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.