  Grandam did not come down to dinner that night. But Mrs. Weyman said that she rarely did appear for two meals in the same day, even when she was feeling her best. Ariel suspected that Mrs. Weyman, in emphasizing this point, was indirectly intending to reassure her and make her feel that Grandam’s absence had nothing to do with her own visit uninvited to the attic apartment. They gathered in the library after dinner. Glenn and Ariel were at one end of the divan in front of the fire engaged in setting up the chessmen. Anne and Prescott Enderly were at the other end, waiting for Mrs. Nevin, who was taking them, that evening, to a dance at the house of friends of hers in Scarsdale. Mrs. Weyman occupied a low chair near by, and she was smoking an after-dinner cigarette. Enderly looked both handsome and distinguished in his evening clothes. “Much more the accredited novelist than the college boy,” thought Mrs. Weyman, looking at him through the spiraling smoke of her cigarette, which was mostly held in her fingers and very rarely in her lips, since she smoked only to put other smokers at their ease, including her daughter Anne,—and to keep young. “He’s changed since he came. Seems more manly, somehow. Firmer. And exhilarated about something too. I wonder, is it Joan? That she’s almost ten years older wouldn’t necessarily make any difference. Probably she’s the first woman of the world he has ever met,—at any rate seen so much of. She would be a revelation, a dream come true, to a young man of his background.” For Enderly’s family was totally undistinguished socially. Glenn had told his mother this, and added that Enderly boasted of the fact, and was more glad than otherwise not to belong to the “bloated bourgeoisie.” So, looking rather keenly at the young man through the smoke spiraling up through her fingers, Mrs. Weyman exclaimed with assumed casualness, “It’s rather sweet of Mrs. Nevin to be so nice to you young things! Having you to meet Michael Schwankovsky this afternoon and all! But I suppose, Prescott, you have unclassed yourself as a young thing by having produced ‘Stephen’s Fall’ and got famous. Glenn and Anne, of course, are merely being included along with you. Don’t you find her very charming?” Enderly was holding Anne’s hand, for all the decorum of their appearance, as it lay between them on the divan, under a fold of her outspread skirt. “Oh, very charming,” he answered, with casualness as assumed as his hostess’. “Beauty, brains and magnetism, all working together, make a very high-powered charm. And she must have used the full force of it on her bootlegger. We don’t get the chance to buy that quality from ours, do we, Glenn!” Mrs. Weyman crushed out her cigarette on a tray at her elbow. For the first time she felt definitely jarred by Enderly’s personality. “You’re quite wrong,” she said coldly. “Anything that Mrs. Nevin serves would be legal. Her cellar was stocked by her husband before the war, and it will last her a lifetime, the way she uses it. She doesn’t drink and give drinking parties as some society women do. She entertains with the same dignity and reasonableness that all of our kind of people did before prohibition. It’s the same with us. Anything you are served here is legal.” It was important for even a famous novelist to be aware of impeccability, when he was being entertained by it. Enderly’s fingers had closed about Anne’s wrist, stifling her heart, while her mother took such pains with his social education. But he answered with disarming candor, “Oh, I took that quite for granted, about you, I mean. But I couldn’t know about Mrs. Nevin, could I? So many different sorts of people know her, or claim to, and boast of being entertained at Holly! And although she’s obviously a lady, she’s even more obviously a person of temperament, genius. I hadn’t associated her with Puritanism.” “I didn’t mean you to! Mrs. Nevin is as far removed from anything Puritanical or priggish as I am. But she has character. Aristocracy, if you like. Self-respecting people must draw the line somewhere, even to-day. But they needn’t be bigoted. Look at me. I let Anne smoke. I even smoke with her. But that sort of tolerance doesn’t change one’s fundamental principles. In things that really matter, our kind of people are not changed at all. We keep our standards for ourselves and our associates pretty definite. And Mrs. Nevin is one of us, very much so.” Glenn had just captured Ariel’s queen, but for all that his smile as he barged into the conversation at this point was a sardonic smile. “Hadn’t you got Mother doped out for yourself, Scribbler?” he asked his friend. “Pity to make her do it for you! Bad commentary on your analytical powers. Couldn’t you see, at first sight, that she is one of those simple souls who believe that this jazz-ridden world is as sound at bottom, possibly sounder, than the lost world of the Good Queen Vic? It has invented virtues, not lost them. Who ever heard of frankness, honesty, hatred of shams before our somber decade? We’re less prudish, of course, but all the more wholesome for precisely that reason. And though somewhat obscured by the camouflage of ‘petting,’ purity still reigns supreme in girlish hearts, and honor in manly breasts. At least in the best families—like ours. Your own novel is only an example, Prescott. Its obscenity is healthy obscenity. By showing up the visible and ugly, you suggest all the more vividly the lovely idealism lurking under it all, invisible. Didn’t Stephen, in the end, after his diverting but possibly sordid passional experiences, fall in love, in the last chapters, with a nice girl? He seduced her, of course, but it woke her stupid parents up to the facts of—er—life. It’s a very idealistic book. Even the old folks got saved. They saw how narrow they’d been—” “Oh, chuck it, Glenn! I’m in perfect sympathy with your mother. And I believe—in fact, I believe it passionately—that she is right. What is moderation and self-control but aristocracy? Our Bohemian pose is too cheap, too easy. What do you think, Anne?” What Anne thought no one but Enderly discovered, however, for it was conveyed to him very simply by the throbbing of a pulse in a delicate, blue-veined wrist. At that moment Miss Peters surprisingly made an appearance in the library door. “Mrs. Weyman Senior would be charmed if Miss Clare would care to come up to her for a little while this evening.” Ariel sprang from the divan. “Oh, do you mind, Glenn? I do want to go.” “Mind!” Glenn exclaimed. “That wouldn’t matter. The Queen has sent her command. And the elevator waits without. I say! I thought you enjoyed chess, though!” Mrs. Weyman beckoned Ariel to her side. “I’m afraid Miss Peters has told Grandam about—our being in the apartment this afternoon, and that is why she has sent for you. I’m sorry. Don’t do anything to excite her unnecessarily, will you, and come away as soon as you can.” Then, turning to Miss Peters, who stood waiting to escort Ariel to the elevator, she asked, “How is Mrs. Weyman to-night? I hope the drive didn’t tire her too much.” “She is a little tired. But I don’t think it was the drive.” Miss Peters was looking curiously at Ariel. “I don’t think she’ll keep Miss Clare long. She ought to be in bed this minute.” The elevator was waiting for them at the end of the back hall. Miss Peters ran it very nonchalantly by a mere touching of buttons. “Oh! That’s the way it works? Next time I can take myself up,” Ariel said, as they stepped out into the attic hall. Miss Peters, meticulously closing the sliding door of the cage, remarked, “Oh, the family never use the elevator. Mrs. Weyman has heart disease, you know, and Mr. Hugh put it in for her. Then it’s a convenience in carrying trays up and down, of course. I couldn’t take care of Mrs. Weyman if I had to climb two flights of stairs each meal.” The attic hall, by night, was unromantically lighted by ordinary electric-light bulbs. Ariel regretted the afternoon’s mysterious twilight. But when Miss Peters had opened Grandam’s door, announced Ariel, and gone on her way, leaving them alone together, all the romance of the afternoon poured back, with Grandam added. Curtains of dim flower pattern were drawn across the windows. But they did not give the effect of shutting in the room. They were caressing, as night’s own starry curtains, and they brought distance near. Tall wax candles glimmered their light down on the piano, over the ivory keys and the glossy rosewood, and the dish with the anemones. But the anemones themselves stood up dark in the dusk, their colors lost. At the edge of the area of light shed by the crystal lamp on the bench, across the room, lay Grandam, her head elevated, among her pillows. She was wearing the silver scarf in which Ariel had been discovered by Mrs. Weyman. A chair was drawn up conveniently near to the daybed in preparation for Miss Clare’s visit. But Ariel ignored it, or perhaps did not see it. She went straight to the daybed and sat down on the edge of that, face to face with Grandam. Grandam did not waste words. “Miss Peters says you were up here this afternoon, Ariel, looking for something in my apartment. I have the liveliest curiosity to know what it was.” “I was looking for ‘Noon,’ the painting Hugh bought of my father. I can’t find where they’ve hung it. I couldn’t ask Hugh, since Father himself wouldn’t,—and anyway, he went away the very first day. But after you came to lunch I thought Hugh must have given it to you,—that it would be here. But it isn’t here. Can you tell me where it is? I don’t mind asking you. Father wouldn’t mind.” Pity woke in Grandam’s face. Things she had at different times heard of Ariel and her father and this picture of Hugh’s all suddenly fitted themselves together into a human pattern. She knew a great deal, all at once. She was silent. Ariel, during the silence, noticed that Grandam was not wearing her wig. This was her own hair, cut short, clipping her small head like a knight’s helmet. It was even lovelier than the wig, Ariel thought. What was Grandam? She was not an old lady with heart disease. She was not a grande dame of a civilization outworn. She was not even Ariel’s great-great-great-great-grandmother. Whatever she was, she was a friend of Ariel’s and would have been even more a friend of her father’s, if he had only known her. Grandam at last said, “I think I must have been away from Wild Acres, abroad, when Hugh came back with that picture. And I never have seen it. But very recently, since you came, in fact, Hortense has mentioned it to me, told me where it is. You shall have it to-night.” Ariel was on her feet. “Now?” “No. Wait. Let’s talk a few minutes first. Sit down again, my dear. Why are you so—so wild to see this picture? Didn’t you bring any other of your father’s pictures with you?” Ariel sat down again on the edge of the bed. Now that Grandam had promised her a sight of “Noon” she could wait patiently forever, so long as she waited here with Grandam. “No. I didn’t bring a single canvas,” she answered. “You see, they are all quite big. But I am keeping out five for myself. Not letting them be sold—although they will be in the exhibition, of course. Father thought ‘Noon’ the very best of them all. And seeing it again now,—well, it will be like going home.” “Yes, I can understand that. But you look as though you were seeing a vision, Ariel. What is it?” Ariel was looking at the picture in the ebony frame beyond Grandam’s shoulder. “Those hands,” she said. “They make me think of Father’s to-night, though they didn’t this afternoon when I was up here. And they aren’t like his really. Father’s hands aren’t so long, and the fingers aren’t nearly so pointed. Are those an angel’s hands? Or a saint’s?” Grandam’s expression was veiled. Yet it was not a secretive look that came into her features, making them enigmatical; it was an illuminative glow. “A very fine artist drew those hands,” she said. But her voice was concealing as much as was her face, and Ariel knew it. “He is dead now. Piccoli. An Italian. And he had an earthly model, not an angel. At least he thought so, I suppose. The hands themselves—are the hands of a friend of mine. He, too, is dead.... How is it with you here at Wild Acres, Ariel? Are you lonely?” Ariel bent quickly forward and picking up an end of Grandam’s silver scarf, kissed it. “I am not lonely now,” she said. “Who could be! And I’m never really lonely in the woods.” Then she told Grandam about sensing violets behind the snow that first day at Wild Acres and how she had found Persis and Nicky in the woods and danced her happiness for them. “But at lunch you were saying you had no talent. What about dancing for a profession, Ariel? Have you thought of that?” Ariel shook her head. “My dancing is like those hands there in their adoring. Adoring, and dancing, and loving,—they aren’t professions.” “Still, dancing can be as much a conscious and cultivated art as painting. Seriously, Ariel, hadn’t this occurred to you? Or to your father?” “No. But, then, I never saw a real dancer. Father has told me about Isadora Duncan and her wonderful dancing. And there’s Ruth St. Denis, too! But he liked Isadora better.” She went on then to tell Grandam how her father had put her, dancing, into all of his pictures. “I’m in ‘Noon’ too,” she said. “But they’re not pictures of me, you understand. Not portraits. You do understand?” “Yes, of course, they’re not pictures of you; they are snatches at the idea of you. But you’ve come just in the nick of time, Ariel. I might have got away, with you in the house, and never known you.” “You are going away!” Ariel’s fingers closed again on the scarf, as if to clutch Grandam back. “Where? How soon?” “I’m going to die. Quite soon, the doctors think. But you got here first. And now I can be a messenger to your father from you. You will bring us together, perhaps. Do you think we shall get along?” Ariel was not grave. She was merry. Oh, this was no old lady with dangerous heart disease, but a vibrant, swift-footed friend whom she was holding back from departure with force, by this piece of clutched drapery. “Do you know,” Grandam told her, “when I was a little girl and taken on train journeys, I’d look out of the windows at other children playing in dooryards, walking along roads, and sitting on fences waving at my train. And I’d wonder how they could bear being left behind, not being in a train. Do all children in trains feel that way, looking out of coach windows? I suspect they do. Well, Ariel, I’m in the same case now. I’m on the train, actually off, on a journey, and all the rest of you are like those other children. The nearest you can come to my adventure is to sit on the country fences and wave me past. And it’s more glorious than exciting because at the end of this journey there will be people I love and haven’t seen for almost a life-time. Those hands—these that you asked about, Ariel—will be there, I believe, to open the coach door.... Do you wonder that I pity all you children, left behind, out of the journey? But not you, Ariel! You aren’t left. You are more like a darting swallow at the train window, keeping up for a little way.” “Yes,” Ariel cried. “Put out your wrist, Grandam! I’ll light on it. I’ll stay till the wind blows me off!” Then they smiled at each other and during the instant of the smile their friendship mellowed as though the instant had been an entire life-time. “But we’re forgetting about ‘Noon,’” Grandam reminded Ariel. “I’ll go with you now to look for it.” “Look for it? But don’t you know where it is? I thought you said you knew.” “It’s in the attic across the hall. It mayn’t be just in plain sight, though. But we’ll find it and bring it in here and hang it above the mantel.” “In the attic! But why?” Ariel could not take it in for a minute. But strangely, her body was quicker than her brain to react. Her heart had started an angry pounding and her fingers were curling into her palms, hard, the nails biting into the flesh. Ariel wondered at her fingers and at her heart. She had followed Grandam across the floor toward the hall door. But Grandam halted by the piano and leaned a hand on it, suddenly supporting herself. “Wait, Ariel,” she said. “I’ll try to explain it to you a little. Hugh put ‘Noon’ in the attic because he didn’t want it around where he could see it. But it isn’t the insult to the painting and to your father that it seems. I’m sure it isn’t. It is something different altogether. For the attic, in this case, isn’t the attic at all....” But Ariel was not to be betrayed into thinking that the attic was the haunted, magical home of the invisible great-great-great-great-grandmother which she had almost imagined it on looking in there this afternoon. Her nails were biting into her palms, and her mouth was dry. What did Grandam mean, saying the attic was not an attic? Grandam was looking down at the anemones. She had stopped looking at Ariel. “The attic isn’t an attic—because it is Hugh’s subconscious mind. That’s what modern psychology, anyway, calls the place where we chuck away the memories that hurt us. And no more than the attic out there is an attic, is ‘Noon’ a painting. It was a painting when Hugh bought it, and thought it so beautiful. But Hugh was in love. And when one is a lover, every Æsthetic joy actually hurts until it can be passed on to the beloved. To share it would be even more relieving, of course. But in this case there was no hope of Hugh’s sharing anything very much with Mrs. Nevin. Her husband was still living and Joan had chosen him in preference to Hugh, anyway. No. Whatever he could possess of beauty he must give her outright, not even think of sharing with her.” Grandam touched the glassy petal of an anemone, so lightly that its delicate nerves did not feel a tremor. “Well, he showed ‘Noon’ to Joan without first telling her that it was to belong to her, because he wanted to tantalize her a little—and enjoy with her the moment of surprise when he thrust ‘Noon’ into her hands, to keep. But he never got that far, for Joan merely laughed at the painting, and the artist, and laughed at all the Bermuda episode. She wanted to be the source of all his joys. “From the instant of that laugh ‘Noon’ stopped being a painting to Hugh. It became the symbol of his love,—sneered at, denied. So he tossed it into the attic and shut the door on it. Forgot it. A very wholesome proceeding in spite of the psychoanalysts.... But whether this explanation, which, to be honest, is not founded on knowledge but merely surmise, really is an explanation or not needn’t matter to you, I hope. You’ll be magnanimous.... If one can’t be magnanimous, one had better be chucked into the attic oneself. I can state that as a fact. No surmise about it.” Ariel, too, was looking at the anemone. She addressed it, rather than Grandam, but to her they were one,—the glassy, heavenly still flower, and the voice counseling magnanimity. “I’m going to go now and get that—love, hidden in the attic,” she said. “Find it. Dust it. Nobody can stop me. You mustn’t come, Grandam. You look very tired.” Grandam was more tired than she had known, and glad to be forced, very nearly carried, over to her daybed by Ariel. She could well afford to rest now. Ariel was all right. It took Ariel some long minutes in the cold barnlike place, robbed by Grandam’s analogy of mystery and charm, to find “Noon.” But at last she hauled it out from behind a wall of discarded mattresses, a rather large and heavy unframed canvas, festooned with dusty cobwebs. Not minding at all the havoc it wreaked on her wispy green evening frock, she brought it in to Grandam’s room. “Turn away your face,” she called from the door. “I want to dust it before you look and I’ll put it up on the mantel with the candles around it. It’ll be better in daylight, of course, but even candlelight will give you some idea!” Grandam turned her face obediently but held out the silver shawl toward Ariel. “Here’s a duster,” she said, “that’s just the thing for it.” Without objections or even hesitation, Ariel used that live, lovely belonging of Grandam’s to dust the cobwebs and the dirt from the face of “Noon.” But she knew perfectly what it was she was doing. And Grandam knew that she knew. For the scarf was a rare and unreplaceable thing. Ariel’s tongue and lips were dry as the dust on the picture over which she worked and her heart beat heavily, like the waves on her home beach after a storm. As she lifted the canvas up to position on the fireplace mantel and then brought candles from the piano to set either side of it, Grandam, with her face conscientiously turned away, was saying, “You mustn’t be disappointed, Ariel, if I don’t find ‘Noon’ so wonderful as Hugh and you and your father think it. I’m no judge of painting. Know next to nothing about it. It will be merely a matter of personal taste with me, and of no account whatever as criticism. But then no individual’s word can make a final judgment. Not Joan’s certainly. Not even Michael Schwankovsky’s. Not yours or mine, or your father’s. Least of all your father’s, Ariel. No one knows anything about his own creative work—whether it’s good or bad—any more than the soul knows its own state.” But Ariel scarcely heard her or cared to hear her. The picture was placed. She moved back into the middle of the room, and looked. And looked. Home.... She had come home! Grandam’s room was a dove-gray wave on which she had been tossed up onto her and her father’s own beach, and she stood now in the hollow where her father’s easel had stood the morning that Hugh interrupted the painting of the masterpiece.... She had come home. And her Father was not far off. Her heart had stopped thudding. The waves on the beach were stilled in the noon heat. Tears overflowed onto her cold cheeks with grateful warmth. She tasted salt on her lips,—and thought it sea spray. But now that she was blind, Grandam was seeing. Grandam, looking through white sunlight, saw an edge of curling wave, a white beach, rocks where the sunlight broke into purple pieces, and in the air just above the rocks, Ariel dancing. It was the Ariel of five years ago, and still it was the same Ariel, because the artist’s genius had caught her as she would be always, through eternity. It was her essence he had caught there, as surely as her grace. And he had got the beach in the same way,—the essence of it. Grandam, in spite of the ignorance she had claimed for herself, knew perfectly well that anything which could stop her breath, as this painting did, and then make her life go on with a new tide of richness and meaning in its flow, as this picture did too, was—good. |
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