  Ariel started to rise from her chair, her face gone wan and strange. But she sank down again. Her heart was beating leaden beats. How could she know that this ring had belonged to the possessor of those hands, now dust, and how could she know that Grandam’s time to die had come! It may have been some glance toward the pictured hands, as Grandam slipped the ring from her finger and gave it to Ariel, unnoticed then but impressed somehow all the same on Ariel’s memory, which let her know to whom the ring belonged. But the conclusion that Grandam had given it to Ariel because she was now to die—that was unreasonable. Ariel clutched her napkin in tense fingers and tried to be reasonable. Mrs. Weyman was saying, “But it’s all right, my dear. It’s only that I’ve never seen Grandam separated from her ring before. Since she gave it to you, she wants you to have it. It is only another sign of her affection....” Schwankovsky, as well as Mrs. Weyman, had been startled by Ariel’s air of shock, and now the big man said soothingly, “Every one has affection for my Ariel. Of the deepest. Old Doctor Hazzard, did you know, is saving your studio in Bermuda for you? The more I offered him for it, the surer he became that you, my child, would have need for it in time. When I told him of the success of the exhibition and tried to show him that you were financially independent, now, he was not changed. By his will the studio is to become yours. He says, and perhaps truly, for he is wise in some ways, that man, that the paintings themselves are the things to make pilgrimages to, not the place where they were made. He says that the studio was a home first, and a studio second. I came away having accomplished nothing.” Joan, at the foot of the table, shrugged and met Michael’s eyes with sympathetic humor. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one of these Philistines to comprehend the artist’s mind,” she put in. “Poor Michael! All your journey for nothing! A home before it was a studio! Lovely!” “Oh, no. Not for nothing. And not ‘lovely’ either! I had a rather rich week, Joan. Enlightening. And Doctor Hazzard himself was well worth the trip. He is coming to visit me this fall. We have become friends. And if he is a Philistine, then a world of Philistines would be a Utopia.” “Oh! I misunderstood you. I thought you needed sympathy!” She turned to Charlie Frye and asked, shutting the rest of the table into the abysses of outer darkness by the intimate fall of her voice, “Did you know this Doctor Hazzard when you were in Bermuda?” Schwankovsky retained Ariel’s hand and stared like a seer into the cold green clarity of the semi-precious stone. Glenn felt shuddery and resentful. Why ever did Ariel let the great creature go on petting her in that absurd way? He might be the great Michael Schwankovsky, famous for his wealth, his art collections and his books, but Glenn refused to be hypnotized by such considerations into overlooking his boorishness. It was hideous of him to have spoken to Ariel about her grief like that—before everybody! Both insane and inane. He was an old sentimentalist too. And all this pawing—! But Ariel seemed to like it. And, in fact, she did. Michael Schwankovsky’s warm, strong, great hand holding her wrist with such gentle firmness was regulating those leaden heartbeats back to normality. Kindness and soundness were transmitted through those strong, firm fingers to her consciousness. From her very first meeting with Michael Schwankovsky she had felt at home with him. And by now, quite simply, she had come to love him very much. Glenn could understand nothing of this. He sat between Ariel and his brother, trying not to care that Schwankovsky was keeping Ariel physically prisoner by that wrist, trying not to hear what seemed to him the mawkish tenderness in the booming voice that shattered, to his senses, against Ariel’s delicate reserves so unforgivably. And Hugh was thinking, “This is going to be an awful evening!” It stretched away before him, a desert of aridity, where Ariel would be kept close at Schwankovsky’s side, his mother and Joan would discuss psychoanalysis and the comparative merits of its different schools endlessly, and Anne, Glenn and this Frye fellow would keep the radio going over all. If it fell out that way, he could not go on with it. His nerves were taut. And then those taut nerves hummed like telephone wires in a storm as he caught the look of tortured disgust on Glenn’s features as the boy’s eyes turned from Ariel’s prisoned wrist. “What right has Glenn to care like that!” Hugh cried to himself. “He’s too young to know really how to love her!” But after dinner, to Hugh’s vast relief, the radio was overlooked. It was a warm, still, moon-flooded night, and as a matter of course the entire little party wandered out to the terrace and settled itself in garden chairs there. Only Joan sat on the balustrade, leaned her shoulder against an urn, and beckoned Hugh with her lighted cigarette to come beside her. She was silent, in spite of being hostess, and he was silent with her for some time, while the others talked. To Joan, the silence between herself and the figure so close to her side was pregnant as none of their other silences had ever been. It was the darkness in which her moment of surrender was germinating. She had told Doctor Steiner at their final conference on the subject this morning that she was going to give marriage with Hugh at least its trial. Mrs. Weyman had taken it upon herself to play hostess for the so unusually obscured Joan. And Joan blessed her future mother-in-law for that. But for all her activity, Mrs. Weyman was not so oblivious as she appeared to be of the two very quiet people withdrawn there from the social group in the dark shadow of the great urn. Her eyes wandered in their direction constantly, and she was deeply excited and hopeful. She, like Anne and Ariel, had her “hunch” that to-night might make Hugh supremely happy. Meanwhile, she was doing her best to keep the social atmosphere from requiring Joan’s attentions by being particularly entertaining herself; and this in spite of Glenn’s unhelpful somberness, Anne’s staccato and unnatural cheerfulness, and that strange creature Michael Schwankovsky’s bearish gambolings. Ariel was not counting, so far as Mrs. Weyman was aware, either for or against her efforts at harmonizing the little group. She was too elusive out here by moonlight, where her voice, flat and pebble cool, was heard only now and then in some quite commonplace, careful answer to somebody’s direct question to her. In Charlie Frye she found her stand-by. Mrs. Weyman put him down, once and for all, in her mental notebook this night as a perfect filler-in for future dinner parties at Wild Acres. “Come along, Ariel!” Schwankovsky boomed suddenly, interrupting Charlie Frye in a really amusing anecdote he was telling. “The time has come when you must dance for me. I will make the music. We shall not be together again for months. Unbearable to think it! So for my consolation you are to dance now!” His arm around her shoulder, he was drawing Ariel into the lighted music room and toward the piano with him. “Oh, Ariel! How delicious! Please do,” Anne cried, jumping up and turning over her chair in her relief at something at last happening in the breathless atmosphere of the terrace. And she followed them in, leaving Charlie Frye’s story hanging in mid-air, just as it was, half told. Mrs. Weyman could do nothing to rescue his anecdote for the embarrassed young man. She could only get up, with him, and follow the noise into the drawing-room, where they sat beside each other, two defeated social captains, on a little Queen Anne sofa, just inside the long window through which they had entered. “This may be interesting. Do you suppose she will?” Joan asked, out in the dark, putting her hand through Hugh’s arm and edging him along the railing to a better view of the interior. Schwankovsky was playing MacDowell’s “Water Lily.” Ariel was sitting on the end of the piano bench, while Anne bent over her, begging her please to dance, and Glenn stood before her, adding his urgings. Then suddenly Anne was kneeling before Ariel. She was stripping off Ariel’s silver slippers and her stockings. Hugh moved abruptly, and Joan’s hand fell lifeless through his arm and to her side. Hugh was striding toward the windows. Ariel was his, in a manner, after all. Her father had given her to him in a way that made his concern imperative. And this was all simply crazy. Schwankovsky was just an insufferable buffoon. And Anne and Glenn were idiots— But Ariel was standing, straight and unabashed in her violet-blue, wood-smoke dress that was made from Grandam’s scarf, the folds of the skirt falling about her bare legs, her high-arched, slim feet very white against the gray velvet rug that covered the floor in there. Hugh halted inside the window. Schwankovsky was saying with almost an hypnotic look and voice, “Forget all about us, my Ariel. Even the music. Remember your beach, and the smooth floor of sand down between the rocks. Remember the loggia and the path through the cedars. Remember the violets and the roses.” He was playing “The Water Lily” as he talked, but stopped and changed abruptly into something that might be CÉsar Franck’s, but nothing of his that Hugh knew. Hugh had not realized before that Schwankovsky could play,—and play like this! The big man was looking beyond Ariel, as if he himself saw the clouds, the beach, felt the rhythms of earth, sky and water, that were pouring through his music. Hugh could not go forward. He dared not break into the Forces of Beauty which even he, Philistine that he was, could feel gathering in that room. Ariel started walking away from the piano, slowly. She was coming directly toward Hugh, but it was obvious that she did not see him, or the others there, against the wall of the room. She was walking forward into the world which Schwankovsky had given her back suddenly, when she was unhappiest and needed it most. And Mrs. Weyman and Charlie Frye, Anne, Glenn, Hugh, and even Joan—out on the dark terrace—were being drawn with the slow pacing of those bare feet over the gray rug into a simple state of harmony with—the cosmic rhythms? Ariel drew them with her, Ariel and Schwankovsky’s music together,—drew them forward, forward, out—out—out beyond the confines of the room, even farther than the boundaries of their individual desires and passions, into a state of identification with the intentions of the universe. They were, all of them, pressing forward along with Ariel’s poised, spiritualized body, her bare, sure feet, and the music,—straight into the heart of Beauty.... When she began to dance, she did not dance to the music. She danced in it. In the music, moving in it as if she were the fire at the heart of its purity, she danced to Life. First it was elemental life, the rhythms of earth, sky, water. Her face stayed immobile. She was as impersonal as the music. Only her body spoke. Much of the time her head was dropped, so that the immobile features were shadowed in her hair, as in the pictures where her father had painted her dancing. This was at the beginning of the dance.... But as Ariel had walked from Schwankovsky’s side and out onto her home beach, and there unified herself with the rhythmical universe, soon she moved forward again into a new aspect. She danced still from within the music and at one with rhythms of earth. But now she was dancing before the Face of Love. She danced before the Face of her love of her father, who had painted her dancing. She danced before the Face of his present happiness, in which she believed utterly. She soon danced before the Face of her own grief and loss.... She danced before the Face of her love and comradeship with Grandam—Grandam, who now was coming close, close to the edge of life.... Finally, she danced before the Face of her religion, her belief in love, in life, in the life beyond death. This was all so personal and poignant that Hugh would have had to turn away and not go on watching if it were not that Ariel’s dear face remained impassive. It might have been carved from still jade, white and luminous, but impassive. Or, no,—it was like the face of a flower whose expression a self-enwrapped mortal cannot read. Hugh was grateful with his whole heart that Ariel’s face was only a flower floating on the stream of the dance. The music poured on. Crystal. Exalted. Pure. And fiery. But the eyes in the white jade face were waking, were getting to be seeing eyes. The pale mouth trembled. Light trembled at its sharp uptilted corners.... Hugh was frightened. “You mustn’t. Oh, Ariel!” his heart cried, loud enough for hers to hear, he should think, “Don’t let it through into your face. Don’t let them see your soul!” Two children’s heads, one topping the other, peering from a fold in the hall portiÈres, were what had brought the expression into the dancer’s face. Persis and Nicky were being naughty. Escaped from Alice’s care—or perhaps Alice was there too in another fold of the silk hangings—in their nightgowns, just as they had left their beds, they were watching Ariel dance in their mother’s very drawing-room, as they had so often watched her dancing in Wild Acres woods. Ariel did not look at the children again. She would not give them away. But that glimpse of them had changed everything. Persis and Nicky had counted on her finding the beginning of the magic path in the woods for them, the path which would lead to faËrie. It was to begin with a clump of yellow and white violets. A hidden way. A secret way. The secret of the yellow and the pearly little flower faces. But she had not found it yet. Might she find it now? Bless them! She would try. She knelt in the center of the gray rug, and looked for a clump of white and yellow violets. She pushed the damp, dead leaves of last summer’s woods away with firm but not repudiating fingers. And there, behind the sheen of the flower-faces she had uncovered, she did discover the secret, hidden way to faËrie. Rising, she turned to take the children’s hands. The path was here, and they would walk it now together. The three walked out the path through light and shade, their faces set toward faËrie. The watchers of the dance saw children with Ariel then, as clearly as if they were really there. And if they did not know exactly that they were on their way to faËrie along with Ariel, they sensed something very like it. Ariel and her invisible dance-children came to a sunny clearing. There, in a circle of happiness, they began walking slowly round and round in faËrie. Until they stopped—to wait and listen in faËrie. Then, and then only Ariel bent her head to look into the faces of her dance children. But it was not Persis and Nicky’s faces that gave her back her look. Here were two dark, thinner faces. Greek in their perfection of feature. High-held, narrow heads, they had. And the dark, soft eyes of their dream-lighted faces were Hugh’s eyes over again.... Hugh’s eyes, in children’s faces! The dance went to shatters. Electric light tore away the sunlight from the clearing. And as though the music had been rays from the dance, it faded, thinned away.... A drawing-room remained, and a group of moved and almost unstrung people. Ariel, standing still, startled by her vision of the dark, aquiline little faces of those terribly beloved dream children, looked about almost wildly for Hugh. And she found him leaning against the jamb of one of the long windows. He was looking at her, waiting for her eyes. Ariel knew that the others were there somewhere, as well,—even that Michael was coming toward her from the piano. She knew where she was. She knew who she was. But in that instant, even with the dance shattered for her, she was too much at one with her soul to keep her secret longer. And Hugh’s face, for any one who could bear to look on such heart’s nakedness, told as much as hers. There flashed between them, across half the length of a room, terrible and startling as lightning, the mutual promise of love’s consummation. Then Ariel blushed. Red swept from the tip of her chin up over her face. She was no longer a fairy-tale girl. Her cheeks seemed rounder, her smile for Anne who had rushed upon her with shrieks of praise, was not light-tipped and eerie. It was warm, merry. Not until Michael Schwankovsky fell to kissing her forehead and her hands with rapturous joy over her performance did the blush fade. |
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