But oddly enough, he took neither hope nor heart. His heart, in fact, instead of responding joyously, had set up a lonely, almost sullen thud. He did not want Ariel to go to Switzerland, next month,—even with Joan.
As he was not responding to her wildly generous suggestion, Joan after a minute of waiting began talking fast, for her, and nervously. “Did you notice that in all these pictures Clare takes great care to paint Ariel turned away—or if her face is there, he blurs it with light, or throws a shadow across it, or bends it down. It seems that he wasn’t so oblivious of the limitations of his model, then, doesn’t it? Her face, at least, never touched his imagination. There’s a whole theme for a tragic novel in that! The tragedy of an artist,—His muse, full face, is not beautiful. Rather subtle, that! Too subtle for you, Hugh, I’m afraid. But it quite thrills me. Some day I may write it. It would be big, profound.... Do you remember, Hugh, how you said that Ariel made no impression on you in Bermuda? How shadowy she was?”
“Did I? Yes, I know I did. Well, she was like some figure in a dream, so absolutelyquiet. But surely you are wrong about Clare. He was more aware than a stupid Philistine like me could ever be. He got itall. Have you forgotten ‘The Shell’? That is his portrait of Ariel.”
“And do you think her beautiful there?” Joan asked, genuinely surprised. “Those narrow, greenish eyes! The thin, sharp lips!”
“I know. No. She isn’t beautiful by any special standards. But did you notice her eyelids in that painting? They are astonishingly beautiful, byanystandards.... Their pure corners ... petals ... And her hair....”
“Hugh! You aren’t convinced! You do think her as beautiful every bit as Michael does? Is it seeing her in all those pictures this afternoon that’s made you? You’ve said all along—”
Hugh laughed constrainedly. “This is nonsense. We’re babbling along like two schoolgirls about another girl! But I do admit and know that of course Ariel Clare is not a beautiful or even a pretty girl.... All the same, Beauty itselfhasher, possesses her. Now you, Joan, dear, have Beauty. You possess It. Do you see the distinction? It’s a real one.”
“No. Indeed I don’t. Hugh, you are maddening. Are you paying me a compliment in this new and inimitably mystical way of talking, or are you laughing at me?”
Hugh put his arm along the seat at Joan’s back. “You’re the most beautiful girl this poor mortal has ever seen or dreamed of, Joan my dear. You know that, and God help me. Let’s forget Ariel.”
“Let’s forget Ariel. Let’s forget Ariel. Let’s forget Ariel.” The words were merely an echo of a thin high cry that had arisen days ago in his heart.
Imperceptibly but very actually Joan’s strong white hand relaxed on the glossy wheel. Hugh thought, “Her driving is superb. But I do hope she keeps up the speed and doesn’t slow down again. If she does keep it up we’ll be there soon, soon....”
And Joan, though happily unconscious that she was doing so, gratified his unspoken desire. She drove where it was absolutely safe to do so at an almost terrific speed, and she did not speak again until she let Hugh out at his door.
In a minute Hugh was standing in the hot attic hallway, among the bowls and jars of flowers which had been swept with the rest of Grandam’s personality out of her room. Under his feet, where his haste had almost broken it, was the wide, shell-like dish of hepaticas he had watched Ariel put up on the mantel long, long ago, that morning.
He opened the door of the attic apartment cautiously, without knocking. As twice before when Grandam had had these heart attacks, her personality had fled the room and left it amazingly bare, even barren. The daybed was there by the long open window, white and stark, no violet and silver cushions left to its adornment,—and on it, straight between white sheets, propped high on white pillows, Grandam lay unstirring. Ariel sat in a chair on the far side of the bed, facing the door, hands folded in her lap. There was something in her posture and utter stillness that said she had been thus immobile a long while.
Hugh came as near to the daybed as he dared. Even then Ariel did not look up. She was intent on Grandam’s sleeping face. He noticed how tiny gold freckles stood out on her cheeks and nose, freckles that the silvery tone of her skin generally concealed but which were shown up now by pallor. Her hair, as in “The Shell,” was bent back from her temples,—only now by the air of Death, not of the sea, Hugh thought. And to him, still under the power and beauty of “The Shell,” she seemed a figure watching at the edge of the tide of death, wondering how high it would come, how close to her watching eyes, her folded hands.
Grandam was sleeping with apparent comfort and tranquillity, her face, airily and delicately mysterious, a face that in its elusive quality had somehow escaped all the marks of the usual human experiences—old age, fear, and now even Death.
Hugh ever since he was grown up, and much more since his father’s death, had realized Grandam’s uniqueness. Her only son, Hugh’s father, had been her last great love left to her, but when he went Grandam had remained as now, elusive of suffering. It was when his father died, or soon after, that Grandam gave herself away to Hugh in confidences, and ever since the already close bond of sympathy between them had been closer.
She had reminded Hugh that she had married a man twenty years older than herself. His friends had become her friends; he had a genius for friendship and the men and women he knew intimately and had drawn to himself were people of rich lives, spiritually and intellectually. Among them were poets and painters, saints and humanitarians. Their values were spiritual. Grandam married when she was seventeen. Hugh’s father was born when she was twenty; and that same year her husband died.
But in those three short years of a perfect marriage Grandam had made herself as accepted and loved by her husband’s circle of rare friends as he was himself.... “My love identified me with him. That is the only way I can explain such a miracle,” she told Hugh, that one brief hour some time in the course of their coming together in grief for his father’s death.
But she never felt worthy of the remarkable friendships. She knew, none better, that she must fly, race, to keep up with her husband’s friends and himself in their flight through time and in Eternity.
“The one who has helped me most in this flight, this race, is the possessor of those hands.” She indicated the drawing of the hands from which Hugh had never known her to be separated, whether at home or traveling. Wherever Grandam was, there always in her bedroom hung the ebony-framed drawing.
“He taught me short cuts. After Hugh died (her husband Hugh, she meant) I would have lost the race if it hadn’t been for ‘The Saint.’ For if Hugh was so far ahead of me in Time here, in Eternity he would be lost—like a star shot into space. But ‘The Saint’ made me have faith that there are ways of keeping in touch even with shooting stars.
“Well, ‘The Saint’ himself and all my husband’s loves have left Time, one after another,—and me here in Time. Even my son has left me behind here. But Time and Eternity are really one in a mysterious way, as ‘The Saint’ taught me, and so I am racing still, a girl at the tail of the race, but in it.”
Grandam had ended these confidences concerning her inner life on a humorous word. “The whole point of this story, Hugh, is that I amGod’s accident. He let me into Time twenty years too late. So I’ve just had to leave time out of my practical life.”
And Hugh knew she had succeeded. Grandam had eluded time. That constituted the mystery of her elusiveness. And looking down at her now, there was nothing of the pity of vigorous youth in his glance. Whether she died to-night or next month didn’t matter. Her death would hardly be so much as a stumble in the race she was running with that clan of noble souls!
Ariel had become aware of Hugh’s presence. She came beside him, took his coat sleeve between a thumb and forefinger, and drew him away from the bed toward the piano. There, as far from the daybed as they could get, she whispered.
“It was like Father. This happened to him several times, before the last one. She was too ill to take the medicine. So I used the hypodermic, as I had done with Father, and as Doctor Bradshaw had said I should with Grandam. Rose got him on the telephone. But it was almost over when he got here. He said that Rose and I and Nora had done everything we could have done to help her. He brought Miss Freer, the nurse, with him. She’s down in the kitchen now. She’s very nice and Grandam likes her ... Grandam was very brave....”
Ariel looked down, away from Hugh’s intent eyes, and her dropped eyelids, delicately etched, petal-shaped, took his breath with their loveliness as they had in “The Shell.”
... “She threw her scarf over her face, Hugh, so that I shouldn’t see the agony of the pain.... Oh, Hugh!”
She lifted eyes, clear of tears, but pitiful. And Hugh had been thinking of petal eyelids and eerie gold freckles, when it was death and agony that were here, close by. His beloved Grandam’s death and agony. It was suddenly Hugh who had tears. His throat ached with them, and the light went black with them.
Instinctively, he felt for and found Ariel’s wrist and held it hard. When he could see again, Ariel was still there by his side, but looking away toward the daybed, a tender patience on her face, keeping watch over Grandam’s peace. Then Hugh remembered the exhibition. Ariel had not asked or looked a word about it. And such a little time ago it had meant so much to her! It was really to have been Ariel’s and her dead father’s great hour.
“She’s a woman, this girl,” Hugh knew with his whole soul then. “Life falls into its just proportions before the eyes of her womanhood. She has forgotten herself. She has even forgotten her father in sharing Grandam’s suffering.”
He was overwhelmingly rejoiced. He felt that neither life nor death could ever sadden him again, because one woman was so good, so sweet.
“Your line has been busy for the past hour! Big business?” It was Joan’s voice, coming to Hugh through his office telephone toward noon the following morning.
He laughed. “Reporters mostly. The papers are on to the exhibition, and all you prophesied seems to be coming true about the part they’re giving Ariel in their stories.”
“Yes, of course. They’ve been hectoring us here too. I’m at the gallery with Michael and Charlie. You can thank me, Hugh, for keeping Michael from giving them the story about ‘Noon’ in the attic. He’s absolutely promised now. And Charlie has promised. It’s safe. And your ‘Shell’ is safe too. Michael’s going to let you have it. I’ve bought you one myself, Hugh. I’d have wanted you to choose it, but it wouldn’t wait. Every last painting, even the sketches, have been bid for. The Metropolitan is going to get the lion’s share. A fortune seems to have been donated by some dark angel. It will probably come out who, though. So far, Michael claims it’s not he. ‘Sun and Wind’s’ the painting I’ve bought for you, Hugh. For your birthday! It’s the only canvas without the Dancer. If for nothing else that makes it a prize, of course. Priceless some day. Have the reporters invaded Wild Acres yet? They know, of course, that Ariel is there. And whenisshe coming in? Michael wants to know.”
“Wonderful of you to remember my birthday, Joan. I don’t remember ‘Sun and Wind.’ But I’m grateful. You shall hang it for me at Wild Acres. But the attic’s barred....” They both laughed.... “Ariel’s not coming in till to-morrow afternoon. Grandam clings to her. She’s so very weak. I wouldn’t be here myself, but there was something that had to be attended to at the office.... To-morrow Glenn and Anne are getting away from college to see Grandam, and they’ll take in the exhibition. If Grandam’s better, Ariel and I’ll meet ’em at the Grand Central, the noon train, and come right along to the gallery before going out to Wild Acres. Tell Schwankovsky that, please.”
“Not till to-morrow! Well, he will be disappointed. Ariel might think of him a little, after all he’s done for her!”
“She does. Of course, Joan. Last night she wrote him a letter, a very dear one, I imagine. I put a special on it and posted it in the Grand Central this morning. He’ll have it when he goes home.”
“Yes? Well, that may appease him. Where are you lunching, Hugh?”
“With you if you’ll let me, and why don’t I come right up and get you now?” But he had little hope of Joan’s acceptance, for it was likely that she had already arranged to lunch with Schwankovsky. “Only alone. Please don’t take me up if there’s to be any one else along.”
The pause which followed this at the other end of the wire protracted itself. Then in a lowered voice, as though not wanting any one at her end of the wire to hear, Joan replied, “Of course we had made plans. But I’d rather be with you, Hugh. I’ll have to think of a way out.... Ah! Well, come for me here then, but not before one o’clock. I know a cool place, small,—a garden in 33rd Street. We won’t be bothered by any of our own crowd there.”
This sounded like Hugh’s good fortune. It sounded like that to him, to his ears, to his brain. But deeper than that—? There were no answering vibrations deeper. Yet his reply went over the wire in as resonant a voice as though all his heart were behind it, so strong is habit, “Bless you. You’re an angel.”
Hugh, Ariel, Glenn and Anne swung up the Avenue through May sunshine, headed for the New Texas Galleries. As they neared Fifty-ninth Street, Glenn strode ahead, and by the time the others had come up had bought a bunch of arbutus from a vender on the corner there. He handed them to Ariel. She was enchanted.
“But what are you going to do with them?” Hugh asked. To carry them in her hand for the next few hours would be wasted effort, for they would be very dead, indeed, by the time the afternoon was over.
“Why, cherish them, of course. I love them,” Ariel responded.
“But they’ll die.”
“No. I don’t think so.” She held them to her nose again, and her expression seemed one of assurance that anything that thrilled and delighted her as these pink-and-white-tight Heaven-smelling flowers did would live forever. Looking down at her, Hugh believed it.
They made rather an arresting group even in the stream of arresting people which throngs the Avenue on spring afternoons: Hugh, with his high-held, hawklike, dark head, clean-cut shoulders and long stride; Anne, buoyantly collegiate; Glenn, hatless, and with hair somewhat long and unbrushed, free in manner and gesture as if he were walking and talking in a wilderness instead of in the heart of a great city.
Ariel alone would have passed without comment. She was wearing a heliotrope felt hat—a present from Mrs. Weyman—which shaded the upper part of her face, an English tweed suit well enough cut to pass muster even on the Avenue, and one of her ivory-colored silk blouses, open at the throat. The only thing to attract attention to her was the fact that she was being swept along by her three rather striking companions, the obvious center of their exuberance.
Until they were actually in the gallery. There she cut herself off from the group, and her quiet was no longer the center of their motion. Hugh knew, as he watched her walking slowly along the rows of canvases, or standing back for long minutes to brood on some particular painting, that she had utterly forgotten him and the other two, for her father’s companionship. He surmised that Ariel was not actually seeing paintings at all, neither thinking nor feeling in terms of art. For after all, what did she really know about the technique of painting, its history or its criticism! Joan had assured Hugh that Ariel knew and cared absolutely nothing, in spite of her long association with a great artist, and Hugh had no reason to disbelieve it. Besides, he remembered Gregory Clare himself saying in Bermuda that his daughter had inherited nothing of his gift or interest in art. He had never even tried to give her instruction in drawing.
Even so, she could be enthralled now by these pictures, seen again after three months of separation. The sky in the pictures, Hugh imagined, was actual Bermuda sky to Ariel, and the sea, the ocean curling her own home beach. The light was dear as her life, home light. She stood, embraced by shore and sky and wave.
And her own figure up there, dancing in light and shade,—what of that? It was the word of her father’s love for her. It was merely his voice saying with the easiness of complete sincerity, “my darling.” And in all the pictures around the walls the artist’s love echoed itself in the dancing figure.
So Hugh dreamed, standing near the entrance door and himself neglecting the paintings to concentrate upon a girl of flesh and blood.
It seemed odd to him that nobody in the crowds which were drifting even this early in the afternoon through the gallery recognized Ariel as the dancer of the pictures. Obviously nobody did. If she should take off her hat, though, if the May sunlight should fall on her pewtery hair, would they then see? Or was she so rapt away into companionship with her dead father and his imagination that she had attained a kind of invisibility, except for those who loved her?
Glenn and Anne kept together in their tour of the walls. Before “Noon,” given the place of honor—the only painting on one whole expanse of wall at the farthest end of the gallery—they stopped the longest. “Think of this being in our attic, just lying there in cobwebs and dust, for the past five years!” Glenn muttered. “Hugh hasn’t a touch of taste, of course—he’s the typical Philistine if there ever was one—but it does seem as if even the Tired Business Man might have an uneasy feeling—a sense that there was something, even if he couldn’t grasp it, in the very presence of a thing like this!”
“Oh, be careful!” Anne whispered, pinching his arm and, with apparent casualness but real concern, glancing around them to see if any one had overheard Glenn’s mutterings.
Glenn lowered his voice but muttered on: “Can you imagine how Ariel felt when she found it in the attic? Why, the kid expected, of course, it would be the first thing her eyes would light on at Wild Acres. And instead she had to start a hunt for it! It goes beyond imagination that anybody could do such a thing to it, even after Joan Nevin had sniffed. Couldn’t Hugh stand up to one little sniff? If he had, he’d be in a beautiful position ofI told you sonow!”
“Hugh’s all right,” Anne defended him. “He appreciates Ariel herself, at any rate. And that takes taste. More than I had. I had to be knocked down to wake up to it. But I can’t understand what was the matter with Joan. It seems incredible.”
Glenn didn’t notice Anne’s ambiguous allusion to having been knocked down. It was her implied opinion of the genuineness of Joan’s taste which interested him.
“You forget,” he pointed out, with a decided sneer in his voice, “that no Michael Schwankovsky had spoken authoritatively on him yet, and Clare wasn’t famous, when Joan had the privilege of first seeing this masterpiece of his. If anything ever showed that old girl up, this business does. She’s a four-flusher, that’s what she is, a kowtower, a sheep, a total washout. If she had any taste, even if she personally detested Clare’s way of painting, she’d have known this was important. Just as I detest D. H. Lawrence’s stuff, but even without the critics to tell me I’d sense he was genuinely a great writer. I hope I would.”
Anne, however, resented all this. She loved Joan less than Glenn did and with more reason. But if Joan was mean, of little account, then what of Anne? No. She preferred to think her rival something better than shoddy. So pride was in it, and pain too, when she answered Glenn hotly, “Joanhastaste, and knows and cares a lot about the things she pretends to know and care about. Look at her own collection of oils! And how many people hasn’t she made! Brenda Loring, for instance. And now she’s doing everything she can to encourage Charlie Frye, they say. This picture—Well, Hugh probably showed it to her in a bad light and on top of his hundredth and first proposal. She merely took her boredom out on ‘Noon.’ Doesn’t that explain it?”
“You always stand up for females, Anne, whether you hate the particular one being criticized or not, I notice. But supposin’ you’re justified this time,—then why doesn’t the pussy own up now, say she never got a good look at the thing, instead of howling all over the place that Hugh never showed it to her at all? Why is Hugh to be the goat! That’s awfully sporting of her, isn’t it! Why! At college any number of fellows have tried to razz me about it already! I suppose I owe that to friend Prescott directly,—to Joan, though indirectly.
“Do you know, Anne, Prescott’s in danger of losing his diploma, I’m afraid, all on account of Joan? I never see him any more. He’s here in New York or at Holly every other day or so. And even his new novel has gone on the rocks. He hasn’t done a stroke for weeks. Perhaps he’s jealous of Hugh, and that’s why he’s made such a point of spreading this story about ‘Noon’ and Hugh, since the papers all came out with the exhibition stuff. Shouldn’t wonder if the press will get hold of it any minute now! Wouldn’t that be just silly!”
Brother and sister looked very much alike at the moment, absorbed in their individual angers, hands behind their backs, gazing up unseeingly at the radiant world in the frame before them.
But the next minute Anne laughed, not without genuine sweetness, and murmured, “Glenn! Take a glance at Ariel. And forget Joan.”
Ariel was standing not far off, her face lifted toward a picture. But she seemed not so much a girl viewing a picture in an art gallery, as a girl who had come down to a beach of yellow sands and was standing looking out at a reef with spray fountaining against it,—who might, in a moment, throw herself down there in the sun, and dream. If she did, out of her body would rise her spirit and dance on the crystal air. Look! There was the spirit already dancing,—where the sun in the picture above threw a white haze across the rocks.
Glenn sang, under his breath,
“Come unto these yellow sands,And then take hands:Curtsied when you have, and kiss’dThe wild waves whist,Foot it featly here and there;And sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”
“Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And sweet sprites, the burthen bear.”
And Anne whispered,
“Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?”
“Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?”
“Neither,” Glenn told her seriously. “In Gregory Clare’s painting and in Ariel’s very body.”
Hugh was coming toward them down the gallery, intending to hurry them on to “The Shell,” which was his, and would soon be hung at Wild Acres. But he halted. He saw the way Glenn was looking at Ariel. He saw a tenderness and gravity in his brother’s expression that he had never caught there before. And he turned away. He did not want to see that expression on his brother’s face an instant longer. And less than anything now did he want to stand in front of that portrait of Ariel and hear what his brother might say about it. He wished, with his whole soul, that Glenn would never come to it, never in his whole life catch so much as a glimpse of it.
“Why, Glenn! I thought it was all arranged. That you had agreed to go as counselor. I didn’t know you were even looking for anything else.”
“But, Mother! Decker will be better than me as counselor. And Adams seemed quite glad to get me. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I have written the camp head all about Decker, and the minute he lets me off I’m to wire Adams. I thought you’d be rather pleased.”
The Weymans were finishing dinner at Wild Acres the night of Anne’s and Glenn’s and Ariel’s visit to the exhibition. Ariel was dining with Grandam in the attic apartment. Glenn had surprised the others by announcing his summer plans and the change he had made in them. In January he had sought and procured for himself a counselorship at a summer camp for boys in Canada. But now, it seemed, he wanted to get onto a paper, and without mentioning it to his family he had negotiated with Mr. Adams, an editor on theWorld, for a job on his staff, and landed it. It only remained to get out of the counselorship.
But Mrs. Weyman did not look the “rather pleased” that Glenn had so confidently expected, and as for Hugh,—Glenn thought to himself that old Hugh was looking deuced funny.
“I don’t quite understand all this raised eyebrow stuff!” Glenn protested. “If it’s that you don’t want me around so much, well, I can board in New York, and still save something toward next year’s expenses, I suppose.”
“Don’t be silly, Glenn!” Mrs. Weyman was looking at him speculatively. “Anne and I’ll be in Maine, so you won’t be any burden to us, in any case. There’ll just be you and Hugh and Grandam here. Unless we persuade Grandam to go with us. But she won’t be persuaded. So it’ll be you three. Hugh will be glad enough of your company. I was only thinking of your obligation to the camp. But if it can be arranged—”
“And don’t you see,” Glenn urged, interrupting in his eagerness, “if I am going into journalism, Hugh, this will be a much more profitable summer? Enderly put me on to the idea. He thinks it’ll be invaluable as experience. I’ll be all the sooner self-supporting if I get some practical experience behind me.”
“All right,” Hugh agreed. “That is, if you can get out of the camp work honorably. Grandam and you and I—and Ariel will keep house together. Ariel seems definitely to have made up her mind to stay by Grandam this summer. Keep her job.”
“Joan Nevin invited her to go to Switzerland with her. Did you know that, Glenn? And that she refused?” His mother was looking at him oddly. “Is that why—did she know you’d be here? Did you and she—” Mrs. Weyman broke off, but Glenn answered as though she had finished her question.
“No, we didn’t,” he said emphatically. But now it was Hugh who thought that Glenn was looking deuced funny. At any rate it was the first time he remembered ever seeing his brother blush.
“Has Joan really invited Ariel to Switzerland with her?” Anne exclaimed. “And she’s not going! Why, Grandam ought toinsiston her going. And you, Hugh! You must make her go. What a chance! It’s just that Ariel is too unsophisticated to know what it means, I guess. Think of the contacts! Does she know about Doctor Steiner’s colony? How tremendously swank it is?”
“‘Swank’ is very much the wrong word,” Mrs. Weyman protested. “Fashion and money don’t help one to get in there. Authentic personality and accomplishment are the open sesame. And of course Ariel doesn’t understand. How should she! It’s just as well, however, for she’d be frightfully at a loss. Joan’s even suggesting it was strange. I know that she did it for you, Hugh. It was very generous. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?”
“Let’s. And dance,” Glenn was in an astonishingly social mood to-night. “Let’s get Ariel down and teach her to dance, Anne. Since she’s turned Joan down, it’s up to us to do something for her education, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid you can’t,” Mrs. Weyman said, getting up and stepping out of the long window onto the terrace. “Grandam can’t be left alone for a minute. And Ariel has proved herself extremely conscientious.”
“Can’t Hugh substitute for a little while? Grandam’s as glad to have him as Ariel, isn’t she? She’s definitely said good night to Anne and me, and good-by, too. Told us not to come up in the morning before leaving. But couldn’t you release Ariel for an hour or so, Hugh? Our one night home?”
“As soon as I’ve had some coffee I’ll go up and try,” Hugh agreed. But Glenn thought his voice now was deuced funny. Hugh’s back was to the lighted dining-room windows, and the stars did not disclose the expression on his face, but Glenn imagined it as matching in expression the deuced funny voice. Glenn had never felt like this before at home. He was aware of tension, not only in his mother and Hugh, but in himself.
It vanished, however, when Hugh had succeeded in making the exchange of himself for Ariel with his grandmother, and Ariel appeared on the terrace.
“Shall we have the victrola, or will you play, Anne?” Glenn asked, throwing his half-smoked cigarette into the rose bushes, and drawing Ariel by both hands along the terrace toward the drawing-room windows.
“Oh, I’ll play, since only two can dance at a time. But I don’t know how Glenn’s going to teach you to dance, Ariel, unless he’s been practicing himself lately.”
“I have,” Glenn confessed. “You see, I thought I was going to get Ariel to Prom. So I’ve been brushing up.”
“You’d better take up the rugs in the library and dance there,” Mrs. Weyman advised, trailing after them, dusky in the dusk. “These flags aren’t a good floor. ’Specially for a beginner.”
“But it’s cooler out here. And Ariel belongs out of doors on such a night.”
“Oh, well, if you will be such children! How is Mrs. Weyman to-night, Ariel? Do you think she’d care to have me go up?”
Ariel hesitated, just a breath, and said, “Hugh seems to rest her the most. And I know she feels like only one person at a time. It’s all Miss Freer would let her have, anyway. Miss Freer has gone for a walk.”
“She’s a good nurse,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “But I don’t see that Grandam leaves her much to do, Ariel. You seem to be bearing the burden.”
“That’s only because I rest Grandam,” Ariel replied. “Miss Freer would really like to do much more. She considers me officious, I can see, and is put out sometimes. But it’s more important that Grandam should be contented, isn’t it, than that Miss Freer should approve of me.”
Mrs. Weyman gasped. Miss Freer had spoken to her several times on the subject of Ariel’s officiousness, but it had not occurred to either of them that Ariel herself knew how the nurse resented her. Since Ariel had taken the job of nurse-companion to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Weyman’s respect for her had, of necessity, grown. Her liking and her interest had grown as well. Besides, there was Anne, so devoted to Ariel! Mrs. Weyman sent up almost daily letters addressed to Ariel in Anne’s sprawling hand. Hugh, too, was fond of her, any one could see. Grandam was absolutely dependent on her. And Glenn! Mrs. Weyman was disturbed about Glenn. When had he ever in his whole life before been interested like this in a girl?
Were she and Joan, then, perhaps wrong? Had they made a mistake from the very first about this artist’s daughter in thinking her a mere child, empty in her total lack of experience?
Anne’s spirited jazz came through the library windows. Ariel was dancing in Glenn’s arms on the starlit terrace. One could not say she was being taught. From the first step she had merely followed Glenn and the music. They danced like one person, a dark and a light figure, slim and rather elegant in the starlight. Glenn was wearing his tux, and patent-leather pumps. Ariel, Mrs. Weyman noticed, was not small and insignificant as she had got into the habit of thinking her. She was tallish and extraordinarily graceful.
“Even so! Glenn mustn’t be serious. It will be years before he even begins to be self-supporting,” Mrs. Weyman mused. “And Joan is probably right. Ariel’s charm is merely that of youth and can’t wear. Still, I don’t like Glenn’s being here all summer. Propinquity does such absurd things sometimes!”
And upstairs, Hugh was standing in one of the apartment windows, listening to the faint thrum-thrum of the jazz from below. Heard from this distance—the library windows were on the other side of the house—it sounded eerie, faint. And it kept itself going with an elfish insistence. To Hugh it became the music of a mischievous fairyland, actually malicious in its pricking at his heart.
Grandam was lying, too weary to talk or to hear Hugh read, half drowsing. But she was aware of his mood.
“I’m glad Ariel’s having a little fun,” she murmured after a while. “Aren’t you, really, Hugh? You’re glad?”
“Yes. Of course. That’s what I want for her....” But in the dimness of her pillows Grandam smiled—a malicious, elfin smile, like the far-away music with which she was for the minute in harmony. A grating in Hugh’s voice, the droop of his ordinarily so squared shoulders, was not unpleasant to her. For Grandam, Saint Paul was contradicted to-night. In the midst of death she was in life.
However, Ariel’s brief hour of comradeship and fun with Anne and Glenn was soon over. The next morning they went back to their colleges until final examinations should release them. A day or two after that Michael Schwankovsky sailed for Bermuda, hoping to buy the Clare studio from Doctor Hazzard, who owned it. To Schwankovsky the studio and the beach where the artist had lived and done all his painting had become sacred. He wanted it as a retreat for himself, for the present, and ultimately to endow and present to St. George’s as an altar to Gregory Clare’s memory. But Doctor Hazzard was not to be hurried in a decision to sell, and Schwankovsky stayed on in Bermuda, waiting. Joan, since Ariel had decided against accepting her offer of Switzerland and contact with the rare souls who would soon be gathering there, paid no more attention to her.
Now at last was Hugh’s best opportunity to relieve the strain of Ariel’s rather arduous days and nights with his friendly interest and companionship. But for a variety of reasons he did not use what might have been the golden days. Instead he spent longer hours at the business of making money. He cultivated Brenda Loring’s willingness to lunch, dine and dance with him in town, and he was meeting and liking many of her friends. They were mostly people with whom Joan and Schwankovsky would not have bothered, and of whom certainly they had never heard—young artists and writers and editors, an architect, a professor from Columbia and so on. Most of the men were struggling but gifted, and the women without exception were earning their way and making places for themselves in the artistic or intellectual life of New York. Hugh felt at home with these new friends and they were candid in their liking for his company. After having for so many years been tolerated on the fringes of Joan’s more sophisticated and glittering world of what his mother called the “absolutely arrived,” this new experience of appreciative friendliness was pleasant. And Brenda’s gay friendship and open admiration were more than pleasant. They were consoling.
So, of Ariel he saw almost nothing. For when he went up to sit with his grandmother, or play or read to her, as he did as often as he was at home in the afternoons or evenings, Ariel ran out for air, or into her own room, in order to leave them together. But Hugh always thought, “She is going to answer Glenn’s letter that I saw on the hall table this morning.”
Joan seldom called him up now, and she was hardly ever at home, at Holly. For the few weeks before leaving for Switzerland she was accepting invitations to house parties; so Hugh saw little of her.
Then, one day toward the middle of June, he received an invitation to a week-end house party himself, at Fernly, Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith’s place on Long Island. As he barely knew the lady, having met her only once, at Holly, and then only for a minute at one of Joan’s larger teas, he rightly attributed his invitation to Joan’s persuasions. Rather to his own surprise, he decided against going.
The invitation was in reality, he knew, an indirect promise from Joan that they should have some long hours together at Fernly, for surely she would never have bothered to secure so unlikely an invitation for him unless she meant to manage to give him a good deal of her time there, as a farewell before her departure for the summer. But even this assurance did not seem inducement enough to Hugh, in the new directions his life had taken this spring, to make him willing to face a household of uncongenial strangers.
Before he had sent his regrets, however, he learned from Brenda that she too was included in this house party. “I suppose you’re asked for Joan,” she said, frankly annoyed at the idea. “And I sha’n’t see anything of you. I don’t believe I’ll go. Oh, yes, but I must, of course. Business! Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith may have a drawing-room or a boudoir that needs doing over. And there’ll be a dozen or so women of her own sort there, I suppose, with drawing-rooms just as terrible which I can fix. No. I can’t afford to turn it down, you see. But, Hugh, will you be a little decent to me, please? I shall be lost among the bigwigs. Theyarebigwigs, you know. Not just money, but diplomacy and high finance. All that. You’ll remember that we’re pals—promise?”
“Oh, but I hadn’t meant to go. I was going to ask you to come out to Wild Acres for the week-end instead. Mother is writing you to-night. But you prefer magnificence and bigwigs?”
“You know I don’t. And I’ll come to Wild Acres any other week-end you ask me, with joy. I think your mother is too lovely, to want me. I couldn’t take my eyes from her at the Clare exhibition. I think I like her already without knowing her, Hugh. But you will come to Fernly? Say you will?”
Her eyes were wistful and pleading. And so, oddly enough, Hugh found himself yielding to Brenda Loring’s persuasions, where Joan’s invisible but encouraging beckon had failed. However, if he had allowed himself to follow his own desires, he would have preferred Wild Acres as a place to spend any Saturday and Sunday. Yes. Even if Ariel must always be in the next room, writing letters to Glenn.
“And apropos of our little friend Brenda,” Joan murmured, sifting sand in rhythmical waves through her fingers, “I’m glad she amuses you so much, Hugh dear. If you’d played around with more girls like her, taken out more time for play and amusing companionships, I mean, you’d have been a lot better off. Brenda wakes you up. Any one can see. And waked up—you are delightful, Hugh. All the women here like you tremendously. And the men, well, they’d like you anyway.Thesemen. They’d respect the really clever side of you, the business side, having most of them come the same road. I did better than I knew when I wheedled Laura into inviting you. For really, I was selfishly thinking only of myself, as usual.”
Laura was Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith, and Joan and Hugh were out on the swimming beach at Fernly, lingering on after the Sunday morning’s general swimming meet in order to be together. Joan was wearing a sea-green beach cape draped about her shoulders and a wide beach hat. But Hugh was sprawled in the sun, unprotected, getting his first tan of the season.
“Brenda’s all right,” Hugh replied nonchalantly. “Every day in every way I like her better and better. She’s refreshing. And she wears.”
“Yes. And I’m glad I’ve been able to help her as much as I have. Laura is thinking of redecorating her Riverside house. Or she was thinking of it before this party. Now she has definitely decided to do it. Told me so last night. So you see I still think of Brenda and for her.”
“Yes. She owes you this invitation as much as I do, then? Well, she’d be grateful if she knew. She’s a loyal soul, Brenda.”
“But of course she owes it to me! Brenda has done some lovely places, her reputation’s grown tremendously. But after all—Laura Hunt-Smith! I suppose you can’t know what that means! But to be honest, my dear boy, it wasn’t Brenda’s career I was thinking of this time. Not that alone, anyway. I wanted to see you two together. Every one else seems to have been seeing you together, and to have jumped to conclusions. I wanted to see for myself, that was all.”
She looked at him, smiling, but an open gay smile, not enigmatical.
“And now you’ve seen—” Hugh asked. “Well?”
“I’ve seen that although you two are good friends, you’re not simple enough for Brenda, simple as you are, darling. I mean she’s a little too simple for you. It’s too obvious! People are such imbeciles when they try to evaluate friendships from the outside! But I, where you’re concerned, Hugh, don’t come in that class, do I? We are so close that I can evaluate your relations with people from the inside, as it were. There’s been arapportbuilt up between us through these most vital years of our lives,—fifteen to thirty, isn’t it? We don’t fool each other. And no matter how much you and Brenda flirt, and how openly, I can only sigh, now that I’ve watched you together here, and see that your heart isn’t in it. Poor Brenda! And it might have solved everything.... I mean, you stood some chance of normal happiness if you could only have found hersimpatica. But you’ll never bring yourself to marry any one without that. Oh, you see, I know—I know....”
Hugh leaned up on one elbow and started scooping out a trench in the sand between himself and Joan. His dark head, silhouetted against the vivid blue-green of the noon Atlantic, was Grecian, Joan thought, in its beautiful symmetry. And his shoulders were as classic under the narrow straps of his damp bathing suit as they appeared when hidden under the most meticulously tailored of dinner jackets. “Fastidious strength. Strength to be used fastidiously. Aristocracy of body—as it is hardly known in the modern world,” Joan mused.
“And he’s mine. I’ve only to reach a finger across this trench. Whisper one word. What am I waiting for? Why can’t I take him as he is, and not expect perfection? Why do I want the moon? What do I hope for, better than this! If Michael and Hugh and Doctor Steiner could only be rolled into a composite person, that would be ideal. But they can’t. Hugh’s himself, and couldn’t be himself and have all their qualities added. And why must I cling to this perfectionist view of my life! Ah! That is still to be discovered. But why wait to understand myself perfectly? I needn’t stop being analyzed just because I’m married. And it isn’t as if marriage were irrevocable. It isn’t. Though of course one does hate to make mistakes, for marriage is important. At the very least mistakes with it are a waste of time. But it’s pride, really. I’m as proud as Lucifer and can’t bear to be caught out in a mistake, important or unimportant.”