  Ariel, quiet but alert, lay in her steamer chair, one of the most inconspicuous of the several hundred passengers the Bermuda was bringing to New York. No one would be likely to look at her twice or give her a second thought, as she crouched away from the March wind, insufficiently protected from the cold by her nondescript tweed coat, and carelessly, casually bare-headed. All about her on the deck were people of outstanding, vivid types. The thing that had impressed Ariel about these fellow passengers during the two days of the voyage was their apparent self-sufficiency,—a gay, bright assurance of their own significance, and the reasonableness, even the inevitableness, of their being what and where they were. The very children appeared to take it quite as a matter of course that they should come skimming over the Atlantic in a mammoth boat-hotel while they played their games, read their books and ate their meals,—just like that. Ariel took nothing as a matter of course, and she never had from the minute of earliest memory. Her proclivity to wonder and to delight was as organic as her proclivity to breathe. But now it was neither delight nor wonder but an aching suspense that quivered at the back of her mind. She thought, “If Father were here! If it weren’t alone, this adventure! New York Harbor at last! I—Ariel! But it isn’t real. There’s no substance. It was to have happened and been wonderful, but this is paler than our imagining of it. The shadow of our imagining. Oh, it’s I who have died and not Father. Where he is, whatever he is doing, it’s still real with him. With Father it would be always real,—alive.” A steward came up the deck, carrying rugs and a book for the woman who had occupied the chair next to Ariel’s during the two days’ voyage. Two children with their nurse trailed behind. Ariel’s glance barely touched the group and returned to New York’s terraced, dream-world sky line. But she was glad that these people had come up on deck and would be near her during the little while left of ship life. It did not matter that they would remain unaware of her until the very end. It was more interesting, being interested in them, than having them interested in her. And there was no reason on earth why they should be interested in her. It never entered Ariel’s head that there was. Joan Nevin, the woman, was tall, copper haired and eyelashed, and graceful with a lithe, body-conscious kind of gracefulness, of fashion, perhaps, more than of nature. Her sleek fur coat, her high-heeled, elegant pumps—even the close dark hat, flaring back from her copper eyebrows—these seemed to motivate her gait and her postures. She was, perhaps, more pliable to them than they to her. But Ariel did not mind this, although she realized it. It was wonderful, in its way, fascinating by strangeness. To tell the truth, Mrs. Nevin interested her more at the moment than the unknown, beautiful harbor at which she appeared to be gazing. And no aching longing for her father’s sharing of this interest could turn it dreamlike, for her father could never share it, alive or dead. Fashionable women, even at a distance, bored him. But how did a woman like that feel, Ariel wondered, about her so finished and catered-to beauty, and her easy self-sufficiency? And how did it feel to have two burnished, curled children that were one’s very own, to love, to live for, to play with? How wonderful if Ariel herself had had children of her own to play with and dance with on their beach, while her father was alive and she could still have gloried in them, before the sense of unreality had settled like a thin dust over unshared happiness! The Nevins and the nurse had come the length of the deck now, and were standing near her, but not taking their chairs, and oddly silent. Still, she would not look directly at them to discover the reason. If she looked into their faces she might become visible to them. So far, these two past days, Ariel had kept herself wrapped in a cloud of invisibility, she felt, merely by not meeting other eyes. She was shy of contacts, ever since her father’s death; and the aching, hurting suspense at the back of her mind, which was caused by dread of the near approaching meeting with her father’s friend, had only intensified her desire for invisibility. As for Mrs. Nevin, until this instant she had been nearly as unaware of Ariel as Ariel supposed her to be. She had looked at her once or twice in the beginning, to wonder whether it was a child, a girl or a woman who occupied the neighboring chair, but quickly decided that such speculation was waste of time since the one thing certain was that Ariel’s age didn’t matter, since she was obviously—nobody. From that decision she had returned to social obliviousness, lying back for hours at a time, wrapped up preciously by her eager cabin steward in two fur-lined rugs, which could not have been hired for the passage but must be her own expensive property, following with absorption the fine print of a thick novel by some one named Aldous Huxley. Now and then she would lift languid but brilliant eyes and gaze for a while at the flying sea. That was all, for after the first half hour on board she had not thought it worth her while to waste that brilliant languid gaze on any other fellow-passenger more than on Ariel. But now she remained standing by Ariel’s chair, as though with some intention, and Ariel had finally to look up and meet, for the first time, in a direct exchange of glance, those brilliant, mahogany-colored eyes set wide apart under their strongly arched coppery brows, and it was, without doubt, a breathtaking moment. But it was the steward who was speaking, and his tone was seriously accusatory. “You are occupying the lady’s chair.” He was right. In the excitement of at last being almost in, so near the landing, Ariel had neglected to make sure of her own name—Ariel Clare—on the slip of pink cardboard stuck into the holder on the chair’s back. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, rose and was off like a bird. The steward’s eyelids just flickered as she brushed past him in exquisite, smooth flight. But the flicker was not because the steward had recognized that the nondescript, pale, young girl had turned exquisite with motion. He blinked merely because her decision to depart and the departure had been so strangely, almost weirdly, simultaneous. “Tuck it in at the foot more, please. Very well. That will do. Thank you.” Ariel, out by the deck rail, heard Mrs. Nevin’s low, but carrying voice directing and dismissing her eager slave. “It was unkind and perfectly needless,” she thought. “Any chair would have done her just as well for the next few minutes until we land. It doesn’t matter, though. I won’t care.” But she decided to go for a last time up to the sun deck. She could watch the boat docking from there just as well—better than from here—and discover her father’s friend among the crowds on the dock just as easily. She was through with deck chairs and pink cards and haughty neighbors, for this voyage, anyway. But she wished she could wipe out from her memory forever those brilliant, indifferent eyes. She found the sun deck surprisingly clear of passengers. The deck chairs there had been almost all gathered up and were now being stacked into corners to wait for the return voyage and new voyagers. Ariel crossed to the rail and began to search, eyes narrowed against the cold sunlight glinting from cold waves, for her father’s friend in the dark mass at the edge of the pier over there, which only now was beginning to show itself as separate individuals waiting for the docking of the Bermuda. “When I care so much that just a stranger scorns me and finds me in the way, how am I going to help caring terribly if the Weymans don’t like me?” she asked herself, baffled that by no act of will could she slow the beating of her excited heart or cool the fire she felt in her cheeks. “Hugh’s so tall I must soon make him out, if he’s really come to meet me. I’ll wave when he catches sight of me.... Forget myself.... Wave for Father.... Pretend it’s Father seeing Hugh after all these years, and not I. I will not be strange and shy.” She imagined her father in her place, leaning on the rail,—blond, blue-eyed, chuckling softly and searching with anticipatory eagerness for the high-held dark head of his friend which would stand out any minute now above the crowd of people. And Gregory Clare was so living, so vibrant with life and joy in life, that when the people on the pier, looking up, first caught sight of him, not a soul of them but would ask himself “Who’s that rather wonderful-looking person?” and an involuntary light, a contagion of life, would ripple answeringly in the lifted faces. The wind whipped a strand of Ariel’s hair smartingly across her eyes. She shut them against the pain for an instant, and when she opened them again her father had gone. She was alone. She was only herself now, shy, trivial, pale,—a worm that wondered about the impression she was going to make on her father’s friend and his family. And all the time there was New York’s sky line to glory in. Well, even though she was so mean a person, so little and mean in her hidden self, perhaps she could do something to improve the outward girl. She could at least put on her hat, stand straight—not flattened against the rail like a weak piece of straw in the wind,—hold her chin up—her chin that was like her father’s, pointed, but firm. She pulled out the hat from one of the pockets of the tweed coat, pushed her blown hair up under its brim and pulled it well down on her head. It was a notable hat, once well on, and whatever it did for the inner girl, it certainly changed the whole air of the outer, visible girl. It was French felt of an exceptionally fine quality, and green, the shade of Bermuda waters when they are stillest. Her father had bought it for her one day in St. George’s. He said he had got it for a song at a stupid sale. It was one of the very few hats of her life, as it happened, because her father thought hats in general ridiculous and more suitable for monkeys than for men and women. But this hat was different. He realized that, when he caught it from the corner of his eye, passing the shop window. It sang Ariel. And he had got it for a “song.” But not the feather that was tacked to the brim, ruffling jewel notes in the wind. That had dropped from a song, not been bought at all. He had picked it up on the beach almost at their door as he came back one afternoon, not many weeks ago, from what was to prove his last swim. No bird from which this feather could have dropped had ever been seen on the island, so far as any ornithologist knew. But here was the feather, in spite of that. It was magic, then. And it magic’d the hat. It pointed the fact that Ariel’s eyes, rather narrow, but nice friendly eyes, and free as the day from the malice that one sometimes detects even in the pleasantest children’s eyes, were as green as itself,—as green as Bermuda waters. Now those eyes had discerned one head that did top all the other heads on the approaching pier, and it very probably was Hugh’s. But she had decided last night, or early this morning—she had slept very little—that she would begin, at least, by calling him “Mr. Weyman.” For it was five years and a few months over since they had seen each other. His father too had died, since that far-away time, and he had left law school to become the support of his mother and younger brother and sister. At twenty-five, still a student without responsibilities, when they had entertained him at the studio, he had seemed a boy. But at thirty now, and having, as she had, encountered death, could he be the same at all, any more than she was the same fourteen-year-old girl that he must be remembering? She thought not; and whether she was shaking with chill from the March wind or from apprehension of change in her father’s friend, she did not know. But she was shaking, miserably, and a strand of hair had escaped again and was stinging her eyes. |
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