“Do not know! But remember that I do know the pictures! Ha!” The huge Russian snatched from his breast pocket a very small flat jade case, snapped it open, extracted a minute, orange-colored cigarette, which he stuck into a very long black holder, and began to smoke ferociously. Out of the astonishing clouds which at once began to drift from his quivering and expansive nostrils his voice growled and reverberated huskily.
“Can one see the pictures and not adore the dancer? But, I forget. You, Mr. Weyman, have seen the pictures, I understand, without allowing yourself to become at all disturbed by their beauty. You have even seen the painter himself. Seen him once plain! Alive! In the flesh! Even called him ‘Friend’! But from you who has ever heard a word of his great art? How is this? Ha! He had to wait and wait and wait until he was dying and a little trifler with art, this little Mr. Frye, came along and thought the paintings pretty. And it is this little dabbler, this no-account would-be painter, who consoles the dying genius, who promises that his life’s work shall be shown, shall be recognized. While you, who knew him for years—Joan says it has been many years—your part has been kindly, oh, so very, very kindly, to take his daughter, the divine child of his muse, and employ her as a servant in your household. But you may intend kindness. One never knows. The certainty is that you are blind. Your perception of beauty is dead or never existed.... I,—I have come to see the dancer.”
“Michael! You’re being outrageous. Hugh, he’s not responsible. Don’t even notice him. He sometimes gets this way.”
Joan was up, moving about restlessly. Suddenly she stopped, swung about, put a hand on Schwankovsky’s arm.
“Michael!” she spoke as to a sleepwalker, cautiously but firmly. “Wait till you see your dancer. You may find that all this excitement is sheer waste, that Hugh is right, and Ariel is quite ordinary. Besides, she isn’t exactly a servant here. You misunderstood me. She’s a companion-nurse. There’s quite a little difference.”
Schwankovsky shook off the quieting hand. “Companion-nurse!” he bellowed. “Good God!” Joan backed away from him, more disconcerted at his having ignored her hand than by his tone. Schwankovsky, seeing her expression, obviously made some effort to be more peaceful. “Forgive me, Joan, my dear. You see I forgot that you had not yet seen the paintings. You’d know, if you had, what Mr. Weyman has no excuse for not knowing, that it is madness and folly to pretend that the dancer is a ‘companion-nurse.’ She simply isn’t anything of the sort. She’s the inspiration, soul, I can say it, of the greatest artist of our times. She’s the germinating force within the outward and visible expression of his art. And this force, this Imagination, inherent in all true art, has nowhere else that I know of ever taken form and showed itself through the actual medium—of paint, or music, or sculpture. So here we have the unique, the unheard-of. Imagination made visible! In Ariel, dancing.—But where is she? Why doesn’t she come?”
She was already there, in the doorway.
“Ha!” The Russian charged lumberingly upon her, and fell, kneeling, by her silver slippers. Grabbing up her hands he kissed them,—the palms, the backs. Hugh cried, but inaudibly, “Why doesn’t Ariel box his ears?” Joan languidly sank into a chair, lighting a fresh cigarette.
“Well, Ariel,” she drawled. “The bear there on the rug is Mr. Michael Schwankovsky. Allow me to present him.”
Schwankovsky bounded up,—turned on Joan. “A totally unnecessary waste of breath,” he expostulated, and seized Ariel’s hands again. “This divine child and I have known each other before the creation of the world. It was she who taught my soul the existence of form while it was yet chaos. ‘Ariel.’ Why did they name you that? It isn’t good enough. But then, you should be nameless. There is no name.”