Ariel, quiet but alert, lay in her steamer chair, one of the most inconspicuous of the several hundred passengers the Bermuda was bringing to New York. No one would be likely to look at her twice or give her a second thought, as she crouched away from the March wind, insufficiently protected from the cold by her nondescript tweed coat, and carelessly, casually bare-headed. All about her on the deck were people of outstanding, vivid types. The thing that had impressed Ariel about these fellow passengers during the two days of the voyage was their apparent self-sufficiency,—a gay, bright assurance of their own significance, and the reasonableness, even the inevitableness, of their being what and where they were. The very children appeared to take it quite as a matter of course that they should come skimming over the Atlantic in a mammoth boat-hotel while they played their games, read their books and ate their meals,—just like that.
Ariel took nothing as a matter of course, and she never had from the minute of earliest memory. Her proclivity to wonder and to delight was as organic as her proclivity to breathe. But now it was neither delight nor wonder but an aching suspense that quivered at the back of her mind. She thought, “If Father were here! If it weren’t alone, this adventure! New York Harbor at last! I—Ariel! But it isn’t real. There’s no substance. It was to have happened and been wonderful, but this is paler than our imagining of it. The shadow of our imagining. Oh, it’s I who have died and not Father. Where he is, whatever he is doing, it’s still real with him. With Father it would be always real,—alive.”
A steward came up the deck, carrying rugs and a book for the woman who had occupied the chair next to Ariel’s during the two days’ voyage. Two children with their nurse trailed behind. Ariel’s glance barely touched the group and returned to New York’s terraced, dream-world sky line. But she was glad that these people had come up on deck and would be near her during the little while left of ship life. It did not matter that they would remain unaware of her until the very end. It was more interesting, being interested in them, than having them interested in her. And there was no reason on earth why they should be interested in her. It never entered Ariel’s head that there was.
Joan Nevin, the woman, was tall, copper haired and eyelashed, and graceful with a lithe, body-conscious kind of gracefulness, of fashion, perhaps, more than of nature. Her sleek fur coat, her high-heeled, elegant pumps—even the close dark hat, flaring back from her copper eyebrows—these seemed to motivate her gait and her postures. She was, perhaps, more pliable to them than they to her. But Ariel did not mind this, although she realized it. It was wonderful, in its way, fascinating by strangeness.
To tell the truth, Mrs. Nevin interested her more at the moment than the unknown, beautiful harbor at which she appeared to be gazing. And no aching longing for her father’s sharing of this interest could turn it dreamlike, for her father could never share it, alive or dead. Fashionable women, even at a distance, bored him. But how did a woman like that feel, Ariel wondered, about her so finished and catered-to beauty, and her easy self-sufficiency? And how did it feel to have two burnished, curled children that were one’s very own, to love, to live for, to play with? How wonderful if Ariel herself had had children of her own to play with and dance with on their beach, while her father was alive and she could still have gloried in them, before the sense of unreality had settled like a thin dust over unshared happiness!
The Nevins and the nurse had come the length of the deck now, and were standing near her, but not taking their chairs, and oddly silent. Still, she would not look directly at them to discover the reason. If she looked into their faces she might become visible to them. So far, these two past days, Ariel had kept herself wrapped in a cloud of invisibility, she felt, merely by not meeting other eyes. She was shy of contacts, ever since her father’s death; and the aching, hurting suspense at the back of her mind, which was caused by dread of the near approaching meeting with her father’s friend, had only intensified her desire for invisibility.
As for Mrs. Nevin, until this instant she had been nearly as unaware of Ariel as Ariel supposed her to be. She had looked at her once or twice in the beginning, to wonder whether it was a child, a girl or a woman who occupied the neighboring chair, but quickly decided that such speculation was waste of time since the one thing certain was that Ariel’s age didn’t matter, since she was obviously—nobody. From that decision she had returned to social obliviousness, lying back for hours at a time, wrapped up preciously by her eager cabin steward in two fur-lined rugs, which could not have been hired for the passage but must be her own expensive property, following with absorption the fine print of a thick novel by some one named Aldous Huxley. Now and then she would lift languid but brilliant eyes and gaze for a while at the flying sea. That was all, for after the first half hour on board she had not thought it worth her while to waste that brilliant languid gaze on any other fellow-passenger more than on Ariel.
But now she remained standing by Ariel’s chair, as though with some intention, and Ariel had finally to look up and meet, for the first time, in a direct exchange of glance, those brilliant, mahogany-colored eyes set wide apart under their strongly arched coppery brows, and it was, without doubt, a breathtaking moment. But it was the steward who was speaking, and his tone was seriously accusatory. “You are occupying the lady’s chair.”
He was right. In the excitement of at last being almost in, so near the landing, Ariel had neglected to make sure of her own name—Ariel Clare—on the slip of pink cardboard stuck into the holder on the chair’s back. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, rose and was off like a bird. The steward’s eyelids just flickered as she brushed past him in exquisite, smooth flight. But the flicker was not because the steward had recognized that the nondescript, pale, young girl had turned exquisite with motion. He blinked merely because her decision to depart and the departure had been so strangely, almost weirdly, simultaneous.
“Tuck it in at the foot more, please. Very well. That will do. Thank you.” Ariel, out by the deck rail, heard Mrs. Nevin’s low, but carrying voice directing and dismissing her eager slave. “It was unkind and perfectly needless,” she thought. “Any chair would have done her just as well for the next few minutes until we land. It doesn’t matter, though. I won’t care.”