  Anne was waked by Ariel putting the breakfast tray down on the bed beside her. “Hello. It’s morning. This is my day off, Anne, and I’m going for a long walk up towards Scarborough. If you want to slip out with me and walk too, nobody would know, it’s so early, and then you could get back to college this afternoon, couldn’t you? Want to do that?” “But when did you get up? Have you had your breakfast? You’re a good bedfellow, Ariel. You didn’t stir all night.” “Well, neither did you, or I wasn’t awake to know if you did. I had breakfast with Grandam. But I haven’t told her that you’re here, since you asked me not to. Rose maneuvered this tray for me. She’s a good sport, isn’t she! Grandam is too. She must wonder who came to the door last night.” “You’re a good sport yourself now that we’re on the subject, Ariel. A darned good one.... Many thanks.” It was still snowing. But one couldn’t believe in the reality of it, somehow: April was so close behind. This was a mere flurry in her face, ephemeral. The whole landscape was ablow with snow clusters, like flowers, like the flowers on Grandam’s curtains masking the night from her room. So this flower-blowing-curtain shut out spring. Why Anne was pushing her way through this dream of snow blobs, shoulder to shoulder with Ariel, on a tramp up the Post Road, she hardly knew. It was Ariel’s will that was motivating her, perhaps. She felt that Ariel’s will—or somebody’s, not her own anyway—had steered even her dreams last night. And hadn’t Ariel undressed her, and brushed her hair and put her to bed like a baby? Anne thought that she had. And she was still giving the same sort of service. For the first hour, or more, the girls scarcely spoke. Anne did at one time call, “Wait a minute, Ariel. I’ve got snow in my ankle.” And Ariel, who had not noticed that Anne had dropped back, turned and retraced her steps to her. And soon after that Ariel had exclaimed, “There’s a wood road! Look how the boughs are tangled over it. It’s like a white cloister! Where do you suppose it goes?” They had followed it, thrilled, up hill through woods until it ended in a high meadow of trackless snow. It may have disappointed Ariel, that snow meadow, after the mysterious woods, but it brought a kind of psychic relief to Anne. Its bare expanse simplified her, was the last touch to Ariel’s own simplifying influence. Silently, with something of the snow’s own silence, they returned to the road and trudged on and on, like two sturdy ponies. Anne began to be aware that with every increase of weariness to her trudging legs and feet a bit of mental misery petered out, got dropped off. Her mind, after a while, even began to function again. Since the moment when Prescott had struck her—and run away from her on the New Haven street, her mind had played almost no part in her actions, at least her conscious mind hadn’t. As she went on beside silent Ariel, suddenly, unaccountably, she recalled an incident of one of her summers at the shore. She was at the extreme outer edge of a dock when a sloop emerged from thick fog before her very face, as if it had taken its form and motion from the mists themselves. And now it seemed to her that her thoughts—the vehicle, that is, that made up her thought-feeling-self—was such a sloop, sailing toward her out of a foggy nothingness, coming clear, taking shape. But then there must be something else, something detached from self, that could see self returning—and indeed, something for self to return to. Any instant now the two would merge. The sloop would slide alongside the dock, and self would step into self. And when she did join this self, taking form and moving swiftly upon her now after absence, would she lose the present sense of detachment? Would she be whole again—less of self-consciousness and more of self? But by now physical weariness had increased to a point which seemed final. If she dragged her feet another step forward through the sticky snow her legs would snap off at the hips. She came to a dead halt, too exhausted even to get onto the side of the road out of the path of possible motors. “Ariel!” she called. “I’m done up. Now what do you want? What’s next?” Anne’s tone and the words themselves sounded hopeless, and certainly her physical self was hopeless. But in the instant of giving in to sheer physical defeat she had also given in to an eerie kind of delight of the spirit. She knew that good was coming, coming, coming, creaming up toward her from every side into a surf of light in her heart. Ariel turned back to her. “I’m tired too,” she confessed. “How far have we come, do you suppose? Where are we?” “A hundred miles or so, and we can’t be any distance at all from Scarborough, if it’s still on the map and not taking a holiday. If we can win on to that burg we can get a snack to eat and then catch a local to New York. But why aren’t there any automobiles out? Too thick a storm? If we could get picked up! What was exactly your idea, anyway, in this form of recreation, Ariel? I’m just begun to get brains enough to inquire into it.” “I don’t know, myself,” Ariel murmured. “Only, after last night, you know, I had to walk, run, or swim. It was the only way to—to uncoil it from me. Let’s start on and pray for a motor to come along, a kind one.” But very soon they got their second wind. Their legs still felt that they might break off at hip or knee, but this had gradually become only an interesting sensation, for their bodies as units began to discount the thousands of separate fatigue messages sent by separate nerves and had grown beautifully light. The girls were moving ahead now—on, on, on, with no need to whip up their wills. If they should learn that they must walk on like this until night they would not rebel. And they began talking as freely as without effort they walked. “I know what you mean about uncoiling it—all that last night’s stuff,” Anne exclaimed. “Every step uncoils me. But I feel, Ariel, as if my feet must leave a trail of slimy sticky awfulness behind me in the snow. Only why should you need to uncoil, Ariel? You weren’t going to slide down into the dark water to slip out under the ice. You hadn’t separated from yourself.” “No. But you’d always horrified me a little. I felt that you were trapped in some dangerous, dreadful way, when I first saw you. And last night it all got real for me. It’s more than as if you’d told me, Anne. It’s as if I’d been in your trap with you and had wanted to die too—and all. I can’t explain myself. But it’s all uncoiling now, every step we take, and the snow is blotting it up. Don’t you feel it?” “Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware of you at all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.” “Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated. “Ariel! Have you ever been in love?” “Yes. As much as you....” “As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?” Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.” But then she noticed Ariel’s face, and was silenced as if by a thunder-clap, although Ariel’s face was as quiet as a stone and shut like a stone. Still, Anne was awed or frightened—she didn’t know which—into sudden silence. After a while Ariel begged, as if Anne hadn’t so carefully shut up, as if she had gone right on with this subject of Hugh and Joan for the last completely silent half mile or so, “Don’t say such things about Hugh. They aren’t so at all. But, oh, Anne! Let us never try to break through and lose ourselves in any one—unless God. That’s the way to be free. Let’s run.—Let’s never be slaves—” Hand in hand the two girls went plunging along the road until they staggered to a stop, winded. Then, laughing, breathlessly, they kissed each other on the mouth, kissed through the snow, their faces soaked and cold with the snow-flower blobs. |
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