  Hugh, who had failed in an effort to discover Ariel’s whereabouts on her first “Saturday off” and make a real holiday for her in New York as he had intended, spoke for the following Saturday by the middle of the week. But he was too late. It was already promised to Joan. This surprised him and made him uneasy. He had lost his hope for Joan’s sympathy with Ariel days ago, and now he was past desiring it. For Ariel and Joan, he had come to see, were essentially antithetical. Ariel had been wiser than he in knowing it from the beginning. So it gave him no particular pleasure to learn that Joan was taking Ariel to a Boston Symphony concert, and afterwards to dine at Michael Schwankovsky’s. Even in Grandam’s apartment it was not easy to see much of Ariel. For when he went up there, evenings, she tactfully left him alone with his grandmother. Monday night when he had protested, “But I’ve come to see you too,” she had surprisingly explained that she wanted to write a letter to Anne and would come back if she finished it. But she had not come back. And why was she writing to Anne? So far as Hugh knew, Anne had paid literally no attention to Ariel at all when Hugh had wanted her to, during the holidays. Of Joan these days it appeared that he could see as much as he liked, but in most unsatisfactory ways. He found himself hovering on the edges of her hospitality to watch her dance and gossip with her kaleidoscopically shifting groups of intimates. From an entire evening spent in thus shadowing her he might be the richer for only one or two alluring but enigmatical glances, or if he was supremely lucky, a few minutes of one-sided intercourse, when Joan drew him out about his business and his own progress, and he waked too late to realize that he had not entered into her world of interests nor been encouraged to do so. To stay away from her altogether would be best. How often he had come to this conclusion! But he was incapable of counting the cost of his love; or at least incapable of acting frugally, once he had counted it. If Joan wanted his friendship, she should have as much of it as she requested. And who would not rather die of starvation one day than go all one’s life without an appetite? While hungering for Joan, Hugh thought much of Ariel. The time when she had been a responsibility peculiarly his seemed passing. For Grandam, Schwankovsky, and now even Joan appeared, suddenly, all inside of a few days, ready, even eager, to assume it on their own accounts. And twice already since Monday Hugh had seen Anne’s writing on envelopes addressed to Ariel. One morning in the next week, Hugh called Brenda Loring on the telephone from his office to invite her to lunch with him. This girl, who from his first meeting with her had made it plain that he interested her, was an interior decorator with an astonishing vogue, considering her age and experience. It was only two or three years since she had graduated from Vassar, and already she had palatial offices of her own on Fifth Avenue, a dozen or more eager assistants, and an income which must be several times the size of Hugh’s. Joan had had a hand in her success. But Miss Loring had been worthy of that patronage, and now she was beyond need of it. Hugh could not fail to be gratified by the pleasure which colored Miss Loring’s voice when she discovered what he wanted of her, and by her quick acceptance of his luncheon invitation, given in spite of the fact that she must break a previously made engagement. He had been rather driven to seeking feminine companionship to-day because he was feeling particularly lonely and at loose ends. The reasons were various and not all of them plain even to himself. The uppermost one seemed to be, however, that it was Ariel’s birthday and that everybody appeared to have known it, except himself. Joan had, at any rate, and she had bargained with Grandam for Ariel to have a half-holiday in which to celebrate it. A party had been arranged and Hugh not been included. Joan had made an attempt at explaining this anomaly by telling him that the party was really Schwankovsky’s whole plan and expense, and that she was not in a position to suggest the guests.—And now Hugh was taking Miss Loring to lunch. He went to her offices to pick her up and suggest that she choose the restaurant. At once she said, “The Jade Swan.” It was in the Village, she explained, but rather beyond anything the Village had ever produced before. “Magnificent, in fact. Every one’s trying it, but it will be my first try, Hugh. I’m going to call you Hugh, now that you’ve at last begun to bother about me, and of course I’m Brenda. And let’s have a table in the balcony where we can see the whole circus. There’ll be plenty of celebrities to stare at. Writers—artists—editors. But just the terribly successful ones. The other sort couldn’t afford it, poor dears!” There were only half a dozen tables in the balcony, and Hugh and his guest were lucky in securing the last of these. It stood against the railing and afforded a view of the entire main floor of the restaurant. All the tables down there were already occupied in spite of the newness of the place, except one in the very center, which had the appearance of being reserved for some particularly festive occasion. For while the other tables all had their centerpieces of poets’ narcissus, this table flaunted a big shallow jade bowl filled with orchids and white roses. “That little bouquet cost somebody a fortune,” Brenda murmured. “And it’s not only expensive. It’s lovely. It’ll be interesting to see whom it’s to honor.” And almost simultaneously Hugh knew who had ordered it and in whose honor, for Schwankovsky’s big voice boomed under the balcony beneath their feet, and he and his party entered from the street. Ariel and Joan, and a frail blond young man, made up the group. “I didn’t know. Honestly I didn’t know they were coming here,” Hugh exclaimed. His companion laughed merrily. “But of course you didn’t. Did you think I was suspecting you of shadowing Joan Nevin, dear fellow? Wasn’t it I who chose the place?” Joan had seated herself facing the balcony; but in spite of the concentrated gaze of all the balcony lunchers on herself and her friends she did not look up or appear to be aware that there was a balcony. Hugh realized, as freshly, almost, as if he had never done so before, how distinguished and unusual as well as beautiful Joan was. Her face glowed with a purpose and light no other face in that crowded room possessed. Perhaps it was the effect of the brilliant large eyes set wide under the coppery-winged sweep of her brows. To-day the burnished hair was concealed under a purple hat so À la mode that not a glimmer of it showed at brow or cheek. Few women could wear a hat so daring as that and preserve at the same time a radiant and feminine beauty. And when Joan spoke, leaning across the table toward Ariel, her lips moved with such beauty of precision that one, without need to hear, knew that her enunciation was perfect. “Heavens! Joan Nevin is a stunning creature,” Brenda ejaculated, all her special gift of taste behind the generous words. “So it’s the great Michael Schwankovsky who invested in the floral piece. Well, if any one in New York can afford it with the stock market what it is, I suppose he can. Big blustering Midas! And it’s Joan he’s blustering around to-day. But that’s quite on the books, isn’t it? The little man, the poor dear, is Charlie Frye. Nobody of any importance, but amiable, and surprisingly often seen in company with the great. The other person—” Brenda assumed her lorgnette, a property she used with discretion and undeniable distinction for one so young,—“The other person—Lady? Child? Flapper? Russian Princess? Can’t make out what she is, and I don’t know who she is. Funny.” “That’s Ariel Clare. And the party’s in her honor, not Joan’s. Because it’s her birthday,” Hugh informed his companion—diffidently. Ariel, thin of cheek and shoulders, emerging with Frye’s help at this instant from her coat of a princess, was pale and small in contrast with the radiant Joan. Meager. Thin. Grandam was certainly—Hugh was sure of it—letting her work far too hard. And so this was Charlie Frye! But what was Brenda Loring saying with so much animation as she waved a presumptuously impatient waiter back from Hugh’s elbow. “Not really! Ariel Clare! The dancer! But how too deliciously interesting to have this early view of her, ahead of the mob. Getting within radius of Joan, though, is as good as being behind the scenes, isn’t it! She’s so frightfully in on everything! But this time you’ve beat Joan. You know the model intimately. She works for you, doesn’t she? Joan’s awfully entertaining on the subject. She declares it’s so typical—your keeping the girl on in that position at Wild Acres now that Schwankovsky himself is her patron, and the exhibition’s going to make her famous. Joan thinks your Philistinism delightful. But of course you’re not so insensible as Joan fondly imagines! I should see through you!” Joan was talking to the blond young man, while he visibly gloried in her radiance. “But the radiance is all in herself,” Hugh thought, looking down on the scene, and for once in his life thinking about Joan objectively, as a stranger might. Ever since she had come into the restaurant it had been as if he were at a play, and the four people sitting around the center table down there the players, to criticize impersonally and make what one could of. “Yes, that radiance is all enclosed. It doesn’t light Frye’s way to her, help him forward. It’s not sympathy. Not really. Now Ariel, although she’s silent and no one is looking at her, throws a radiance out from herself, all about her. She stays dim. One hardly thinks of her. But if Frye turned now from Joan to her, he’d find an illumination in the air between them. Sympathy.” He speculated about Schwankovsky. Had he tenderness for Ariel’s self, which was so poignantly accessible? Or was it merely self-dramatization in the big creature that had thrown him to his knees at her feet when she came into the drawing-room at Wild Acres that Sunday afternoon? Well, if he had been genuine then—and Hugh thought he was probably much too egocentric for that to be possible—his enthusiasm seemed to have dwindled since, for he had looked only at Joan all this time, listened to her speaking first to Ariel, then to Frye, openly absorbed in her and proud of her. Hugh wondered what he meant to do with Ariel the rest of the afternoon, now that he had usurped her birthday, if this was the extent of his interest in her. “I’ll excuse myself and go down and find out,” he decided. “Perhaps they’ll hand her over to me after lunch. She’ll like seeing the office, I think, and our view of the Battery. She can wait while I finish up the absolutely necessary business, and then we can walk in the Park, or go to an exhibition, or do anything she’d like. Joan and Schwankovsky can’t, after all, enjoy playing around with any one so simple and outside all their interests! My taking her on will be a relief to them, I imagine.” But with the next breath his plan and his hope were shattered. For Schwankovsky suddenly turned to Ariel, until now so unnoticed beside him, and put his great, hairy hand close down on hers, which lay on the white cloth, and they smiled at each other. It was over in an instant but it told Hugh all that he had doubted of understanding and sympathy between those two. Hugh perceived now—turned almost clairvoyant for the instant—that although Schwankovsky might look at Joan and listen to her, world without end, Ariel was all the while in his heart, and that he was as aware of her as—yes, as a mother is aware of the child in her arms while she converses with a caller.... So again Ariel had no need of Hugh. He returned his attention to Miss Loring, and tried to respond to something she had been saying. “I don’t exactly see why Joan should be amused at Ariel’s having a job and sticking at it, until the exhibition, anyway,” he exclaimed. “What’s funny about that, Miss—I mean Brenda?” “Nothing, if it were a respectable job, of course. But the idea was, you see, her being a maid. An odd coat, that, for a maid to be wearing!” “Oh, but she isn’t a servant. She’s my grandmother’s companion-nurse, and doing it very well too! You misunderstood Joan.” “Perhaps.” Brenda had turned around in her chair, and continuing to pretend that the impatient waiter did not exist, looked down at Ariel with clever, narrowed eyes. Then she laughed, a keen little ripple of pure pleasure, and continuing to squint through her lorgnette at the unconscious Ariel, cried softly, “But I do begin to see—something in her, anyway. The dancer. A cerise veil, a straight, very short purple tunic. Sheer. Neck, arms, legs, bare. That clean line of shoulder blade and thigh.... The face doesn’t matter, you know, in dancing. It’s the body.” “The dancer! What do you mean?” Hugh was suddenly as much revolted by Brenda’s narrowed, discerning eyes taking Ariel in from her head to her feet as he had been revolted a minute ago by Schwankovsky’s hand swallowing Ariel’s on the white tablecloth. Brenda dropped her lorgnette and looked across at Hugh, surprised by his tone. “Of course. The dancer. Why not? Joan’s crowd are saying it now. But soon all the world will be shouting it,—if Schwankovsky is right, and the Clare pictures are all that he thinks them. Isn’t this Ariel in every one of them, dancing? Isadora Duncan stuff? May Morning stuff? Well, there’s all the publicity she needs, if she wants to go on the stage, whether she has any actual talent or not. They say she’s untrained. But a few weeks of hard work would fix that. Æsthetic dancing doesn’t require the technique that ballet requires, you know, or even the vaudeville dancing stunts. All that is necessary is a reasonably pretty body, some gracefulness, and a lot of feeling. Given these, and a cerise veil, that girl down there can go as far as she likes—providing her father’s paintings make a big enough stir. Haven’t you even thought of that, Hugh? After all, the girl’s in your house, no matter in what capacity. You might get just a little interested, I should think!” Hugh peremptorily beckoned the waiter, by now almost hopeless, and took up the matter of their lunch with him. After the business was settled to Brenda’s complete satisfaction, and even more to the waiter’s, whose respect for Hugh showed to almost a shocking degree in his face as he received his orders, Hugh asked, “Did Joan put this nonsense into your head, or Schwankovsky? Anyway, it is utterest nonsense.” He could not disguise from himself, and even less from Miss Loring, that he was angry and uncomfortable. “What? About Ariel Clare? Really, I don’t remember. Why, it’s so obvious I may even have thought of it myself,” Brenda retorted, laughing. “Is it true, Hugh,” she went on, still teasingly, “that you yourself have had one of these Clare pictures for years, the best one at that, the gem of them all, according to Schwankovsky, in your attic? And did Schwankovsky and Joan and Ariel go on a still hunt for its recovery? And is it now hanging in your grandmother’s bedroom, because there’s no other place you want it at Wild Acres? Or are they only making a good story?” “It’s quite true,” Hugh replied seriously. “Except that Ariel got the picture out herself when she came to us, without help. By the time Schwankovsky had looked her up at Wild Acres, it was hung over my grandmother’s mantel. But it belongs to Ariel now, because I’ve given it to her.” Brenda stopped laughing. She looked at Hugh with new seriousness and exclaimed, “Do you know, I’m really, in my heart of hearts, quite different from Joan and from most of the women she plays with. I’m willing to have all the cultivation myself, and not expect my men friends to play up to all that.... Art, you know. Taste. It doesn’t matter so much as one thinks! And I don’t believe that we so-called artistic people have all the imagination, either. Men like you, business men, your imagination is the real thing. You create something out of nothing. Fortunes out of ideas. Skyscrapers out of thin air. Who am I to laugh when you show bad taste in judging a painting or prefer jazz to Debussy? One can’t have things both ways. And your way looks to me to be the biggest, truly. “Schwankovsky, for instance, is an entertaining person, and he certainly has cultivated his taste to an extraordinary and sure degree, and he’s done a whole lot for art in our benighted country. But he inherited his millions. His imagination never had to go into the making of them. Only in the spending. He uses his imagination in the spending, you in the making. Nobody would have time to do both. “I’d be willing to bet quite a lot, Hugh, that you in this particular case are the one who’s right. Not about the picture. Schwankovsky’s more likely to be right about that. But about the girl. Your genius must be in sizing up people. All business men, successful ones, have to be able to size up people. That’s obvious. And if you see that Ariel Clare is just a simple, wholesome girl who happened to have an artist for a father, but herself is a type to make a good nurse or maid, something practical and useful, then I think you’re right in sticking to it and being disgusted at the idea of Joan and her friend Schwankovsky thinking they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.... I’d accept your judgment on a person much quicker than anybody’s down there.” She waved her cigarette in its long holder in the direction of the Schwankovsky party. “Have you ever in your life tasted such onion soup?” she murmured after a minute of rather stunned silence on Hugh’s part. “How old is she, by the way? To become a dancer one should start very young.” “Ariel, you mean? Yes, the soup is very good. She’s twenty to-day. It’s her birthday.” As Hugh said this, Ariel caught sight of him for the first time, and smiled up at the balcony. He bowed to her, and his own smile was rather constrained. But he felt that a finger of sunshine had suddenly traversed his heart. He said again, not realizing that he was repeating himself, “To-day is her birthday. She is twenty.” |
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