on azure air as in her father’s paintings. Yes. From her arrival on the same boat with Joan, Ariel had been above and outside but very present to Hugh’s conscious mind.... So he thought now, stirred to such thinking by those pointed, sharp buds of the tree boughs.
Yet after all it wasn’t these buds which had pierced through and touched his soul. As he turned out from the spring woods onto the Post Road, he knew that it wasn’t the buds but something corresponding to them. For all Ariel’s delicate lightness, her tenderness, it was she, her presence at Wild Acres, which had pierced the harsh coating over his sleeping soul.
He jammed on his brakes and the big wheels of his car spurted gravel on Holly’s superbly tended driveway under Holly’s portico. Joan was on the steps.
She, too, knew that spring had come. From head to foot she was all in fresh spring raiment. A lettuce-green hat tilted its shade across glowing eyes. She was drawing on lemon-colored doeskin gloves and laughing. “I thought you were going to drive right through and out again! Whatwereyou thinking of so dourly, Hugh?”
He waited while she settled in beside him, knees close together, narrow patent-leather-slippered feet glittering by the accelerator, her shoulder a careful inch or so from his. “I wasn’t a bit dour. Quite the contrary. I was thinking of spring.”
Joan opened a huge patent-leather purse, as glittering as her feet, glanced to make sure of money, tickets, compact, kerchief, snapped the luxurious receptacle shut, tucked it between them on the seat, and clasped her gloved hands about her knees, ready.
“Yes? Spring’s really come, hasn’t it! And one begins to make summer plans. I’ve been flirting with the idea of Switzerland all morning, and Doctor Steiner’s colony. He wants me to spend July there. Your little friend, Brenda, may go. And Michael certainly will.”
Hugh threw in the clutch, and they slid away down the broad avenue between wide, freshly spaded flower-beds glowing with hyacinths. Hugh was thinking, “Ariel must get spring clothes too. She was still wearing her fur coat yesterday. No wonder she looked tired! Yesterday was almost as warm as today.”
Joan went on. “Your engine, Hugh, is as soundless as a gull’s wings almost, even in first and second. Oh! It’s too delicious! I can think of nothing but the sea and the mountains. I think I must fall in with Doctor Steiner’s plan. I’m dreadfully happy and excited ’cause it’s spring and I’m free to go anywhere, do anything I please!—And you, Hugh?”
She had given him his cue. She would sense either in his silence or hear in words what spring, that might take her to the other side of the world, could mean to him. Loneliness, of course.
But to-day Hugh did not seem to be realizing what spring should mean to him with Joan already planning to go away because of it. He’d missed his cue. For he was saying, “Look here, Joan. I want to talk to you about Ariel. It’s rather a strenuous existence she has with Grandam, you know. And these New York parties on top of her work might prove a bit too much. Last night, she turned up completely exhausted. Anybody could see! Poor kid! So I’ve persuaded her to break her Saturday engagement with your crowd, or to let me break it for her. I hope you don’t mind, Joan. I don’t really see how it can do her any good. If she gave up her job she might manage that sort of thing. But I think she’s right to prefer to keep the job. I like her pluck. Don’t you, really? And you don’t mind, do you, not having her along at whatever it is you’ve planned?”
After a breath of surprised silence, Joan exclaimed, “Of course I don’t mind. She isn’t exactly one of those people whomakea party, is she! It’s only that Michael’s got the bee in his bonnet that Gregory Clare’s daughter needs a little polishing,—some experience of the world. But I agree with you that he’s forcing the pace a bit. I was only trying to help.”
“Yes. I can imagine that. And you’ve been sweet to Ariel these last few days. Iamgrateful.”
But Joan pushed away his gratitude. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s Michael I’m befriending, not Ariel. After an erotic past of thirty or forty odd years, the poor dear is ripe for the attractions of sheer youth, as are most of his kind, not? It may be only a flash in the pan, probably is. But I understand it’s quite real while it lasts. If he goes so far as to marry the little thing, perhaps you won’t then be so thankful I’m helping him. For I prophesy he’ll murder her during the second week of the honeymoon. He’s as fearful of boredom as any creature I ever knew, and by the second week Ariel will be about as stimulating as a milk-shake. So in the end it may be accessory before the fact you’ll accuse me of being.”
If Joan had looked at Hugh then! But she didn’t.
After a while, “Am I meant to take any of that seriously, Joan?” he asked. “Schwankovsky is sixty-two, you told me. Ariel’s twenty. I don’t like Schwankovsky. Why should I? He despises me and takes no pains to hide it. But he’s being very kind to Ariel. I haven’t liked to see the way he paws her, naturally. But I thought it was just his Bohemian habit. The artistic temperament. And Ariel doesn’t seem to mind. I trusted her instinct: thought he must be all right, do you see, sinceshewasn’t revolted, no matter what I felt. But if he’s the sort you suggest, then she’s never to so much as shake hands with him again. I’ll attend to it.... But it isn’t so. You were—teasing?”
“Teasing! Why should I? But perhaps you misunderstood. The gentleman’s intentions if he has any, of which I’m not after all certain, are honorable. And if that’s so, what’s bothering you? Wouldn’t it be rather a wonderful marriage for such a girl as Ariel? The murder—well, that’ll probably turn into a divorce. Dear old Michael wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know, much less a tender youngmädchen. It seems to me that Ariel has all to gain.”
“Please don’t. It isn’t funny. And I shall see that they don’t go on meeting. It’s horrible.”
“And the exhibition?” Joan asked.
Hugh consigned the exhibition to perdition with a breath. “I’ll take that over,” he said, “and do my best with it.”
“You!” Joan laughed. “You’d make a funny art patron, Hugh! Besides, I’m afraid that this particular exhibition needs more money as well as more authority than you happen to be able to bring to it. But if you are as earnest as you sound, or even half as earnest, I might take sides with you, push Michael into giving up the exhibition, and separate spring and winter. How about it? Do you want my help?”
Hugh, half in hope half in distrust, just glanced at his companion’s cameo-like profile, and surprised on it a gleam which stirred an old and until now forgotten memory. They were a boy and a girl just come on their skis to the top of Sparrow Hill in the snow, up above Wild Acres. Joan was insisting on trying a dangerously steep and tricky slide to regain her tam-o’-shanter which had blown over and down. Hugh dragged her back just in time, as he thought, and holding out his arms against her, shot past and down himself. He saw no surer way to convince Joan of the absurdity of her intention than to break his own neck in demonstration. As he went down he carried with him the memory of her profile. To-day’s very gleam was on it then. A gleam ofelated malice. Going down the slide he took the gleam with him, and then with the snapping of his ankle, for he broke it at the bottom, he forgot it ... until this instant. And now memory’s revival saved him. He smiled to himself.
“I’m dull not to know when you’re joking, Joan,—after all these years,” he said. “Of course, we both know that a man doesn’t love beautiful things and give his fortune and his time generously to them if he’s nothing more than a sensualist at heart. Schwankovsky’s devotion to Ariel is disinterested. He’s fascinated by everything that concerns the Clare pictures, that’s all. And who can wonder! They are so wonderful!”
“But dear Hugh! If you are so sure that the pictures are wonderful why did you keep ‘Noon’ in the attic all these years?”
He answered through his teeth. They might just as well have been fourteen again, and back on their skis up on Sparrow Hill. “You know very well why I put it in the attic. It was you put it there and not I. And you know it. But for some reason it amuses you to make me out stupid. Why? And it isn’t only ‘Noon’ you’ve put in the attic for me, but most of my æsthetic pleasures. You know perfectly well that I can’t hear great music or see a sunset without wanting to take them in my bare hands and rush to lay them in your lap. I can’t adore anything for its own sake. Even God. Beauty disrupts me, gives me anguish precisely in proportion to its loveliness, for the simple cause that I can so seldom share it with you. That’s what’s the matter with me. Or it has been that way until lately. Lately, thank God, I’ve almost been able to care about things for their own sakes again, as I did when I was a boy. Getting ‘Noon’ out again has helped, perhaps. I don’t know.”
He was exasperated. Weary. Now let dull misery rise again and entomb him where the sharp-pointed buds of spring could not pierce through. What was all their red-purple-gold to him!
Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold ...
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold ...
But Joan was appeased. Certainties which had quaked lately were stable again. Hugh adored her. Just now what she usually got only in his eyes and kisses, he had given her in words. For once and at last he was articulate, poor darling. Complacency, almost amounting to beatitude, reëstablished itself in her psyche. But it was a beatitude just tainted, curdled rather, with scorn. Joan regretted the curdle. But it was inevitable. For it is a law of the heart, she realized, that love given so completely as Hugh’s was given, with nothing reserved, can never have its like in return. “And it’s a pity,” she thought a little bitterly. “For if I could be absolutely sure of a love like Hugh’s, and return it, it would be bliss. The trouble is, one can’t. It’s against nature.” Wistfully, some lines from an Irish poet echoed through her mind.
Never give all the heart, for loveWill hardly seem worth thinking ofTo passionate women, if it seemCertain, and they never dreamThat it fades out from kiss to kiss.
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women, if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss.
She pulled off her lemon-colored gloves and reached a warm vital hand, laying each separate finger exactly on Hugh’s fingers, which were guiding the wheel now through Fifth Avenue traffic. She measured their hands thus. And hers were only a little smaller than his. For Joan’s hands, though beautiful, with their smooth palms and backs, and the long conical fingers, glistening-tipped, were large and strong. The hand on Hugh’s shut away the hot, spring sunlight. And it seemed almost, then, as though his whole body as by infection from the shadowed hand was darkened slowly. Flames might any instant roar through that dark. But his expression was unmoved except for straightened lips. His eyes remained keen for every loophole in the difficult traffic. Even his hand, under that shut-down vital one on it, vibrated only with the nuances of steering.
Joan was absorbed like a child in the way her enameled finger nails reflected the spring sunlight. And then she became aware of how beautifully shaped and groomed were Hugh’s own almond-shaped nails. By shifting the tips of her fingers ever so slightly she could see the moons at the base of his nails, so clear, high and definite.
“You have nice hands, Hugh,” she murmured. “Terribly nice.” And when he did not respond by look or word she added with sudden generosity, “I’ll ’fess up, dear. I did make an idiotic and totally moronish mistake about ‘Noon’ five years ago when you brought it to me from Bermuda. But don’t tell on me, please; I am ashamed. And it doesn’t matter to you what any one thinks of your taste. You don’t pretend to anything, you dear, so they can’t show you up, do you see!”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Hugh muttered. He meant, of course, “What does anything matter compared with your hand on mine, and this darkness and its flame corroding my body, my mind!”
Presently Joan said, “You can put me down at the next corner, Hugh. I want to walk twenty blocks or so for exercise before plunging into my silly spring shopping.”
She did not stir her hand from his until the car was parked against the curb.
But spring was insistent. Nothing could keep the pointed, delicate buds from piercing their way through the harsh bark to azure light and air and sun, and their flowering expression. One afternoon, a few days after his drive to town with Joan, Hugh returned to Wild Acres rather early with the idea of persuading Ariel and his grandmother to take a drive with him, it was such perfect weather. No one answered his knock at the attic apartment door; so he opened it and went in.
Grandam was not there on the bed nor in the long chair: only Ariel, and she was kneeling by one of the wide-open windows, her back to the room, looking out into the tree-tops that in the past few days had foamed into a sea of green gold. The sunlight slanted down this sea, at the moment of Hugh’s arrival and Ariel’s watching, in a way that turned it into an unearthly lightness of gold,—a winged, breathingwindof green gold. And Ariel knelt upright at the edge of the wind-shaken loveliness like a wand, stilled, not bent, by the high stir of beauty.
Hugh stopped short. He had come to Grandam’s low table and saw it spread with brown paper, and on the paper a heap of wild flowers. Hepaticas, anemones, white and yellow violets, green leaves too, and clumps of rich brown wood loam,—all in a fragrant tangle. At the edge of the pile Ariel’s green hat was tossed down, with its green feather.
“Hello! Did you collect all these?” Hugh asked.
At his voice Ariel turned and stood, her body aurora’d by the golden stream of air and leaves behind her.
“You here? Hello, Hugh! Grandam’s driving with your mother. It’s such a day! I’ve been in the woods all the afternoon, with Persis and Nicky. Just got in.”
She moved toward him and stood by the table looking down at the flowers. Some of the gold from beyond the window had flowed into her hair. And when she looked up from the flowers Hugh saw it in her eyes too,—green gold. The woods, Wild Acres woods, beloved of Hugh, were there, shimmering, in Ariel’s eyes.
She looked her surprise at the expression on Hugh’s face before her. It was so stirred, so new. Perhaps it was to break the spell and get the familiar Hugh back again that she lifted her hands, palm upwards,—the corners of her mouth too, in that sharp delicate lift darted with light, that was her smile when she danced in the woods for Persis and Nicky—and remarked, “Spring has come.”
It had indeed. It had come rushing on a broad stream of light and poured itself along Hugh’s veins. The look in his face increased rather than diminished. But Ariel had done her best, all she knew, to relieve the intensity in Hugh’s dark eyes. Her knees began to tremble. She did not want Hugh to see that she was trembling. She would be utterly ashamed if he should see. So she sat down suddenly, on the edge of the daybed, and commenced to part the flowers from the wood loam, and from each other.
Her hands were browned by this one afternoon’s sun and air. They were narrow hands and small, with rather square-tipped, very straight fingers. Hugh recalled Joan’s hand above his own on his steering wheel. It was white and beautiful and exquisitely molded, a sculptor’s dream. But these little hands—their appeal was in their simplicity, in their graceful but inconspicuous motions, not in their form and modeling. If he should put his own hands down over them now they would be quite lost, all the magic and grace of their movements stilled away, and they would feel to him like the grubby hands of any little girl who had been out picking wild flowers in the woods.
He would put his hands down over hers. He would do that. He would find out how it felt to capture grace like a bird under one’s fingers,—perhaps to destroy it in the grasp of it and so prove it an illusion. Not real. Not actual. Not like Joan’s beauty, inescapable. He would prove that Ariel’s charm for him was something he could always control, could catch and subdue and hide away from himself, under his hand.
It was only for a breath or so that he had Ariel’s hands under his own, crushed down in the medley of spring flowers and damp earth. But the grace, the charm was not controlled by his will or his hold. It escaped without a flutter of struggle. It flowed up into the surprised lift of Ariel’s head, the rising of her eyelids, and spread a shimmer of green-gold light in the quickly widening pupils of her eyes, raised to his.
Suddenly he discovered, and she knew that he had discovered it, that she was trembling. What Ariel did not realize was that Hugh was trembling too, a little.
He released her hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt the flowers,” he muttered. “Sorry if I have.” And he commenced to help her in her sorting.
“I’m going to put these shortest-stemmed ones in a saucer,” Ariel explained. “Isn’t there something special, don’t you think, about little white and yellow violets? Secret and special? They sort of break my heart....”
He should hear how her voice didn’t tremble. She repeated the silly words to make sure that he heard how it didn’t: “They sort of break my heart.”
“Yes? Well,springsort of breaksmyheart,” Hugh responded.
Joan heard voices over toward Wild Acres. They came from the top of the wall which for half a mile or so shut off Holly’s well-kept grounds from the wildwood tangle of the neighboring estate. Although she was courting solitude this afternoon, or had intended to, Joan turned that way, out of curiosity, and in a minute or so four backs were presented to her. Persis, Nicky, their nurse, Alice, and Ariel Clare were all up on the wall, their legs swinging over on the Wild Acres side, their faces wildwood-tangleward, talking. Much overheard talk sounds like monkey chatter, when the words are indistinguishable, but not this of the two girls and the two children. With such inflections, such deliberate tranquillity, the gods might converse on Olympus. Joan drew nearer the beatitude of intercourse, walking softly on moist spring ground, ears beginning to catch the words.
The children sat between the two girls. It was Nicky speaking now, but with a manner of speech Joan had never heard him use before, unhurried and clear. So many imaginative and sensitive children, when speaking to an adult, or even to their own contemporaries, have a nervous, anxious note in their voices, from fear of interruption or misapprehension; and Nicky was no exception. But now it was different. Now he spoke with unruffled but expedient precision.