“Yes.... I should stay away as long as I wished. Perhaps until the next spring. And even then I would not come home unless the pony would come with me. But he would come. He would come for a year.”
Persis interrupted, but calmly, not startlingly. “Where would he sleep, Nicky? Would he have to sleep with the horses in the stables?”
“Of course not. Not this pony. He would just walk up the back stairs, nights, not disturbing anybody. And mornings, long before anybody else is up, even before the servants are up, he will take me for long rides on his back, first through Wild Acres, jumping all the lowest trees and streams, and this wall, and then way beyond even Wild Acres. But Ariel will be awake. She will lean out of her window and call, ‘Whoa!’ I’ll pull him up, and we’ll say good morning to each other, and how did we sleep? When we go on Ariel’ll see us jump the sundial in the rose garden. But that will be nothing, quite a low jump, compared to some of the trees we take in our leaps. And during the day, Persis can sometimes go rides on him if she likes, so long as she’s careful that nobody sees him, and Alice, you can have him too, often. But Ariel can have him nights. When there’s starlight. And she’ll wear the hat with the green feather. And nobody but us four’ll know there is a pony. And that’s all.... Now it’s Ariel’s turn.”
When before, in Joan’s knowledge, had Nicky ever had a chance to say, “And that’s all”? She was pricked by a light remorse. Some time she must be patient, let him say his say through to her, his mother,—and for reward at the end, hear his “And that’s all,” like a little clear bell ringing benedictus through a tranquil world.
Ariel’s voice was pitched lower than Nicky’s, flat and clear. It had little carrying quality. But Joan was so close under the wall that she heard easily enough.
“I’ll look for a path first. Hunt all around in Wild Acres for the path.”
“A path! You! Are you sure, Ariel?” Nicky asked, surprised.
“Yes. But not a regular path. Not one we have ever seen in there yet. A path to take me to the inside of the inside of the woods, you see, really into faërie. Once there, in faërie, I won’t need a path, of course.”
Persis leaned forward and looked up into her brother’s face. “Do you see, Nicky,” she murmured. “A path to the inside of the inside, that’s what Ariel means. You’d need a path for that. It’s very hard to find it without.”
Nicky nodded, and Ariel continued. “The path, I think, will begin at a place where there are little white and yellow violets, where it’s thick with them. The violets will show me the path. But not with words. They haven’t voices, and if they had they wouldn’t use them, not at the beginning of the path, where everything is hush, stiller than stillest water, airy stillness. And I couldn’t see it with my eyes, either. They’ll have to tell me in another way, their own way, where it starts off, and I’ll have to understand without seeing or hearing, at first.”
“But you couldn’t,” Persis objected. “You’d have to see or hear to follow it. How would the violets tell you, if you can’t see it and they won’t speak and it’shush?”
Alice, the nurse, spoke up, surprising Joan immensely. “I know, Ariel. It’s funny about the first wildwood flowers in the spring. They do do that to you. And it’s the little white and yellow violets that do it hardest. They show you something, but something not to be seen or heard. They put a kind of glory over you....”
“Yes. Spring glory. I’ll push away some of last year’s brown leaves, brown, brown, wet, earth-smelling.... I’ll clear a place for the little white and yellow violets in the air, so they’ll stand out on the air, clear, pure.... Then I’ll find where the path starts. I think it will lead to—”
The children were “hush” themselves, following with Ariel where that path would lead. But Joan, taking no account of “hush,” put up a hand from her side of the wall and took hold of Persis’s blue skirt. “It’s a nice story, I know, ducks, but Miss Clare will finish it for you some other time perhaps. I want her to come up to the house and have tea with me now. And Alice, I don’t approve of the children sitting around quietly like this in the damp. It’s not summer yet. I want them to exercise. Get them to playing some game at once, or take them for a walk. I thought I had made it clear.”
Persis was the first to realize the bitterness of their sudden loss. She wailed, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Ariel, when will you finish? Will you come back? When will you show us the path? Will you dance for us in faërie when we get there? You do mean to take us with you, don’t you? I thought soon you would begin to dance. Oh, Ariel! Oh, dear!”
“Please come, Ariel. I’m famished for society. Besides, I’ve special things I want to talk about.”
Alice had hurried her charges down from the wall. But the children were walking away backwards, their longing eyes on Ariel. “We’ll look for the path next time,” she called after them, and it sounded to their ears like a promise of the sort that keeps itself. “And we’ll all dance in faërie. Good-by, Alice.”
“I don’t know about having tea,” Ariel looked down at Joan from the wall doubtfully. “I must be back by five—”
“Oh, that’s all right. We’ll have it now, early. Do come along.”
Joan pulled Ariel’s arm through her own, when she jumped down and stood beside her in Holly. Then she drew her, not entirely unresisting, up toward the house.
It had been mere impulse on Joan’s part, but now that for the first time in their acquaintance she was to have an hour alone with Ariel she would do what she so well had the power of doing, throw herself, the whole concentrated weight of her personality, into the contact,—put her own stamp upon the coin of the moment as Ariel had put hers, Joan rather rebelliously felt, on her contacts with Persis and Nicky. Now that the opportunity had practically imposed itself upon her, she was decided, once for all, to waste no more time about finding Ariel out. She would discover her charm. Or she would discover what passed for charm with Schwankovsky, ruthless where personalities were concerned: with Grandam, so ultra-fastidious: with Joan’s own children, whom until to-day she had thought rather typical neurotic American products. And even perhaps with Hugh, so undiscerning, except where she, Joan, was concerned.
She was not jealous of Ariel. How could she be? For Hugh, in particular, she knew that Ariel’s charm would never shadow her own,—knew it all the more surely since that recent drive to town when he had so unprecedentedly expressed his adoration for herself in articulate sentences. But all the same she felt it might be worth her while to explore this Ariel a little for herself. There must be something she had missed. Besides, she was bored. She had kept the afternoon free for a sun bath on her roof, and a new book on the latest developments in psychoanalysis which Doctor Steiner had urged on her. But the sun had been unbenignantly hot, and she had dressed and come out after less than ten minutes of it. As for the book, which she still carried in her hand, after all there was nothing very new in it.
Almost unconsciously she decided against having tea served on the terrace, the place she would naturally choose to-day if she were alone, but drew Ariel on toward one of the drawing-rooms. Out of doors Ariel might escape her divining. But against Joan’s own background, in the green and gold drawing-room which she had recently created with Brenda Loring’s assistance, with its sharp outlines and definite color combinations, Ariel must stand out, at least in bas-relief.
As they traversed the wide hall Joan told herself confidently, “It isn’t, anyway, mere youth that Ariel uses. At least, she can’t use it in competition with me.” For Joan had glanced at their contrasted reflections in several long mirrors as they passed through her hall, and in those clear reflections she found herself more vividly young than the girl by her side. She saw with something like relief the beautiful, clean line of her chin and throat, the lithe Diana-ish line of thigh and leg, the life radiating from her burnished hair, glowing brow, and lustrous brown eyes. Ariel’s youth, in comparison, was lusterless. Besides, Ariel had not that added, rather terrible attribute of the older and experienced woman, consciousness of her power and of how to use it.
Joan put Ariel into a formal, high-backed chair, facing a window, and herself sank into the low, luxurious corner of a sofa at right angles to the same window. A footman appeared—Joan had rung for him as they came in—and she ordered tea. “And we are in a hurry, please. I’m not at home to any one else.”
Then she gave her attention to Ariel. “You’re rather a dear to my babies.” She was looking at Ariel with an expression of affectionate gratitude. Joan’s charm was a weapon which she used as consciously and expertly as any master of fencing uses his sword. “They’re utterly devoted to you. I think some day soon I must invite you to have supper with them in the nursery. On Nicky’s birthday, perhaps. That’s Sunday. It would be such a treat to them that I imagine you’ll be willing. You do love children, don’t you! Any one can see.”
“I like Persis and Nicky, anyway. Very much. But whether Sunday I can get away for supper—”
“Well, it doesn’t have to be on the birthday, though that would be nicest. How about to-morrow? That’s your day off, anyway. And you know, of course, that Hugh has broken your engagement with Michael and me. So do make the children ecstatic to-morrow. Nursery tea is at five-thirty. I’ll let him have his birthday cake then.”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I should love to. But I’ve promised Hugh all to-morrow. We’re going off on a picnic in his car and won’t be back till after dark, I’m afraid. Too late for the nursery supper, anyway.”
Joan’s smile rather stiffened. “Yes? So that’s why he cried you off with us? Hugh was looking for a playmate for himself. But it’s unlike Hugh to be so uncandid. What have you done to him, Ariel?”
Ariel could not dream, and Joan herself was astonished, at how much she really wanted to know the true answer to this seemingly lightly asked question.
“No. It wasn’t that, I’m sure,” Ariel answered, too ingenuously, Joan thought, to be really ingenuous. “He’s not thinking of himself a bit. He’s worried about me. Says I’m tired. That I ought to be out of doors.”
“Sweet of him. And very self-sacrificing!” Joan was flippant, but there was something in those brilliant brown eyes—just glimpsed in them—that rather contradicted flippancy.
Tea came in at the moment. When the silver tray with its silver tea service and covered dishes was established between them on a table brought by a second footman, and the men had left the room, Joan sat on for some seconds, her hands clasped around her crossed knees, looking down absently at the food and not stirring to officiate as hostess.
But then she laughed abruptly, a delightful, crisp laugh, and drew a cup toward her. “Well, I’ve known Hugh Weyman many years longer than you have, you amusing girl. So you can’t tell me anything to surprise me about the lengths to which his altruism will take him, given a chance. He’s a martyr to every one, his mother, his grandmother, his brother and sister, and now I can very easily take your word for it, he is ready to play the heavy father to you. He thinks he was created to take care of people, poor dear. And if it comes to that, his Creator seems to think so too, by the burdens He has put on him. Cream? Lemon? Ah! When you are a middle-aged old dud like me, Ariel, you’ll take lemon and no sugar, thank you, just like that.”
She filled Ariel’s cup one third with cream, and added the two lumps of sugar which Ariel wanted. Then she passed across a dish of hot English muffins.
“A muffin too, and dripping with butter!” Joan murmured enviously. “My word, child! While I must content myself with a dry cracker.”
But Ariel, to Joan’s secret annoyance, showed no overt surprise that Joan’s beautiful figure needed any such disciplining. She ignored the opportunity for flattery and protested: “Hugh’s not playing father to me, not at all. He wouldn’t think of it, I’m sure. We’re very good, very wonderful friends, Mrs. Nevin.”
“Oh! Yes. Friends in a way! But that’s only a little of the story. I’ll take back the ‘heavy father,’ if you like, but only to change it for ‘grandfather.’ Hugh and I are pretty close, you see. So he has a way of confiding his joys and troubles to me. And I can tell you something about him you mayn’t have guessed in your rather brief acquaintance. It’s this: this guardian of yours is an extremely conventional person. He has almost great-grandfatherly ideas, in fact, of how young girls should—shouldn’t, rather—allow old men to pet them, for instance. The fact is, Ariel, it isn’t your physical health Hugh is concerned for. If it were, he wouldn’t let his grandmother work you like a slave, as anybody can see she is doing, would he? You do look dreadfully tired! It’s your manners and morals Hugh’s bashing himself about.”
Ariel said nothing. So Joan went on with it. “What I can’t make Hugh see, innocent dear that he is, is that all girls your age are like that now! Why, I suppose his own sister Anne isn’t so different. Petting may be as much a matter of course to her as brushing her teeth. But naturally I don’t drag Anne into things when discussing your situation with Hugh. I leave him to his illusions where his sister’s concerned. Why not! But with you it’s different. You’re not quite so vital to him—not so near home. Still, in spite of my most earnest defense of you, Ariel, the old dear wasn’t persuaded. He said he was going to arrange things so that you could have nothing to do with Michael from now on. And that’s the reason for the simple life and this picnic, and if you don’t call it grandfatherly, I do!”
This was hardly capturing Ariel’s admiration and affection as Joan had set out to do, nor was it a very successful method of sounding for Ariel’s own attractions. It was, of course, a mere baiting of the girl,—and cheap, really beneath her, Joan knew. But every instant since Ariel had told Joan about that picnic, when Ariel and Hugh were to be alone together until “after dark, I’m afraid,” Joan had forgotten her original direction and purpose in this tête-à-tête. If by using a pin and scratching or pricking Ariel’s smooth, silvery flesh, she could have drawn forth the secret of Ariel’s attraction for Hugh, she would happily have taken that trouble; but for any ways more devious of accomplishing the end, she simply couldn’t be bothered. She would exert herself now only to wound. Yet she thought that Ariel was escaping from even her malice, running through her very fingers as it were,—melting away on a background of light and air, for all that she had taken such pains about putting four walls around her.
As a matter of fact, Ariel had not escaped from Joan at all. She was there in that formal, straight chair, all of her there, cold, and shut up like a stone. It was quite a minute of silence before she asked, “Why shouldn’t I see Michael Schwankovsky? What do you and what does Hugh mean?”
She was looking at the frosted cakes on a Wedgwood plate as she asked this, and Joan thought, “She’d take one if I’d pass it. She’s thinking about cake like any greedy schoolgirl. Why am I spending time and attention like this on a mere chrysalis! If she’s to grow wings some day, be a woman worth even annoying, that day’s far off.”
“Why shouldn’t you see Michael? But you should, my dear. In fact, if he’s to go on with this exhibition of your father’s work, you must. It is only Hugh who thinks you shouldn’t. Though Hugh’s enough to spoil the chances for the exhibition, if he begins interfering.”
“I simply don’t understand, Mrs. Nevin,—what you are trying to say.”
Trying to say!She! Joan! Well, just for that Joan would say it.
“Simply this. Hugh’s merely decided that if you’re the sort of girl it’s so easy to be affectionate with, you aren’t safe with a person of Michael Schwankovsky’s temperament. Anybody can see that Michael can’t keep his hands off you, and that you would be sorry if he could. But I told Hugh that it might come to more than petting. Suppose Michael’s actually thinking of marriage, Ariel!”
Ariel put her cup down on the table and stood up. “Marry Michael Schwankovsky!” she exclaimed—anger giving place to shock. “Why, he’s old enough to be my grandfather!” She looked down at Joan, and grew still again, but this time it was not a stony stillness. It was just sudden natural relaxation. “You have misunderstood Hugh,” she affirmed. “You’re as far off about him as you are about Michael. And they were both of them friends of yours long before I ever knew them. So it’s strange you can make these mistakes.” She said it in all simplicity and went on, more relaxed and at peace with every word she uttered, “I’m very fond of Michael Schwankovsky and very grateful to him. He believes in the pictures. I’d love him just for that. But I love him for himself. He means more to me than any one else living except Doctor Hazzard and Hugh. And he’d no more think of wanting to marry me than Doctor Hazzard would think of it. And Doctor Hazzard’s a grandfather with eight grandchildren. So you see.
“And you’ve made just as strange a mistake about Hugh too. Hugh’s very fond of me. And he’d never, never talk about me unkindly. I know he wouldn’t. He doesn’t know how to hide things, anyway. His eyes tell you what he thinks. And he’s never thought any hateful thoughts about me.Only very good thoughts!Dear thoughts!”
Joan looked up at Ariel, after a pause. “You do reassure me,” she murmured. “For when the time comes that I stand in a position of second parent to you, as it were, along with Hugh, Ishouldhate to have him always fussing, and I do assure you I’d be on your side, not his, anyway.”
“A second parent to me? You mean a mother?” Ariel laughed, a rather interesting laugh to Joan because of the hint of wildness in it; but she held her languid pose in the corner of the couch, while her guest stood.
“Mrs. Nevin, you’re a little too young to be my mother, aren’t you, just as dear Michael is much too old to be my lover! Hugh doesn’t stand in the relation to me, either, that you imply. He’s not a guardian, or anything like that. We are dear friends, as I told you. And now that I’ve got my job, he isn’t even my host. You’re all mixed up.”
Ariel turned toward the window, which was open, in one swift motion of flight. But she did not fly. She was civilized. She would say a proper good-by to her hostess and depart with dignity by the door. Joan stood up, with slightly delayed protests. Ariel heard her own voice asking a question that she did not want to ask, but it was as uncontrollable as her first motion of flight had been. “Mrs. Nevin, are you engaged to Hugh? Were you meaning that too?”
Joan restrained a smile, butobviouslyrestrained it. “No, dear child,” she replied. “But I have a refusal. If you know what that means. It’s a term used largely in real estate, I believe. Must you go?”
“I hope I’m not hurrying you!” Joan and Ariel turned in surprise toward the unexpected voice. Prescott Enderly had come in soundlessly, and was just at Ariel’s elbow.
Joan exclaimed, “But how did you get here like this, unannounced? I’m not at home. Where’s Parks? And what are you doing away from college?”
“One word answers them all,” Enderly replied. “Spring! Parks must be out somewhere watching the tulips grow. Anyway, the door was unguarded. In the spring nothing goes according to pattern, even your housekeeping, Joan.”
Joan gave him her hand. He had nodded at Ariel and she at him. Ariel was seeing him as the person who had caused Anne all that anguish. His sea-blue eyes, crinkled now with a forced smile, the lines in his cheeks that just escaped being dimples and gave sympathy to his face, his eager sensitive body, his full, sensuous but sensitive lips,—these she was seeing with Anne’s eyes. But he was shockingly white. The man was simply beside himself, she felt, with some deep emotion.
Joan was a bit short with him. “I wasn’t meaning to see any one to-day,” she said. “I’m even dining alone to-night. But yes—you may stay. You’ve come so far. I’d rather you called first on the telephone, however. Surprises always put me off a little. Do they you, Ariel? Some people they do.”
“Joan, you are wonderful not to turn me out. But I’d have come, even if there was only one chance in ten thousand of your seeing me. If I’d called on the telephone, there wasn’t even that chance, I felt. You are a saint to put up with me.”
They seemed hardly aware when Ariel said her polite say about the tea Joan had given her and departed. She might have used the window after all and no one noticed. From the door she glanced back and saw them on the sofa, Enderly bent forward, holding both of Mrs. Nevin’s hands in his, his eyes blue sea fire, his face still paper white. Neither of them was speaking.
In her short cut home through the woods, no white and yellow violets gave to Ariel’s eyes or feet a path into faërie. She had lost faërie for that day, lost it to quite a bewildering degree.
The morning of the Gregory Clare exhibition Hugh was waked by the clangor of birds in Wild Acres woods. The window by Hugh’s bed held the view like a picture frame. Sleepily, he thought it a pity they couldn’t hang this in the exhibition. It was quite in the Gregory Clare manner. But something was missing from it. The painter’s daughter. Where would he, Hugh, put her, if he were the painter? There at the right, where the sunlight was silvery in the tops of the giant beech, her head not quite level with the highest branch, standing still on the breathless, silvery-green-gold air.
Hugh was to meet his mother in town for lunch and be with her at the New Texas Galleries in time for the opening of the doors. Joan had offered to drive Ariel in directly after lunch, and get her there in good time for the opening also. That was kind of Joan. Remembering and appreciating this kindness of Joan’s was Hugh’s first thought of her this morning. He noticed, just in passing, this surprising fact. When before had he ever been awake for any length of time without thinking of Joan! And now she had come only in connection with Ariel and the exhibition. Certainly to sail coolly into town in Joan’s open roadster would be far better for Ariel than traveling in alone on the stuffy local. It promised, already, to be a very warm day. Hugh regretted, however, that Grandam had not taken his suggestion of sending Ariel in for lunch with his mother and himself. She might be devoted to Ariel, but working her to death was a strange way of showing it. Ariel had been very quiet as to what she felt about this great day herself; but Hugh knew it to be one of the most exciting and exhilarating days of her life.
He lay down again. It was very early, just past dawn. He half imagined, half dreamed himself waiting for Ariel in the little anteroom of the galleries, her arrival, pale with excitement, and his rising to steady her and share in her feelings of elation and joy. Taking her arm through his and holding her hand steadily and firmly under his elbow against his side, they mixed with the crowd which was genuflecting and chattering before her father’s genius.
No one would guess that the inconspicuous girl on the arm of the inconspicuous, rather typical New York business man was the dancer of the pictures. Least of all would any one, now or ever, know that Hugh had given to the painter his first taste of practical appreciation in buying “Noon” for one thousand dollars. It would be delightful, masquerading with Ariel like this, sharing alone in all that crowd their secrets. For some reason his mother, Schwankovsky, Charlie Frye, even Joan herself, did not enter into this early morning daydream. But Hugh did not miss them. In fact, they would have spoiled the point, the reason of its creation, which was his isolation with Ariel in her first great happiness.
He went up to the attic as soon as he had had his breakfast. Grandam and Ariel had been awake and dressed since the crack of dawn. Grandam was as stirred as Ariel about the significance of the day, and it occurred to Hugh that that was why she had wanted to keep Ariel with her until the last possible minute. She, too, had her daydream of sharing happiness with the dear girl. She was lying in her long chair at the edge of the almost too warm sunshine which fell through the open tall window. Ariel was just finishing turning the night bed into a daybed. She placed the last silver pillow as Hugh came in.
“Noon” was gone from the mantel, but the whole room had taken on its atmosphere. It seemed that in vanishing it had left its very glamour and light behind. And it had left the dancer. She was there with a shallow dish of hepaticas in her hand, a dish that might have been a wide sea shell, reaching up to place it on the mantel. In an ivory silk blouse, opened at the throat, and a clinging green skirt, her hair a wave of light on her neck—and the identical light of the spring morning in her eyes and at the corners of her uptilted lips, she was the dancer glorified.
Hugh had a swift sense as he entered that Ariel, Grandam and the room were all aswim in the clear light that was Gregory Clare’s imagination: that he was seeing them as they existed only in Gregory Clare’s heart, not in his, Hugh Weyman’s, dull life. For the moment he knew that his friend was not dead, that Ariel was still his care, and still moved through his imagination, the dancer. Almost jealously Hugh came forward, tried to enter and be where Ariel was, in that realm of imagination and light.
And he did not entirely fail. For the few minutes he stayed in Grandam’s apartment the world was fresh and life was winged.
There was a crush in the anteroom of the exhibition when Hugh and his mother arrived. Schwankovsky had promised them this would be so, and Hugh’s daydream had previsioned it. Although they had made a point of being ten minutes early, the room was already full of curious and eager men and women, and the three elevators in the hall of the building were steadily discharging more groups of crowding humanity to add to the discomfort.
There was no question of Hugh finding a chair for his mother while they waited that ten minutes. They were lucky, they felt, in having and retaining standing room. As the day had turned out to be an unseasonably hot day, far more like August at its hottest than mid-May, the room was almost unbearably close.
Very soon Mrs. Weyman murmured, “Really, Hugh, I shan’t be able to stay. I’d rather go out and return to-morrow after the first rush. After all, what is the advantage in being among the first in the stampede for this show?”
“Oh, do stick it if you can, darling,” Hugh urged. “I’ll find you some ice-water. Will that help?” He himself was only stimulated to a kind of elation by the heat and the pressing crowd.
“Of course it will help. But you’re the only person I know, Hugh, who would so confidently promise ice-water in these circumstances. And the nice part of it is that I know you’ll manage it somehow. You’re awfully satisfactory, dear boy.”
He grinned down at her his appreciation of her appreciation, patted her arm, and vanished like a genie. When he returned through the envious crowd, steadying a paper cup filled to the brim with ice-water, he found that Schwankovsky, against all the laws of physics, had made a place for his great bulk in the room somehow, and was towering above Mrs. Weyman, talking down at the top of her smart spring hat.
“Warm?” he was booming. “Why, I hadn’t thought so. Hadn’t noticed. Those pictures in there are more on my mind than the weather. They’re going to take you by storm, I promise. You never saw sunlight in paint before, on canvas. It’s epoch-making. You’ll see. It almost blinds you, this Clare sunlight does.”
Mrs. Weyman shuddered prettily, and gratefully took the drink from Hugh’s hands. “But didn’t he paint any shade?” she asked. “If not, I absolutely shall not risk it.”
“Pooh! You wouldn’t miss it for the world. But where’s my Ariel? I thought she was with you, Weyman. She must be here when the doors are opened.”
Hugh was annoyed. He felt it very important for Ariel’s peace of mind and her enjoyment of the victory—if the exhibition was to prove a victory—that she should be unrecognized, and he expected Schwankovsky to think of this and be a little careful.
“Joan’s driving Ariel in. They’ll be here any minute,” he replied in as low a voice as he could use and still be heard.
But the minute hand on the face of Schwankovsky’s absurd little platinum wristwatch moved on under his anxious gaze, and proved Hugh wrong. Schwankovsky waited five minutes beyond the announced time of the opening for Joan and Ariel to make their appearance before, with a disappointed grunt, he gave the sign to Charlie Frye to slide back the big doors.
“I’ll wait here for them,” Hugh told his mother. “You go on in, though. It’ll be cooler there.”
It was very much cooler. The gallery where the Clare pictures were hung was a huge room covering nearly half a block, and the crowds which had choked the anteroom, Hugh could observe through the great open doors, were mere driblets of humanity almost lost in the expanse of floor space.
He pushed a chair to an open window, where he would find air to breathe if there was any, and composed himself, outwardly, to wait. People continued to arrive by the elevators, and even some undaunted and impatient ones by the stairs. They hesitated in the anteroom to secure their catalogues from Charlie Frye, who was officiating at the desk there, and passed quickly on into the gallery, where a babble, as the minutes passed, was rising gradually higher and higher, with Schwankovsky’s big voice forever cresting it.
Hugh spent his time between watching the door for the appearance of the girls and studying the catalogue which Charlie Frye had, unsolicited, thrust into his hands. It was a good-looking catalogue, engraved on creamy, thick paper.
“The Shell” ... “Tree in the Sun” ... “Reef” ... “Under the Rock.” ...
Gradually he worked down the list of two hundred odd titles. And although he knew that the dancer appeared in them all, in no title was she mentioned. He was vastly relieved by this fact. But then his eye caught something it had missed. “212. Sketch for the Dancer.” He remembered Schwankovsky’s mention of this sketch and he was chilled. Schwankovsky had said that life without it would be unthinkable, or something as exaggerated.
A finger of shadow fell on “212. Sketch for the Dancer.” Hugh sprang to his feet, for he was aware of Joan, and had a sense that she had been standing beside him for some appreciable seconds before she made the stir that flung the shadow. She gave him her hand. He took it warmly, but instantly looked beyond her for Ariel. “Where is she?”
If his question had been a slap in Joan’s face a more scarlet stain would not have whipped her cheeks. She looked at Hugh with astonishment too profound to hide. But he missed it, still looking for Ariel. Others, however, were not so unobservant. Art-lovers passing through the anteroom into the gallery turned their heads, and even paused to look again at the tall, very beautiful woman who appeared so gloriously angry. Meanwhile, she controlled her voice, if not her blazing eyes, and explained about Ariel.
“She isn’t coming. Your grandmother was taken ill, one of her attacks. In the middle of the morning. The servants got Doctor Bradshaw at once, and he brought a nurse. Ariel, in the excitement, I suppose, forgot to call me and explain. So when I went for her she merely came downstairs and told me about it. I offered to stay in her place and let Amos drive her in. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t stay long enough even to give me the essential details to bring to you. So I insisted on seeing Doctor Bradshaw. He assured me that the danger was quite past, for this time. He said, too, that Ariel was not needed now, and could come into the exhibition of her father’s paintings as well as not. I gathered that the poor child in her anxiety had been and was still being a trifle officious and that both doctor and nurse would be glad to have her out of it. But she was stronger than any of us.—Now I’m killed, sir, in all this heat, and without a glass of water or anything. Your messenger may fall dead at any moment. Smiling though, in the heroic manner.”
Hugh did not rally to her humor.
“My dear, you’ll let me take your car, won’t you, and go right out there? Schwankovsky or somebody will send you home. Where did you leave it?”
She shook her head. “No. Sorry. But you know I never let any one, even you, drive my car. You haven’t been into the gallery yet? You must come in with me for a few minutes, and then I’ll drive you out myself, if you insist. I assure you Doctor Bradshaw’s not a bit worried, and for this time the danger to your grandmother is past. But seriously, first I must cool my throat. Is there water anywhere?”
Michael Schwankovsky, catching sight of them, barged down into their path, insisting that they produce his Ariel. When he learned that she was not coming at all to-day, he appeared to be desolated. He took his beard in his hands and declared it was too bitter. But the next instant he was dragging Joan and Hugh forward to point out for them with exuberant joy the canvases that pleased him most.
“Here’s one,” he bellowed. “That ought to be called, ‘The Dancer.’ But we left Clare’s own titles, of course. This is the painting for which he made the sketch, ‘The Dancer.’”
It was one of the newer pictures, since Hugh’s visit to Bermuda. And it must, in fact, be comparatively recent, for there was Ariel as she was now. It might be a portrait of her, for here, as in not one of the other paintings, she was the theme. The foreground was a line of tide on a beach of silver sand. The misty, dewy light said early morning. The dancer had taken a shell from the fingers of the incoming tide, and she was straightening from having reached for it. She held it before her with extended arms, her fingers curling its outward edges, and her expression of face and body was all of delight and gratitude. The moist wind bent her hair back from brow and neck. It bent her violet tunic back against knees and breasts. And for the first time, here in a painting, Hugh was consciously aware, with an odd pang of recognition, of what he had seen only half-consciously before,—the beautiful and naïve shape of her eyelids.
“Well, she’s not dancing!” He heard Joan’s voice as if from a great way off, although in reality she was close by his side. “Why, Michael, do you want to call it ‘The Dancer’?”
“Oh, but my friend! Isn’t it plain? She has just found this shell in the foam, brought to her by the tide. She is the soul of this fragile, drifting shell. Or the shell is her soul. God knows which is which, but one is true. All that one does know is that those two hands with those so deliciously curling fingers will lift the iridescent thing higher and higher, as her figure comes more and more erect. Finally, with it held as high as her hands can reach above her head, she will dance, looking up at it. Slowly. A religious dance of gratitude. It is my Ariel. And she dances gratitude. Gratitude to God Himself for the gift of her soul and for life.”
Joan laughed. “Oh, Michael! You aren’t talking art. That’s mystical mush.”
“Perhaps!” Schwankovsky agreed with good humor. “Probably, in fact. But my Ariel, even in pictures, has a way of turning me into a mystical mush. She is so sweet.”
“Horrible! Please spare my sensibilities, and the sensibilities of the two or three hundred people who are listening to you,” Joan murmured nervously, for at times being about with Michael Schwankovsky publicly was embarrassing,—yes, even when as now he was the sole patron of an exhibition, and every one knew he was the famous Michael Schwankovsky.
Hugh said in a low but emphatic voice, “Schwankovsky! I want to buy this picture. It’s here in the catalogue as ‘The Shell.’ Do I arrange it with you or Frye?”
But Schwankovsky hummed, deep in his throat. “Um ... Ah ... Um ... This one, Weyman, we’ve given a rather high figure. I did that, meaning to get it myself. However, when you take it up with Frye—he’s the business manager—say I waive my claim, if, hearing the price, you still want it. No sales are being made until the end of the exhibition, but people are speaking ahead, of course. The sketch for this painting, let me tell you, nobody could get for love or money. It’s mine. It’s really finer than the painting. There’s an exquisiteness, almost supernatural, that is lost in the paint. And the foot and leg, the turn of that bared shoulder—it’s spiritually ravishing. But if you can afford to own ‘The Shell,’ Weyman, you needn’t worry. It’s the pick of all the paintings—except for ‘Noon.’ That’s—”
He broke off in disgust, suddenly remembering “Noon’s” history, and Hugh’s connection with it.
“If Frye lets ‘The Shell’ go to you, he’d better see that a contract goes with it, stating explicitly that you’ll not hang it in your attic or your cellar. Come to think of it, Weyman, you’re probably an art sadist!” He turned on Joan. “Would that be possible? You know all about morbid psychology. Do some men like to torment artists as others like to torment women?”
Joan shrugged this away. And Hugh was too genuinely moved by the painting before him, and by his underlying anxiety for his grandmother, to speculate which Schwankovsky thought himself, humorous or insulting. Joan took Hugh’s arm and said impatiently, but her impatience was directed toward Michael Schwankovsky, “Hugh! It’s getting dreadfully close! Let’s look at the ‘Studio’ Michael’s giving me, and dash off. How will your mother get home? We must find her and tell her about your grandmother.”
“You will come back to-morrow and all the days, I trust,” Schwankovsky commanded them both. “And please take my devoted respects to Mrs. Weyman. The first minute she will see me I shall beg the privilege. But she knows this. She’s agreed to send me word when next I may have that felicity. And give my Ariel my fondest love, fondest kisses, and describe for her the crowds and the enthusiasm. Our success is already apparent. Not? But you look tired, Joan, my girl! It is the heat. Insist on driving, Weyman. She has no business to be your chauffeur, looking like that!”
When they were down on the Avenue, walking toward the spot where Joan, by bribing a policeman pretty heavily, had been able to park only half a block from the galleries, Hugh urged, “Do let me drive, Joan. Schwankovsky’s right. The heat has got you. I won’t strip the gears, or anything.”
But Joan autocratically rejected the idea. “It will be cooler the minute we are out of this ghastly city,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had Amos put down the top if I’d realized what a blazing day it is. But we won’t even stop to get it up now. Only I don’t want to worry you, Hugh. You will tell me if I go too fast?”
Hugh, however, very justly and at all times admired Joan’s driving, and to-day was no exception. It occurred to him, as they won out of traffic at last to the open road, where speed was not only possible but safe, that she would like to frighten him by her use of the accelerator,—that she wanted him to think her unduly reckless. But he knew, instinctively, that she would not for an instant endanger her beautiful body and rich life. So her passenger was safe. This was not a matter of skiing, where their interests were separated.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, snatching a glance at his profile.
He could scarcely tell her the truth, that he was seeing her, and for the first time, as a woman who would never under any circumstances be capable of living dangerously: that she might encourage it in others, but never if it involved herself. Besides, he imagined that he was still in love with her, and so he let the sudden unflattering perception slip from the foreground of his mind even as she asked her question. He said, what in truth had been very much in his heart all the time, “It’s a shame Ariel missed the opening. Did she seem dreadfully disappointed? Or was she too upset by Grandam’s attack to realize?”
“I don’t think she realized. Imagination isn’t exactly Ariel’s long suit, is it? And of course, she was upset about your grandmother. Pain isn’t ever pretty—’specially to the young.”
“Her father died that way. Did you know? So it would be all the worse. Poor girl!”
Joan gripped the wheel. “Now I’m going to make time,” she warned. “Watch out for motor police, please. Your Ariel’s not a ‘poor girl’ at all. A supremely lucky one. In one day, without any merit or effort of her own, she’s become financially independent and perhaps even famous too. The next question, though, is: will the dear public ever grasp the fact that Gregory Clare idealized his model beyond conception? Or will they think her beautiful and talented, hypnotized by the suggestions of the press and Michael Schwankovsky’s ravings? What will they do to her? Pay her a fabulous fortune for showing herself to them in the talkies, or go by the thousands to see her walk around in front of velvet curtains, waving her arms above her head and kneeling now and then—an æsthetic dancer? What’s your guess, Hugh?”
Hugh was some time before even trying to answer the cool and slightly weary voice of his interlocutor. When he did speak, finally, he too sounded slightly weary. “Personally, I don’t see why the public should bother about Ariel at all. But you and Brenda Loring seem to take it for granted that they will, so I’m wrong probably. It’s rather up to us, isn’t it, to protect her from cheap publicity. It’s in Schwankovsky’s power, I’m sure. Will you speak to him, Joan?”
Joan shook her head. “Schwankovsky happens to be hypnotized by the ways Gregory Clare found of putting light on canvas. But some other just as good critics are going to be even more hypnotized by how a great artist has been able to take one single model and by changing her postures make of her a whole symphony of the dance, a kaleidoscopic vision of the possibilities of beauty in movement of the feminine form.... If only Ariel had the beauty that Clare has imagined and created there! But she simply hasn’t any quality which will justify the free publicity she’ll be getting from all this.
“So I think shewillneed protection. Butours, Hugh, not Schwankovsky’s. Whatever Michael’s talents are, protecting’s not one of them. I should think we’d be agreed on that, you and I. No, it’s up to us, if you think she’s worth the bother. And you do, I know. You’ve been a darling from the very first about this girl. You are the protector supreme, my dear. It’s quite your character! Would you be pleased if I helped a little, took her off your hands? I might even invite her to Switzerland with me next month. Would that help?”
Hugh knew at once that it would help, immensely. What better could happen to Ariel this summer than that a woman like Joan should take her in hand, travel with her? And wasn’t it very wonderful of Joan? Mightn’t Hugh take hope and heart from the fact that Joan was at last identifying her interests with his own in this sudden and generous way?