Hugh went, of course. It was the first time he had ever been invited to Michael Schwankovsky’s house. And to-night it was not in any sense, he knew, Schwankovsky’s invitation, but entirely Joan’s.
When he got to the mansion—for Schwankovsky’s house on Riverside Drive was no less—Hugh was taken up in the house elevator, run by a footman in Schwankovsky’s livery, to the top floor, where the host and his dinner guests were dancing in the long gallery. This was—the World knew—where Schwankovsky’s collection of oils was hung, and Hugh wondered, as the elevator ascended, whether the connoisseur had perhaps already snaked out some of the best of the Clare pictures for himself, and whether they were already up here in the famous gallery. He did not know the ethics of the business, or whether, indeed, Frye had the right to sell ahead of the exhibition. But even if he might not purchase them, it was conceivable that the man who was to finance and advertise the exhibition could borrow from it ahead, at will, any pictures he wished.
Hugh thought of Ariel. “She’ll want to know every last detail, which pictures are here, how they look by electric light, everything. I must take particular pains to notice and remember.”
The elevator let him out directly into the gallery. A dozen couples were dancing. An electrola was blaring. Joan saw him, left her partner, and crossed to him at once.
“Nice of you to come. Don’t bother whether you know people or not. Just cut in and dance with them. Have a drink?”
“No, thanks. But can’t we talk—you and I? Must it be dancing?”
“I’m afraid so, for a while, anyway. We’ve only just begun.”
“Are you going out to Holly to-night? Is your car here?”
“No. I’m not going home till to-morrow morning. I’m staying with Brenda Loring. You remember her? Be nice to her to-night. She quite betrayed her girlish heart concerning you in Philadelphia. She was at the house party.”
Hugh had met Miss Loring several times at Holly, and she was one of the very few girls among Joan’s acquaintances who cherished the illusion that he was unattached. She danced past at the moment with Michael Schwankovsky and smiled brilliantly at Hugh around—she could not possibly manage it over—the big man’s shoulder.
Hugh noticed Joan’s recently discarded partner, who had seized the opportunity of Joan’s welcoming Hugh to get himself a drink at the buffet set up temporarily near the electrola, turning toward them. “Not yet, you idiot!” he cried inwardly, and took Joan quickly into his arms. They danced.
“I was going to write you, Joan. But I waited. You can’t know what a brick I think you’ve been. How I appreciate—”
Joan was exchanging lip and eye signals with her host, who, still with Brenda Loring, was passing them again, and she barely noticed Hugh’s words.
“I don’t see any of the pictures up here, though. Perhaps it’s more advisable to wait and spring them on the public, all at once. Is that the idea? Knock their eyes out? I must speak to your friend about ‘Noon.’ He’ll want that in the exhibition, of course. I’ve given it to Ariel.”
“Hugh! Whatareyou talking about? Hold me closer. That’s right. You haven’t caught on yet, have you? You’ll have to, though. This step has come to stay. Itisa little intricate. But try now. That’s better!”
At least he was holding her closer. But his heart and his pulse found it hard to keep the slow rhythm. They boomed, pounded, plunged as though he were one with some cosmic ocean. And the new step Joan wanted him to learn was mathematically precise, for all that the partner must be held so very close.
It was naturally, then, some time before Hugh got back to the subject of the exhibition, and he only returned to it at all—desperately trying to ignore the mad race of his blood—because of Ariel. He must take news to her, detailed news, since Frye had neglected to write again in answer to her instant letter of many eager questions. Joan, of course, could now tell him all that they wanted to know. He hoped Ariel would be awake when he got home and thought she would; for he had telephoned her that he was to see Schwankovsky himself to-night. He had refrained from mentioning Joan only because Ariel, strangely, seemed to resent Joan’s part in her amazing good fortune.
“It’s too splendid about Schwankovsky—that he should be so enthusiastic about the pictures!” he managed finally. “Did you have to do much persuading—after he had seen them, I mean? And have you seen any of them yourself yet? Joan! You were a darling to do it!”
There were the other two again, Schwankovsky smiling intimately into Joan’s passing eyes, Miss Loring into Hugh’s. “Like silly monkeys going past on a merry-go-round. I wish they’d stop it. Joan won’t listen. She hasn’t heard a word,” Hugh groaned to himself. And all the time there was his thundering heart, his pulse to ignore,—holding Joan close like this in the slow movements of the dance.
“Does Schwankovsky think the exhibition is bound to be a success?” Hugh’s voice raised itself, insistent, above the electrola’s blare, and above the thundering of the cosmic sea in his blood. Joan began to pay attention.
“What exhibition?” she asked. “Which exhibition?”
“Ariel’s.... The Gregory Clare pictures, of course.”
“Oh! So it’s Ariel again. Good Heavens! I keep forgetting that wretched girl. The wretched artist-father too! Sorry, Hugh. I know you feel responsible about the stupid business. That you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be! But it isn’t at all likely that Michael knows anything about that silly exhibition,—if there is really to be one. Why should he be bothered?”
“But I thought that Schwankovsky—that you, Joan—that you’d got him to look at the pictures, and that that was why—”
Joan laughed tolerantly. “Well, I haven’t got him to look at them. I don’t even know where they are, in fact. And I’m glad I don’t. After the sample you showed me! But there’s nothing to keepyoufrom pulling wires for Ariel, if you like. Why, you might even get Michael as a patron for the event. What a delicious idea!”
Schwankovsky joined them at this point in their conversation of cross-purposes. The music had fallen mercifully silent for the minute. Joan took the big man possessively by the arm. “I invited Hugh here to-night,” she began, explaining to him, “to see me. But he’s not interested in me. Only in some wretched little artist’s exhibition. I suspect he means to tackle you next, Michael.—Better first-hand than second-hand, Hugh.—But I’m warning you, Michael! Hugh’s on the prowl for strings to pull to-night. He’s all on the make—for the artist’s daughter.”
Having thus made things, as she thought, simple for her simple friend, Joan gave herself up to the arms of a new partner simultaneously with the reawakening of the electrola to a fresh burst of racket.
Hugh had not the slightest idea of how he had managed it, but, plainly, during their brief moments of contact he had irritated Joan beyond endurance. And now he must gather up the pieces of himself which she had left and be coherent for his involuntary host. “It’s only the Clare pictures I was discussing with Joan,” he explained. “I thought she had had something to do with your interest in them.”
“The Clare pictures! What do you know about the Clare pictures, if you please, Mr. Weyman? Or Mrs. Nevin, for the matter of that? Kindly tell me!”
The big man was openly annoyed.
“What do I know? Well, not much. Except, of course, that you’ve taken ’em on.”
“Who told you that?”
“Charlie Frye wrote it to us. Since then, we’ve heard nothing.”
“Charlie Frye! Young idiot! Now why should he go around telling this, when I particularly requested that he shouldn’t?”
“Well, of course, he had to letusknow! Naturally we—”
“Pff. Since it’s out, it’s out. No matter. Only it was going to be something of a satisfaction, springing an exhibition like that on New York. But now you and Joan know! Probably he’s told everybody. Well, I don’t suppose it really matters—”
He blustered off without another word or look, leaving Hugh stranded. Didn’t Schwankovsky know that Ariel was at Wild Acres with the Weymans? That Hugh was her host? Apparently not.
Miss Loring, seeing Hugh so suddenly and unequivocally disengaged, forsook her own group by the buffet and started to insinuate her way through the room toward him.
“Got to catch a train,” he thought, to put himself in countenance with himself. If Miss Loring got to him before the elevator arrived, summoned by his urgent finger, he would say it aloud. He looked at his watch. True enough! If he was to catch the hour’s train from the Grand Central, he must get himself on the inside of a taxi in something less than a minute. The elevator beat Miss Loring, and Hugh was grateful.
In the taxi he began sorting it out. Schwankovsky had seen Gregory Clare’s pictures all right, and he had taken the exhibition in charge. But Joan had had nothing to do with it, and in fact knew nothing about it. And Schwankovsky himself hadn’t a hint of Hugh’s connection with the artist or with his daughter. Probably he wasn’t even aware that Joan herself knew Ariel. Surprising, perhaps, but not unaccountable. Charlie Frye mightn’t even have mentioned that she had left Bermuda.—And Hugh decided that his having bolted away from that party didn’t matter. He couldn’t think that Miss Loring would be unconsolable, and no one else would even notice. Certainly Joan wouldn’t. Asking him to come had been the merest impulse—a fragile impulse at that—just a slight flutter of well-meaningness toward poor old Hugh.
He looked drawn as he paid off his taxi driver at the Grand Central and mingled his stride with the throngs pouring toward their various locals on the lower level.
His mother was reading in bed when he got home. She called out to him. Propped among snowy pillows, swathed in a rosy negligee under a rosy bedside light, she was reading a book of “Cases,”—collected and edited by Joan’s Doctor Steiner. For unpleasantness of subject they competed tolerably with the popular murder mysteries of the day, and for the ingenuity of their unraveling and denouements they competed not at all, but superbly surmounted.
“Ariel in bed?” Hugh inquired. Mrs. Weyman closed the book, but kept a finger in it. “I should hope so,” she exclaimed, just this side of sharpness, while her welcoming smile changed into an irritated frown. “Really! Hugh! Don’t you expect quite a lot of me these days? Three times this week I’ve dined with that girl alone here. We’ve nothing to say to each other. If Grandam came down, it would help. But no, Ariel seems to have become my eternal vis-à-vis. Joan’s away. Mrs. Drake and the Eddingtons and ’most everybody else, for the matter of that, are still in Florida. Even without Ariel it would be dreary enough—Butwithher! And you come rushing in—’Is Ariel in bed?’ I can’t stand it.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. But Joan’s back. You’ll see her to-morrow, probably. That will help. And the exhibition’s on the way,—less than two months to wait. After that Ariel might go abroad, or something, with some nice older woman. Meanwhile—”
“Exactly, Hugh! Meanwhile? It’s appalling! What to do with her! And how’s she to go abroad, or do anything—without any money?”
“Why, Mother! You’re crying! Why? I hadn’t an idea you were so bothered! Poor darling!—I’ve an idea. Why don’tyougo to Europe right now, this spring? We can manage it beautifully—”
“And leave you unchaperoned here with this young person, I suppose!”
“That’s ridiculous! Unchaperoned! But if you must be so considerate, darling, there’s Grandam—”
“Yes? Butisthere? I sometimes wonder! Grandam might as well be living in the highest snow of the Andes for all the contact she has withusthese days! Her röle as chaperone wouldn’t have much illusion for the servants, or even for the world at large, I’m afraid, Hugh dear. But in any case I don’t want to be driven away, if you please, from my home and my children and my friends by your Ariel Clare!”
Hugh was utterly taken aback. He had not known that his mother harbored any resentment whatever toward Ariel. And why in heaven’s name should she! But he said, after a moment of quick thought, “Look here, Mother! Ariel can go in to New York with me mornings. There’ll be plenty for her to do all day, seeing the sights. That’ll get her off your hands. I only haven’t suggested it before because she’ll need money, batting around by herself, and the poor girl’s awfully touchy about money right now. If she weren’t so proud—”
His mother’s strange, suddenly hysterical laugh halted him. “So proud!” she gibed. “Why don’t you suggest that she pawn the fur coat you gave her, Hugh! She wouldn’t need any further resources for a long time. Shecouldgo to Europe then, or anywhere else she wanted to—comfortably. But certainly you’re not to dry-nurse her days in New York. That’s absurd. Something will come along to solve the problems, I know. It’ll have to. Thursday, though, Iwilllet you take your turn, since you suggest it. It’s my day for the Shakespeare Club, and Ariel certainly wouldn’t fit. So your New York plan will be useful for that one day. You are a self-sacrificing old dear!”
Hugh, on leaving his mother, walked quietly out to the guest-room wing and stood for a few seconds before Ariel’s shut door. All was still. So very still that he actuallysenseda girl sleeping. He wanted to go in, to look at her asleep. Her room, when she was in it, was, he knew, like a still little corner in the sky, cold, star-filled.... She was precious to him, this daughter of his friend, every hour more so, as he came to know her better. Was this tenderness that welled in his heart merely the automatic tenderness which most people do harbor for what is helpless and dependent on them, and not really the unique thing he felt it? He scarcely knew.
But as he turned away from Ariel’s door, he was thinking of Joan. He felt that he knew to-night, definitely and forever, that she would never relent, never love him. Her indifference to Ariel and Ariel’s good had convinced him. It was as if in refusing to share some of his tenderness for Ariel, Joan had refused to give him a child. This was absurd, on the surface, he was aware, but it had deep roots of truth somewhere, strongly reaching down into reality.
Thursday came, and Ariel was prepared to go to town with Hugh. They were breakfasting together. The day was clear and sunny. Ariel was wearing her green hat with the magic feather, and her fur coat was lying with her pocketbook on a near-by chair, ready to be snatched up when they had finished their toast and coffee.
Ariel put down her cup suddenly. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “We want the address of Charlie’s studio. I forgot it.” They planned to look Mr. Frye up at his studio and invite him to lunch with them. His number might not be obtainable from the New York telephone book, so Hugh let Ariel run up to her room. He heard her humming on the stairs. His heart smote him a little. She was so gay, so expectant. An excursion to New York the cause! Why, he should have given her that excursion days ago,—and several of them! He heard her voice on the stairs but not her feet. Somehow that humming put him back five years, into the studio’s loggia, sitting there smoking with Gregory Clare, steeped in sunlight,—flower-light too, because the flowers in and around the Clare studio did give off light of their own. They were so still, Hugh and his friend, that butterflies crossed and recrossed close before their faces in their commerce with the flowers. It had been an adventure in friendship, and he, Hugh Weyman, had not lived up to the riches it offered him. He had failed. Since Ariel’s coming, and her and Grandam’s rescue of “Noon” from the attic, Hugh had realized poignantly how he had turned back at the very beginning of that adventure and let his friend go on alone with it. Gregory’s last letter to him had proved that hehadgone on with it, only half aware that his friend was not abreast of him in the golden realm of imagination and love.
So it was from the Bermuda loggia that he was recalled by his mother surprisingly coming into the dining room at this unusual hour.
He jumped up and pulled a chair from the table for her. “I didn’t see you, Mother, or hear you.” He was almost abashed at the completeness of his day-dreaming.
“I’ve had the wretchedest night, Hugh. Hardly slept a wink. Miss Peters has thrown up her job, or Grandam has fired her. I can’t make out which. Anyway, she’s going this morning. She told me, quite casually, when I ran into her in the butler’s pantry last night. She was getting hot milk for Grandam. And she’s just told Ariel now. On the stairs.”
How her telling Ariel applied to the matter Hugh didn’t at the moment pause to consider or inquire. He said, reasonably, “Well, there’s always the agency. I’ll go there first thing—before lunch, anyway. But Miss Peters will have to stay on, of course, till we do get a good person. You told her that, I hope.”
“No. Don’t ring.” His mother stopped his hand that would have brought Rose. “Heaven knows I don’t want breakfast. Not now. Not till something’s settled. It’s too ridiculous, Hugh, but your grandmother hasn’t any intention that we shall replace Miss Peters for her. She has already engaged some one. I thought, possibly, you knew,—thought, in fact, youwouldknow.”
“Why, no. But then that’s all right. Is the new person coming to-day?”
Mrs. Weyman replied dryly, “She’s here now. But she herself didn’t know her job began to-day,—not until Miss Peters told her. It’s Ariel.”
“Nonsense! Ariel’s just off to town with me. There’s her coat. Anyway,” as the significance of it all dawned on him, “itisnonsense.”
“I agree. But it seems that Ariel told Grandam she wanted a job, must have a job, and Grandam manufactured one for her. That’s the story. Rather unfair to Miss Peters, I think.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Miss Peters was about ready, I imagine. It was wearing pretty thin, both ways. I felt she wasn’t for long. You must have too, Mother. But it’s no job for Ariel. It’s too difficult. A job for a strong and experienced woman.” Then he repeated himself lamely—“It’s nonsense.”
“Of course. But Ariel’s wanting a job isn’t nonsense. I’m rather pleased with her for that. And you should be too. But this—this that Grandam has given her—why, it’s work for a husky and sensible woman, as you say. How Grandam thinks Ariel’s going to be of any use to her, I don’t see. Why, Miss Peters gets her up, puts her to bed, runs about with heavy trays, sweeps, dusts, scrubs. Can you visualize Ariel?”
Hugh’s face had grown steadily darker at the picture his mother made so vivid. “It’s ridiculous of Grandam!” he muttered. “And I shan’t let her do this to Ariel. Not a chance! We’ll get hold of just the right person somehow. There must be some one, just the right one. I’ll go to the agent—”
“You are a comfort, Hugh. Always! And we’ll find something for Ariel, something more appropriate, quite easily.” His mother wanted now to make up to Hugh for having been so unpleasant about Ariel the other night.
“Yesterday Joan and I put our heads together over it. So nice having her at home again! We are deliciously congenial, Hugh, in spite of our ages.”
She was not looking at her son, but she was intent on his reaction to this, all the same. She knew from Joan by now that Hugh had been rude to her,—left rather rudely, without saying good night, a party to which she had invited him. And Mrs. Weyman had felt that Joan hadcared, in spite of her laughter in the telling. So she had begun to hope that Joan was on the verge of “untangling her complexes” and surrendering to Hugh’s long devotion.
“Well, what did Joan suggest,—about Ariel, I mean? Does she by any chance know about Schwankovsky now? What he’s doing for Ariel?”
“Oh, yes. He told her. After you’d left his house so unceremoniously. She’s quite pleased. But her plan for Ariel has nothing to do with that. The exhibition’s not till May. Ariel has almost two months to get through somehow, you see. Joan says the big department stores pay living wages now. Some of them. One has to have, however, either a college education or some sort of personal pull, to be taken on, Joan says. Imagine, in a department store! But Joan can supply the pull, she’s sure. And even better, Joan thinks she’ll be able to get her into the American Girls’ Club to live. Joan’s one of the committeeanda trustee. Only twelve dollars a week for a good room, shared with one or two other girls, and breakfasts and dinners. Lunches they get near their work, I believe.”
Hugh was staring at his mother in a way that seemed odd to her. And now he took his watch up from where it had been lying beside his plate and put it into his pocket with a leisurely finality that seemed to indicate that time had ceased to matter to him and expresses might go their ways unnoticed.
“I didn’t know Joan was so keenly interested in Ariel’s affairs,” he murmured. “But Ariel’s my concern. Nobody else need bother.”
Mrs. Weyman shrugged, ever so slightly. She said, archly, “Don’t be obtuse, dear boy. Joan isn’t interested in Ariel for Ariel’s sake. How could she be! Who could be? It’s us, Joan’s concerned for. Me—and you. Aren’t you grateful?”
“And she thinks she can really get Ariel into the American Girls’ Club? But she can’t be certain of it, of course. Aren’t they pretty exclusive down there?”
Mrs. Weyman answered in all good faith. She did not dream how much at cross purposes they had gotten in the last few seconds, she and her son. “Yes. They have to be exclusive, of course. Or they’d be overrun with immigrants. But Ariel’s parents were both American citizens. And morally she’s all right,—what’s termed in those places, ‘A good girl.’ So I think Joan can manage it. She can manage most things, you know. I’ll let Ariel help with Grandam to-day—since Miss Peters really insists on going—and by to-night you’ll have found a suitable woman. But I’m afraid you’ll have to get a later train, Hugh, for I do need you to do the persuading with Grandam. She’ll listen to you. She’ll have to. Why, it wouldn’t be safe to let her depend on Ariel for care.”
Here Ariel returned. She stood in the doorway and almost burst into song in Hugh’s direction. “I can’t go into town with you after all!I’ve got a job.The job I told you about. And it’s already begun.”
Hugh went toward her. “Mother has just told me about it. Is it a job you really like, Ariel? Think you want to give it a try?”
Ariel treated those questions as humor. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she cried. “Oh, I’m the luckiest girl!”
Hugh appeared to be joining in her transports. Mrs. Weyman was astounded by the inexplicable right-about-face in Hugh’s attitude she saw taking place before her eyes.
He was actually saying “I congratulate you. I think you’ll see it through too,—be a grand nurse and companion, and be as independent as blazes right up to the day of your picture exhibition, Ariel. After that, we’ll see what next. But now it appears to be just a matter of marking time.”
Ariel was standing directly in morning sunlight, where it made a fan on the floor and laced the door jambs with light. Was she on her toes, just hovering? It was only for an instant, and might have been illusion caused by too much white sunlight, but to him she was a spirit dancing on winter air—as her father would see her, were he here in the Weyman dining room instead of way off in that dream loggia with the dream butterflies over the dream sea. Her body seemed elongated, taller with its upward lift. She was reaching out her arms, not toward the snowy air and the sky, however, but simply to take the coat and pocketbook which Hugh had picked up for her from the chair where she had tossed them before breakfast in readiness for train-catching.
All that Mrs. Weyman felt was that Ariel was pleased over having stolen a march on herself and Hugh. Then the unaccountable girl was gone.
“Aren’t you a little unreliable, Hugh? You appeared to agree with me that the whole thing was nonsense. Then, right on top of that, you congratulated Ariel! Are you or are you not going up to Grandam now and straighten her out as to what she can and can’t do.”
“I’d rather saynot. I think we can trust Grandam to go lightly with Ariel, though it is rather whimsical of her! Not so inappropriate though, once you get used to the idea. There’s something goddess-like about Grandam. So she can do with lovely service. And it’s better, worlds better, than Macy’s and the American Girls’ Club, all thanks to Joan just the same for her interest—in us.”
“You’re behaving weirdly! But Ariel won’t last with Grandam a week, so in the end it won’t matter. Anyway, now I can invite people to dinner without wondering what’s to be done with the child.”
Sunday. A gray dismal afternoon at Wild Acres. Mrs. Weyman was driving with friends to New York to hear a Philharmonic concert.
Suddenly Hugh, who had passed up the concert, put down the mystery story he had intended to substitute for it and went, three steps at a time, up to the attic apartment. He wanted society—Grandam’s and Ariel’s—and perhaps to sit down at Grandam’s piano and play the mists away from heart and mind. Yesterday, while he was lunching a man at the Waldorf, the orchestra had played something of César Franck’s which Hugh had never heard before. He thought he could remember bits of it, work them out for Grandam this afternoon. Hugh was musical in a temperamental, totally undisciplined way, and for years past he had played only for Grandam or himself. Not even his mother could persuade him. But, somehow, Ariel’s presence wouldn’t matter to him a bit, he knew. Or rather it would matter. The very thought of her listening made his fingers want the keys.
Wood smoke mingled with the smell of the violets which bloomed perpetually in the glass bowl by the daybed. This mixture of smells had lifelong association for Hugh. It meant understanding and an atmosphere of exquisite harmony between two human beings. Grandam was draped in a red shawl—the red of wild poppies in June fields—and lying in the long chair under the western windows. Ariel was kneeling on the floor by her side, and they were reading from a book resting on the arm of the chair, “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”
Ariel got up when Hugh came in. She looked strange to him, for a minute, because of a new frock she was wearing. It was the color of wood smoke, or dim violets. It was, Hugh thought, the mingled smell of violets and wood smoke run into color and form. It fell in soft pleats from a silver piping at the base of her throat, was gathered in at her waist by a silver cord, and from there, still thickly pleated, hung in dense thick chiffon folds down almost to her ankles. With it she was wearing the low-heeled silver slippers that went with her green evening frock, and silver stockings.
So Grandam had already dressed her serving-maid in these first days of her service. Hugh recognized the material instantly as having come from one of Grandam’s most notable scarfs, a great square of loveliness with which he had been familiar from boyhood.
“You’ve come to play, Hugh! Well, I wanted music. Ariel ought to run out and get the air. I’ve been working her rather hard.”
But Ariel cried, “Not a bit of it! It’s wonderful up here, Hugh!”
“Don’t I know! But have you been out of doors since you began the job? No? Well, then Grandam’s right and you’d better run along now. If you drove a car I’d offer you the roadster—” But he was disappointed, all the same. He really wanted her there, with himself and Grandam—and music. Then Rose knocked on Grandam’s door and interrupted their discussion of what Ariel’s outing should be. “A telephone for Mr. Weyman.”
While Ariel knelt again beside Grandam to finish “The Forsaken Merman,” he went down to his mother’s room to take the message on the extension telephone there. Joan was on the wire. And she surprised him by asking at once, “Is Ariel Clare still at Wild Acres with you, Hugh?”
“Yes. Of course.” Did she think she was at the American Girls’ Club or the Working Girls’ Home? he asked himself.
“She’s there now, this afternoon? All right. I’m bringing Michael over. He wants to see her.”
“Well, that will be all right. I’ll tell her.”
The receiver at the other end went up smartly. Thoughtfully, Hugh put his own instrument back on the table. What next? Well, it was quite in the course of things, he supposed, that Schwankovsky, having discovered from Frye or from Joan that the artist’s daughter was at Wild Acres, wanted to meet her. Hugh didn’t know why he had not thought of that probability when his mother at dinner had given him the information that Schwankovsky was week-ending at Holly. It was only Joan’s voice which puzzled him. So unnaturally crisp. Hugh didn’t believe for an instant that Joan was taking the trouble to keep up the pretense of being put out with him for his behavior at Schwankovsky’s the other night. But obviously she was put out about something.
“You want to discuss the exhibition with Ariel? She’ll be down in a minute.” Hugh shook hands with Michael Schwankovsky and lighted Joan’s cigarette for her.
“The exhibition! No, not at all. It’s already entirely arranged for, and will be a magnificent success. Mr. Frye has given mecarte blanche. It is the dancer I would see, not the lady who is to become rich from the sale. Yes, here to look with my own eyes on the soul of the paintings, the dancer herself. I palpitate for one glimpse of that spirit.... When you spoke to me of the exhibition, Mr. Weyman, at my house the other night, I did not know that the dancer was in this country, much less your guest. I knew nothing of your connection with the affair whatever. But can it be true? She is really here?” He turned in a full circle, his glance, his hands, sweeping the library with an amazed gesture. “In these bourgeois surroundings!Mon Dieu!But how is it done? Have you stuck a pin through her head, Mr. Weyman? Is she mounted on cardboard?”
Hugh chose to treat this, as he hoped it was intended, humorously. “Gregory Clare was my friend,” he explained what he had not been allowed a chance to explain at Schwankovsky’s house. “Naturally, I am delighted that you are interesting yourself in his work. But I do not quite understand why your enthusiasm should extend itself to his daughter whom you do not know.”
“Do not know!But remember that Idoknow the pictures! Ha!” The huge Russian snatched from his breast pocket a very small flat jade case, snapped it open, extracted a minute, orange-colored cigarette, which he stuck into a very long black holder, and began to smoke ferociously. Out of the astonishing clouds which at once began to drift from his quivering and expansive nostrils his voice growled and reverberated huskily.
“Can one see the pictures and not adore the dancer? But, I forget. You, Mr. Weyman, have seen the pictures, I understand, without allowing yourself to become at all disturbed by their beauty. You have even seen the painter himself. Seen him once plain! Alive! In the flesh! Even called him ‘Friend’! But from you who has ever heard a word of his great art? How is this? Ha! He had to wait and wait and wait until he was dying and a little trifler with art, this little Mr. Frye, came along and thought the paintings pretty. And it is this little dabbler, this no-account would-be painter, who consoles the dying genius, who promises that his life’s work shall be shown, shall be recognized. While you, who knew him for years—Joan says it has been many years—your part has been kindly, oh, so very, very kindly, to take his daughter, the divine child of his muse, and employ her as a servant in your household. But you may intend kindness. One never knows. The certainty is that you are blind. Your perception of beauty is dead or never existed.... I,—I have come to see the dancer.”
“Michael! You’re being outrageous. Hugh, he’s not responsible. Don’t even notice him. He sometimes gets this way.”
Joan was up, moving about restlessly. Suddenly she stopped, swung about, put a hand on Schwankovsky’s arm.
“Michael!” she spoke as to a sleepwalker, cautiously but firmly. “Wait till you see your dancer. You may find that all this excitement is sheer waste, that Hugh is right, and Ariel is quite ordinary. Besides, she isn’t exactly a servant here. You misunderstood me. She’s a companion-nurse. There’s quite a little difference.”
Schwankovsky shook off the quieting hand. “Companion-nurse!” he bellowed. “Good God!” Joan backed away from him, more disconcerted at his having ignored her hand than by his tone. Schwankovsky, seeing her expression, obviously made some effort to be more peaceful. “Forgive me, Joan, my dear. You see I forgot thatyouhad not yet seen the paintings. You’d know, if you had, what Mr. Weyman has no excuse for not knowing, that it is madness and folly to pretend that the dancer is a ‘companion-nurse.’ She simply isn’t anything of the sort. She’s the inspiration, soul, I can say it, of the greatest artist of our times. She’s the germinating force within the outward and visible expression of his art. And this force, thisImagination, inherent in all true art, has nowhere else that I know of ever taken form and showed itself through the actual medium—of paint, or music, or sculpture. So here we have the unique, the unheard-of. Imagination made visible! In Ariel, dancing.—But where is she? Why doesn’t she come?”
She was already there, in the doorway.
“Ha!” The Russian charged lumberingly upon her, and fell, kneeling, by her silver slippers. Grabbing up her hands he kissed them,—the palms, the backs. Hugh cried, but inaudibly, “Why doesn’t Ariel box his ears?” Joan languidly sank into a chair, lighting a fresh cigarette.
“Well, Ariel,” she drawled. “The bear there on the rug is Mr. Michael Schwankovsky. Allow me to present him.”
Schwankovsky bounded up,—turned on Joan. “A totally unnecessary waste of breath,” he expostulated, and seized Ariel’s hands again. “This divine child and I have known each other before the creation of the world. It was she who taught my soul the existence of form while it was yet chaos. ‘Ariel.’ Why did they name you that? It isn’t good enough. But then, you should be nameless. Thereisno name.”
Hugh asked of Joan in a low voice, with genuine concern, “Is it all right? Has he been drinking?”
Joan laughed, but mirthlessly. “Not a bit of it! He’s merely been a little put out with me lately, and this is the reaction. He couldn’t take it in why I hadn’t told him Ariel was here. But how could I dream he’d be interested? That it meant anything to him? And why, in heaven’s name, Hugh Weyman, didn’t you tell me that he had seen the Clare pictures and was exhibiting them? I don’t understand your secretiveness. It wasn’t like you. It was horrid.”
“But you were away. And I thought you knew, of course. I thought it was you yourself, Joan, who had got the old duffer interested. I was awfully grateful to you. I tried to tell youhowgrateful when we danced, remember? I went over there that night all primed to bless you, and thank you, for what I supposed, of course, you’d done.”
Joan looked away. She was pale, he noticed, and there were fine lines around her mouth and between her eyes. Nerves. But he had never before seen her destitute of the glow of complacency. It took him aback. “If only I had seen the pictures!” she murmured. “I would have talked them up to Michael. That goes without saying. He’d be the logical person, obviously. But you scarcely mentioned them, Hugh. And then Charlie Frye—the fact ofhimsponsoring them! That threw me off, naturally. How could I suspect that he’d stumbled on something really good? I was absolutely in the dark. And it was you who kept me there.”
“But I—” Hugh began. He was tempted to remind her how he had brought her “Noon,” the painting which Clare himself, dying, considered his masterpiece, and that she had laughed at it. But he did not want to distress her any more than she was already distressed, and so he hesitated and looked away toward Ariel.
She and the Russian were sitting facing each other on the little gilt sofa before the windows. They were in profile to the room, knee to knee. In fact, Ariel’s hands were palm upwards on the big man’s knees, while his own huge hairy hands held them there. Hugh had no excuse to interfere, for Ariel seemed contented. He caught words now and then from their hurried, eager talk:Gregory Clare...Clare...Father...Gregory...Genius...Studio...Beauty...Art...Color...Sunlight...Love...Shells...Life...Father...Shells...Wind...Death...Genius....
Joan smoked cigarettes rapidly, lighting one from another, as Anne sometimes smoked but Joan seldom, and flicked the ashes onto the rug by her chair, for Hugh had neglected to provide her with an ash tray. He remained, with head turned, listening, as she too was listening, to the rough, deep voice mingling with the flattened, clear tones, over by the windows.
“What are you thinking?” Joan asked suddenly, but softly. What she really meant was, “Why don’t you look at me? Listen for my voice, not Ariel’s? You are thinking about me, only me, aren’t you? It would be strange if you weren’t.”
Hugh answered her spoken question dryly. “Beauty and the beast! An obvious and unescapable thought, don’t you agree?”
“Hugh!” She barely moved her lips to whisper the name. But although scarcely breathed, it was heavy with intended significance. He turned to her like a shot. Their eyes met. Hers darkened under his gaze, and the eyelids drooped, while her lips softened, opening just perceptibly. It was the old call, more sudden and direct than usual, and more unexpected, given the time and the place,—but effective. Flame glared against the blackness in Hugh’s suddenly quenched mind. His heart began its obedient thundering gallop....
Came a crash! The grizzly over by the windows had suddenly sprung to his feet, turning over a small table in the act. A china box and a marble figurine lay smashed to bits on the polished floor. Both the marble and the box were cherished, valuable possessions of Mrs. Weyman’s; but Schwankovsky’s only apology was a shrug of his great shoulders and a humorous arching of bushy eyebrows in unwarranted surprise at the destruction. He came rushing toward Joan and Hugh, sweeping Ariel with him by a great arm. “She says one of the pictures is here, upstairs,” he roared. “A picture that Clare thought the best of them all! It’s up in Grannie’s room she says, old Grannie’s room in the attic! We forgive Mr. Weyman his unique absence of perceptions, perhaps—but you, Joan Nevin—You!” His scorn choked out his utterance.
“In Grandam’s room? Well, I haven’t seen it. I haven’t been up there for weeks,” Joan drawled, but her cheeks were dangerously flushed.
“But they’ve had it for years, Ariel says. And you have told me about this Grannie, my friend,—this old lady. You call on her frequently. More than once in five years, if I remember. So youmustknow this picture. And you never told me, your friend!” His hands were clawing his hair.
Hugh spoke soothingly, “It’s been in the store-room until recently. Ariel rescued it for us out of the attic. I’d put it there. So Joan hasn’t seen it—not hung in my grandmother’s room.”
He was giving Joan her way out, if she cared to take it. She could say now truly enough that she had never seen “Noon” hung, and in a good light.
But Joan did not take advantage of the way out Hugh had so carefully prepared for her vanity. And Schwankovsky grew stormier. “In the attic! You put this picture in the attic?Youdid? And you boast of it? Then, when Ariel finds it there, you very, very kindly let her hang it up in Grannie’s room? Wonderful! This is too wonderful! More and more wonderful, and still more so!”
Joan kept a silence which masked itself as amusement. As for Hugh, he nodded, but did not pretend to be entertained by the vaudeville sketch in bad manners which was being imposed upon them.
Let Schwankovsky think him the fool he pretended. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest. For Hugh had never, at any period in his life, and least of all at this minute, aspired to be considered “a man with taste” in any sense that Schwankovsky would credit. If he had married Joan she, like so many other American wives, would have had the responsibility for all that sort of thing. And for the past five years Hugh had come more and more to consider himself a business man with very little that was æsthetic in his make-up. He acknowledged to himself now that if to-day he should see “Noon” for the first time, there was a large likelihood that he would not even make a stab at coming to any opinion for himself as to whether it was good or bad. Certainly he would not be pierced to his soul by the white light—which, then, years ago, when he was young, had seemed to him to come from some esoteric birth of beauty behind the light itself. So he neither blamed Schwankovsky for his choking sputterings nor felt insulted. He had the grace to realize that five years ago he would even have been in sympathy with him.