  “Why, Glenn! I thought it was all arranged. That you had agreed to go as counselor. I didn’t know you were even looking for anything else.” “But, Mother! Decker will be better than me as counselor. And Adams seemed quite glad to get me. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I have written the camp head all about Decker, and the minute he lets me off I’m to wire Adams. I thought you’d be rather pleased.” The Weymans were finishing dinner at Wild Acres the night of Anne’s and Glenn’s and Ariel’s visit to the exhibition. Ariel was dining with Grandam in the attic apartment. Glenn had surprised the others by announcing his summer plans and the change he had made in them. In January he had sought and procured for himself a counselorship at a summer camp for boys in Canada. But now, it seemed, he wanted to get onto a paper, and without mentioning it to his family he had negotiated with Mr. Adams, an editor on the World, for a job on his staff, and landed it. It only remained to get out of the counselorship. But Mrs. Weyman did not look the “rather pleased” that Glenn had so confidently expected, and as for Hugh,—Glenn thought to himself that old Hugh was looking deuced funny. “I don’t quite understand all this raised eyebrow stuff!” Glenn protested. “If it’s that you don’t want me around so much, well, I can board in New York, and still save something toward next year’s expenses, I suppose.” “Don’t be silly, Glenn!” Mrs. Weyman was looking at him speculatively. “Anne and I’ll be in Maine, so you won’t be any burden to us, in any case. There’ll just be you and Hugh and Grandam here. Unless we persuade Grandam to go with us. But she won’t be persuaded. So it’ll be you three. Hugh will be glad enough of your company. I was only thinking of your obligation to the camp. But if it can be arranged—” “And don’t you see,” Glenn urged, interrupting in his eagerness, “if I am going into journalism, Hugh, this will be a much more profitable summer? Enderly put me on to the idea. He thinks it’ll be invaluable as experience. I’ll be all the sooner self-supporting if I get some practical experience behind me.” “All right,” Hugh agreed. “That is, if you can get out of the camp work honorably. Grandam and you and I—and Ariel will keep house together. Ariel seems definitely to have made up her mind to stay by Grandam this summer. Keep her job.” “Joan Nevin invited her to go to Switzerland with her. Did you know that, Glenn? And that she refused?” His mother was looking at him oddly. “Is that why—did she know you’d be here? Did you and she—” Mrs. Weyman broke off, but Glenn answered as though she had finished her question. “No, we didn’t,” he said emphatically. But now it was Hugh who thought that Glenn was looking deuced funny. At any rate it was the first time he remembered ever seeing his brother blush. “Has Joan really invited Ariel to Switzerland with her?” Anne exclaimed. “And she’s not going! Why, Grandam ought to insist on her going. And you, Hugh! You must make her go. What a chance! It’s just that Ariel is too unsophisticated to know what it means, I guess. Think of the contacts! Does she know about Doctor Steiner’s colony? How tremendously swank it is?” “‘Swank’ is very much the wrong word,” Mrs. Weyman protested. “Fashion and money don’t help one to get in there. Authentic personality and accomplishment are the open sesame. And of course Ariel doesn’t understand. How should she! It’s just as well, however, for she’d be frightfully at a loss. Joan’s even suggesting it was strange. I know that she did it for you, Hugh. It was very generous. Shall we have coffee on the terrace?” “Let’s. And dance,” Glenn was in an astonishingly social mood to-night. “Let’s get Ariel down and teach her to dance, Anne. Since she’s turned Joan down, it’s up to us to do something for her education, isn’t it?” “I’m afraid you can’t,” Mrs. Weyman said, getting up and stepping out of the long window onto the terrace. “Grandam can’t be left alone for a minute. And Ariel has proved herself extremely conscientious.” “Can’t Hugh substitute for a little while? Grandam’s as glad to have him as Ariel, isn’t she? She’s definitely said good night to Anne and me, and good-by, too. Told us not to come up in the morning before leaving. But couldn’t you release Ariel for an hour or so, Hugh? Our one night home?” “As soon as I’ve had some coffee I’ll go up and try,” Hugh agreed. But Glenn thought his voice now was deuced funny. Hugh’s back was to the lighted dining-room windows, and the stars did not disclose the expression on his face, but Glenn imagined it as matching in expression the deuced funny voice. Glenn had never felt like this before at home. He was aware of tension, not only in his mother and Hugh, but in himself. It vanished, however, when Hugh had succeeded in making the exchange of himself for Ariel with his grandmother, and Ariel appeared on the terrace. “Shall we have the victrola, or will you play, Anne?” Glenn asked, throwing his half-smoked cigarette into the rose bushes, and drawing Ariel by both hands along the terrace toward the drawing-room windows. “Oh, I’ll play, since only two can dance at a time. But I don’t know how Glenn’s going to teach you to dance, Ariel, unless he’s been practicing himself lately.” “I have,” Glenn confessed. “You see, I thought I was going to get Ariel to Prom. So I’ve been brushing up.” “You’d better take up the rugs in the library and dance there,” Mrs. Weyman advised, trailing after them, dusky in the dusk. “These flags aren’t a good floor. ’Specially for a beginner.” “But it’s cooler out here. And Ariel belongs out of doors on such a night.” “Oh, well, if you will be such children! How is Mrs. Weyman to-night, Ariel? Do you think she’d care to have me go up?” Ariel hesitated, just a breath, and said, “Hugh seems to rest her the most. And I know she feels like only one person at a time. It’s all Miss Freer would let her have, anyway. Miss Freer has gone for a walk.” “She’s a good nurse,” Mrs. Weyman murmured. “But I don’t see that Grandam leaves her much to do, Ariel. You seem to be bearing the burden.” “That’s only because I rest Grandam,” Ariel replied. “Miss Freer would really like to do much more. She considers me officious, I can see, and is put out sometimes. But it’s more important that Grandam should be contented, isn’t it, than that Miss Freer should approve of me.” Mrs. Weyman gasped. Miss Freer had spoken to her several times on the subject of Ariel’s officiousness, but it had not occurred to either of them that Ariel herself knew how the nurse resented her. Since Ariel had taken the job of nurse-companion to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Weyman’s respect for her had, of necessity, grown. Her liking and her interest had grown as well. Besides, there was Anne, so devoted to Ariel! Mrs. Weyman sent up almost daily letters addressed to Ariel in Anne’s sprawling hand. Hugh, too, was fond of her, any one could see. Grandam was absolutely dependent on her. And Glenn! Mrs. Weyman was disturbed about Glenn. When had he ever in his whole life before been interested like this in a girl? Were she and Joan, then, perhaps wrong? Had they made a mistake from the very first about this artist’s daughter in thinking her a mere child, empty in her total lack of experience? Anne’s spirited jazz came through the library windows. Ariel was dancing in Glenn’s arms on the starlit terrace. One could not say she was being taught. From the first step she had merely followed Glenn and the music. They danced like one person, a dark and a light figure, slim and rather elegant in the starlight. Glenn was wearing his tux, and patent-leather pumps. Ariel, Mrs. Weyman noticed, was not small and insignificant as she had got into the habit of thinking her. She was tallish and extraordinarily graceful. “Even so! Glenn mustn’t be serious. It will be years before he even begins to be self-supporting,” Mrs. Weyman mused. “And Joan is probably right. Ariel’s charm is merely that of youth and can’t wear. Still, I don’t like Glenn’s being here all summer. Propinquity does such absurd things sometimes!” And upstairs, Hugh was standing in one of the apartment windows, listening to the faint thrum-thrum of the jazz from below. Heard from this distance—the library windows were on the other side of the house—it sounded eerie, faint. And it kept itself going with an elfish insistence. To Hugh it became the music of a mischievous fairyland, actually malicious in its pricking at his heart. Grandam was lying, too weary to talk or to hear Hugh read, half drowsing. But she was aware of his mood. “I’m glad Ariel’s having a little fun,” she murmured after a while. “Aren’t you, really, Hugh? You’re glad?” “Yes. Of course. That’s what I want for her....” But in the dimness of her pillows Grandam smiled—a malicious, elfin smile, like the far-away music with which she was for the minute in harmony. A grating in Hugh’s voice, the droop of his ordinarily so squared shoulders, was not unpleasant to her. For Grandam, Saint Paul was contradicted to-night. In the midst of death she was in life. However, Ariel’s brief hour of comradeship and fun with Anne and Glenn was soon over. The next morning they went back to their colleges until final examinations should release them. A day or two after that Michael Schwankovsky sailed for Bermuda, hoping to buy the Clare studio from Doctor Hazzard, who owned it. To Schwankovsky the studio and the beach where the artist had lived and done all his painting had become sacred. He wanted it as a retreat for himself, for the present, and ultimately to endow and present to St. George’s as an altar to Gregory Clare’s memory. But Doctor Hazzard was not to be hurried in a decision to sell, and Schwankovsky stayed on in Bermuda, waiting. Joan, since Ariel had decided against accepting her offer of Switzerland and contact with the rare souls who would soon be gathering there, paid no more attention to her. Now at last was Hugh’s best opportunity to relieve the strain of Ariel’s rather arduous days and nights with his friendly interest and companionship. But for a variety of reasons he did not use what might have been the golden days. Instead he spent longer hours at the business of making money. He cultivated Brenda Loring’s willingness to lunch, dine and dance with him in town, and he was meeting and liking many of her friends. They were mostly people with whom Joan and Schwankovsky would not have bothered, and of whom certainly they had never heard—young artists and writers and editors, an architect, a professor from Columbia and so on. Most of the men were struggling but gifted, and the women without exception were earning their way and making places for themselves in the artistic or intellectual life of New York. Hugh felt at home with these new friends and they were candid in their liking for his company. After having for so many years been tolerated on the fringes of Joan’s more sophisticated and glittering world of what his mother called the “absolutely arrived,” this new experience of appreciative friendliness was pleasant. And Brenda’s gay friendship and open admiration were more than pleasant. They were consoling. So, of Ariel he saw almost nothing. For when he went up to sit with his grandmother, or play or read to her, as he did as often as he was at home in the afternoons or evenings, Ariel ran out for air, or into her own room, in order to leave them together. But Hugh always thought, “She is going to answer Glenn’s letter that I saw on the hall table this morning.” Joan seldom called him up now, and she was hardly ever at home, at Holly. For the few weeks before leaving for Switzerland she was accepting invitations to house parties; so Hugh saw little of her. Then, one day toward the middle of June, he received an invitation to a week-end house party himself, at Fernly, Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith’s place on Long Island. As he barely knew the lady, having met her only once, at Holly, and then only for a minute at one of Joan’s larger teas, he rightly attributed his invitation to Joan’s persuasions. Rather to his own surprise, he decided against going. The invitation was in reality, he knew, an indirect promise from Joan that they should have some long hours together at Fernly, for surely she would never have bothered to secure so unlikely an invitation for him unless she meant to manage to give him a good deal of her time there, as a farewell before her departure for the summer. But even this assurance did not seem inducement enough to Hugh, in the new directions his life had taken this spring, to make him willing to face a household of uncongenial strangers. Before he had sent his regrets, however, he learned from Brenda that she too was included in this house party. “I suppose you’re asked for Joan,” she said, frankly annoyed at the idea. “And I sha’n’t see anything of you. I don’t believe I’ll go. Oh, yes, but I must, of course. Business! Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith may have a drawing-room or a boudoir that needs doing over. And there’ll be a dozen or so women of her own sort there, I suppose, with drawing-rooms just as terrible which I can fix. No. I can’t afford to turn it down, you see. But, Hugh, will you be a little decent to me, please? I shall be lost among the bigwigs. They are bigwigs, you know. Not just money, but diplomacy and high finance. All that. You’ll remember that we’re pals—promise?” “Oh, but I hadn’t meant to go. I was going to ask you to come out to Wild Acres for the week-end instead. Mother is writing you to-night. But you prefer magnificence and bigwigs?” “You know I don’t. And I’ll come to Wild Acres any other week-end you ask me, with joy. I think your mother is too lovely, to want me. I couldn’t take my eyes from her at the Clare exhibition. I think I like her already without knowing her, Hugh. But you will come to Fernly? Say you will?” Her eyes were wistful and pleading. And so, oddly enough, Hugh found himself yielding to Brenda Loring’s persuasions, where Joan’s invisible but encouraging beckon had failed. However, if he had allowed himself to follow his own desires, he would have preferred Wild Acres as a place to spend any Saturday and Sunday. Yes. Even if Ariel must always be in the next room, writing letters to Glenn. |
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