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.