  “You want to discuss the exhibition with Ariel? She’ll be down in a minute.” Hugh shook hands with Michael Schwankovsky and lighted Joan’s cigarette for her. “The exhibition! No, not at all. It’s already entirely arranged for, and will be a magnificent success. Mr. Frye has given me carte blanche. It is the dancer I would see, not the lady who is to become rich from the sale. Yes, here to look with my own eyes on the soul of the paintings, the dancer herself. I palpitate for one glimpse of that spirit.... When you spoke to me of the exhibition, Mr. Weyman, at my house the other night, I did not know that the dancer was in this country, much less your guest. I knew nothing of your connection with the affair whatever. But can it be true? She is really here?” He turned in a full circle, his glance, his hands, sweeping the library with an amazed gesture. “In these bourgeois surroundings! Mon Dieu! But how is it done? Have you stuck a pin through her head, Mr. Weyman? Is she mounted on cardboard?” Hugh chose to treat this, as he hoped it was intended, humorously. “Gregory Clare was my friend,” he explained what he had not been allowed a chance to explain at Schwankovsky’s house. “Naturally, I am delighted that you are interesting yourself in his work. But I do not quite understand why your enthusiasm should extend itself to his daughter whom you do not know.” “Do not know! But remember that I do know the pictures! Ha!” The huge Russian snatched from his breast pocket a very small flat jade case, snapped it open, extracted a minute, orange-colored cigarette, which he stuck into a very long black holder, and began to smoke ferociously. Out of the astonishing clouds which at once began to drift from his quivering and expansive nostrils his voice growled and reverberated huskily. “Can one see the pictures and not adore the dancer? But, I forget. You, Mr. Weyman, have seen the pictures, I understand, without allowing yourself to become at all disturbed by their beauty. You have even seen the painter himself. Seen him once plain! Alive! In the flesh! Even called him ‘Friend’! But from you who has ever heard a word of his great art? How is this? Ha! He had to wait and wait and wait until he was dying and a little trifler with art, this little Mr. Frye, came along and thought the paintings pretty. And it is this little dabbler, this no-account would-be painter, who consoles the dying genius, who promises that his life’s work shall be shown, shall be recognized. While you, who knew him for years—Joan says it has been many years—your part has been kindly, oh, so very, very kindly, to take his daughter, the divine child of his muse, and employ her as a servant in your household. But you may intend kindness. One never knows. The certainty is that you are blind. Your perception of beauty is dead or never existed.... I,—I have come to see the dancer.” “Michael! You’re being outrageous. Hugh, he’s not responsible. Don’t even notice him. He sometimes gets this way.” Joan was up, moving about restlessly. Suddenly she stopped, swung about, put a hand on Schwankovsky’s arm. “Michael!” she spoke as to a sleepwalker, cautiously but firmly. “Wait till you see your dancer. You may find that all this excitement is sheer waste, that Hugh is right, and Ariel is quite ordinary. Besides, she isn’t exactly a servant here. You misunderstood me. She’s a companion-nurse. There’s quite a little difference.” Schwankovsky shook off the quieting hand. “Companion-nurse!” he bellowed. “Good God!” Joan backed away from him, more disconcerted at his having ignored her hand than by his tone. Schwankovsky, seeing her expression, obviously made some effort to be more peaceful. “Forgive me, Joan, my dear. You see I forgot that you had not yet seen the paintings. You’d know, if you had, what Mr. Weyman has no excuse for not knowing, that it is madness and folly to pretend that the dancer is a ‘companion-nurse.’ She simply isn’t anything of the sort. She’s the inspiration, soul, I can say it, of the greatest artist of our times. She’s the germinating force within the outward and visible expression of his art. And this force, this Imagination, inherent in all true art, has nowhere else that I know of ever taken form and showed itself through the actual medium—of paint, or music, or sculpture. So here we have the unique, the unheard-of. Imagination made visible! In Ariel, dancing.—But where is she? Why doesn’t she come?” She was already there, in the doorway. “Ha!” The Russian charged lumberingly upon her, and fell, kneeling, by her silver slippers. Grabbing up her hands he kissed them,—the palms, the backs. Hugh cried, but inaudibly, “Why doesn’t Ariel box his ears?” Joan languidly sank into a chair, lighting a fresh cigarette. “Well, Ariel,” she drawled. “The bear there on the rug is Mr. Michael Schwankovsky. Allow me to present him.” Schwankovsky bounded up,—turned on Joan. “A totally unnecessary waste of breath,” he expostulated, and seized Ariel’s hands again. “This divine child and I have known each other before the creation of the world. It was she who taught my soul the existence of form while it was yet chaos. ‘Ariel.’ Why did they name you that? It isn’t good enough. But then, you should be nameless. There is no name.” Hugh asked of Joan in a low voice, with genuine concern, “Is it all right? Has he been drinking?” Joan laughed, but mirthlessly. “Not a bit of it! He’s merely been a little put out with me lately, and this is the reaction. He couldn’t take it in why I hadn’t told him Ariel was here. But how could I dream he’d be interested? That it meant anything to him? And why, in heaven’s name, Hugh Weyman, didn’t you tell me that he had seen the Clare pictures and was exhibiting them? I don’t understand your secretiveness. It wasn’t like you. It was horrid.” “But you were away. And I thought you knew, of course. I thought it was you yourself, Joan, who had got the old duffer interested. I was awfully grateful to you. I tried to tell you how grateful when we danced, remember? I went over there that night all primed to bless you, and thank you, for what I supposed, of course, you’d done.” Joan looked away. She was pale, he noticed, and there were fine lines around her mouth and between her eyes. Nerves. But he had never before seen her destitute of the glow of complacency. It took him aback. “If only I had seen the pictures!” she murmured. “I would have talked them up to Michael. That goes without saying. He’d be the logical person, obviously. But you scarcely mentioned them, Hugh. And then Charlie Frye—the fact of him sponsoring them! That threw me off, naturally. How could I suspect that he’d stumbled on something really good? I was absolutely in the dark. And it was you who kept me there.” “But I—” Hugh began. He was tempted to remind her how he had brought her “Noon,” the painting which Clare himself, dying, considered his masterpiece, and that she had laughed at it. But he did not want to distress her any more than she was already distressed, and so he hesitated and looked away toward Ariel. She and the Russian were sitting facing each other on the little gilt sofa before the windows. They were in profile to the room, knee to knee. In fact, Ariel’s hands were palm upwards on the big man’s knees, while his own huge hairy hands held them there. Hugh had no excuse to interfere, for Ariel seemed contented. He caught words now and then from their hurried, eager talk: Gregory Clare ... Clare ... Father ... Gregory ... Genius ... Studio ... Beauty ... Art ... Color ... Sunlight ... Love ... Shells ... Life ... Father ... Shells ... Wind ... Death ... Genius.... Joan smoked cigarettes rapidly, lighting one from another, as Anne sometimes smoked but Joan seldom, and flicked the ashes onto the rug by her chair, for Hugh had neglected to provide her with an ash tray. He remained, with head turned, listening, as she too was listening, to the rough, deep voice mingling with the flattened, clear tones, over by the windows. “What are you thinking?” Joan asked suddenly, but softly. What she really meant was, “Why don’t you look at me? Listen for my voice, not Ariel’s? You are thinking about me, only me, aren’t you? It would be strange if you weren’t.” Hugh answered her spoken question dryly. “Beauty and the beast! An obvious and unescapable thought, don’t you agree?” “Hugh!” She barely moved her lips to whisper the name. But although scarcely breathed, it was heavy with intended significance. He turned to her like a shot. Their eyes met. Hers darkened under his gaze, and the eyelids drooped, while her lips softened, opening just perceptibly. It was the old call, more sudden and direct than usual, and more unexpected, given the time and the place,—but effective. Flame glared against the blackness in Hugh’s suddenly quenched mind. His heart began its obedient thundering gallop.... Came a crash! The grizzly over by the windows had suddenly sprung to his feet, turning over a small table in the act. A china box and a marble figurine lay smashed to bits on the polished floor. Both the marble and the box were cherished, valuable possessions of Mrs. Weyman’s; but Schwankovsky’s only apology was a shrug of his great shoulders and a humorous arching of bushy eyebrows in unwarranted surprise at the destruction. He came rushing toward Joan and Hugh, sweeping Ariel with him by a great arm. “She says one of the pictures is here, upstairs,” he roared. “A picture that Clare thought the best of them all! It’s up in Grannie’s room she says, old Grannie’s room in the attic! We forgive Mr. Weyman his unique absence of perceptions, perhaps—but you, Joan Nevin—You!” His scorn choked out his utterance. “In Grandam’s room? Well, I haven’t seen it. I haven’t been up there for weeks,” Joan drawled, but her cheeks were dangerously flushed. “But they’ve had it for years, Ariel says. And you have told me about this Grannie, my friend,—this old lady. You call on her frequently. More than once in five years, if I remember. So you must know this picture. And you never told me, your friend!” His hands were clawing his hair. Hugh spoke soothingly, “It’s been in the store-room until recently. Ariel rescued it for us out of the attic. I’d put it there. So Joan hasn’t seen it—not hung in my grandmother’s room.” He was giving Joan her way out, if she cared to take it. She could say now truly enough that she had never seen “Noon” hung, and in a good light. But Joan did not take advantage of the way out Hugh had so carefully prepared for her vanity. And Schwankovsky grew stormier. “In the attic! You put this picture in the attic? You did? And you boast of it? Then, when Ariel finds it there, you very, very kindly let her hang it up in Grannie’s room? Wonderful! This is too wonderful! More and more wonderful, and still more so!” Joan kept a silence which masked itself as amusement. As for Hugh, he nodded, but did not pretend to be entertained by the vaudeville sketch in bad manners which was being imposed upon them. Let Schwankovsky think him the fool he pretended. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest. For Hugh had never, at any period in his life, and least of all at this minute, aspired to be considered “a man with taste” in any sense that Schwankovsky would credit. If he had married Joan she, like so many other American wives, would have had the responsibility for all that sort of thing. And for the past five years Hugh had come more and more to consider himself a business man with very little that was Æsthetic in his make-up. He acknowledged to himself now that if to-day he should see “Noon” for the first time, there was a large likelihood that he would not even make a stab at coming to any opinion for himself as to whether it was good or bad. Certainly he would not be pierced to his soul by the white light—which, then, years ago, when he was young, had seemed to him to come from some esoteric birth of beauty behind the light itself. So he neither blamed Schwankovsky for his choking sputterings nor felt insulted. He had the grace to realize that five years ago he would even have been in sympathy with him. But although he did not really mind Schwankovsky’s rage at himself, some unhappiness was clawing at his inner consciousness, some psychic pain, unlocated. Was it Joan’s cool, smiling silence? Joan could and should be defending him against this hot-tempered friend of hers, he realized. If she began to, he would hush her up, of course; but she was not even starting.... But perhaps it wasn’t Joan. He didn’t think it was. Was it Ariel? That Ariel should be looking at him as she was now! Her hand lay on Schwankovsky’s mammoth arm, the fingers clutched and lost in his great fingers. That was a little sickening to Hugh. But it was her face, its expression, which actually stabbed. Had Schwankovsky succeeded in making Ariel believe what was, indeed, the truth—that Hugh had failed her father? And what did Joan expect him to do in reply to these taunts from her friend, anyway? And why didn’t Joan laugh out loud, instead of smiling that way? But it was Ariel who kept the drama melodramatic. She turned on Joan. “Why do you let your friends misunderstand each other so?” she cried. “Why don’t you stop being amused and set Mr. Schwankovsky straight about Hugh? Hugh liked ‘Noon’ the best of all the pictures Father had done when he was in Bermuda. And he bought it. He named his own price, and paid it. One thousand dollars. Hugh had four thousand dollars a year to spend then. Father knew that. And Father thought it splendid that a man would spend one fourth of his income on a picture. But no one goes after beauty for himself or wants it that way. It’s for his friends as much as himself. Hugh only put ‘Noon’ in the attic because it reminded him that he couldn’t share it or anything else that was real to him with you, Mrs. Nevin. No one wants to be reminded of things like that about any one he loves. Love is more important than art, isn’t it!” Joan assumed the appearance of looking through Ariel as through clear glass—something that might not be there at all—but the amusement on her lips and in her eyes turned genuine. She spoke only to Schwankovsky and as if both Hugh and Ariel had suddenly vanished. “I’m wild to see this picture, now that you tell me of it, Michael. And don’t be cut up about finding it in the grandmother’s apartment. If it weren’t rather fine she wouldn’t let it remain an instant. She has taste. Let’s go up this minute. I’m thrilled. Ariel has been misinformed, you can see.” Hugh stopped them. “I’ll have to get Grandam’s permission, of course. Joan knows she’s rather strong on etiquette, and that one has to be announced.” But Ariel again asserted herself: “Grandam said I might take Mr. Schwankovsky up. She knew he’d want to see ‘Noon.’ And then, if she can have Mrs. Nevin too, I’ll come down and say so.” When Hugh and Joan were left alone he said, by way of saying something in the face of her disconcerting, aloof silence, “Grandam is devoted to Ariel. She’d let her do anything she asked, I think.” “She’s dressed her up, I notice. Quite touching of your grandmother to be so interested, don’t you think? I do. She’s playing a game with Ariel, I imagine. Recreating a raw personality. Even a frock like that can’t work miracles though, and Grandam must know it in her heart. But life must be getting rather dull for her.” “Life is never dull for Grandam. At least, to me, she always seems to be living at a higher rate of vibration than the rest of us.” He smiled at an idea which leapt in his mind. “Do you know, to me, she’s something like babies are, under two years at any rate, growing while they sleep, while your back’s turned, changing like anything, every minute. Think how marvelously quickly they learn terribly deep and obscure things! what words mean, for instance, and cause and effect, and all! Grandam is still like that,—simply rushing along into new perceptions of Life. You and I have slowed down long ago. We feel and experience. But do we change? I don’t, much. Not consciously, anyway. But she’s simply absorbed and exhilarated with her processes of change! She’s—” But Joan had turned away and was groping for a cigarette in the silver box on the mantel above the fire, with her back to Hugh. “Oh, come! That’s enough about your grandmother. This box is empty, drat it! I need a cigarette.” “I’ll get some from the library,” he offered, and was gone. As he went, Joan turned about and looked after his back, astounded. She had thought him almost at her shoulder—and now he was gone, like that. When he returned she was nonchalantly settled on the gilt sofa. She waved away the cigarette she had said she wanted. “I’ve smoked too much to-day,” she murmured. “Much too much. I’d like to give it up altogether. It’s become so usual, and it never was exactly a beautiful performance, a woman smoking!” Hugh lighted a cigarette for himself and sat down a little ways off. “It’s rather sweet the way Ariel defended you just now,” Joan commented absently. “Like a little guinea hen over its chick. And her startling aphorisms! Love is more important than art—and—No one goes after beauty for himself. Now, I ask you!” But suddenly Joan dropped that note and began talking seriously about Prescott Enderly. She smoothed out the fingers of her gloves as she went on, looking from Hugh to them, from them to Hugh. And as the gloves got smoothed, so her face. Under Hugh’s eyes it bloomed again, gradually, with its wonted complacency. It amused her, she told him, when very young men fell in love with her these days. Men older than herself—sometimes even very much older—she had come to consider more worthy game. When they were interesting at all they had had time, you see, to become just that much more interesting. Michael, for instance! He was over sixty. He looked much younger, of course. But “Who’s Who” said sixty-two. It was Prescott Enderly, however, she wanted to discuss with Hugh. The boy had become, almost over night, something of a problem. She laughed. “After all, middle-aged people one needn’t worry about, no matter how desperately infatuated they appear to themselves. One notices they don’t kill themselves for love. It’s only the very young who have the vitality to be tragic. Don’t you agree, Hugh? If I weren’t so really fond of your young novelist friend, I’d be diverted. He’s very dramatic.” “This is quite new to me,” Hugh told her, as uncomfortably as she could wish. “I thought Enderly was Anne’s beau. Didn’t know you ever saw him, in fact, until that night here.—It was Ariel’s first night with us, remember?” Ariel’s first night! Joan came near to starting, as much at the voice as at the words themselves. It had been Joan’s first night, if you like, back from her winter away, but here was Hugh identifying it by Ariel’s coming to Wild Acres! And in that rich, low, reminiscent voice! “Yes, that was the night I met Enderly,” she agreed. “But I’ve seen him since, you know. Quite a lot. Didn’t I tell you that I got Mrs. Allison to invite him to her house party in Philadelphia? He was there, very much so, from Friday to Monday. How he gets away with it at Yale I can’t say. And he’s at Holly now. He’s reading me all he’s got done of the new novel to-night. Pris Larkin, by the way, is week-ending too, and your particular friend, Brenda Loring. So come over for supper, if you like. Brenda will bless me if you do—” She glanced up at the clock. “They’ll be expecting us back for tea soon now! Whatever’s keeping Michael up there all this time? It’s almost half an hour I’ve been boring you with my conquests. What is keeping Michael?” “The picture, I should suppose. And getting acquainted with Grandam. Of course, he’s never met any one like her before. You mustn’t mind her not sending down for us. Schwankovsky in himself must be as taxing as a dozen people.” “Oh, I don’t mind.” But she got up, restlessly, and wandered, Hugh following her, into the library. There she dropped down on the piano bench and commenced to play some Debussy. Hugh leaned on the piano and watched her hands. They were as strong as they were beautiful. She asked, above the music, “Why is Michael putting himself to such trouble to annoy me, do you suppose? It’s simply silly of you, my dear, to suggest your grandmother as my rival.” “Well, there’s Ariel too! He didn’t appear to be exactly indifferent to Ariel....” Joan’s playing gained in subtility of interpretation. “It’s funny, Hugh, but poor old Michael is madly jealous of Enderly. Last night he was quite boorish about it. And Pressy understood the situation perfectly. It was rather delicious, watching, but disgraceful of Michael, all the same. In some ways Prescott is more sophisticated than Michael. In spite of his background and youth. Perhaps the really sophisticated mind is an accident, like genius, and can appear out of nowhere.... Michael’s jealousy, though, does flatter the boy. How could it not! A man like that jealous of him!... And now, you see, Michael thinks he’s paying me out....” She dropped her hands from the keys. “Come on,” she cried, jumping up. “I’ve duties to my other guests. So I shall have to gratify Michael to the extent of using violence to drag him home with me, I suppose. Unless he’s to walk, and he’s not so good at walking as you are, Hugh dear!” Hugh could only go with her. He could hardly insist that Grandam, who had kept the noisy, ranting Schwankovsky with her for almost an hour, was not up to saying “good afternoon and good-by” to an old acquaintance like Joan. But Joan was disconcerted almost to the point of awkwardness when they discovered Schwankovsky in the middle of tea with Grandam and Ariel, and looking as if he would like nothing better than to stay on all the afternoon. Ariel, as they came in, was kneeling up straight at one side of the hearth, toasting a big slice of graham bread which in its very size and thickness proclaimed it had been ordered by Schwankovsky for himself. At the other side of the hearth, at Grandam’s knee, he crouched, waiting for it, like some giant Tartar on a cushion. Her scarf, falling from a shoulder, trailed down the giant’s back, and he had drawn the end across a great knee. It was bright in the firelight, very bright and vital. Ariel’s face was pure silver, and her eyes emerald green against the flames. When Grandam saw the new arrivals she leaned farther back in the long chair and shut her eyes for an instant. Hugh said with quick concern, “You are getting too tired! We don’t want tea, Joan and I. Hers is waiting for her at home, along with a house full of guests who are expecting her and Mr. Schwankovsky back for it.” “Well, you will let Michael Schwankovsky finish his fourth cup here, won’t you, Joan? Now he’s begun it? Do sit down, both of you. Ariel, please pass the sweets to Joan and Hugh. There’s cheese, Michael Schwankovsky, in that jar, if you like it on graham toast. Hugh, get a cup for yourself from the tray.” Hugh preferred to smoke,—but nothing less than a pipe this time, for he felt Joan’s strain and confusion; and his well-worn, smooth and beautiful meerschaum at least gave a superficial air of peace to the gathering. Joan sat looking over Grandam’s head to the western windows. She observed, with something like exasperation, that even out there, far, far in the western sky, the red-violet light of the clearing evening was turning the very heavens into a mere extension of Grandam’s apartment. In the smell of browning toast, the firelight, the laughter, Ariel’s silver slippers coming and going in Grandam’s hospitality, the smoke from Hugh’s meerschaum, and the shadows dancing on its bowl, she refused to take pleasure. But Schwankovsky would not let her stay out of it whether she felt at home or not. He sprang to his feet, seized her by the elbows, pulled her up, and walked her backwards, away from the fireplace into the center of Grandam’s room. “You haven’t looked at ‘Noon’!” he shouted. “My Ariel was right. It is the jewel of them all. I admit it. Clare didn’t go beyond that even in ‘The Shell.’ “But I wonder if it is well, my friend, that you are seeing the best first! To lead up to it gradually might put less strain upon one’s understanding of what the artist intends. What do you think of it? Speak! Say, my friend!” His excitement, as he watched Joan studying the picture through narrowed eyes, was childlike in its eager expectancy. But it was a full minute before she gave him any satisfaction. Then she merely said, with what appeared to be a quiet sincerity, “Yes. It is good. What do you suppose he used to get that tone in the white? Yet I don’t quite see the point of the introduction of the figure. I’m distressed for the unity, Michael.” “No, no, no, no. See! It is like this—” The big man was off on a technical exposition of a new, a more subtle idea of unity, as discovered and used by Gregory Clare. “As for the way he got that white—well, Charlie Frye has told me in the most particular detail how Clare mixed his paints,—but only God knows how he moved the brush to get such effects! “But you do not expand, Joan!” he halted his dissertation to expostulate. “You are not convinced?” Hugh was afraid that the Russian might burst into tears. “Oh, yes. I am convinced that here we have something really important!” Joan admitted. “Ha! You do.” He rubbed his hands. “Well, that is enough! All that I expect from anybody for the next hundred years or so. After that, we shall see! But there will be those, my friend, who will not admit even so much. You are aware of the stupidity abounding, particularly here in your New York. I should like to keep those stupid ones alive a few centuries, though, just to show them up to themselves. They are going to insist how the work of this painter is sentimental because of his insistence on the introduction of the dancer. Clare sentimental! A man who paints rocks like that, sees them like that! It is obvious that he is as hard as the rocks he paints. Spiritually hard and firm, a chiseled-out soul. Sound, through and through, and formed! Sentimental? Pff! But we will speak only technicalities, my friend, when they begin that rumpus. We will answer them with cold technicalities in their own jargon—for even there we will have them. And a hundred years from now, they’ll be groveling, eating from our hands, as it were. Not?” Joan replied nothing, but went on viewing the painting from various angles. “I shall buy you one, Joan,” Schwankovsky promised her. “Not an oil, perhaps. What you want of the finished work you will choose and invest in, yourself. At the exhibition. There I would not influence you. But there’s a sketch of the dancer you’d value. But no. That I must have myself. Life would be unthinkable, lacking it! Ha! There’s a pencil drawing of the studio itself. It is beautiful. It has a perfection. And when one realizes that the artist lived there all his painting years, and the dancer with him, it becomes too poignant. Perhaps I shall give you that one, Joan. It will ravish you. You will see!” All the while Hugh was studying Joan, with narrowed eyes, much as she was studying “Noon.” He did not question her sincerity in praising the work at which she had shrugged once. That one grew in appreciation as well as in accomplishment he knew very well. But he saw that she was still disturbed, even angry, although she sought to hide it. Hugh’s problem was: was Joan angry with him or Ariel or her friend, Schwankovsky, or with herself? He came to the conclusion that she was angry with herself, and for the first time in his life he felt a motion of pity toward this woman he loved. He wanted to say to her: “Don’t be angry because you have grown big enough to grasp Gregory Clare’s essential spirit. Be glad, darling! No one blames you for changing. I have nothing to forgive you in this.” Ah! Until this minute pity and magnanimity had been the elements lacking in his tormenting love for Joan. Pray God now that nothing more of poignancy be added to it until he died! Before he could be torn from Grandam, “Noon” and the attic where he had found an atmosphere which was an amazement and a delight to him, Michael Schwankovsky took Ariel straight into his arms and kissed her forehead and her lips. “We are friends, my child,” he informed her and the world at large, “for eternity.” And Hugh saw, somewhat against his will, that Ariel liked Schwankovsky very much, and that his caresses neither surprised nor embarrassed her. |
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