  Mrs. Nevin had been visiting in Philadelphia at a house party a few days, and Hugh had not the opportunity to thank her for what he was convinced was the result of her machinations concerning the Clare pictures. He thought of writing, but decided against it, preferring to express to her face the gratitude which he felt so deeply. Strange, sweet gratitude, really. Soon now her voice might come to him on the telephone either at his office or Wild Acres, to tell him that she was back and wanted to see him. For because it was Hugh who did most of the wanting, the initiative had become, gradually, almost entirely Joan’s. She knew, and he knew that she knew, that he would break an appointment with heaven itself for a three-minute encounter with her anywhere, any time. And this being true, the initiative had to be hers, unless he were to lose her altogether; for if it were his he would only drive her from his life by constant importunities. The only way to hold Joan, Hugh knew, was by letting her go. Her summons came sooner than he had dared hope. The telephone on his office desk rang joyfully. She was to be in town that evening, she said, for a dinner at Schwankovsky’s. Afterwards Michael wouldn’t mind a bit if Hugh turned up there. They’d probably dance. Hugh went, of course. It was the first time he had ever been invited to Michael Schwankovsky’s house. And to-night it was not in any sense, he knew, Schwankovsky’s invitation, but entirely Joan’s. When he got to the mansion—for Schwankovsky’s house on Riverside Drive was no less—Hugh was taken up in the house elevator, run by a footman in Schwankovsky’s livery, to the top floor, where the host and his dinner guests were dancing in the long gallery. This was—the World knew—where Schwankovsky’s collection of oils was hung, and Hugh wondered, as the elevator ascended, whether the connoisseur had perhaps already snaked out some of the best of the Clare pictures for himself, and whether they were already up here in the famous gallery. He did not know the ethics of the business, or whether, indeed, Frye had the right to sell ahead of the exhibition. But even if he might not purchase them, it was conceivable that the man who was to finance and advertise the exhibition could borrow from it ahead, at will, any pictures he wished. Hugh thought of Ariel. “She’ll want to know every last detail, which pictures are here, how they look by electric light, everything. I must take particular pains to notice and remember.” The elevator let him out directly into the gallery. A dozen couples were dancing. An electrola was blaring. Joan saw him, left her partner, and crossed to him at once. “Nice of you to come. Don’t bother whether you know people or not. Just cut in and dance with them. Have a drink?” “No, thanks. But can’t we talk—you and I? Must it be dancing?” “I’m afraid so, for a while, anyway. We’ve only just begun.” “Are you going out to Holly to-night? Is your car here?” “No. I’m not going home till to-morrow morning. I’m staying with Brenda Loring. You remember her? Be nice to her to-night. She quite betrayed her girlish heart concerning you in Philadelphia. She was at the house party.” Hugh had met Miss Loring several times at Holly, and she was one of the very few girls among Joan’s acquaintances who cherished the illusion that he was unattached. She danced past at the moment with Michael Schwankovsky and smiled brilliantly at Hugh around—she could not possibly manage it over—the big man’s shoulder. Hugh noticed Joan’s recently discarded partner, who had seized the opportunity of Joan’s welcoming Hugh to get himself a drink at the buffet set up temporarily near the electrola, turning toward them. “Not yet, you idiot!” he cried inwardly, and took Joan quickly into his arms. They danced. “I was going to write you, Joan. But I waited. You can’t know what a brick I think you’ve been. How I appreciate—” Joan was exchanging lip and eye signals with her host, who, still with Brenda Loring, was passing them again, and she barely noticed Hugh’s words. “I don’t see any of the pictures up here, though. Perhaps it’s more advisable to wait and spring them on the public, all at once. Is that the idea? Knock their eyes out? I must speak to your friend about ‘Noon.’ He’ll want that in the exhibition, of course. I’ve given it to Ariel.” “Hugh! What are you talking about? Hold me closer. That’s right. You haven’t caught on yet, have you? You’ll have to, though. This step has come to stay. It is a little intricate. But try now. That’s better!” At least he was holding her closer. But his heart and his pulse found it hard to keep the slow rhythm. They boomed, pounded, plunged as though he were one with some cosmic ocean. And the new step Joan wanted him to learn was mathematically precise, for all that the partner must be held so very close. It was naturally, then, some time before Hugh got back to the subject of the exhibition, and he only returned to it at all—desperately trying to ignore the mad race of his blood—because of Ariel. He must take news to her, detailed news, since Frye had neglected to write again in answer to her instant letter of many eager questions. Joan, of course, could now tell him all that they wanted to know. He hoped Ariel would be awake when he got home and thought she would; for he had telephoned her that he was to see Schwankovsky himself to-night. He had refrained from mentioning Joan only because Ariel, strangely, seemed to resent Joan’s part in her amazing good fortune. “It’s too splendid about Schwankovsky—that he should be so enthusiastic about the pictures!” he managed finally. “Did you have to do much persuading—after he had seen them, I mean? And have you seen any of them yourself yet? Joan! You were a darling to do it!” There were the other two again, Schwankovsky smiling intimately into Joan’s passing eyes, Miss Loring into Hugh’s. “Like silly monkeys going past on a merry-go-round. I wish they’d stop it. Joan won’t listen. She hasn’t heard a word,” Hugh groaned to himself. And all the time there was his thundering heart, his pulse to ignore,—holding Joan close like this in the slow movements of the dance. “Does Schwankovsky think the exhibition is bound to be a success?” Hugh’s voice raised itself, insistent, above the electrola’s blare, and above the thundering of the cosmic sea in his blood. Joan began to pay attention. “What exhibition?” she asked. “Which exhibition?” “Ariel’s.... The Gregory Clare pictures, of course.” “Oh! So it’s Ariel again. Good Heavens! I keep forgetting that wretched girl. The wretched artist-father too! Sorry, Hugh. I know you feel responsible about the stupid business. That you’re worried. Who wouldn’t be! But it isn’t at all likely that Michael knows anything about that silly exhibition,—if there is really to be one. Why should he be bothered?” “But I thought that Schwankovsky—that you, Joan—that you’d got him to look at the pictures, and that that was why—” Joan laughed tolerantly. “Well, I haven’t got him to look at them. I don’t even know where they are, in fact. And I’m glad I don’t. After the sample you showed me! But there’s nothing to keep you from pulling wires for Ariel, if you like. Why, you might even get Michael as a patron for the event. What a delicious idea!” Schwankovsky joined them at this point in their conversation of cross-purposes. The music had fallen mercifully silent for the minute. Joan took the big man possessively by the arm. “I invited Hugh here to-night,” she began, explaining to him, “to see me. But he’s not interested in me. Only in some wretched little artist’s exhibition. I suspect he means to tackle you next, Michael.—Better first-hand than second-hand, Hugh.—But I’m warning you, Michael! Hugh’s on the prowl for strings to pull to-night. He’s all on the make—for the artist’s daughter.” Having thus made things, as she thought, simple for her simple friend, Joan gave herself up to the arms of a new partner simultaneously with the reawakening of the electrola to a fresh burst of racket. Hugh had not the slightest idea of how he had managed it, but, plainly, during their brief moments of contact he had irritated Joan beyond endurance. And now he must gather up the pieces of himself which she had left and be coherent for his involuntary host. “It’s only the Clare pictures I was discussing with Joan,” he explained. “I thought she had had something to do with your interest in them.” “The Clare pictures! What do you know about the Clare pictures, if you please, Mr. Weyman? Or Mrs. Nevin, for the matter of that? Kindly tell me!” The big man was openly annoyed. “What do I know? Well, not much. Except, of course, that you’ve taken ’em on.” “Who told you that?” “Charlie Frye wrote it to us. Since then, we’ve heard nothing.” “Charlie Frye! Young idiot! Now why should he go around telling this, when I particularly requested that he shouldn’t?” “Well, of course, he had to let us know! Naturally we—” “Pff. Since it’s out, it’s out. No matter. Only it was going to be something of a satisfaction, springing an exhibition like that on New York. But now you and Joan know! Probably he’s told everybody. Well, I don’t suppose it really matters—” He blustered off without another word or look, leaving Hugh stranded. Didn’t Schwankovsky know that Ariel was at Wild Acres with the Weymans? That Hugh was her host? Apparently not. Miss Loring, seeing Hugh so suddenly and unequivocally disengaged, forsook her own group by the buffet and started to insinuate her way through the room toward him. “Got to catch a train,” he thought, to put himself in countenance with himself. If Miss Loring got to him before the elevator arrived, summoned by his urgent finger, he would say it aloud. He looked at his watch. True enough! If he was to catch the hour’s train from the Grand Central, he must get himself on the inside of a taxi in something less than a minute. The elevator beat Miss Loring, and Hugh was grateful. In the taxi he began sorting it out. Schwankovsky had seen Gregory Clare’s pictures all right, and he had taken the exhibition in charge. But Joan had had nothing to do with it, and in fact knew nothing about it. And Schwankovsky himself hadn’t a hint of Hugh’s connection with the artist or with his daughter. Probably he wasn’t even aware that Joan herself knew Ariel. Surprising, perhaps, but not unaccountable. Charlie Frye mightn’t even have mentioned that she had left Bermuda.—And Hugh decided that his having bolted away from that party didn’t matter. He couldn’t think that Miss Loring would be unconsolable, and no one else would even notice. Certainly Joan wouldn’t. Asking him to come had been the merest impulse—a fragile impulse at that—just a slight flutter of well-meaningness toward poor old Hugh. He looked drawn as he paid off his taxi driver at the Grand Central and mingled his stride with the throngs pouring toward their various locals on the lower level. His mother was reading in bed when he got home. She called out to him. Propped among snowy pillows, swathed in a rosy negligee under a rosy bedside light, she was reading a book of “Cases,”—collected and edited by Joan’s Doctor Steiner. For unpleasantness of subject they competed tolerably with the popular murder mysteries of the day, and for the ingenuity of their unraveling and denouements they competed not at all, but superbly surmounted. “Ariel in bed?” Hugh inquired. Mrs. Weyman closed the book, but kept a finger in it. “I should hope so,” she exclaimed, just this side of sharpness, while her welcoming smile changed into an irritated frown. “Really! Hugh! Don’t you expect quite a lot of me these days? Three times this week I’ve dined with that girl alone here. We’ve nothing to say to each other. If Grandam came down, it would help. But no, Ariel seems to have become my eternal vis-À-vis. Joan’s away. Mrs. Drake and the Eddingtons and ’most everybody else, for the matter of that, are still in Florida. Even without Ariel it would be dreary enough—But with her! And you come rushing in—’Is Ariel in bed?’ I can’t stand it.” “I’m sorry, Mother. But Joan’s back. You’ll see her to-morrow, probably. That will help. And the exhibition’s on the way,—less than two months to wait. After that Ariel might go abroad, or something, with some nice older woman. Meanwhile—” “Exactly, Hugh! Meanwhile? It’s appalling! What to do with her! And how’s she to go abroad, or do anything—without any money?” “Why, Mother! You’re crying! Why? I hadn’t an idea you were so bothered! Poor darling!—I’ve an idea. Why don’t you go to Europe right now, this spring? We can manage it beautifully—” “And leave you unchaperoned here with this young person, I suppose!” “That’s ridiculous! Unchaperoned! But if you must be so considerate, darling, there’s Grandam—” “Yes? But is there? I sometimes wonder! Grandam might as well be living in the highest snow of the Andes for all the contact she has with us these days! Her rÖle as chaperone wouldn’t have much illusion for the servants, or even for the world at large, I’m afraid, Hugh dear. But in any case I don’t want to be driven away, if you please, from my home and my children and my friends by your Ariel Clare!” Hugh was utterly taken aback. He had not known that his mother harbored any resentment whatever toward Ariel. And why in heaven’s name should she! But he said, after a moment of quick thought, “Look here, Mother! Ariel can go in to New York with me mornings. There’ll be plenty for her to do all day, seeing the sights. That’ll get her off your hands. I only haven’t suggested it before because she’ll need money, batting around by herself, and the poor girl’s awfully touchy about money right now. If she weren’t so proud—” His mother’s strange, suddenly hysterical laugh halted him. “So proud!” she gibed. “Why don’t you suggest that she pawn the fur coat you gave her, Hugh! She wouldn’t need any further resources for a long time. She could go to Europe then, or anywhere else she wanted to—comfortably. But certainly you’re not to dry-nurse her days in New York. That’s absurd. Something will come along to solve the problems, I know. It’ll have to. Thursday, though, I will let you take your turn, since you suggest it. It’s my day for the Shakespeare Club, and Ariel certainly wouldn’t fit. So your New York plan will be useful for that one day. You are a self-sacrificing old dear!” Hugh, on leaving his mother, walked quietly out to the guest-room wing and stood for a few seconds before Ariel’s shut door. All was still. So very still that he actually sensed a girl sleeping. He wanted to go in, to look at her asleep. Her room, when she was in it, was, he knew, like a still little corner in the sky, cold, star-filled.... She was precious to him, this daughter of his friend, every hour more so, as he came to know her better. Was this tenderness that welled in his heart merely the automatic tenderness which most people do harbor for what is helpless and dependent on them, and not really the unique thing he felt it? He scarcely knew. But as he turned away from Ariel’s door, he was thinking of Joan. He felt that he knew to-night, definitely and forever, that she would never relent, never love him. Her indifference to Ariel and Ariel’s good had convinced him. It was as if in refusing to share some of his tenderness for Ariel, Joan had refused to give him a child. This was absurd, on the surface, he was aware, but it had deep roots of truth somewhere, strongly reaching down into reality. |
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