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.