"And apropos of our little friend Brenda," Joan murmured, sifting sand
in rhythmical waves through her fingers, "I'm glad she amuses you so
much, Hugh dear. If you'd played around with more girls like her, taken
out more time for play and amusing companionships, I mean, you'd have
been a lot better off. Brenda wakes you up. Any one can see. And waked
up--you are delightful, Hugh. All the women here like you tremendously.
And the men, well, they'd like you anyway. _These_ men. They'd respect
the really clever side of you, the business side, having most of them
come the same road. I did better than I knew when I wheedled Laura into
inviting you. For really, I was selfishly thinking only of myself, as
usual."
Laura was Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith, and Joan and Hugh were out on the
swimming beach at Fernly, lingering on after the Sunday morning's
general swimming meet in order to be together. Joan was wearing a
sea-green beach cape draped about her shoulders and a wide beach hat.
But Hugh was sprawled in the sun, unprotected, getting his first tan of
the season.
"Brenda's all right," Hugh replied nonchalantly. "Every day in every way
I like her better and better. She's refreshing. And she wears."
"Yes. And I'm glad I've been able to help her as much as I have. Laura
is thinking of redecorating her Riverside house. Or she was thinking of
it before this party. Now she has definitely decided to do it. Told me
so last night. So you see I still think of Brenda and for her."
"Yes. She owes you this invitation as much as I do, then? Well, she'd be
grateful if she knew. She's a loyal soul, Brenda."
"But of course she owes it to me! Brenda has done some lovely places,
her reputation's grown tremendously. But after all--Laura Hunt-Smith! I
suppose you can't know what that means! But to be honest, my dear boy,
it wasn't Brenda's career I was thinking of this time. Not that alone,
anyway. I wanted to see you two together. Every one else seems to have
been seeing you together, and to have jumped to conclusions. I wanted to
see for myself, that was all."
She looked at him, smiling, but an open gay smile, not enigmatical.
"And now you've seen--" Hugh asked. "Well?"
"I've seen that although you two are good friends, you're not simple
enough for Brenda, simple as you are, darling. I mean she's a little too
simple for you. It's too obvious! People are such imbeciles when they
try to evaluate friendships from the outside! But I, where you're
concerned, Hugh, don't come in that class, do I? We are so close that I
can evaluate your relations with people from the inside, as it were.
There's been a _rapport_ built up between us through these most vital
years of our lives,--fifteen to thirty, isn't it? We don't fool each
other. And no matter how much you and Brenda flirt, and how openly, I
can only sigh, now that I've watched you together here, and see that
your heart isn't in it. Poor Brenda! And it might have solved
everything.... I mean, you stood some chance of normal happiness if you
could only have found her _simpatica_. But you'll never bring yourself
to marry any one without that. Oh, you see, I know--I know...."
Hugh leaned up on one elbow and started scooping out a trench in the
sand between himself and Joan. His dark head, silhouetted against the
vivid blue-green of the noon Atlantic, was Grecian, Joan thought, in its
beautiful symmetry. And his shoulders were as classic under the narrow
straps of his damp bathing suit as they appeared when hidden under the
most meticulously tailored of dinner jackets. "Fastidious strength.
Strength to be used fastidiously. Aristocracy of body--as it is hardly
known in the modern world," Joan mused.
"And he's mine. I've only to reach a finger across this trench. Whisper
one word. What am I waiting for? Why can't I take him as he is, and not
expect perfection? Why do I want the moon? What do I hope for, better
than this! If Michael and Hugh and Doctor Steiner could only be rolled
into a composite person, that would be ideal. But they can't. Hugh's
himself, and couldn't be himself and have all their qualities added. And
why must I cling to this perfectionist view of my life! Ah! That is
still to be discovered. But why wait to understand myself perfectly? I
needn't stop being analyzed just because I'm married. And it isn't as if
marriage were irrevocable. It isn't. Though of course one does hate to
make mistakes, for marriage is important. At the very least mistakes
with it are a waste of time. But it's pride, really. I'm as proud as
Lucifer and can't bear to be caught out in a mistake, important or
unimportant."
Joan was talking for Doctor Steiner in these musings. She had almost
forgotten the presence of the occasion of them, and Doctor Steiner's
emaciated face with its piercing but impersonal eyes was before her, in
her imagination, more vivid to her than Hugh in the flesh. He was
probing with herself into the depths of her psyche, watching with a
whole mind's powerful concentration for the one word that might turn the
lock, explain to them Joan's inability to live life as the majority of
people do live it, discover the mystery of why she, almost alone in the
world of civilized women, felt that if she could not give herself in her
entirety to a marriage she could not give herself at all: in other
words, that compromise was beneath her.
Doctor Steiner had often drawn her attention to the fact that compromise
is the attitude necessary if one is to lead a normal, rational life. The
gods, if there are gods, may live without it, but not mortals. Joan must
forget her Luciferian pride, learn to be an ordinary mortal, if she
hoped for happiness.
Last night she had dreamed, and written it down with minutest detail in
her dream notebook kept for Doctor Steiner's eyes alone, something which
might help him to understand, more than any other dream she'd had since
being analyzed, the secret of this inability to stoop to compromise with
life. It was a dream which, given almost any interpretation, flattered
Joan's soul very much. She could hardly wait for Doctor Steiner to hear
it and by its illumination pierce a little deeper with his so divinely
impersonal vision into her mysterious depths. Indeed, she found herself
looking forward to to-morrow afternoon, and the two hours he would give
her in his office then, with a vast impatience. Would that it were here!
After all, what could Laura Hunt-Smith's house party offer in
competition with two hours of Doctor Steiner's active interest in one's
complicated soul states!
But Doctor Steiner's keen face was beginning to disintegrate and form
again into Hugh's obtuse one. Hugh had completed his trench and was
interrupting Joan's train of absorbing thoughts by talking. And about
Brenda Loring! Stupid of him! Joan was tired of Brenda. She herself had
exhausted that subject, and here was Hugh keeping it up. He was saying,
"There's no question of sentimentality between us. Brenda and I are
friends. And she has no more designs on me than I have on her. That's
one of the things I like about her. She's so finely independent."
"Perhaps not so independent as you think! She's only human, dear boy,
even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she
has with interiors. But I'm not pretending to understand Brenda. It's
only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you
can't bring yourself to be fonder of her."
He responded nothing to that, and after a little she leaned forward and
destroyed his trench, smoothing it out with her fingers. She was giving
him her attention again, Doctor Steiner practically forgotten. She
decided to speak gravely and simply.
"Hugh, dear! I've already lived. Had a life. My adorable children! They
have satisfied the maternal in me. Filled my cup to overflowing. And I
am deeply satisfied. I wouldn't want more children, even if I married.
That side of me is finished. Perfected. Do you see? Wouldn't it be
better for you--far better--if you could fall in love with a wholesome,
healthy girl who still wants and needs all that for her development? I
don't say Brenda. I see she wouldn't do. She's not quite wonderful
enough.... But some one quite wonderful.... If you could find her....
Don't you think it would be kinder of me, even if I loved you, to give
you up once and for all? Today! Now! For your sake?"
She was looking at the smoothed plateau where the trench had been
between them. If Doctor Steiner had been there, actually in the body and
not merely hovering in the background of Joan's obsessed imagination,
would he have noticed a contradiction between what Joan's hands had just
done in so ruthlessly destroying Hugh's trench and the noble womanly
kindness of Joan's words? And supposing he had noticed the work of
Joan's hands, would he have called it the outward sign of an inward
conflict; or would he--for even a psychoanalyst, no matter how bigoted,
cannot be totally ignorant of human nature--have thought privately that
here hypocrisy of a very simple order had accidentally symbolized
itself? Perfectly self-conscious hypocrisy, at that?
She was looking at the smoothed plateau and not at Hugh, yet she felt
that his dark gaze was raised, burningly, to her face. But she was
wrong. Hugh was looking neither at her nor at the plateau her beautiful
fingers were still smoothing and smoothing. He was looking into space.
And he asked, with as grave a voice as she had used, and every bit as
quietly, "Do you really and finally mean this, Joan? Are you telling me
to give up hope of you? And would you be glad if I could find some
one--wonderful--and she would be so simple and dear as to marry me, and
we should have children? Do you mean this?"
There was something of a pause. Joan lifted her gaze from the sand with
a slight surprise in it. But Hugh's face was averted. She guessed the
pain in his eyes. Well, perhaps pain was what she had asked for, more
than passion, in what she had just conveyed to him. She said with an
intended beautiful frankness, "No, my dear. I'm quite normally selfish.
Every one is, you know, but most people are capable of rationalizing
their selfishnesses into looking like nobilities. Well, being
psychoanalyzed destroys in one, if he cooperates with the discipline,
the possibility of this comforting variety of self-deceit. It has
destroyed it in me, at any rate. So I cannot say to you what would only
be a lie. I cannot be so dishonest, Hugh, as to tell you that your
falling in love and marrying and having children by some one you thought
very wonderful--more wonderful than me--would make me glad. How could
it? It's very pleasant to be adored. And I love your love. This is true
of me emotionally, you understand, my dear. But one cannot act in
harmony with his emotions all the time unless he has the facility, which
I, thank God, have not, of rationalizing them eternally. No, Hugh, dear.
It is the findings of my sane, free mind that I would share with you in
this. And that mind says, 'He would be far happier married to almost any
one than to you, Joan Nevin. He needs the great experience of having
children of his own, and of being adored, as he adores you.... If you
are generous, you will help him to this deliverance, Joan Nevin.'"
She paused. She put her hand near his hand on the sand. She looked at
it, and finished in a low, quite beautiful intonation, "Dear boy. I love
you enough to be frank with you. And I do believe if you could find such
a woman, and make such a marriage, that our friendship would be only
deepened by it. I love you, in my own way. But, frankly, it is not a way
that is good enough for you. That love, such as it is, you can never
lose. Your marriage with some wonderful person--only she _must_ be
wonderful, Hugh, or I should be unreconcilable--might even deepen it. I
think, Hugh, I could love the very children she gave you, for your
sake."
"I don't understand the distinctions you make, Joan, between your sane
mind and your emotions. But you are saying that you want me to give you
up? You are advising it?"
Joan did not hesitate. Although their hands were not touching, she
sensed the vibration of some passionate emotion through his whole body.
And now she was ready for climax. She had built up her scene. She had
used her sane mind in the way that Doctor Steiner admired so much in
her, that beautiful detachment and frankness of which so few women are
capable. Already Doctor Steiner had encored her performance, in her
imagination, and would certainly do so again in actuality when she told
him the whole story to-morrow afternoon. But now she was a little tired
of all that. Life is many-sided. The ideal life is one lived on all its
sides. Rhythm is the fundamental law of life. So now let come emotion.
She would _feel_ again. The sun and the salt air on her lips was not
quite enough of sensuous comfort. She would invite Hugh's hard,
passionate, bitter kiss. Her veins were hungry for it.
"Yes, Hugh darling. I want you to give me up once and for all. Only I
want it--it would break my heart if you failed to understand
this!--because I do truly love you."
She bent her head and waited for the storm. But it held off. Hugh had
sat up and was looking out to sea. He said in an even tone--iron
control, Joan thought he was showing--"That is the way you love me?
Yes?"
"But it's a very dear love, Hugh, isn't it, to put your happiness ahead
of my own?"
Hugh suddenly turned over and lay prone in the sand, stretched to his
full length, his face on his folded arms. There was a space when he
might have been dead. He was lying in the dark. Darkness of body,
darkness of soul, darkness of mind. Time was lost. Then he felt the
shore under him. Earth. And the sun on his back, on his neck. Out of
death he had been tossed up--onto the shore of life. He lay, light as
the dark waves that had swept him here, and buoyant with peace. Clean
swept of all the dark. Purged of desire too. He was on a new shore. A
new existence opened to him, a free man.
"I would rather have had violets." He remembered Ariel so vividly,
standing before him in the white coat, her voice and face passionately
earnest. It was the only time he had ever seen her passionate about
anything, except that close-shut stone-like passion of anger against
Joan that Sunday, when Joan had brought Schwankovsky to call and had let
him blame Hugh for 'Noon's' having been relegated to the attic, and said
no word about her own part in it. That was passion, if you like, but
shut-in, angry.... "I would rather have had the violets," that was
passion outflowing. Beautiful.... Daring.... But he had given Joan the
violets, and, he had thought, for all time. Now, however,--glory be!
Joan had tossed them back. Definitely. Finally. They were his to give
again....
Joan touched his shoulder, lightly, pityingly. He started, for he had
forgotten she was there. He looked at her with surprise.
"Gosh! I thought I was alone!" He mumbled it like a boy who is caught
day-dreaming by an elder, and with the same flushed shamedness. And
then, in his more natural voice, "I say, excuse me, Joan."
The queer expression that swept Joan's features was not intelligible to
him. But instinctively he knew that he had never seen its like before in
her face. It was the shadow of a strange consternation.
"You forgot I was here!... Hugh!"
"I was imagining things," he tried to explain, and made it worse than it
need have been. "Kid stuff.... Desert islands, adventure.... New lands,
you know.... I thought--" But he saw that he was offending her, and
struggled for something else to talk about. "See here," he blurted,
"does this sunlight remind you of Clare's? It does me. And the green of
that water! It's Bermudian."
Joan's head and shoulders were turned away. He had trouble in catching
her words. She was saying, "Crowell Fuller was telling me last night at
dinner that he thinks we've vastly over-rated the importance of Gregory
Clare. He bought two of the paintings himself and grants he's
important--but not so important. It's a pity, and Michael will be
disappointed. For Fuller could hold up Michael's hands so substantially,
if he only saw eye to eye. He's the one person--over here--in a position
to. And he's not doing it."
She was cool, impersonal. She might have been talking to some one she
had just met at a tea, except for that turned-away shoulder, the averted
face.
"But does it really matter--now?" Hugh asked, genuinely surprised. "The
Metropolitan's bought a bunch of 'em. There were none left untaken after
the third day of the exposition. Ariel has more money from them than
even her father dreamed of,--enough, if it's managed at all well, to
secure her a free, even opulent life by ordinary standards. So what can
Crowell Fuller or any other person do now to spoil things? You're
certainly borrowing trouble, Joan."
She swung on him angrily. At last he had given her a cause for anger
which she could openly acknowledge. And Hugh, obtuse, did not dream that
the fury now directed at his head was not caused by his last remarks at
all, but by what had gone before.
Her voice was splintered with anger, all the lovely intonations
splintered and lost. "I thought Gregory Clare was your friend. After
all, you were the first purchaser he ever had. And now you can so
_stupidly_ say that it doesn't matter what place he's to hold among
American painters! Nothing matters, I take it, except the money that his
dear little daughter's pulled from the sale. I tell you that Gregory
Clare, dead, is worth a million of Ariel Clares living. A
million--million! But now that she won't have to drudge for a living,
it's no matter to you what becomes of Clare's wonderful art. You are
content. Complacent. Very exhilarating!"
She laughed with what sounded like bitterest scorn.
"You put me too much in the wrong, Joan. I won't take it." Hugh, too,
could lose his temper. "What I really feel, and _know_, is that you nor
I nor Crowell Fuller nor Schwankovsky nor anybody on God's earth, in the
last analysis, will have a damned finger in the ultimate fate of Clare's
work. Justice goes its own ways, with art as with souls. And don't let
any one tell you it isn't so! If Clare's paintings are really important
(God! how I hate that word, used as you patronizing intelligentsia are
using it these days!), the importance will win through for itself,
without your worrying about it. That's what I believe, anyway. Always
_have_."
Joan's jaw dropped perceptibly. But her eyes kept their angry glitter.
"That is a decision, my friend, which I believe even the greatest
philosophers haven't dared to make. Personally, I have never supposed
that there is a god of art who deals out ultimate justice, willy-nilly.
It looks pretty much a matter of chance--and of friends, and
advertising. I'd say--"
But Hugh interrupted her, still hot. "Well, I wouldn't. There's a life,
a soul of its own in a picture like--'The Shell,' for instance. It's a
life that will, come spring, burst through into humanity's appreciation,
the way buds burst through bark, come their spring, to light and air.
For the imagination is strong, like love.... It is a power.... Yes. I'm
willing to leave my friend's works to their own destinies. So long as
imagination is organic in them, as it is in Clare's pictures, then
they're potent in their own right as is a bolt of electricity. Even if
some poor fool hides 'em away in his attic, or even if fire burns 'em or
water drowns 'em,--justice still works with 'em and for 'em.... For
Beauty is--_must be_--as immortal as goodness.... Though we don't see
how, or understand.
"It's the same with people.... With people's personalities I mean. Their
'importance,' since you like the word so well. If they have any
importance--_beauty of spirit_, _Soundness_, are my terms for it--it
bursts a way for itself, like buds in the spring. Environment and
accident haven't got power over it. Not a bit. It can't be kept in, held
back, any more than birth itself can be held back, once it gets
going.... And Ariel's got that thing in her personality,--that
_soundness_, _beauty_, _importance_. Beauty's organic in her
character...."
Hugh's whole face was burning, and his words came out staccato, fierce
with conviction. Joan, almost miraculously, she felt, had the insight to
realize that at least part of this amazing passion of conviction was
impersonal. She saw that Hugh was really talking about such things as
imagination, love, personality, abstractly,--out of deep-seated
convictions which had grown in him with his own growth, and which she
had never suspected in him. Why, he was a man with a religion, and she
had never guessed! But she preferred to pretend to think him moved by
personal emotions merely, and asked bitingly, "Then what is your plan
for Ariel when your grandmother dies? Have you changed your mind about
her so utterly as it appears, and you'll let her be a second Isadora?
Express this wonderful personality, this beauty of spirit of hers, in
some world-shaking way?"
Hugh dropped back to natural. He was ashamed of so having betrayed his
soul's convictions to Joan's skepticisms. "I shall have nothing to say
about it; why should I? But of course that wasn't what I meant at all,
or anything like it. Ariel's far too ordinary--"
Joan's mind reeled. "Oh, but surely not. After all you've said!
Ordinary?"
"Well, 'ordinary's' the wrong word, of course. But you know very well
what I mean, Joan. She's not artistic. She has nothing in her of the
genius, or the artist. Or rather, her genius is her personality. I
thought I said it all before. She's of the spirit.... _Love_--_Life_....
It would be rotten to turn it into dancing. All that _life_."
"'Life' doesn't seem at all descriptive of that child to me, Hugh. She's
about the quietest--"
"I'm not talking about liveliness. Well, look at the sun, here on the
back of my hand. Still, isn't it? Quiet? But it's life! Ariel's quiet is
like that."
Joan was silent, quiet herself for a minute. But not the kind of quiet
Hugh had just explained to her. She asked, finally, "Are you sorry,
then, that her father has advertised Ariel, as he has, in his pictures?
Do you think it is cheapening? And would you think that being a famous
dancer would cheapen her? Is that what you're afraid of?"
He hesitated. "I'm afraid I used to feel that way," he acknowledged.
"The first time it was suggested that Ariel might get all this publicity
she has been getting, I did think it a shame. I wanted to protect her
from it. But I've outgrown that angle of it. I know now that that's a
false, inherited attitude. Not sound. You yourself, Joan, let Enderly
and those other literary fellows vote you the most beautiful mother in
the East for the Ideal Perfume Company, Inc., the other day, and your
picture's even in the subway entrances now, and in the advertising
sections of every magazine, that's worth the name, I've picked up this
month. I've had to get over the prejudice, you see. And I've succeeded,
I think. No, it isn't that at all now that convinces me that Ariel
shouldn't go in for dancing. I--"
But Joan cried, laughing shakily, "So you don't think publicity is
cheap, and what's convinced you is because I've allowed it? So I still
am a criterion, Hugh? Really?"
"But of course."
"That's nice. I'm _glad_. And Hugh, I gave the money to the home for
Crippled Children. That's what made me consent to the silly
business,--that, and the help it might just possibly be to Prescott's
sales."
"Good for you! But I knew it was all right."
"Only see here, Hugh! Have I been too stupid? You aren't going to tell
me that that--that girl whose name you can't keep off your funny old
tongue is the wonderful person we were talking about, when we agreed
that you ought to marry some one else, and have children of your own?
I'm not going to believe that, even if you say so. It simply couldn't--"
Hugh put out a hand as if to push something strongly away. Joan might
have seen suffering in his face now, if she had known when and how to
look for it. But his voice was his ally. It did not betray him as he
said, "Hardly! Haven't I told you? It's Glenn who's in love with Ariel.
Any one can see...."
He did not need to go on, for she took it up so eagerly. "No, really!
But you'd never let Glenn, would you? Why, your mother would be wild.
And you,--you wouldn't like it yourself, would you, Hugh?"
"I don't see why not. You know how I feel about Ariel. And I believe
rather deeply in early marriage. But I doubt whether Glenn realizes
wholly how it is with him yet. You mustn't say anything, Joan. I trust
you. Youth is so easily--wounded by too many words."
"Oh, dear! She _should_ have gone to Switzerland with me! It would be
too bad, if you're right! Glenn's only twenty! And he's going to be
dreadfully clever--fascinating, when he grows up!"
A cloud, thin and ragged, was obscuring the sun. Hugh had lost his
desert island where life was new and possibilities unlimited. He did not
slip back into the dark waves. He knew he would never be tossed drifting
there again. He still was free. Life still was new. But the warmth and
the joy were gone.
"Oh! It's chilly. Come--" Joan was on her sandaled feet first, making a
pretense of pulling him up by his hands. Her peace, so violently
threatened in the past minutes, was established again. She would see
Doctor Steiner at least once more before she made Hugh utterly happy.
But she was--she knew it now--through with being a perfectionist. This
chill in the air! The loss of the sun! It all spoke a word to her which
she had heard but without realizing before. It said that she was thirty,
and that life was running away.
"Come, my dear," she murmured. "Brenda won't bless me for monopolizing
you like this. Just the same, let's steal away for a walk late this
afternoon, do without tea. Shall we? There's a heavenly walk I know
here, partly through the woods and partly along the shore. And we won't
quarrel again. I promise. Do you promise?"
She strode beside him like a goddess in the freedom of her bathing
dress, her cape blowing back and away out in the new-sprung, chill wind.
She had pulled off her shade hat, and her hair shone, even in the chill
light, live and beautiful.
Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith and Brenda Loring were taking a gossipy stroll in
the rose garden when Hugh and Joan came up from the beach.
"Look, my dear!" Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith exclaimed under her breath to
the girl by her side, as the bathers drew near. "Did you ever see
anything so radiantly perfect! They are a Greek god and goddess. And
against that sea! Beautiful! I can't understand why dear Joan holds off
so. Eventually two creatures like that--so perfectly matched--must come
together. Isn't it obvious?"
Brenda gave the Greek god and his goddess barely a glance, before
looking beyond them to the sea which was their background.
"Perhaps it's obvious," she responded. "Too obvious to be true. Some
things are, you know."