“Hello. It’s morning. This is my day off, Anne, and I’m going for a long walk up towards Scarborough. If you want to slip out with me and walk too, nobody would know, it’s so early, and then you could get back to college this afternoon, couldn’t you? Want to do that?”
“But when did you get up? Have you had your breakfast? You’re a good bedfellow, Ariel. You didn’t stir all night.”
“Well, neither did you, or I wasn’t awake to know if you did. I had breakfast with Grandam. But I haven’t told her that you’re here, since you asked me not to. Rose maneuvered this tray for me. She’s a good sport, isn’t she! Grandam is too. She must wonder who came to the door last night.”
“You’re a good sport yourself now that we’re on the subject, Ariel. A darned good one.... Many thanks.”
It was still snowing. But one couldn’t believe in the reality of it, somehow: April was so close behind. This was a mere flurry in her face, ephemeral. The whole landscape was ablow with snow clusters, like flowers, like the flowers on Grandam’s curtains masking the night from her room. So this flower-blowing-curtain shut out spring.
Why Anne was pushing her way through this dream of snow blobs, shoulder to shoulder with Ariel, on a tramp up the Post Road, she hardly knew. It was Ariel’s will that was motivating her, perhaps. She felt that Ariel’s will—or somebody’s, not her own anyway—had steered even her dreams last night. And hadn’t Ariel undressed her, and brushed her hair and put her to bed like a baby? Anne thought that she had. And she was still giving the same sort of service.
For the first hour, or more, the girls scarcely spoke. Anne did at one time call, “Wait a minute, Ariel. I’ve got snow in my ankle.” And Ariel, who had not noticed that Anne had dropped back, turned and retraced her steps to her.
And soon after that Ariel had exclaimed, “There’s a wood road! Look how the boughs are tangled over it. It’s like a white cloister! Where do you suppose it goes?” They had followed it, thrilled, up hill through woods until it ended in a high meadow of trackless snow. It may have disappointed Ariel, that snow meadow, after the mysterious woods, but it brought a kind of psychic relief to Anne. Its bare expanse simplified her, was the last touch to Ariel’s own simplifying influence. Silently, with something of the snow’s own silence, they returned to the road and trudged on and on, like two sturdy ponies.
Anne began to be aware that with every increase of weariness to her trudging legs and feet a bit of mental misery petered out, got dropped off. Her mind, after a while, even began to function again. Since the moment when Prescott had struck her—and run away from her on the New Haven street, her mind had played almost no part in her actions, at least her conscious mind hadn’t. As she went on beside silent Ariel, suddenly, unaccountably, she recalled an incident of one of her summers at the shore. She was at the extreme outer edge of a dock when a sloop emerged from thick fog before her very face, as if it had taken its form and motion from the mists themselves. And now it seemed to her that her thoughts—the vehicle, that is, that made up her thought-feeling-self—was such a sloop, sailing toward her out of a foggy nothingness, coming clear, taking shape. But then there must be something else, something detached from self, that could see self returning—and indeed, something for self to return to. Any instant now the two would merge. The sloop would slide alongside the dock, and self would step into self. And when she did join this self, taking form and moving swiftly upon her now after absence, would she lose the present sense of detachment? Would she be whole again—less of self-consciousness and more of self?
But by now physical weariness had increased to a point which seemed final. If she dragged her feet another step forward through the sticky snow her legs would snap off at the hips. She came to a dead halt, too exhausted even to get onto the side of the road out of the path of possible motors. “Ariel!” she called. “I’m done up. Now what do you want? What’s next?”