  “Your line has been busy for the past hour! Big business?” It was Joan’s voice, coming to Hugh through his office telephone toward noon the following morning. He laughed. “Reporters mostly. The papers are on to the exhibition, and all you prophesied seems to be coming true about the part they’re giving Ariel in their stories.” “Yes, of course. They’ve been hectoring us here too. I’m at the gallery with Michael and Charlie. You can thank me, Hugh, for keeping Michael from giving them the story about ‘Noon’ in the attic. He’s absolutely promised now. And Charlie has promised. It’s safe. And your ‘Shell’ is safe too. Michael’s going to let you have it. I’ve bought you one myself, Hugh. I’d have wanted you to choose it, but it wouldn’t wait. Every last painting, even the sketches, have been bid for. The Metropolitan is going to get the lion’s share. A fortune seems to have been donated by some dark angel. It will probably come out who, though. So far, Michael claims it’s not he. ‘Sun and Wind’s’ the painting I’ve bought for you, Hugh. For your birthday! It’s the only canvas without the Dancer. If for nothing else that makes it a prize, of course. Priceless some day. Have the reporters invaded Wild Acres yet? They know, of course, that Ariel is there. And when is she coming in? Michael wants to know.” “Wonderful of you to remember my birthday, Joan. I don’t remember ‘Sun and Wind.’ But I’m grateful. You shall hang it for me at Wild Acres. But the attic’s barred....” They both laughed.... “Ariel’s not coming in till to-morrow afternoon. Grandam clings to her. She’s so very weak. I wouldn’t be here myself, but there was something that had to be attended to at the office.... To-morrow Glenn and Anne are getting away from college to see Grandam, and they’ll take in the exhibition. If Grandam’s better, Ariel and I’ll meet ’em at the Grand Central, the noon train, and come right along to the gallery before going out to Wild Acres. Tell Schwankovsky that, please.” “Not till to-morrow! Well, he will be disappointed. Ariel might think of him a little, after all he’s done for her!” “She does. Of course, Joan. Last night she wrote him a letter, a very dear one, I imagine. I put a special on it and posted it in the Grand Central this morning. He’ll have it when he goes home.” “Yes? Well, that may appease him. Where are you lunching, Hugh?” “With you if you’ll let me, and why don’t I come right up and get you now?” But he had little hope of Joan’s acceptance, for it was likely that she had already arranged to lunch with Schwankovsky. “Only alone. Please don’t take me up if there’s to be any one else along.” The pause which followed this at the other end of the wire protracted itself. Then in a lowered voice, as though not wanting any one at her end of the wire to hear, Joan replied, “Of course we had made plans. But I’d rather be with you, Hugh. I’ll have to think of a way out.... Ah! Well, come for me here then, but not before one o’clock. I know a cool place, small,—a garden in 33rd Street. We won’t be bothered by any of our own crowd there.” This sounded like Hugh’s good fortune. It sounded like that to him, to his ears, to his brain. But deeper than that—? There were no answering vibrations deeper. Yet his reply went over the wire in as resonant a voice as though all his heart were behind it, so strong is habit, “Bless you. You’re an angel.” Hugh, Ariel, Glenn and Anne swung up the Avenue through May sunshine, headed for the New Texas Galleries. As they neared Fifty-ninth Street, Glenn strode ahead, and by the time the others had come up had bought a bunch of arbutus from a vender on the corner there. He handed them to Ariel. She was enchanted. “But what are you going to do with them?” Hugh asked. To carry them in her hand for the next few hours would be wasted effort, for they would be very dead, indeed, by the time the afternoon was over. “Why, cherish them, of course. I love them,” Ariel responded. “But they’ll die.” “No. I don’t think so.” She held them to her nose again, and her expression seemed one of assurance that anything that thrilled and delighted her as these pink-and-white-tight Heaven-smelling flowers did would live forever. Looking down at her, Hugh believed it. They made rather an arresting group even in the stream of arresting people which throngs the Avenue on spring afternoons: Hugh, with his high-held, hawklike, dark head, clean-cut shoulders and long stride; Anne, buoyantly collegiate; Glenn, hatless, and with hair somewhat long and unbrushed, free in manner and gesture as if he were walking and talking in a wilderness instead of in the heart of a great city. Ariel alone would have passed without comment. She was wearing a heliotrope felt hat—a present from Mrs. Weyman—which shaded the upper part of her face, an English tweed suit well enough cut to pass muster even on the Avenue, and one of her ivory-colored silk blouses, open at the throat. The only thing to attract attention to her was the fact that she was being swept along by her three rather striking companions, the obvious center of their exuberance. Until they were actually in the gallery. There she cut herself off from the group, and her quiet was no longer the center of their motion. Hugh knew, as he watched her walking slowly along the rows of canvases, or standing back for long minutes to brood on some particular painting, that she had utterly forgotten him and the other two, for her father’s companionship. He surmised that Ariel was not actually seeing paintings at all, neither thinking nor feeling in terms of art. For after all, what did she really know about the technique of painting, its history or its criticism! Joan had assured Hugh that Ariel knew and cared absolutely nothing, in spite of her long association with a great artist, and Hugh had no reason to disbelieve it. Besides, he remembered Gregory Clare himself saying in Bermuda that his daughter had inherited nothing of his gift or interest in art. He had never even tried to give her instruction in drawing. Even so, she could be enthralled now by these pictures, seen again after three months of separation. The sky in the pictures, Hugh imagined, was actual Bermuda sky to Ariel, and the sea, the ocean curling her own home beach. The light was dear as her life, home light. She stood, embraced by shore and sky and wave. And her own figure up there, dancing in light and shade,—what of that? It was the word of her father’s love for her. It was merely his voice saying with the easiness of complete sincerity, “my darling.” And in all the pictures around the walls the artist’s love echoed itself in the dancing figure. So Hugh dreamed, standing near the entrance door and himself neglecting the paintings to concentrate upon a girl of flesh and blood. It seemed odd to him that nobody in the crowds which were drifting even this early in the afternoon through the gallery recognized Ariel as the dancer of the pictures. Obviously nobody did. If she should take off her hat, though, if the May sunlight should fall on her pewtery hair, would they then see? Or was she so rapt away into companionship with her dead father and his imagination that she had attained a kind of invisibility, except for those who loved her? Glenn and Anne kept together in their tour of the walls. Before “Noon,” given the place of honor—the only painting on one whole expanse of wall at the farthest end of the gallery—they stopped the longest. “Think of this being in our attic, just lying there in cobwebs and dust, for the past five years!” Glenn muttered. “Hugh hasn’t a touch of taste, of course—he’s the typical Philistine if there ever was one—but it does seem as if even the Tired Business Man might have an uneasy feeling—a sense that there was something, even if he couldn’t grasp it, in the very presence of a thing like this!” “Oh, be careful!” Anne whispered, pinching his arm and, with apparent casualness but real concern, glancing around them to see if any one had overheard Glenn’s mutterings. Glenn lowered his voice but muttered on: “Can you imagine how Ariel felt when she found it in the attic? Why, the kid expected, of course, it would be the first thing her eyes would light on at Wild Acres. And instead she had to start a hunt for it! It goes beyond imagination that anybody could do such a thing to it, even after Joan Nevin had sniffed. Couldn’t Hugh stand up to one little sniff? If he had, he’d be in a beautiful position of I told you so now!” “Hugh’s all right,” Anne defended him. “He appreciates Ariel herself, at any rate. And that takes taste. More than I had. I had to be knocked down to wake up to it. But I can’t understand what was the matter with Joan. It seems incredible.” Glenn didn’t notice Anne’s ambiguous allusion to having been knocked down. It was her implied opinion of the genuineness of Joan’s taste which interested him. “You forget,” he pointed out, with a decided sneer in his voice, “that no Michael Schwankovsky had spoken authoritatively on him yet, and Clare wasn’t famous, when Joan had the privilege of first seeing this masterpiece of his. If anything ever showed that old girl up, this business does. She’s a four-flusher, that’s what she is, a kowtower, a sheep, a total washout. If she had any taste, even if she personally detested Clare’s way of painting, she’d have known this was important. Just as I detest D. H. Lawrence’s stuff, but even without the critics to tell me I’d sense he was genuinely a great writer. I hope I would.” Anne, however, resented all this. She loved Joan less than Glenn did and with more reason. But if Joan was mean, of little account, then what of Anne? No. She preferred to think her rival something better than shoddy. So pride was in it, and pain too, when she answered Glenn hotly, “Joan has taste, and knows and cares a lot about the things she pretends to know and care about. Look at her own collection of oils! And how many people hasn’t she made! Brenda Loring, for instance. And now she’s doing everything she can to encourage Charlie Frye, they say. This picture—Well, Hugh probably showed it to her in a bad light and on top of his hundredth and first proposal. She merely took her boredom out on ‘Noon.’ Doesn’t that explain it?” “You always stand up for females, Anne, whether you hate the particular one being criticized or not, I notice. But supposin’ you’re justified this time,—then why doesn’t the pussy own up now, say she never got a good look at the thing, instead of howling all over the place that Hugh never showed it to her at all? Why is Hugh to be the goat! That’s awfully sporting of her, isn’t it! Why! At college any number of fellows have tried to razz me about it already! I suppose I owe that to friend Prescott directly,—to Joan, though indirectly. “Do you know, Anne, Prescott’s in danger of losing his diploma, I’m afraid, all on account of Joan? I never see him any more. He’s here in New York or at Holly every other day or so. And even his new novel has gone on the rocks. He hasn’t done a stroke for weeks. Perhaps he’s jealous of Hugh, and that’s why he’s made such a point of spreading this story about ‘Noon’ and Hugh, since the papers all came out with the exhibition stuff. Shouldn’t wonder if the press will get hold of it any minute now! Wouldn’t that be just silly!” Brother and sister looked very much alike at the moment, absorbed in their individual angers, hands behind their backs, gazing up unseeingly at the radiant world in the frame before them. But the next minute Anne laughed, not without genuine sweetness, and murmured, “Glenn! Take a glance at Ariel. And forget Joan.” Ariel was standing not far off, her face lifted toward a picture. But she seemed not so much a girl viewing a picture in an art gallery, as a girl who had come down to a beach of yellow sands and was standing looking out at a reef with spray fountaining against it,—who might, in a moment, throw herself down there in the sun, and dream. If she did, out of her body would rise her spirit and dance on the crystal air. Look! There was the spirit already dancing,—where the sun in the picture above threw a white haze across the rocks. Glenn sang, under his breath, “Come unto these yellow sands, And then take hands: Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d The wild waves whist, Foot it featly here and there; And sweet sprites, the burthen bear.” And Anne whispered, “Where should this music be? i’ the air or the earth?” “Neither,” Glenn told her seriously. “In Gregory Clare’s painting and in Ariel’s very body.” Hugh was coming toward them down the gallery, intending to hurry them on to “The Shell,” which was his, and would soon be hung at Wild Acres. But he halted. He saw the way Glenn was looking at Ariel. He saw a tenderness and gravity in his brother’s expression that he had never caught there before. And he turned away. He did not want to see that expression on his brother’s face an instant longer. And less than anything now did he want to stand in front of that portrait of Ariel and hear what his brother might say about it. He wished, with his whole soul, that Glenn would never come to it, never in his whole life catch so much as a glimpse of it. |
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