But although he did not really mind Schwankovsky’s rage at himself, some unhappiness was clawing at his inner consciousness, some psychic pain, unlocated. Was it Joan’s cool, smiling silence? Joan could and should be defending him against this hot-tempered friend of hers, he realized. If she began to, he would hush her up, of course; but she was not even starting.... But perhaps it wasn’t Joan. He didn’t think itwas. Was it Ariel? That Ariel should be looking at him as she was now! Her hand lay on Schwankovsky’s mammoth arm, the fingers clutched and lost in his great fingers. That was a little sickening to Hugh. But it was her face, its expression, which actually stabbed. Had Schwankovsky succeeded in making Ariel believe what was, indeed, the truth—that Hugh had failed her father?
And what did Joan expect him to do in reply to these taunts from her friend, anyway? And why didn’t Joan laugh out loud, instead of smiling that way? But it was Ariel who kept the drama melodramatic. She turned on Joan.
“Why do you let your friends misunderstand each other so?” she cried. “Why don’t you stop being amused and set Mr. Schwankovsky straight about Hugh? Hugh liked ‘Noon’ the best of all the pictures Father had done when he was in Bermuda. And heboughtit. He named his own price, andpaidit.One thousand dollars.Hugh had four thousand dollars a year to spend then. Father knew that. And Father thought it splendid that a man would spend one fourth of his income on a picture. But no one goes after beauty for himself or wants it that way. It’s for his friends as much as himself. Hugh only put ‘Noon’ in the attic because it reminded him that he couldn’t share it or anything else that was real to him with you, Mrs. Nevin. No one wants to be reminded of things like that about any one he loves. Love is more important than art, isn’t it!”
Joan assumed the appearance of looking through Ariel as through clear glass—something that might not be there at all—but the amusement on her lips and in her eyes turned genuine. She spoke only to Schwankovsky and as if both Hugh and Ariel had suddenly vanished. “I’m wild to see this picture, now that you tell me of it, Michael. And don’t be cut up about finding it in the grandmother’s apartment. If it weren’t rather fine she wouldn’t let it remain an instant. She has taste. Let’s go up this minute. I’m thrilled. Ariel has been misinformed, you can see.”
Hugh stopped them. “I’ll have to get Grandam’s permission, of course. Joan knows she’s rather strong on etiquette, and that one has to be announced.”
But Ariel again asserted herself: “Grandam said I might take Mr. Schwankovsky up. She knew he’d want to see ‘Noon.’ And then, if she can have Mrs. Nevin too, I’ll come down and say so.”
When Hugh and Joan were left alone he said, by way of saying something in the face of her disconcerting, aloof silence, “Grandam is devoted to Ariel. She’d let her do anything she asked, I think.”
“She’s dressed her up, I notice. Quite touching of your grandmother to be so interested, don’t you think? I do. She’s playing a game with Ariel, I imagine. Recreating a raw personality. Even a frock like that can’t work miracles though, and Grandam must know it in her heart. But life must be getting rather dull for her.”
“Life is never dull for Grandam. At least, to me, she always seems to be living at a higher rate of vibration than the rest of us.” He smiled at an idea which leapt in his mind. “Do you know, to me, she’s something like babies are, under two years at any rate, growing while they sleep, while your back’s turned, changing like anything, every minute. Think how marvelously quickly they learn terribly deep and obscure things! what words mean, for instance, and cause and effect, and all! Grandam is still like that,—simply rushing along into new perceptions of Life. You and I have slowed down long ago. We feel and experience. But do we change? I don’t, much. Not consciously, anyway. But she’s simply absorbed and exhilarated with her processes of change! She’s—”
But Joan had turned away and was groping for a cigarette in the silver box on the mantel above the fire, with her back to Hugh. “Oh, come! That’s enough about your grandmother. This box is empty, drat it! I need a cigarette.”
“I’ll get some from the library,” he offered, and was gone. As he went, Joan turned about and looked after his back, astounded. She had thought him almost at her shoulder—and now he was gone, like that. When he returned she was nonchalantly settled on the gilt sofa. She waved away the cigarette she had said she wanted. “I’ve smoked too much to-day,” she murmured. “Much too much. I’d like to give it up altogether. It’s become so usual, and it never was exactly a beautiful performance, a woman smoking!”
Hugh lighted a cigarette for himself and sat down a little ways off.
“It’s rather sweet the way Ariel defended you just now,” Joan commented absently. “Like a little guinea hen over its chick. And her startling aphorisms!Love is more important than art—and—No one goes after beauty for himself. Now, I ask you!”
But suddenly Joan dropped that note and began talking seriously about Prescott Enderly. She smoothed out the fingers of her gloves as she went on, looking from Hugh to them, from them to Hugh. And as the gloves got smoothed, so her face. Under Hugh’s eyes it bloomed again, gradually, with its wonted complacency.
It amused her, she told him, when very young men fell in love with her these days. Men older than herself—sometimes even very much older—she had come to consider more worthy game. When they were interesting at all they had had time, you see, to become just that much more interesting. Michael, for instance! He was over sixty. He looked much younger, of course. But “Who’s Who” said sixty-two. It was Prescott Enderly, however, she wanted to discuss with Hugh. The boy had become, almost over night, something of a problem. She laughed.
“After all, middle-aged people one needn’t worry about, no matter how desperately infatuated they appear to themselves. One notices they don’t kill themselves for love. It’s only the very young who have the vitality to be tragic. Don’t you agree, Hugh? If I weren’t so really fond of your young novelist friend, I’d be diverted. He’s very dramatic.”
“This is quite new to me,” Hugh told her, as uncomfortably as she could wish. “I thought Enderly was Anne’s beau. Didn’t know you ever saw him, in fact, until that night here.—It was Ariel’s first night with us, remember?”
Ariel’s first night! Joan came near to starting, as much at the voice as at the words themselves. It had beenJoan’sfirst night, if you like, back from her winter away, but here was Hugh identifying it by Ariel’s coming to Wild Acres! And in that rich, low, reminiscent voice!
“Yes, that was the night I met Enderly,” she agreed. “But I’ve seen him since, you know. Quite a lot. Didn’t I tell you that I got Mrs. Allison to invite him to her house party in Philadelphia? He was there, very much so, from Friday to Monday. How he gets away with it at Yale I can’t say. And he’s at Holly now. He’s reading me all he’s got done of the new novel to-night. Pris Larkin, by the way, is week-ending too, and your particular friend, Brenda Loring. So come over for supper, if you like. Brenda will bless me if you do—” She glanced up at the clock. “They’ll be expecting us back for tea soon now! Whatever’s keeping Michael up there all this time? It’s almost half an hour I’ve been boring you with my conquests. Whatiskeeping Michael?”
“The picture, I should suppose. And getting acquainted with Grandam. Of course, he’s never met any one like her before. You mustn’t mind her not sending down for us. Schwankovsky in himself must be as taxing as a dozen people.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.” But she got up, restlessly, and wandered, Hugh following her, into the library. There she dropped down on the piano bench and commenced to play some Debussy. Hugh leaned on the piano and watched her hands. They were as strong as they were beautiful. She asked, above the music, “Why is Michael putting himself to such trouble to annoy me, do you suppose? It’s simply silly of you, my dear, to suggest your grandmother as my rival.”
“Well, there’s Ariel too! He didn’t appear to be exactly indifferent to Ariel....”
Joan’s playing gained in subtility of interpretation. “It’s funny, Hugh, but poor old Michael is madly jealous of Enderly. Last night he was quite boorish about it. And Pressy understood the situation perfectly. It was rather delicious, watching, but disgraceful of Michael, all the same. In some ways Prescott is more sophisticated than Michael. In spite of his background and youth. Perhaps the really sophisticated mind is an accident, like genius, and can appear out of nowhere.... Michael’s jealousy, though, does flatter the boy. How could it not! A man likethatjealous ofhim!... And now, you see, Michael thinks he’s paying me out....” She dropped her hands from the keys.
“Come on,” she cried, jumping up. “I’ve duties to my other guests. So I shall have to gratify Michael to the extent of using violence to drag him home with me, I suppose. Unless he’s to walk, and he’s not so good at walking as you are, Hugh dear!”
Hugh could only go with her. He could hardly insist that Grandam, who had kept the noisy, ranting Schwankovsky with her for almost an hour, was not up to saying “good afternoon and good-by” to an old acquaintance like Joan.
But Joan was disconcerted almost to the point of awkwardness when they discovered Schwankovsky in the middle of tea with Grandam and Ariel, and looking as if he would like nothing better than to stay on all the afternoon.
Ariel, as they came in, was kneeling up straight at one side of the hearth, toasting a big slice of graham bread which in its very size and thickness proclaimed it had been ordered by Schwankovsky for himself. At the other side of the hearth, at Grandam’s knee, he crouched, waiting for it, like some giant Tartar on a cushion. Her scarf, falling from a shoulder, trailed down the giant’s back, and he had drawn the end across a great knee. It was bright in the firelight, very bright and vital. Ariel’s face was pure silver, and her eyes emerald green against the flames.
When Grandam saw the new arrivals she leaned farther back in the long chair and shut her eyes for an instant. Hugh said with quick concern, “You are getting too tired! We don’t want tea, Joan and I. Hers is waiting for her at home, along with a house full of guests who are expecting her and Mr. Schwankovsky back for it.”
“Well, you will let Michael Schwankovsky finish his fourth cup here, won’t you, Joan? Now he’s begun it? Do sit down, both of you. Ariel, please pass the sweets to Joan and Hugh. There’s cheese, Michael Schwankovsky, in that jar, if you like it on graham toast. Hugh, get a cup for yourself from the tray.”
Hugh preferred to smoke,—but nothing less than a pipe this time, for he felt Joan’s strain and confusion; and his well-worn, smooth and beautiful meerschaum at least gave a superficial air of peace to the gathering.
Joan sat looking over Grandam’s head to the western windows. She observed, with something like exasperation, that even out there, far, far in the western sky, the red-violet light of the clearing evening was turning the very heavens into a mere extension of Grandam’s apartment. In the smell of browning toast, the firelight, the laughter, Ariel’s silver slippers coming and going in Grandam’s hospitality, the smoke from Hugh’s meerschaum, and the shadows dancing on its bowl, she refused to take pleasure.
But Schwankovsky would not let her stay out of it whether she felt at home or not. He sprang to his feet, seized her by the elbows, pulled her up, and walked her backwards, away from the fireplace into the center of Grandam’s room. “You haven’t looked at ‘Noon’!” he shouted. “My Ariel was right. It is the jewel of them all. I admit it. Clare didn’t go beyond that even in ‘The Shell.’
“But I wonder if it is well, my friend, that you are seeing the best first! To lead up to it gradually might put less strain upon one’s understanding of what the artist intends. What do you think of it? Speak! Say, my friend!”
His excitement, as he watched Joan studying the picture through narrowed eyes, was childlike in its eager expectancy. But it was a full minute before she gave him any satisfaction. Then she merely said, with what appeared to be a quiet sincerity, “Yes. It isgood. What do you suppose he used to get that tone in the white? Yet I don’t quite see the point of the introduction of the figure. I’m distressed for the unity, Michael.”
“No, no, no, no. See! It is like this—” The big man was off on a technical exposition of a new, a more subtle idea of unity, as discovered and used by Gregory Clare. “As for the way he got that white—well, Charlie Frye has told me in the most particular detail how Clare mixed his paints,—but only God knows how he moved the brush to get such effects!
“But you do not expand, Joan!” he halted his dissertation to expostulate. “You are not convinced?” Hugh was afraid that the Russian might burst into tears.
“Oh, yes. I am convinced that here we have something really important!” Joan admitted.
“Ha! Youdo.” He rubbed his hands. “Well, that is enough! All that I expect from anybody for the next hundred years or so. After that, we shall see! But there will be those, my friend, who will not admit even so much. You are aware of the stupidity abounding, particularly here in your New York. I should like to keep those stupid ones alive a few centuries, though, just to show them up to themselves. They are going to insist how the work of this painter is sentimental because of his insistence on the introduction of the dancer. Clare sentimental! A man who paints rocks like that, sees them like that! It is obvious that he is as hard as the rocks he paints. Spiritually hard and firm, a chiseled-out soul. Sound, through and through, andformed! Sentimental? Pff! But we will speak only technicalities, my friend, when they begin that rumpus. We will answer them with cold technicalities in their own jargon—for even there we will have them. And a hundred years from now, they’ll be groveling, eating from our hands, as it were. Not?”
Joan replied nothing, but went on viewing the painting from various angles.
“I shall buy you one, Joan,” Schwankovsky promised her. “Not an oil, perhaps. What you want of the finished work you will choose and invest in, yourself. At the exhibition. There I would not influence you. But there’s a sketch of the dancer you’d value. But no. That I must have myself. Life would be unthinkable, lacking it! Ha! There’s a pencil drawing of the studio itself. It is beautiful. It has a perfection. And when one realizes that the artist lived there all his painting years, and the dancer with him, it becomes too poignant. Perhaps I shall give you that one, Joan. It will ravish you. You will see!”
All the while Hugh was studying Joan, with narrowed eyes, much as she was studying “Noon.” He did not question her sincerity in praising the work at which she had shrugged once. That one grew in appreciation as well as in accomplishment he knew very well. But he saw that she was still disturbed, even angry, although she sought to hide it. Hugh’s problem was: was Joan angry with him or Ariel or her friend, Schwankovsky, or with herself? He came to the conclusion that she was angry with herself, and for the first time in his life he felt a motion of pity toward this woman he loved. He wanted to say to her: “Don’t be angry because you have grown big enough to grasp Gregory Clare’s essential spirit. Be glad, darling! No one blames you for changing. I have nothing to forgive you in this.”
Ah! Until this minute pity and magnanimity had been the elements lacking in his tormenting love for Joan. Pray God now that nothing more of poignancy be added to it until he died!
Before he could be torn from Grandam, “Noon” and the attic where he had found an atmosphere which was an amazement and a delight to him, Michael Schwankovsky took Ariel straight into his arms and kissed her forehead and her lips. “We are friends, my child,” he informed her and the world at large, “for eternity.”
And Hugh saw, somewhat against his will, that Ariel liked Schwankovsky very much, and that his caresses neither surprised nor embarrassed her.
To-morrow, Saturday, Ariel (contrary to Mrs. Weyman’s predictions) would have held her job and given satisfaction for something over a week, and she was to have a holiday. Grandam had decided that one entire day free, rather than the two afternoons which had been Miss Peters’, would afford Ariel more of a break and give her a chance to begin getting acquainted with New York. Having a job now and money of her own, she could go ahead at this without loss of pride.
Ariel was finishing getting Grandam to bed for the night. It was nearly midnight. “I don’t really like leaving you to-morrow,” she was protesting. “If Mrs. Ridelle doesn’t show up in the morning I shan’t be sorry.”
“But she always does. She never fails. And you are to get right out and away the minute we have had breakfast. You’re free until midnight. Don’t even come in to say good night to me. It’s a totally free day. I want it that way. My only word of advice is, wear both your slippers home when you do come, and be in bed at the stroke of twelve. But your overshoes will secure the slippers.—This is probably the last snowfall we’ll have this year.” The soft thud of big flakes sounded constantly on the glass of the panes at the back of the faintly flowered curtains. The sound was lovely to Ariel. It was whiteness and stillness made sensible.
But there came almost the same soft thud on the door, as Ariel was about to pull back the curtains, open the windows and let in the snowy night. “I can’t imagine,” Grandam murmured. “But go see.”
Ariel opened the door into the brightly lighted attic hall. Nothing there. She stepped out, feeling eerie. Then she saw who had knocked. It was Anne Weyman, in hat and coat just as she had come from the station, pressed back against the wall, out of sight of Grandam’s bed. In the glaring overhead light she looked ghastly. “Ariel Clare,” she whispered, “I’ve got to see you. How soon can you sneak down to my room? No one but Rose knows I’m home, and I don’t want they should. Rose said you were up here!”
“I can’t come down at all,” Ariel whispered back. “I have to keep in touch with Grandam’s bell, you see. I’m in Miss Peters’ place. Did you know? But go on into my bedroom and I’ll be there in a minute. Or don’t you want to speak to Grandam first?”
“No. Absolutely. Don’t tell her I’m here, or anything. Only hurry.”
Ariel shut the door and returned to her final night duties. “It’s something for me. Very important,” she told Grandam. “But I can’t tell you. You don’t mind?”
Grandam let her finish and go off to her own room without a single question, or even any show of surprise; she was a person wise in her incuriosities. Going, Ariel shut all the doors between herself and Grandam. The electric bell in the side of Grandam’s bed made that reasonably safe, and in any case it was always done.
Anne was lying across Ariel’s bed, still in her coat though her hat had been thrown on the floor, sobbing. Ariel sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to get her attention, but the wild sobbing only increased. She knew nothing farther to do but to lie down beside her, throw an arm tight around her, bulky fur coat and all, and press her cheek to the burning, drenched one. She had never heard any one cry like this or felt such convulsions of sobbing through a body. But her pity was more potent than her surprise and shyness, and she pressed closer and closer, holding Anne with a steady arm.
Then, gradually, as though quelled by that slender arm which was so persistent in its steadiness and the cool cheek pressed against her own, Anne’s sobbing began to die away, the convulsions to lessen, to stop altogether. After several minutes of comparative quiet Anne disengaged herself from Ariel’s clasp and sat up. The rouge on her cheeks, if there had been any, was soaked away. She was white, like a Pierrot, in spite of all her weeping. When she began speaking, the natural huskiness of her voice was roughened by past sobs into a raspingness hardly human.
“See here, Ariel! I’ve been thinking about you, coming toward you, wanting to get to you, hours and hours. Not any girl at Smith. Not Mother. Nobody but you, Ariel! You are the only one who can help me and keep me from killing myself.”
Ariel took Anne’s words literally and believed them. She knew that Anne was here for her to save from death. Why she was the one who had to do it, didn’t matter. It might be, however, for the simple reason that she herself was simple enough and real enough to be able to believe in the stark danger which threatened Anne before it had been demonstrated by fulfillment.
Tears were streaming down Anne’s face, but she made no more noise of crying and seemed unaware of the continuing flood. So Ariel took her own handkerchief and wiped them as they came, while Anne stared into nothingness. Now the minute had come when Ariel was to have it out with Death on Anne’s account. Anne was moved away, out of the conflict. Thus the blind stare, the stopped sobbing. And Ariel knew Death when she was faced with it. Hadn’t she gotten thoroughly acquainted with its presence in the studio that last week with her father, while it waited around to make its final attack? And here it was, back again. Strong and stark as before. However, there was some difference between Ariel’s two meetings with the dark wings. Before, they had hovered down slowly, with every assurance of finding a resting place in the studio, and been content to stir and rustle from corner to corner, waiting their time. But to-night they were not so sure of their prey, and not being sure, were insistent, beating, angry.
Ariel could not pretend to ignore them; but she took both of Anne’s hands in her own hands,—the hands that Doctor Hazzard had found so firm after her first Death encounter. They were every bit as firm now. Anne felt without doubt the strength that the doctor had felt. “What is the matter, Anne? Tell me?”
The haggard dark eyes made an effort, focused on Ariel’s face. Then went blank again. And in their blank-dark Ariel saw—was it a wild beating of black wings? “Look at me!” she cried. “Anne Weyman, stop staring like that. You’ve got to tell me what is the matter.”
Anne reacted, as if she were under hypnosis, which in fact she was. The wings beat back and away in the depths of the brown eyes. “It’s Prescott,” she said. “He’s ended with me.”
“What do you mean? What has happened? Go on. Tell me.” This was forced confidence, in all conscience, and well for Anne that Ariel had no compunction about that. Indeed, she no more hesitated in compelling Anne’s confidence at this minute than she would have hesitated to knock a child, in danger of drowning, unconscious in order to save it. But the command in Ariel’s voice knocked Anne into consciousness, not out of it. She began at once telling Ariel, coherently and with detail, everything.
“Last year,” the ragged parrot-voice croaked out, “I made up my mind to be like other girls. I didn’t see why I wasn’t popular in the way they were—with men, I mean. I wanted so much to be. My roommate—and she’s my best friend, too—said it was because I was prudish. You can’t beprudishif you want invitations to fraternity dances and things. Patty told me how she worked it. She said she’d begun herself by not being very keen on necking, but it grew on you. So she got a few dates for me through her dates, and I went ahead, trying her plan out. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t pretend well enough. And then, of course, the dates didn’t repeat. I didn’t much mind, for if popularity came that way it wasn’t worth the price, I’d learned, you see. So I went in for Drama instead, and compensated by trying to make my dent acting. And I got quite happy again. Patty and I sort of drifted apart. But giving up the ambition to be popular was like coming out of prison and I could bear even losing Patty.
“Then all of a sudden, Ariel, the whole works went bang.... Because I met Prescott. And I had to laugh. For how can you really let a man kiss you so it counts, until you’re really and truly crazy for him to kiss you? I ask you?”
This last was no mere slang phrase. Anne was seriously asking Ariel. And Ariel replied sharply, “You can’t, of course. That’s the whole secret; anybody knows.”
Anne laughed, if one could call it laughter. It was neither sob nor speech, at any rate. And went on. “There’s something tremendous about wanting to be kissed like that. You don’t know whether it’s pain or bliss. It’s both, I guess, full up to the brim of your heart, really.... When he touched my hand, even by accident, it was like the world coming to an end. I thought I’d die of it. And it seemed to be like that with him too.
“Patty said I was coming along,—for I’d won back her respect again, attracting a man like Prescott. She warned me to be careful, though. But there has never been any danger. It was Prescott who was careful. So far as I was concerned he could have had anything he wanted of me. Why not? After kisses like that?
“But it didn’t affecthimthat way I guess. Just his loving me as much as he did was bliss. And I didn’t want him to want to marry me, after he explained to me his point of view on marriage and I had read ‘Stephen’s Fall,’ and all. It wouldn’t have been Prescott, you see, married stodgily to a nice girl! I was glad he was just himself and I wasproudthat he could tell me frankly just how much he didn’t care for me as well as how much he did, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Ariel agreed. “I do know. Loving a person doesn’t mean wanting to change them, even if changing them would only mean their being able to love you better. You love them because they are the way they are....”
“Yes. And listen.—The last two days of vacation here, Prescott was different. Toward me, I mean. If he could manage it, he wasn’t alone with me. He’d stick around Glenn or you, or Mother. Any one! And he went for one walk all alone. Pretended he didn’t know I was waiting for him with my things on in the library. Just slipped out without my knowledge.
“I thought it was you that had changed him, Ariel. Imagine! But then he did keep saying how graceful you are and what lovely hair you’ve got. And that last morning when he went to sleep in the library—remember? That morning I wassurethat he was crazy about you.
“I was pretty dumb not to see that it was Joan Nevin all the time, from the first minute he saw her!
“When he got back to New Haven, after his visit here, he didn’t write. He’d written every day for months. I nearly went insane watching for mail. I wrote him at first, pretending everything was the same. But when he wouldn’t answer, I began calling him up on long distance. He was always out—they said. I sent telegrams too. I hadn’t any pride. Or I’d have it one hour, decide I’d let eternal silence on my part show him how indifferent I was, and the nextminute, almost, I was calling long distance again. It was wild, but I didn’t seem to have any will. Then, to-day, I couldn’t stand it. Ihadto see him if he was never going to answer the telephone, never write. So I cut all my classes and went to New Haven. I’d gone to classes right along. Even studied. Patty never guessed anything, right in the room with me! I didn’t cry, not once. Till you came in just now.
“I went right from the train to Prescott’s dorm. And I met him coming out of the street door. I had meant to go right up to his room, unless somebody stopped me. But there he was—like Fate. He took me away from the college into the town to an awful, dirty little eating place, miles away. It seemed miles. And all the time he talked. He said I was crazy and he despised me for chasing him like that. He’d made love to dozens of girls and got through with them. But not one of them had ever done a crazy thing like coming to his dormitory and trying to throw a scene. Girls of my sort understood how much necking meant with a man, andhow little. If they didn’t, he’d written a book, to help them to, hadn’t he! If a man of his sort wanted something more serious than necking, he didn’t usually take it with the sisters of his best friends. Or with my kind of girl at all. He thought I’d understood that. I’d pretended to understand, he said.
“And he talked like anything against Mother—sneered—kept saying that in inviting him to visit us she’d tacitly admitted that she expected me to be able to take care of myself. Or hadn’t she believed in the sincerity of ‘Stephen’s Fall’? She had read it, hadn’t she? Well, then—and so on! He said that she, Mother, expected to have her cake and eat it too. That she didn’t think straight.
“He said it had come to him here at Wild Acres that in spite of Mother’s and my stupidity, he didn’t want to go on fooling along with his best friend’s sister any longer.
“I grabbed his hands. We were in the tearoom. They were building a house out of matches. He has marvelous hands, do you remember? Just looking at them stops your heart,—my heart. He pulled them away, and there mine lay, flat, on the tablecloth. I looked at them and looked at them. They seemed to have dropped off from my arms and be just lying there, you know.
“He wouldn’t even look at me any more. His face was all twisted—snarly. Loathing me. I left my hands on the table and said over and over, ‘I love you. I love you. What has Glenn got to do with it? Or Mother? I’ll take all the responsibility. You’re afraid, that’s what’s the matter. You’re afraid of Glenn. And Mother. Afraid.’
“He got even angrier. He said, ‘Be quiet. Glenn Weyman’s friendship means more to me than necking with a dozen girls like you, or a hundred. How couldn’t it! He has a mind I respect. He’s a person. A contemporary I value. He means something in my life and always will, I hope. And of course, I’m not afraid of him. He isn’t the sort to let me down because I’ve kissed his sister a few times without matrimonial intentions. Not Glenn. Hugh’s in that class, perhaps. Hugh might raise a rumpus, even now, when we haven’t done anything. So what if wehad? Doesn’t that scareyou?’
“He said he didn’t suppose I was capable of understanding how much more real satisfaction it was to him to spend his time with a person like Glenn than to waste it dabbling for hours with me on the edge of aslough of sentimentality tainted with sensuality. The economical and fastidious thing, he said, was for him to take his intellectual companionship where he could find it, with fellows like Glenn, and when he wanted a girl he’d do what Stephen did before he lost his soul and married the nice daughter of his president.... Yes, Ariel. He said that.
“He said, ‘If I ever do fall romantically in love, it would have to be with a developed personality, a real woman. Some one who has a life of her own, and to whom our passion would be just an incident of that life, not a fulfillment.Some one like Mrs. Nevin.’
“Then I knew. It was Joan had done it all to him. Some of the very things he had said, she had said first, and he was just quoting. Iknew....
“He took a bill out of his pocketbook and pushed it all mussed up into my hand. ‘You pay. I’m going,’ he said. I was dizzy. He hated even to look at me. He got up and walked out of the tearoom. I hadn’t poured the tea. The toast hadn’t been uncovered. I put the money down on my plate and walked out too. Walking to the door was like walking in the dark. I couldn’t see. Felt my way among the chairs. But when I got into the street the faintness went. I must have run, for I caught up with Prescott down the block. I took his arm. He jumped as if a leper had come and taken his arm, almost off the curb. But I got his hand. He hit me then, I think, and started to run. Whether there were other people on the street or not, I don’t know. Must have been, though. After a while, I saw a taxi driver looking at me funnily. He was drawn up by the curb. He said, ‘Buck up. It’s a great life, kid, if you don’t weaken.’ He was fine. I liked him. He took me to the station.
“I bought a ticket for Northampton. But I was really headed for the Connecticut. I was crazy to get down to a place I know—a place he and I had often been—where the water is deep, and I could slide off into the blackness under the ice. I didn’t think of Mother or Glenn or Hugh or Grandam or Patty or any one. I didn’t even think about death. I only wanted to slip off under the ice.
“But sometime, after a long time, you came, Ariel, like a picture on the air. You, and your green feather! I remembered how you had lost your father. I’d never taken it in before, but I did then, on the train. You had lost him and I had lost Prescott. And then for the first time I knew that I was crazy, and that my wanting to get into the black water was part of the craziness. But your green feather was not part of it. It was the other direction, away from craziness. I don’t understand about that. But it was the Connecticut for me, or to go where the green feather was.
“So I came home on the first train. And now the craziness has gone.... Every word I’ve said to you, Ariel, has been driving it away. Just looking at you drives it away. But I don’t see where your feather comes in, do you? Is it still on your hat? Safe in the closet? There’s something—deep—about that, that I don’t see....”
Again Ariel wiped the tears from Anne’s face; for although she had come back into occupation of her mentality, she was still almost beyond physical sensation, and did not even know she was crying.
“Let’s say our prayers,” Ariel said. “That’s all we can do. I don’t understand about the green feather any more than you. But God is in it somewhere—and my darling father, for it’s father’s feather. Persis and Nicky think it’s a magic feather—but I guess there’s something better than magic about it now.... Deeper ... though wedon’tunderstand.”
They knelt beside the bed.
Anne was waked by Ariel putting the breakfast tray down on the bed beside her.
“Hello. It’s morning. This is my day off, Anne, and I’m going for a long walk up towards Scarborough. If you want to slip out with me and walk too, nobody would know, it’s so early, and then you could get back to college this afternoon, couldn’t you? Want to do that?”
“But when did you get up? Have you had your breakfast? You’re a good bedfellow, Ariel. You didn’t stir all night.”
“Well, neither did you, or I wasn’t awake to know if you did. I had breakfast with Grandam. But I haven’t told her that you’re here, since you asked me not to. Rose maneuvered this tray for me. She’s a good sport, isn’t she! Grandam is too. She must wonder who came to the door last night.”
“You’re a good sport yourself now that we’re on the subject, Ariel. A darned good one.... Many thanks.”
It was still snowing. But one couldn’t believe in the reality of it, somehow: April was so close behind. This was a mere flurry in her face, ephemeral. The whole landscape was ablow with snow clusters, like flowers, like the flowers on Grandam’s curtains masking the night from her room. So this flower-blowing-curtain shut out spring.
Why Anne was pushing her way through this dream of snow blobs, shoulder to shoulder with Ariel, on a tramp up the Post Road, she hardly knew. It was Ariel’s will that was motivating her, perhaps. She felt that Ariel’s will—or somebody’s, not her own anyway—had steered even her dreams last night. And hadn’t Ariel undressed her, and brushed her hair and put her to bed like a baby? Anne thought that she had. And she was still giving the same sort of service.
For the first hour, or more, the girls scarcely spoke. Anne did at one time call, “Wait a minute, Ariel. I’ve got snow in my ankle.” And Ariel, who had not noticed that Anne had dropped back, turned and retraced her steps to her.
And soon after that Ariel had exclaimed, “There’s a wood road! Look how the boughs are tangled over it. It’s like a white cloister! Where do you suppose it goes?” They had followed it, thrilled, up hill through woods until it ended in a high meadow of trackless snow. It may have disappointed Ariel, that snow meadow, after the mysterious woods, but it brought a kind of psychic relief to Anne. Its bare expanse simplified her, was the last touch to Ariel’s own simplifying influence. Silently, with something of the snow’s own silence, they returned to the road and trudged on and on, like two sturdy ponies.
Anne began to be aware that with every increase of weariness to her trudging legs and feet a bit of mental misery petered out, got dropped off. Her mind, after a while, even began to function again. Since the moment when Prescott had struck her—and run away from her on the New Haven street, her mind had played almost no part in her actions, at least her conscious mind hadn’t. As she went on beside silent Ariel, suddenly, unaccountably, she recalled an incident of one of her summers at the shore. She was at the extreme outer edge of a dock when a sloop emerged from thick fog before her very face, as if it had taken its form and motion from the mists themselves. And now it seemed to her that her thoughts—the vehicle, that is, that made up her thought-feeling-self—was such a sloop, sailing toward her out of a foggy nothingness, coming clear, taking shape. But then there must be something else, something detached from self, that could see self returning—and indeed, something for self to return to. Any instant now the two would merge. The sloop would slide alongside the dock, and self would step into self. And when she did join this self, taking form and moving swiftly upon her now after absence, would she lose the present sense of detachment? Would she be whole again—less of self-consciousness and more of self?
But by now physical weariness had increased to a point which seemed final. If she dragged her feet another step forward through the sticky snow her legs would snap off at the hips. She came to a dead halt, too exhausted even to get onto the side of the road out of the path of possible motors. “Ariel!” she called. “I’m done up. Now what do you want? What’s next?”
Anne’s tone and the words themselves sounded hopeless, and certainly her physical self was hopeless. But in the instant of giving in to sheer physical defeat she had also given in to an eerie kind of delight of the spirit. She knew that good was coming, coming, coming, creaming up toward her from every side into a surf of light in her heart.
Ariel turned back to her. “I’m tired too,” she confessed. “How far have we come, do you suppose? Where are we?”
“A hundred miles or so, and we can’t be any distance at all from Scarborough, if it’s still on the map and not taking a holiday. If we can win on to that burg we can get a snack to eat and then catch a local to New York. But why aren’t there any automobiles out? Too thick a storm? If we could get picked up! What was exactly your idea, anyway, in this form of recreation, Ariel? I’m just begun to get brains enough to inquire into it.”
“I don’t know, myself,” Ariel murmured. “Only, after last night, you know, I had to walk, run, or swim. It was the only way to—to uncoil it from me. Let’s start on and pray for a motor to come along, a kind one.”
But very soon they got their second wind. Their legs still felt that they might break off at hip or knee, but this had gradually become only an interesting sensation, for their bodies as units began to discount the thousands of separate fatigue messages sent by separate nerves and had grown beautifully light. The girls were moving ahead now—on, on, on, with no need to whip up their wills. If they should learn that they must walk on like this until night they would not rebel. And they began talking as freely as without effort they walked.
“I know what you mean about uncoiling it—all that last night’s stuff,” Anne exclaimed. “Every step uncoils me. But I feel, Ariel, as if my feet must leave a trail of slimy sticky awfulness behind me in the snow. Only why should you need to uncoil, Ariel? You weren’t going to slide down into the dark water to slip out under the ice.Youhadn’t separated from yourself.”
“No. But you’d always horrified me a little. I felt that you were trapped in some dangerous, dreadful way, when I first saw you. And last night it all got real for me. It’s more than as if you’d told me, Anne. It’s as if I’d been in your trap with you and had wanted to die too—and all. I can’t explain myself. But it’s all uncoiling now, every step we take, and the snow is blotting it up. Don’t you feel it?”
“Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware ofyouat all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.”
“Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated.
“Ariel! Have you ever been in love?”
“Yes. As much as you....”
“As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?”