Joan was talking for Doctor Steiner in these musings. She had almost forgotten the presence of the occasion of them, and Doctor Steiner’s emaciated face with its piercing but impersonal eyes was before her, in her imagination, more vivid to her than Hugh in the flesh. He was probing with herself into the depths of her psyche, watching with a whole mind’s powerful concentration for the one word that might turn the lock, explain to them Joan’s inability to live life as the majority of people do live it, discover the mystery of why she, almost alone in the world of civilized women, felt that if she could not give herself in her entirety to a marriage she could not give herself at all: in other words, that compromise was beneath her.
Doctor Steiner had often drawn her attention to the fact that compromise is the attitude necessary if one is to lead a normal, rational life. The gods, if there are gods, may live without it, but not mortals. Joan must forget her Luciferian pride, learn to be an ordinary mortal, if she hoped for happiness.
Last night she had dreamed, and written it down with minutest detail in her dream notebook kept for Doctor Steiner’s eyes alone, something which might help him to understand, more than any other dream she’d had since being analyzed, the secret of this inability to stoop to compromise with life. It was a dream which, given almost any interpretation, flattered Joan’s soul very much. She could hardly wait for Doctor Steiner to hear it and by its illumination pierce a little deeper with his so divinely impersonal vision into her mysterious depths. Indeed, she found herself looking forward to to-morrow afternoon, and the two hours he would give her in his office then, with a vast impatience. Would that it were here! After all, what could Laura Hunt-Smith’s house party offer in competition with two hours of Doctor Steiner’s active interest in one’s complicated soul states!
But Doctor Steiner’s keen face was beginning to disintegrate and form again into Hugh’s obtuse one. Hugh had completed his trench and was interrupting Joan’s train of absorbing thoughts by talking. And about Brenda Loring! Stupid of him! Joan was tired of Brenda. She herself had exhausted that subject, and here was Hugh keeping it up. He was saying, “There’s no question of sentimentality between us. Brenda and I are friends. And she has no more designs on me than I have on her. That’s one of the things I like about her. She’s so finely independent.”
“Perhaps not so independent as you think! She’s only human, dear boy, even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she has with interiors. But I’m not pretending to understand Brenda. It’s only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you can’t bring yourself to be fonder of her.”
He responded nothing to that, and after a little she leaned forward and destroyed his trench, smoothing it out with her fingers. She was giving him her attention again, Doctor Steiner practically forgotten. She decided to speak gravely and simply.
“Hugh, dear! I’ve already lived. Had a life. My adorable children! They have satisfied the maternal in me. Filled my cup to overflowing. And I am deeply satisfied. I wouldn’t want more children, even if I married. That side of me is finished. Perfected. Do you see? Wouldn’t it be better for you—far better—if you could fall in love with a wholesome, healthy girl who still wants and needs all that for her development? I don’t say Brenda. I see she wouldn’t do. She’s not quite wonderful enough.... But some one quite wonderful.... If you could find her.... Don’t you think it would be kinder of me, even if I loved you, to give you up once and for all? Today! Now! For your sake?”
She was looking at the smoothed plateau where the trench had been between them. If Doctor Steiner had been there, actually in the body and not merely hovering in the background of Joan’s obsessed imagination, would he have noticed a contradiction between what Joan’s hands had just done in so ruthlessly destroying Hugh’s trench and the noble womanly kindness of Joan’s words? And supposing he had noticed the work of Joan’s hands, would he have called it the outward sign of an inward conflict; or would he—for even a psychoanalyst, no matter how bigoted, cannot be totally ignorant of human nature—have thought privately that here hypocrisy of a very simple order had accidentally symbolized itself? Perfectly self-conscious hypocrisy, at that?
She was looking at the smoothed plateau and not at Hugh, yet she felt that his dark gaze was raised, burningly, to her face. But she was wrong. Hugh was looking neither at her nor at the plateau her beautiful fingers were still smoothing and smoothing. He was looking into space. And he asked, with as grave a voice as she had used, and every bit as quietly, “Do you really and finally mean this, Joan? Are you telling me to give up hope of you? And would you be glad if I could find some one—wonderful—and she would be so simple and dear as to marry me, and we should have children? Do you mean this?”
There was something of a pause. Joan lifted her gaze from the sand with a slight surprise in it. But Hugh’s face was averted. She guessed the pain in his eyes. Well, perhaps pain was what she had asked for, more than passion, in what she had just conveyed to him. She said with an intended beautiful frankness, “No, my dear. I’m quite normally selfish. Every one is, you know, but most people are capable of rationalizing their selfishnesses into looking like nobilities. Well, being psychoanalyzed destroys in one, if he coöperates with the discipline, the possibility of this comforting variety of self-deceit. It has destroyed it in me, at any rate. So I cannot say to you what would only be a lie. I cannot be so dishonest, Hugh, as to tell you that your falling in love and marrying and having children by some one you thought very wonderful—more wonderful than me—would make me glad. How could it? It’s very pleasant to be adored. And I love your love. This is true of me emotionally, you understand, my dear. But one cannot act in harmony with his emotions all the time unless he has the facility, which I, thank God, have not, of rationalizing them eternally. No, Hugh, dear. It is the findings of my sane, free mind that I would share with you in this. And that mind says, ‘He would be far happier married to almost any one than to you, Joan Nevin. He needs the great experience of having children of his own, and of being adored, as he adores you.... If you are generous, you will help him to this deliverance, Joan Nevin.’”
She paused. She put her hand near his hand on the sand. She looked at it, and finished in a low, quite beautiful intonation, “Dear boy. I love you enough to be frank with you. And I do believe if you could find such a woman, and make such a marriage, that our friendship would be only deepened by it. I love you, in my own way. But, frankly, it is not a way that is good enough for you. That love, such as it is, you can never lose. Your marriage with some wonderful person—only shemustbe wonderful, Hugh, or I should be unreconcilable—might even deepen it. I think, Hugh, I could love the very children she gave you, for your sake.”
“I don’t understand the distinctions you make, Joan, between your sane mind and your emotions. But you are saying that you want me to give you up? You are advising it?”
Joan did not hesitate. Although their hands were not touching, she sensed the vibration of some passionate emotion through his whole body. And now she was ready for climax. She had built up her scene. She had used her sane mind in the way that Doctor Steiner admired so much in her, that beautiful detachment and frankness of which so few women are capable. Already Doctor Steiner had encored her performance, in her imagination, and would certainly do so again in actuality when she told him the whole story to-morrow afternoon. But now she was a little tired of all that. Life is many-sided. The ideal life is one lived on all its sides. Rhythm is the fundamental law of life. So now let come emotion. She wouldfeelagain. The sun and the salt air on her lips was not quite enough of sensuous comfort. She would invite Hugh’s hard, passionate, bitter kiss. Her veins were hungry for it.
“Yes, Hugh darling. I want you to give me up once and for all. Only I want it—it would break my heart if you failed to understand this!—because I do truly love you.”
She bent her head and waited for the storm. But it held off. Hugh had sat up and was looking out to sea. He said in an even tone—iron control, Joan thought he was showing—“That is the way you love me? Yes?”
“But it’s a very dear love, Hugh, isn’t it, to put your happiness ahead of my own?”
Hugh suddenly turned over and lay prone in the sand, stretched to his full length, his face on his folded arms. There was a space when he might have been dead. He was lying in the dark. Darkness of body, darkness of soul, darkness of mind. Time was lost. Then he felt the shore under him. Earth. And the sun on his back, on his neck. Out of death he had been tossed up—onto the shore of life. He lay, light as the dark waves that had swept him here, and buoyant with peace. Clean swept of all the dark. Purged of desire too. He was on a new shore. A new existence opened to him, a free man.
“I would rather have had violets.” He remembered Ariel so vividly, standing before him in the white coat, her voice and face passionately earnest. It was the only time he had ever seen her passionate about anything, except that close-shut stone-like passion of anger against Joan that Sunday, when Joan had brought Schwankovsky to call and had let him blame Hugh for ‘Noon’s’ having been relegated to the attic, and said no word about her own part in it. That was passion, if you like, but shut-in, angry.... “I would rather have had the violets,” that was passion outflowing. Beautiful.... Daring.... But he had given Joan the violets, and, he had thought, for all time. Now, however,—glory be! Joan had tossed them back. Definitely. Finally. They were his to give again....
Joan touched his shoulder, lightly, pityingly. He started, for he had forgotten she was there. He looked at her with surprise.
“Gosh! I thought I was alone!” He mumbled it like a boy who is caught day-dreaming by an elder, and with the same flushed shamedness. And then, in his more natural voice, “I say, excuse me, Joan.”
The queer expression that swept Joan’s features was not intelligible to him. But instinctively he knew that he had never seen its like before in her face. It was the shadow of a strange consternation.
“You forgot I was here!... Hugh!”
“I was imagining things,” he tried to explain, and made it worse than it need have been. “Kid stuff.... Desert islands, adventure.... New lands, you know.... I thought—” But he saw that he was offending her, and struggled for something else to talk about. “See here,” he blurted, “does this sunlight remind you of Clare’s? It does me. And the green of that water! It’s Bermudian.”
Joan’s head and shoulders were turned away. He had trouble in catching her words. She was saying, “Crowell Fuller was telling me last night at dinner that he thinks we’ve vastly over-rated the importance of Gregory Clare. He bought two of the paintings himself and grants he’s important—but not so important. It’s a pity, and Michael will be disappointed. For Fuller could hold up Michael’s hands so substantially, if he only saw eye to eye. He’s the one person—over here—in a position to. And he’s not doing it.”
She was cool, impersonal. She might have been talking to some one she had just met at a tea, except for that turned-away shoulder, the averted face.
“But does it really matter—now?” Hugh asked, genuinely surprised. “The Metropolitan’s bought a bunch of ’em. There were none left untaken after the third day of the exposition. Ariel has more money from them than even her father dreamed of,—enough, if it’s managed at all well, to secure her a free, even opulent life by ordinary standards. So what can Crowell Fuller or any other person do now to spoil things? You’re certainly borrowing trouble, Joan.”
She swung on him angrily. At last he had given her a cause for anger which she could openly acknowledge. And Hugh, obtuse, did not dream that the fury now directed at his head was not caused by his last remarks at all, but by what had gone before.
Her voice was splintered with anger, all the lovely intonations splintered and lost. “I thought Gregory Clare was your friend. After all, you were the first purchaser he ever had. And now you can sostupidlysay that it doesn’t matter what place he’s to hold among American painters! Nothing matters, I take it, except the money that his dear little daughter’s pulled from the sale. I tell you that Gregory Clare, dead, is worth a million of Ariel Clares living. A million—million! But now that she won’t have to drudge for a living, it’s no matter to you what becomes of Clare’s wonderful art. You are content. Complacent. Very exhilarating!”
She laughed with what sounded like bitterest scorn.
“You put me too much in the wrong, Joan. I won’t take it.” Hugh, too, could lose his temper. “What I really feel, andknow, is that you nor I nor Crowell Fuller nor Schwankovsky nor anybody on God’s earth, in the last analysis, will have a damned finger in the ultimate fate of Clare’s work. Justice goes its own ways, with art as with souls. And don’t let any one tell you it isn’t so! If Clare’s paintings are really important (God! how I hate that word, used as you patronizing intelligentsia are using it these days!), the importance will win through for itself, without your worrying about it. That’s what I believe, anyway. Alwayshave.”
Joan’s jaw dropped perceptibly. But her eyes kept their angry glitter. “That is a decision, my friend, which I believe even the greatest philosophers haven’t dared to make. Personally, I have never supposed that there is a god of art who deals out ultimate justice, willy-nilly. It looks pretty much a matter of chance—and of friends, and advertising. I’d say—”
But Hugh interrupted her, still hot. “Well, I wouldn’t. There’s a life, a soul of its own in a picture like—‘The Shell,’ for instance. It’s a life that will, come spring, burst through into humanity’s appreciation, the way buds burst through bark, come their spring, to light and air. For the imagination is strong, like love.... It is a power.... Yes. I’m willing to leave my friend’s works to their own destinies. So long as imagination is organic in them, as it is in Clare’s pictures, then they’re potent in their own right as is a bolt of electricity. Even if some poor fool hides ’em away in his attic, or even if fire burns ’em or water drowns ’em,—justice still works with ’em and for ’em.... For Beauty is—must be—as immortal as goodness.... Though we don’t see how, or understand.
“It’s the same with people.... With people’s personalities I mean. Their ‘importance,’ since you like the word so well. If they have any importance—beauty of spirit,Soundness, are my terms for it—it bursts a way for itself, like buds in the spring. Environment and accident haven’t got power over it. Not a bit. It can’t be kept in, held back, any more than birth itself can be held back, once it gets going.... And Ariel’s got that thing in her personality,—thatsoundness,beauty,importance. Beauty’s organic in her character....”
Hugh’s whole face was burning, and his words came out staccato, fierce with conviction. Joan, almost miraculously, she felt, had the insight to realize that at least part of this amazing passion of conviction was impersonal. She saw that Hugh was really talking about such things as imagination, love, personality, abstractly,—out of deep-seated convictions which had grown in him with his own growth, and which she had never suspected in him. Why, he was a man with a religion, and she had never guessed! But she preferred to pretend to think him moved by personal emotions merely, and asked bitingly, “Then what is your plan for Ariel when your grandmother dies? Have you changed your mind about her so utterly as it appears, and you’ll let her be a second Isadora? Express this wonderful personality, this beauty of spirit of hers, in some world-shaking way?”
Hugh dropped back to natural. He was ashamed of so having betrayed his soul’s convictions to Joan’s skepticisms. “I shall have nothing to say about it; why should I? But of course that wasn’t what I meant at all, or anything like it. Ariel’s far too ordinary—”
Joan’s mind reeled. “Oh, but surely not. After all you’ve said! Ordinary?”
“Well, ‘ordinary’s’ the wrong word, of course. But you know very well what I mean, Joan. She’s not artistic. She has nothing in her of the genius, or the artist. Or rather, her genius is her personality. I thought I said it all before. She’s of the spirit....Love—Life.... It would be rotten to turn it into dancing. All thatlife.”
“‘Life’ doesn’t seem at all descriptive of that child to me, Hugh. She’s about the quietest—”
“I’m not talking about liveliness. Well, look at the sun, here on the back of my hand. Still, isn’t it? Quiet? But it’s life! Ariel’s quiet is like that.”
Joan was silent, quiet herself for a minute. But not the kind of quiet Hugh had just explained to her. She asked, finally, “Are you sorry, then, that her father has advertised Ariel, as he has, in his pictures? Do you think it is cheapening? And would you think that being a famous dancer would cheapen her? Is that what you’re afraid of?”
He hesitated. “I’m afraid I used to feel that way,” he acknowledged. “The first time it was suggested that Ariel might get all this publicity she has been getting, I did think it a shame. I wanted to protect her from it. But I’ve outgrown that angle of it. I know now that that’s a false, inherited attitude. Not sound. You yourself, Joan, let Enderly and those other literary fellows vote you the most beautiful mother in the East for the Ideal Perfume Company, Inc., the other day, and your picture’s even in the subway entrances now, and in the advertising sections of every magazine, that’s worth the name, I’ve picked up this month. I’ve had to get over the prejudice, you see. And I’ve succeeded, I think. No, it isn’t that at all now that convinces me that Ariel shouldn’t go in for dancing. I—”
But Joan cried, laughing shakily, “So you don’t think publicity is cheap, and what’s convinced you is because I’ve allowed it? So I still am a criterion, Hugh? Really?”
“But of course.”
“That’s nice. I’mglad. And Hugh, I gave the money to the home for Crippled Children. That’s what made me consent to the silly business,—that, and the help it might just possibly be to Prescott’s sales.”
“Good for you! But I knew it was all right.”
“Only see here, Hugh! Have I been too stupid? You aren’t going to tell me that that—that girl whose name you can’t keep off your funny old tongue is the wonderful person we were talking about, when we agreed that you ought to marry some one else, and have children of your own? I’m not going to believe that, even if you say so. It simply couldn’t—”
Hugh put out a hand as if to push something strongly away. Joan might have seen suffering in his face now, if she had known when and how to look for it. But his voice was his ally. It did not betray him as he said, “Hardly! Haven’t I told you? It’s Glenn who’s in love with Ariel. Any one can see....”
He did not need to go on, for she took it up so eagerly. “No, really! But you’d never let Glenn, would you? Why, your mother would be wild. And you,—you wouldn’t like it yourself, would you, Hugh?”
“I don’t see why not. You know how I feel about Ariel. And I believe rather deeply in early marriage. But I doubt whether Glenn realizes wholly how it is with him yet. You mustn’t say anything, Joan. I trust you. Youth is so easily—wounded by too many words.”
“Oh, dear! Sheshouldhave gone to Switzerland with me! It would be too bad, if you’re right! Glenn’s only twenty! And he’s going to be dreadfully clever—fascinating, when he grows up!”
A cloud, thin and ragged, was obscuring the sun. Hugh had lost his desert island where life was new and possibilities unlimited. He did not slip back into the dark waves. He knew he would never be tossed drifting there again. He still was free. Life still was new. But the warmth and the joy were gone.
“Oh! It’s chilly. Come—” Joan was on her sandaled feet first, making a pretense of pulling him up by his hands. Her peace, so violently threatened in the past minutes, was established again. She would see Doctor Steiner at least once more before she made Hugh utterly happy. But she was—she knew it now—through with being a perfectionist. This chill in the air! The loss of the sun! It all spoke a word to her which she had heard but without realizing before. It said that she was thirty, and that life was running away.
“Come, my dear,” she murmured. “Brenda won’t bless me for monopolizing you like this. Just the same, let’s steal away for a walk late this afternoon, do without tea. Shall we? There’s a heavenly walk I know here, partly through the woods and partly along the shore. And we won’t quarrel again. I promise. Do you promise?”
She strode beside him like a goddess in the freedom of her bathing dress, her cape blowing back and away out in the new-sprung, chill wind. She had pulled off her shade hat, and her hair shone, even in the chill light, live and beautiful.
Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith and Brenda Loring were taking a gossipy stroll in the rose garden when Hugh and Joan came up from the beach.
“Look, my dear!” Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith exclaimed under her breath to the girl by her side, as the bathers drew near. “Did you ever see anything so radiantly perfect! They are a Greek god and goddess. And against that sea! Beautiful! I can’t understand why dear Joan holds off so. Eventually two creatures like that—so perfectly matched—must come together. Isn’t it obvious?”
Brenda gave the Greek god and his goddess barely a glance, before looking beyond them to the sea which was their background.
“Perhaps it’s obvious,” she responded. “Too obvious to be true. Some things are, you know.”
Late afternoon. Glenn walked up the avenue at Wild Acres, back from the first day of his job on theWorld. It had been a long day, beginning at seven in the morning. He looked and was weary and disheartened, and his mouth was set in a rather bitter line. Anne, lying in a long chair in the square garden, the only patch of ground, except for a bit of lawn, which was cultivated at Wild Acres, saw him through the screen of hedge which protected her privacy, and sat up. “Glenn,” she called softly, “oh, Glenn!”
He responded to the call dispiritedly enough, but came around the hedge and sat down on the foot of her chair when she had moved her legs to make room for him. She handed him a cigarette and then held a match for him. She herself had been smoking for hours, it seemed, for the grass all around her chair was littered with cigarette stubs thrown carelessly down.
“How goes it?” she asked.
He hesitated, then looked at her gloomily. “Have you seen the morning papers?” he asked.
“Yes. TheTimes. But there’s hope for him, it seems. And it may have been only—only a temporary aberration. I’m upset too, Glenn. But there’s nothing we can do. Or will you try to see him?”
Brother and sister looked startlingly alike in their anxiety and disillusionment. There were deep rings under their eyes and the general pinched and worn look that can come, even to the very young, from a long day of anguish. The morning papers on their front pages had carried a blatantly headlined story of the attempted suicide in New York the night before of the young novelist, Prescott Enderly. Failure in getting his degree at Yale was the suggested cause, but there were added some pointed hints at a love affair with an “older woman.” And Glenn had been assigned to write a more detailed story for the evening edition of his paper, because he had known Enderly at Yale.
“Adams sent me to the hospital to get the latest on it,” he told Anne. “They wouldn’t let me see him. He’s delirious, anyway. He may lose one eye. It was a bell boy who caught him in the act and jogged up his arm. The bullet just grazed the brow and went through the ceiling. It was the smoke that got the eye. Ass! Not to lock his door! Some bell boy! Nerve, that kid had. I got his story too. Don’t know why he had to butt in, though! Pressy’s not thanking him any.”
Glenn’s face was as white as the petals of the paper narcissus blowing in the June breeze by the side of the long chair. Anne’s eyes were black with pain. They were both breathing fast. Short, nervous breaths.
After a minute Anne muttered. “He’ll get over it and be happy yet. He’ll go on and have a good life. See if he doesn’t! It was Joan, of course.”
“How did you know? Yes, it was. But don’t say it to a soul. Promise? He saw her in town after he learned he’d lost out at Yale. He said something to frighten her. Must have, I think. She saw he was desperate, anyway. And she refused to see him again. Cut him right out. I knew he’d written since and called her up. He told me this was what he’d do too,—blow his brains out. But I—fool—couldn’t believe him. Anne, I laughed at him. Didn’t help him any.... You see I simply can’t imagine any one being so desperate he’ll do a thing—like this. I can’t yet, as a matter of fact. But if I’dhadthe imagination, I might have saved him. It’s worse now, it seems to me, than as if he’d succeeded. Ghastly humiliating, unless he tries again and does a clean job next time. I was a damned fool. I am a damned fool.... I failed him....”
Anne held her cigarette case toward Glenn again, pulling one out for herself at the same time. Glenn lit his from the stub of the one about to burn his fingers, and kicked viciously at the clump of paper narcissus blowing beside them, there in the June garden. Anne’s eyes followed the kick sympathetically. Her hands, clutching the arms of the long chair, were shaking. And she had thought she was going to be calm when Glenn came home!
All that morning, from the time she had happened upon theTimesheadlines soon after breakfast, she had tramped—she didn’t know where—in woods and fields. And all the afternoon she had lain here, exhausted, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the light change across the lawn and garden and the edges of the woods, and waiting for Glenn. Ariel she had avoided, rather than hunt her out. For Ariel had done for her, Anne, what there had been nobody to do for Prescott. And Anne almost resented that she had had an Ariel to go to, when Prescott had had no one. If Anne herself was any good, Prescott would have had her, as she had had Ariel.... If she had been understanding.... If she had been able to break the snare of her own blind, egoistic passion and had not driven him away from her by clutching at—what never comes for clutching.... How terrible to be deaf and dumb and blind with passionate love—and to lose that way all the possibilities of friendship and its salvations!
And now, even if the beloved ever came sane,—and, blind in one eye and shattered, should undertake to face the world again and its bitterness, it would never be Anne who would help steady him to it. It would be Glenn, perhaps. And, looking at the paper narcissus which had sprung erect again with delicate vitality from Glenn’s kick, she made a resolution that Glenn must not know to what a degree she was suffering over the plight of—his friend. Why, one of the reasons for Prescott’s breaking with her was his desire that Glenn should never know how far their affair had gone. He had valued Glenn’s comradeship mountains above Anne’s stupid, egoistic passion of love. And he was right to do so. One thing she could save from the wreck of what might have become a fine, even a lovely, human relationship with Prescott: she could save Prescott’s self-respect with her brother and incidentally, but not primarily, for truly she was not thinking of herself in the old way any more, her own self-respect.
“Joan’s called off the dinner to-night, I suppose,” Glenn muttered.
“Not so far as I know,” Anne said, keeping her voice from shaking with better success than her hands. “And I don’t think she will. In fact, I hope she won’t. For both Hugh’s and Ariel’s sake. And why should she? She’ll pretend, don’t you think, to be absolutely out of all this business?”
“Yes. I suppose she will. But, of course I shan’t go. And you needn’t either, Anne. After all, you were fond of him too. You can say you’re cut up, as I shall say.”
Suddenly he turned and looked at her with a sharpness that almost broke down her defenses. “And I believe you are. Of course you are. You and Pressy were quite pals. Anyway, I know he liked you tremendously.”
“But I’m going. I’m going, no matter what, Glenn! For Ariel’s and Hugh’s sake!”
Glenn’s face softened at this repetition of Ariel’s name. “Why for their sakes?” he asked. “Why should they be so keen on eating dinner at Holly this particular night?”
“Well, after all, Ariel hasn’t been outside of Wild Acres for several weeks. She’s getting a little too tired. She’s thin. Anybody can see. Besides, it’s the poor darling’s last chance to see Michael Schwankovsky for months. He’s going to Switzerland next week, and then to Russia. And the party’s a celebration in honor of the exhibition, you know. So, of course, Ariel must be looking forward to it. And Hugh—Well, Joan’s off herself, to-morrow, for her Switzerland colony. I have a hunch—have had it all day—that to-night may be Hugh’s last chance. If she goes away without their settling anything this time—he might just as well give up. So—I’m going to the party anyway. You come too, old thing. For Ariel?”
“I’d do anything in life for Ariel,” Glenn responded quietly. “And if she goes I want to go, anyway.”
“Glenn? Really?”
“Well, yes, it is really. But it oughtn’t to be. It’s so idiotic of me, isn’t it? Two years more at least before I’ll be making anything decent, if then. And she deserves a man. Not a boy. If old Prescott had only gone off his nut for her instead of for Joan, I could’ve understood it. But then, if he had, I should all the more have wished him better success with his target practice. Oh, Anne! I am a fool.”
He buried his dark head in his hands. His shoulders shook. Anne prayed through clenched lips that he would not cry out loud. But she understood his sudden loss of control. His crying had nothing whatever to do with Ariel, she knew. The thought of Ariel, whom he would in all probability win and marry, was only joy to him. It was what he had said about “target practice” and his friend. He was appalled at his own brutal words.
She said in a matter-of-fact voice—but her face was set in a womanly and even noble mask above Glenn’s bent head—“It will be you and I, and Mother, and Hugh, and Ariel, and Michael, and Charlie Frye and Joan, and that’s all to-night. If Joan does decide to marry Hugh you’ll have to forget about her and Prescott, you know. And if she decides not to marry him, and will only be so kind as to tell him so to-night, then neither of us need ever have anything to do with the creature again. No reason to. We can forget her even before she has taken the trouble to forget us.... Let’s go in and give ourselves good old soapy baths now, doll up, and see it through. Come along with big sister.”
Contrary to Anne’s and Glenn’s expectations, though, Joan pretended neither indifference nor ignorance concerning Prescott that night. Her first words to Glenn were words of sympathy, and she took pains to let him guess that her hostess manners this night were covering a grieved and very troubled, even a contrite, heart. Glenn actually found himself being sorry for her. After all, she had never encouraged Prescott to think that he counted especially with her. Remembering this, and Prescott’s open hopelessness as he stated it, Glenn was boy enough and susceptible enough to be softened by Joan’s beauty and the pathos in her eyes, as she stood holding his hand that brief minute of their whispered interchange of troubled words in her wide hall at Holly. “It isn’t your fault,” he heard himself muttering sincerely. “You couldn’t believe he meant what he said, any more than I could. If you only knew, Joan, you’re not so much to blame as I am.”
Hugh was near enough to hear. And Joan turned to him, drawing him into it. She said with something which had the similitude of harsh grief, “Youth itself is to be blamed for this terrible thing. Do you remember, Hugh, weeks, months ago, my telling you that young men in love were frightening? The middle-aged were safe? They do not kill themselves for romance. It is your generation, Glenn. Yours—and Anne’s.”
Anne had caught this, and for a minute she thought that Joan had raised her voice for that very purpose. Had Prescott, then, told Joan that Anne too had wanted a way out of life, and almost found it, because of youth and love? But Ariel alone knew that. And Anne’s sordid secret was as safe with Ariel as it would be with the Wild Acres woods, or with the sky, had she made her confidences to either. Anne was certain.
She turned away from Joan’s group, hard, austere. Glenn might be won to Joan by her beauty and charm, in spite of her terrible part in the tragedy of his friend. Hugh might marry Joan. But Anne knew at that moment that she herself would never again, after this night, be able to bear the sight or the sound of her. “She’s horrible,” she thought. “A glutton of love. A walking sore of vanity. It isn’t jealousy that makes me see her this way. Even to be loved by Prescott I would not be anything like Joan Nevin. I’d rather Prescott never gave me a thought again through eternity than have any touch of that stinking vanity, scarring my voice and face as it scars Joan’s to-night. I’m the only one whosees. She’s horrid, rotten.” And she went over to stand with Michael Schwankovsky and Charlie Frye and Ariel before the painting of Gregory Clare’s which Joan had bought for herself and which now hung between the long windows in the drawing-room, where the party was to wait for the announcement of dinner.
But even here she could not escape Joan’s echoes. As Anne joined the group, Charlie Frye was saying, “... wonderful! Of course, she knows, just as we all know, that it’s she young Enderly went off his head over. She goes on with it all, though. Entertains us. It’s magnificent of her, I think. But she’s pale to-night....”
Anne gripped Ariel’s hand hard and cried with stifled violence, “Merely a matter of leaving off rouge! Very effective too,”—and wanted to bite her tongue out when she had said it. Michael Schwankovsky looked at her, whether disgusted or quizzically she didn’t know.Or care!Charlie Frye bit his lips to keep an angry retort back, and frowned at the floor. But Ariel threw an arm about Anne’s shoulder, and Anne felt that she was trembling in unison with her.
The long windows leading onto the terraced rose-garden were open throughout dinner. Candlelight, moonlight, rose scents and the glowing colors of the other women’s evening frocks were all mingled for Ariel in a web of sensuous pleasure which mixed with a mind almost as anguished as her friend Anne’s.
Schwankovsky occupied the head of the table, where he played host spectacularly, with a noisy zeal. Ariel, in whose honor the party had been planned, was given the place of honor at his right. Mrs. Weyman was opposite Ariel at his other side.
Glenn on Ariel’s right remembered poignantly the first meal she had had with them, how she had been as silent as now, but with a different silence. Then she had bent with the flow of talk as forget-me-nots bent in a grassy stream, flowing with it, not obstructing it. But to-night she was withdrawn, on purpose. And she looked often at Anne, Glenn noticed, with a tender, watchful regard. Why, Glenn could not imagine, for Anne by this time was entering into everything exuberantly, as she had promised him and herself she would. Charlie Frye, quite over his earlier irritation with her, was merry as a grig. Anne was flirting with him, a little clumsily, perhaps, but effectively, if one judged from the man’s reactions. What Glenn did not notice, but Ariel did, was that Anne, on the evening when Joan Nevin had left off her rouge, had painted her own face most brilliantly.
The talk flowed on. Chatter about summer plans, their own and other people’s. Gossip about Doctor Steiner who had just been given a degree by conservative Harvard. Would he go to make his home in Vienna next year, as he was threatening, or stay to enrich America with his knowledge and genius? Some desultory discussions, too, of music, plays, books and painting.
Suddenly, in a way that he intended to be confidential and intimate but could not make so because of his size and the timbre of his voice which even when consciously lowered compelled the attention of the whole table, Schwankovsky leaned to Ariel and took her wrist in his fingers. “My own darling child, you aretriste. At this, your own party! But, believe me, some day very soon, it will be forgotten.... You’ll be rid of grief.... Your old friend knows.... And grief so pure as yours is pure, unstained by remorse, leaves no sediment of heaviness when time has once flowed over it and past. It is a good fortune to have youth and grief together. Some day you will think so.... This is a very beautiful aquamarine, Ariel!”
He lifted her hand higher, and looked long and delightedly at the heavy silver ring with its beautifully colored and flawless stone, which Ariel was wearing.
Ariel wanted to cry, “Oh, Michael! It isn’t missing my father that makes me so out of things to-night. And please forgive me for not playing up when we owe you everything, my father and I,—and you are going away so soon! It isn’t grief. It’s something else. For I can’t be brave, the way Anne is brave. I am frightened, do you see?”
She was indeed frightened! For Ariel, like Anne, had a conviction that to-night things were to be decided between Hugh and Joan. She only said, however, calmly enough, conscious of the waiting silence of the others, “Grandam gave me this ring just to-night. The color is wonderful, I think.”
“And the setting! It’s a rare and beautiful setting! But it is a man’s ring! It cannot belong to you, my Ariel! It is much too heavy for this little hand.”
He continued to hold her wrist and stare down, fascinated, at the lovely ring.
Mrs. Weyman was leaning across the table, amazed. “Grandam gave you her aquamarine, Ariel! I hadn’t noticed you wearing it. But she values it above everything she possesses, except that pencil drawing of the hands. I don’t know what its association for her is, or why she always wears it. She’s avoided telling us. Did she give it to you, or just let you wear it, Ariel?”
“She gave it to me,” Ariel replied, but her own words, her answer to the simple question, rang in her ears like a knell. Her blood went icy. For suddenly she knew the significance of the ring, and the significance of Grandam’s having given it to her. And yet no one had told her. This ring had been worn on one of those pictured hands, on the hand that was to open the coach door for Grandam when she got out in Eternity. That holy hand had given the jewel to Grandam as its last act on earth. And now Grandam had passed it on to Ariel. And all Grandam had said was, “Here’s a keepsake to match your green feather.”
Father’s green feather.... Grandam’s and the Saint’s aquamarine!Oh, pray God Grandam hadn’t meant Ariel to understand a swift farewell in the casual, sacred gift. Pray God! Pray God! Did Grandam think she was about to die?
Ariel started to rise from her chair, her face gone wan and strange. But she sank down again. Her heart was beating leaden beats. Howcouldshe know that this ring had belonged to the possessor of those hands, now dust, and how could she know that Grandam’s time to die had come! It may have been some glance toward the pictured hands, as Grandam slipped the ring from her finger and gave it to Ariel, unnoticed then but impressed somehow all the same on Ariel’s memory, which let her know to whom the ring belonged. But the conclusion that Grandam had given it to Ariel because she was now to die—that was unreasonable. Ariel clutched her napkin in tense fingers and tried to be reasonable.
Mrs. Weyman was saying, “But it’s all right, my dear. It’s only that I’ve never seen Grandam separated from her ring before. Since she gave it to you, she wants you to have it. It is only another sign of her affection....”
Schwankovsky, as well as Mrs. Weyman, had been startled by Ariel’s air of shock, and now the big man said soothingly, “Every one has affection for my Ariel. Of the deepest. Old Doctor Hazzard, did you know, is saving your studio in Bermuda for you? The more I offered him for it, the surer he became that you, my child, would have need for it in time. When I told him of the success of the exhibition and tried to show him that you were financially independent, now, he was not changed. By his will the studio is to become yours. He says, and perhaps truly, for he is wise in some ways, that man, that the paintings themselves are the things to make pilgrimages to, not the place where they were made. He says that the studio was a home first, and a studio second. I came away having accomplished nothing.”
Joan, at the foot of the table, shrugged and met Michael’s eyes with sympathetic humor. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one of these Philistines to comprehend the artist’s mind,” she put in. “Poor Michael! All your journey for nothing! A home before it was a studio! Lovely!”
“Oh, no. Not for nothing. And not ‘lovely’ either! I had a rather rich week, Joan. Enlightening. And Doctor Hazzard himself was well worth the trip. He is coming to visit me this fall. We have become friends. And if he is a Philistine, then a world of Philistines would be a Utopia.”
“Oh! I misunderstood you. I thought you needed sympathy!” She turned to Charlie Frye and asked, shutting the rest of the table into the abysses of outer darkness by the intimate fall of her voice, “Did you know this Doctor Hazzard when you were in Bermuda?”
Schwankovsky retained Ariel’s hand and stared like a seer into the cold green clarity of the semi-precious stone. Glenn felt shuddery and resentful. Why ever did Ariel let the great creature go on petting her in that absurd way? He might be the great Michael Schwankovsky, famous for his wealth, his art collections and his books, but Glenn refused to be hypnotized by such considerations into overlooking his boorishness. It was hideous of him to have spoken to Ariel about her grief like that—before everybody! Both insane and inane. He was an old sentimentalist too. And all this pawing—!