  Joan telephoned Hugh the next morning early and asked him to pick her up at Holly if he was driving to town that day. This was not an unusual request, but for all its usualness Hugh never failed to be delightedly surprised to the point of suddenly being able to eat no more breakfast. To-day, however, its effect on him was unusual. He was delighted, it is true, and decided instantly that he was driving, of course, although he had intended going in by train and leaving the car for his mother. The sudden change in plan necessitated hiring a car and driver from a Tarrytown garage by telephone, writing a note of explanation to his mother, who was still asleep, and arriving an hour or so late at his office. This meant nothing to him, or ordinarily would have meant nothing, compared with the felicity of having Joan’s company on the long drive. But to-day, on returning from the telephone, he finished his whole breakfast and told himself that if he drove fast perhaps he needn’t be much more than an hour late in town. He’d try, anyway. It had been a long winter. But to-day not so much as a wispy trace of it was left in the Wild Acres woods. As he drove down the avenue he marveled how the last patches of snow had melted from the hollows over night. The woods glistened with red and purple and gold leaf-buds. To-morrow, or the next day—or the day after that, at the latest,—it would be a golden-green blaze through here. Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold— That was the beginning of a poem of Robert Frost’s. Anne had quoted or read it to Hugh sometime in the winter. He remembered her coming to him where he sat at the piano, tentatively searching for some theme he had heard,—keeping it soft and just for his own ear. He had not wanted to share his music. But Anne had wanted to share her poem. And how had he responded? He had listened, his hands raised waiting above the keys, to that much: Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold— and beyond that he remembered nothing. Perhaps his indifference and self-absorption had discouraged Anne. In any case, she hadn’t gone on with the poem. But it wasn’t so much his music she had interrupted with her poetry, that far-away afternoon in winter. It was his thoughts. And those thoughts, his whole preoccupation, had been Joan ... Joan ... Joan.... His music was only a path, winding through his preoccupation, a path through, not a path out. But now, this morning, noticing the swelling purple and red and gold of the budded trees which almost before his eyes were rushing upon spring, the beauty Anne had failed to share so many weeks ago pierced through to him. And it came to him, as a matter of fact, that things in general lately had been piercing through to him with more and more persistence. He saw, felt, tasted, smelled the world this spring as he had not done for many springs. Joan was in his mind more or less, for he was still in love with her. But she no longer tinged his perceptions of everything else as well. Anne, Glenn, his mother, Brenda Loring, his friends at the office, spring coming,—these held vital places of their own in his new, sharpened attention. And Ariel and Grandam? Grandam had never given way to Joan in his thoughts, any more than she gave way to her in actuality. As for Ariel, she did not so much enter into as hover about the outer edges of Hugh’s consciousness, her feet on azure air as in her father’s paintings. Yes. From her arrival on the same boat with Joan, Ariel had been above and outside but very present to Hugh’s conscious mind.... So he thought now, stirred to such thinking by those pointed, sharp buds of the tree boughs. Yet after all it wasn’t these buds which had pierced through and touched his soul. As he turned out from the spring woods onto the Post Road, he knew that it wasn’t the buds but something corresponding to them. For all Ariel’s delicate lightness, her tenderness, it was she, her presence at Wild Acres, which had pierced the harsh coating over his sleeping soul. He jammed on his brakes and the big wheels of his car spurted gravel on Holly’s superbly tended driveway under Holly’s portico. Joan was on the steps. She, too, knew that spring had come. From head to foot she was all in fresh spring raiment. A lettuce-green hat tilted its shade across glowing eyes. She was drawing on lemon-colored doeskin gloves and laughing. “I thought you were going to drive right through and out again! What were you thinking of so dourly, Hugh?” He waited while she settled in beside him, knees close together, narrow patent-leather-slippered feet glittering by the accelerator, her shoulder a careful inch or so from his. “I wasn’t a bit dour. Quite the contrary. I was thinking of spring.” Joan opened a huge patent-leather purse, as glittering as her feet, glanced to make sure of money, tickets, compact, kerchief, snapped the luxurious receptacle shut, tucked it between them on the seat, and clasped her gloved hands about her knees, ready. “Yes? Spring’s really come, hasn’t it! And one begins to make summer plans. I’ve been flirting with the idea of Switzerland all morning, and Doctor Steiner’s colony. He wants me to spend July there. Your little friend, Brenda, may go. And Michael certainly will.” Hugh threw in the clutch, and they slid away down the broad avenue between wide, freshly spaded flower-beds glowing with hyacinths. Hugh was thinking, “Ariel must get spring clothes too. She was still wearing her fur coat yesterday. No wonder she looked tired! Yesterday was almost as warm as today.” Joan went on. “Your engine, Hugh, is as soundless as a gull’s wings almost, even in first and second. Oh! It’s too delicious! I can think of nothing but the sea and the mountains. I think I must fall in with Doctor Steiner’s plan. I’m dreadfully happy and excited ’cause it’s spring and I’m free to go anywhere, do anything I please!—And you, Hugh?” She had given him his cue. She would sense either in his silence or hear in words what spring, that might take her to the other side of the world, could mean to him. Loneliness, of course. But to-day Hugh did not seem to be realizing what spring should mean to him with Joan already planning to go away because of it. He’d missed his cue. For he was saying, “Look here, Joan. I want to talk to you about Ariel. It’s rather a strenuous existence she has with Grandam, you know. And these New York parties on top of her work might prove a bit too much. Last night, she turned up completely exhausted. Anybody could see! Poor kid! So I’ve persuaded her to break her Saturday engagement with your crowd, or to let me break it for her. I hope you don’t mind, Joan. I don’t really see how it can do her any good. If she gave up her job she might manage that sort of thing. But I think she’s right to prefer to keep the job. I like her pluck. Don’t you, really? And you don’t mind, do you, not having her along at whatever it is you’ve planned?” After a breath of surprised silence, Joan exclaimed, “Of course I don’t mind. She isn’t exactly one of those people who make a party, is she! It’s only that Michael’s got the bee in his bonnet that Gregory Clare’s daughter needs a little polishing,—some experience of the world. But I agree with you that he’s forcing the pace a bit. I was only trying to help.” “Yes. I can imagine that. And you’ve been sweet to Ariel these last few days. I am grateful.” But Joan pushed away his gratitude. “You’ve got it wrong. It’s Michael I’m befriending, not Ariel. After an erotic past of thirty or forty odd years, the poor dear is ripe for the attractions of sheer youth, as are most of his kind, not? It may be only a flash in the pan, probably is. But I understand it’s quite real while it lasts. If he goes so far as to marry the little thing, perhaps you won’t then be so thankful I’m helping him. For I prophesy he’ll murder her during the second week of the honeymoon. He’s as fearful of boredom as any creature I ever knew, and by the second week Ariel will be about as stimulating as a milk-shake. So in the end it may be accessory before the fact you’ll accuse me of being.” If Joan had looked at Hugh then! But she didn’t. After a while, “Am I meant to take any of that seriously, Joan?” he asked. “Schwankovsky is sixty-two, you told me. Ariel’s twenty. I don’t like Schwankovsky. Why should I? He despises me and takes no pains to hide it. But he’s being very kind to Ariel. I haven’t liked to see the way he paws her, naturally. But I thought it was just his Bohemian habit. The artistic temperament. And Ariel doesn’t seem to mind. I trusted her instinct: thought he must be all right, do you see, since she wasn’t revolted, no matter what I felt. But if he’s the sort you suggest, then she’s never to so much as shake hands with him again. I’ll attend to it.... But it isn’t so. You were—teasing?” “Teasing! Why should I? But perhaps you misunderstood. The gentleman’s intentions if he has any, of which I’m not after all certain, are honorable. And if that’s so, what’s bothering you? Wouldn’t it be rather a wonderful marriage for such a girl as Ariel? The murder—well, that’ll probably turn into a divorce. Dear old Michael wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know, much less a tender young mÄdchen. It seems to me that Ariel has all to gain.” “Please don’t. It isn’t funny. And I shall see that they don’t go on meeting. It’s horrible.” “And the exhibition?” Joan asked. Hugh consigned the exhibition to perdition with a breath. “I’ll take that over,” he said, “and do my best with it.” “You!” Joan laughed. “You’d make a funny art patron, Hugh! Besides, I’m afraid that this particular exhibition needs more money as well as more authority than you happen to be able to bring to it. But if you are as earnest as you sound, or even half as earnest, I might take sides with you, push Michael into giving up the exhibition, and separate spring and winter. How about it? Do you want my help?” Hugh, half in hope half in distrust, just glanced at his companion’s cameo-like profile, and surprised on it a gleam which stirred an old and until now forgotten memory. They were a boy and a girl just come on their skis to the top of Sparrow Hill in the snow, up above Wild Acres. Joan was insisting on trying a dangerously steep and tricky slide to regain her tam-o’-shanter which had blown over and down. Hugh dragged her back just in time, as he thought, and holding out his arms against her, shot past and down himself. He saw no surer way to convince Joan of the absurdity of her intention than to break his own neck in demonstration. As he went down he carried with him the memory of her profile. To-day’s very gleam was on it then. A gleam of elated malice. Going down the slide he took the gleam with him, and then with the snapping of his ankle, for he broke it at the bottom, he forgot it ... until this instant. And now memory’s revival saved him. He smiled to himself. “I’m dull not to know when you’re joking, Joan,—after all these years,” he said. “Of course, we both know that a man doesn’t love beautiful things and give his fortune and his time generously to them if he’s nothing more than a sensualist at heart. Schwankovsky’s devotion to Ariel is disinterested. He’s fascinated by everything that concerns the Clare pictures, that’s all. And who can wonder! They are so wonderful!” “But dear Hugh! If you are so sure that the pictures are wonderful why did you keep ‘Noon’ in the attic all these years?” He answered through his teeth. They might just as well have been fourteen again, and back on their skis up on Sparrow Hill. “You know very well why I put it in the attic. It was you put it there and not I. And you know it. But for some reason it amuses you to make me out stupid. Why? And it isn’t only ‘Noon’ you’ve put in the attic for me, but most of my Æsthetic pleasures. You know perfectly well that I can’t hear great music or see a sunset without wanting to take them in my bare hands and rush to lay them in your lap. I can’t adore anything for its own sake. Even God. Beauty disrupts me, gives me anguish precisely in proportion to its loveliness, for the simple cause that I can so seldom share it with you. That’s what’s the matter with me. Or it has been that way until lately. Lately, thank God, I’ve almost been able to care about things for their own sakes again, as I did when I was a boy. Getting ‘Noon’ out again has helped, perhaps. I don’t know.” He was exasperated. Weary. Now let dull misery rise again and entomb him where the sharp-pointed buds of spring could not pierce through. What was all their red-purple-gold to him! Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold ... But Joan was appeased. Certainties which had quaked lately were stable again. Hugh adored her. Just now what she usually got only in his eyes and kisses, he had given her in words. For once and at last he was articulate, poor darling. Complacency, almost amounting to beatitude, reËstablished itself in her psyche. But it was a beatitude just tainted, curdled rather, with scorn. Joan regretted the curdle. But it was inevitable. For it is a law of the heart, she realized, that love given so completely as Hugh’s was given, with nothing reserved, can never have its like in return. “And it’s a pity,” she thought a little bitterly. “For if I could be absolutely sure of a love like Hugh’s, and return it, it would be bliss. The trouble is, one can’t. It’s against nature.” Wistfully, some lines from an Irish poet echoed through her mind. Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women, if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss. She pulled off her lemon-colored gloves and reached a warm vital hand, laying each separate finger exactly on Hugh’s fingers, which were guiding the wheel now through Fifth Avenue traffic. She measured their hands thus. And hers were only a little smaller than his. For Joan’s hands, though beautiful, with their smooth palms and backs, and the long conical fingers, glistening-tipped, were large and strong. The hand on Hugh’s shut away the hot, spring sunlight. And it seemed almost, then, as though his whole body as by infection from the shadowed hand was darkened slowly. Flames might any instant roar through that dark. But his expression was unmoved except for straightened lips. His eyes remained keen for every loophole in the difficult traffic. Even his hand, under that shut-down vital one on it, vibrated only with the nuances of steering. Joan was absorbed like a child in the way her enameled finger nails reflected the spring sunlight. And then she became aware of how beautifully shaped and groomed were Hugh’s own almond-shaped nails. By shifting the tips of her fingers ever so slightly she could see the moons at the base of his nails, so clear, high and definite. “You have nice hands, Hugh,” she murmured. “Terribly nice.” And when he did not respond by look or word she added with sudden generosity, “I’ll ’fess up, dear. I did make an idiotic and totally moronish mistake about ‘Noon’ five years ago when you brought it to me from Bermuda. But don’t tell on me, please; I am ashamed. And it doesn’t matter to you what any one thinks of your taste. You don’t pretend to anything, you dear, so they can’t show you up, do you see!” “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Hugh muttered. He meant, of course, “What does anything matter compared with your hand on mine, and this darkness and its flame corroding my body, my mind!” Presently Joan said, “You can put me down at the next corner, Hugh. I want to walk twenty blocks or so for exercise before plunging into my silly spring shopping.” She did not stir her hand from his until the car was parked against the curb. But spring was insistent. Nothing could keep the pointed, delicate buds from piercing their way through the harsh bark to azure light and air and sun, and their flowering expression. One afternoon, a few days after his drive to town with Joan, Hugh returned to Wild Acres rather early with the idea of persuading Ariel and his grandmother to take a drive with him, it was such perfect weather. No one answered his knock at the attic apartment door; so he opened it and went in. Grandam was not there on the bed nor in the long chair: only Ariel, and she was kneeling by one of the wide-open windows, her back to the room, looking out into the tree-tops that in the past few days had foamed into a sea of green gold. The sunlight slanted down this sea, at the moment of Hugh’s arrival and Ariel’s watching, in a way that turned it into an unearthly lightness of gold,—a winged, breathing wind of green gold. And Ariel knelt upright at the edge of the wind-shaken loveliness like a wand, stilled, not bent, by the high stir of beauty. Hugh stopped short. He had come to Grandam’s low table and saw it spread with brown paper, and on the paper a heap of wild flowers. Hepaticas, anemones, white and yellow violets, green leaves too, and clumps of rich brown wood loam,—all in a fragrant tangle. At the edge of the pile Ariel’s green hat was tossed down, with its green feather. “Hello! Did you collect all these?” Hugh asked. At his voice Ariel turned and stood, her body aurora’d by the golden stream of air and leaves behind her. “You here? Hello, Hugh! Grandam’s driving with your mother. It’s such a day! I’ve been in the woods all the afternoon, with Persis and Nicky. Just got in.” She moved toward him and stood by the table looking down at the flowers. Some of the gold from beyond the window had flowed into her hair. And when she looked up from the flowers Hugh saw it in her eyes too,—green gold. The woods, Wild Acres woods, beloved of Hugh, were there, shimmering, in Ariel’s eyes. She looked her surprise at the expression on Hugh’s face before her. It was so stirred, so new. Perhaps it was to break the spell and get the familiar Hugh back again that she lifted her hands, palm upwards,—the corners of her mouth too, in that sharp delicate lift darted with light, that was her smile when she danced in the woods for Persis and Nicky—and remarked, “Spring has come.” It had indeed. It had come rushing on a broad stream of light and poured itself along Hugh’s veins. The look in his face increased rather than diminished. But Ariel had done her best, all she knew, to relieve the intensity in Hugh’s dark eyes. Her knees began to tremble. She did not want Hugh to see that she was trembling. She would be utterly ashamed if he should see. So she sat down suddenly, on the edge of the daybed, and commenced to part the flowers from the wood loam, and from each other. Her hands were browned by this one afternoon’s sun and air. They were narrow hands and small, with rather square-tipped, very straight fingers. Hugh recalled Joan’s hand above his own on his steering wheel. It was white and beautiful and exquisitely molded, a sculptor’s dream. But these little hands—their appeal was in their simplicity, in their graceful but inconspicuous motions, not in their form and modeling. If he should put his own hands down over them now they would be quite lost, all the magic and grace of their movements stilled away, and they would feel to him like the grubby hands of any little girl who had been out picking wild flowers in the woods. He would put his hands down over hers. He would do that. He would find out how it felt to capture grace like a bird under one’s fingers,—perhaps to destroy it in the grasp of it and so prove it an illusion. Not real. Not actual. Not like Joan’s beauty, inescapable. He would prove that Ariel’s charm for him was something he could always control, could catch and subdue and hide away from himself, under his hand. It was only for a breath or so that he had Ariel’s hands under his own, crushed down in the medley of spring flowers and damp earth. But the grace, the charm was not controlled by his will or his hold. It escaped without a flutter of struggle. It flowed up into the surprised lift of Ariel’s head, the rising of her eyelids, and spread a shimmer of green-gold light in the quickly widening pupils of her eyes, raised to his. Suddenly he discovered, and she knew that he had discovered it, that she was trembling. What Ariel did not realize was that Hugh was trembling too, a little. He released her hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt the flowers,” he muttered. “Sorry if I have.” And he commenced to help her in her sorting. “I’m going to put these shortest-stemmed ones in a saucer,” Ariel explained. “Isn’t there something special, don’t you think, about little white and yellow violets? Secret and special? They sort of break my heart....” He should hear how her voice didn’t tremble. She repeated the silly words to make sure that he heard how it didn’t: “They sort of break my heart.” “Yes? Well, spring sort of breaks my heart,” Hugh responded. |
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