The Dark Star
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The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy, inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and passionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim hand that guided it.
She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance, had no preferences among the youths of Gayfield, no romances. For that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned cheeks.
She had an agreeable time that winter, enchanted to learn dancing, happy at “showers” and parties, at sleigh rides and “chicken suppers,” and the various species of village gaiety which ranged from moving pictures every Thursday and Saturday nights to church entertainments, amateur theatricals at the town hall, and lectures under the auspices of the aristocratic D. O. F. – Daughters of the Old Frontier.
But she never saw any boy she preferred to any other, never was conscious of being preferred, excepting once – and she was not quite certain about that.
It was old Dick Neeland’s son, Jim – vaguely understood to have been for several years in Paris studying art – and who now turned up in Gayfield during Christmas week.
Ruhannah remembered seeing him on several occasions when she was a little child. He was usually tramping across country with his sturdy father, Dick Neeland of Neeland’s Mills – an odd, picturesque pair with their setter dogs and burnished guns, and old Dick’s face as red as a wrinkled winter apple, and his hair snow-white.
There was six years’ difference between their ages, Jim Neeland’s and hers, and she had always considered him a grown and formidable man in those days. But that winter, when somebody at the movies pointed him out to her, she was surprised to find him no older than the other youths she skated with and danced with.
Afterward, at a noisy village party, she saw him dancing with every girl in town, and the drop of Irish blood in this handsome, careless young fellow established him at once as a fascinating favourite.
Rue became quite tremulous over the prospect of dancing with him. Presently her turn came; she rose with a sudden odd loss of self-possession as he was presented, stood dumb, shy, unresponsive, suffered him to lead her out, became slowly conscious that he danced rather badly. But awe of him persisted even when he trod on her slender foot.
He brought her an ice afterward, and seated himself beside her.
“I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said. “How many times did I spike you?”
She flushed and would have found a pleasant word to reassure him, but discovered nothing to say, it being perfectly patent to them both that she had retired from the floor with a slight limp.
“I’m a steam roller,” he repeated carelessly. “But you dance very well, don’t you?”
“I have only learned to dance this winter.”
“I thought you an expert. Do you live here?”
“Yes… I mean I live at Brookhollow.”
“Funny. I don’t remember you. Besides, I don’t know your name – people mumble so when they introduce a man.”
“I’m Ruhannah Carew.”
“Carew,” he repeated, while a crease came between his eyebrows. “Of Brookhollow– Oh, I know! Your father is the retired missionary – red house facing the bridge.”
“Yes.”
“Certainly,” he said, taking another look at her; “you’re the little girl daddy and I used to see across the fields when we were shooting woodcock in the willows.”
“I remember you,” she said.
“I remember you!”
She coloured gratefully.
“Because,” he added, “dad and I were always afraid you’d wander into range and we’d pepper you from the bushes. You’ve grown a lot, haven’t you?” He had a nice, direct smile though his speech and manners were a trifle breezy, confident, and sans façon. But he was at that age – which succeeds the age of bumptiousness – with life and career before him, attainment, realisation, success, everything the mystery of life holds for a young man who has just flung open the gates and who takes the magic road to the future with a stride instead of his accustomed pace.
He was already a man with a profession, and meant that she should become aware of it.
Later in the evening somebody told her what a personage he had become, and she became even more deeply thrilled, impressed, and tremulously desirous that he should seek her out again, not venturing to seek him, not dreaming of encouraging him to notice her by glance or attitude – not even knowing, as yet, how to do such things. She thought he had already forgotten her existence.
But that this thin, freckled young thing with grey eyes ought to learn how much of a man he was remained somewhere in the back of Neeland’s head; and when he heard his hostess say that somebody would have to see Rue Carew home, he offered to do it. And presently went over and asked the girl if he might – not too patronisingly.
In the cutter, under fur, with the moonlight electrically brilliant and the world buried in white, she ventured to speak of his art, timidly, as in the presence of the very great.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I studied in Paris. Wish I were back there. But I’ve got to draw for magazines and illustrated papers; got to make a living, you see. I teach at the Art League, too.”
“How happy you must be in your career!” she said, devoutly meaning it, knowing no better than to say it.
“It’s a business,” he corrected her, kindly.
“But – yes – but it is art, too.”
“Oh, art!” he laughed. It was the fashion that year to shrug when art was mentioned – reaction from too much gabble.
“We don’t busy ourselves with art; we busy ourselves with business. When they use my stuff I feel I’m getting on. You see,” he admitted with reluctant honesty, “I’m young at it yet – I haven’t had very much of my stuff in magazines yet.”
After a silence, cursed by an instinctive truthfulness which always spoiled any little plan to swagger:
“I’ve had several – well, about a dozen pictures reproduced.”
One picture accepted by any magazine would have awed her sufficiently. The mere fact that he was an artist had been enough to impress her.
“Do you care for that sort of thing – drawing, painting, I mean?” he inquired kindly.
She drew a quick breath, steadied her voice, and said she did.
“Perhaps you may turn out stuff yourself some day.”
She scarcely knew how to take the word “stuff.” Vaguely she surmised it to be professional vernacular.
She admitted shyly that she cared for nothing so much as drawing, that she longed for instruction, but that such a dream was hopeless.
At first he did not comprehend that poverty barred the way to her; he urged her to cultivate her talent, bestowed advice concerning the Art League, boarding houses, studios, ways, means, and ends, until she felt obliged to tell him how far beyond her means such magic splendours lay.
He remained silent, sorry for her, thinking also that the chances were against her having any particular talent, consoling a heart that was unusually sympathetic and tender with the conclusion that this girl would be happier here in Brookhollow than scratching around the purlieus of New York to make both ends meet.
“It’s a tough deal,” he remarked abruptly. “ – I mean this art stuff. You work like the dickens and kick your heels in ante-rooms. If they take your stuff they send you back to alter it or redraw it. I don’t know how anybody makes a living at it – in the beginning.”
“Don’t you?”
“I? No.” He reddened; but she could not notice it in the moonlight. “No,” he repeated; “I have an allowance from my father. I’m new at it yet.”
“Couldn’t a man – a girl – support herself by drawing pictures for magazines?” she inquired tremulously.
“Oh, well, of course there are some who have arrived – and they manage to get on. Some even make wads, you know.”
“W-wads?” she repeated, mystified.
“I mean a lot of money. There’s that girl on the Star, Jean Throssel, who makes all kinds of wealth, they say, out of her spidery, filmy girls in ringlets and cheesecloth dinner gowns.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, Jean Throssel, and that Waythorne girl, Belinda Waythorne, you know – does all that stuff for The Looking Glass– futurist graft, no mouths on her people – she makes hers, I understand.”
It was rather difficult for Rue to follow him amid the vernacular mazes.
“Then, of course,” he continued, “men like Alexander Fairless and Philip Lightwood who imitates him, make fortunes out of their drawing. I could name a dozen, perhaps. But the rest – hard sledding, Miss Carew!”
“Is it very hard?”
“Well, I don’t know what on earth I’d do if dad didn’t back me as his fancy.”
“A father ought to, if he can afford it.”
“Oh, I’ll pay my way some day. It’s in me. I feel it; I know it. I’ll make plenty of money,” he assured her confidently.
“I’m sure you will.”
“Thank you,” he smiled. “My friends tell me I’ve got it in me. I have one friend in particular – the Princess Mistchenka – who has all kinds of confidence in my future. When I’m blue she bolsters me up. She’s quite wonderful. I owe her a lot for asking me to her Sunday nights and for giving me her friendship.”
“A – a princess?” whispered the girl, who had drawn pictures of thousands but was a little startled to realise that such fabled creatures really exist.
“Is she very beautiful?” she added.
“She’s tremendously pretty.”
“Her – clothes are very beautiful, I suppose,” ventured Rue.
“Well – they’re very – smart. Everything about her is smart. Her Sunday night suppers are wonderful. You meet people who do things – all sorts – everybody who is somebody.”
He turned to her frankly:
“I think myself very lucky that the Princess Mistchenka should be my friend, because, honestly, Miss Carew, I don’t see what there is in me to interest such a woman.”
Rue thought she could see, but remained silent.
“If I had my way,” said Neeland, a few moments later, “I’d drop illustrating and paint battle scenes. But it wouldn’t pay, you see.”
“Couldn’t you support yourself by painting battles?”
“Not yet,” he said honestly. “Of course I have hopes – intentions–” he laughed, drew his reins; the silvery chimes clashed and jingled and flashed in the moonlight; they had arrived.
At the door he said:
“I hope some day you’ll have a chance to take lessons. Thank you for dancing with me… If you ever do come to New York to study, I hope you’ll let me know.”
“Yes,” she said, “I will.”
He was halfway to his sleigh, looked back, saw her looking back as she entered the lighted doorway.
“Good night, Rue,” he said impulsively, warmly sorry for her.
“Good night,” she said.
The drop of Irish blood in him prompted him to go back to where she stood framed in the lighted doorway. And the same drop was no doubt responsible for his taking her by the waist and tilting back her head in its fur hood and kissing her soft, warm lips.
She looked up at him in a flushed, bewildered sort of way, not resisting; but his eyes were so gay and mischievous, and his quick smile so engaging that a breathless, uncertain smile began to edge her lips; and it remained stamped there, stiffening even after he had jumped into his cutter and had driven away, jingling joyously out into the dazzling moonshine.
In bed, the window open, and the covers pulled to her chin, Rue lay wakeful, living over again the pleasures of the evening; and Neeland’s face was always before her open eyes, and his pleasant voice seemed to be sounding in her ears. As for the kiss, it did not trouble her. Girls she went with were not infrequently so saluted by boys. That, being her own first experience, was important only in that degree. And she shyly thought the experience agreeable. And, as she recalled, revived, and considered all that Neeland had said, it seemed to her that this young man led an enchanted life and that such as he were indeed companions fit for princesses.
“Princess Mistchenka,” she repeated aloud to herself. And somehow it sounded vaguely familiar to the girl, as though somewhere, long ago, she had heard another voice pronounce the name.
CHAPTER V
EX MACHINA
After she had become accustomed to the smell of rancid oil and dyestuffs and the interminable racket of machinery she did not find her work at the knitting mill disagreeable. It was like any work, she imagined, an uninteresting task which had to be done.
The majority of the girls and young men of the village worked there in various capacities; wages were fair, salaries better, union regulations prevailed. There was nothing to complain of.
And nothing to expect except possible increase in wages, holidays, and a disquieting chance of getting caught in the machinery, which familiarity soon discounted.
As for the social status of the mill workers, the mill was Gayfield; and Gayfield was a village where the simpler traditions of the Republic still survived; where there existed no invidious distinction in vocations; a typical old-time community harbouring the remains of a Grand Army Post and too many churches of too many denominations; where the chance metropolitan stranger was systematically “done”; where distrust of all cities and desire to live in them was equalled only by a passion for moving pictures and automobiles; where the school trustees used double negatives and traced their ancestry to Colonial considerables – who, however, had signed their names in “lower case” or with a Maltese cross – the world in miniature, with its due proportion of petty graft, petty squabbles, envy, kindness, jealousy, generosity, laziness, ambition, stupidity, intelligence, honesty, hypocrisy, hatred, affection, badness and goodness, as standardised by the code established according to folk-ways on earth – in brief, a perfectly human community composed of the usual ingredients, worthy and unworthy – that was Gayfield, Mohawk County, New York.
Before spring came – before the first robin appeared, and while icy roads still lay icy under sunlit pools of snow-water – a whole winter indoors, and a sedentary one, had changed the smoothly tanned and slightly freckled cheeks of Rue Carew to a thinner and paler oval. Under her transparent skin a tea-rose pink came and went; under her grey eyes lay bluish shadows. Also, floating particles of dust, fleecy and microscopic motes of cotton and wool filling the air in the room where Ruhannah worked, had begun to irritate her throat and bronchial tubes; and the girl developed an intermittent cough.
When the first bluebird arrived in Gayfield the cough was no longer intermittent; and her mother sent her to the village doctor. So Rue Carew was transferred to the box factory adjoining, in which the mill made its own paper boxes, where young women sat all day at intelligent machines and fed them with squares of pasteboard and strips of gilt paper; and the intelligent and grateful machines responded by turning out hundreds and hundreds of complete boxes, all neatly gilded, pasted, and labelled. And after a little while Ruhannah was able to nourish one of these obliging and responsive machines. And by July her cough had left her, and two delicate freckles adorned the bridge of her nose.
The half-mile walk from and to Brookhollow twice a day was keeping her from rapid physical degeneration. Yet, like all northern American summers, the weather became fearfully hot in July and August, and the half-mile even in early morning and at six in the evening left her listless, nervously dreading the great concrete-lined room, the reek of glue and oil, the sweaty propinquity of her neighbours, and the monotonous appetite of the sprawling machine which she fed all day long with pasteboard squares.
She went to her work in early morning, bareheaded, in a limp pink dress very much open at the throat, which happened to be the merciful mode of the moment – a slender, sweet-lipped thing, beginning to move with grace now – and her chestnut hair burned gold-pale by the sun.
There came that movable holiday in August, when the annual shutdown for repairs closed the mill and box factory during forty-eight hours – a matter of prescribing oil and new bearings for the overfed machines so that their digestions should remain unimpaired and their dispositions amiable.
It was a hot August morning, intensely blue and still, with that slow, subtle concentration of suspended power in the sky, ominous of thunder brooding somewhere beyond the western edges of the world.
Ruhannah aided her mother with the housework, picked peas and a squash and a saucer full of yellow pansies in the weedy little garden, and, at noon, dined on the trophies of her husbandry, physically and æsthetically.
After dinner, dishes washed and room tidied, she sat down on the narrow, woodbine-infested verandah with pencil and paper, and attempted to draw the stone bridge and the little river where it spread in deeps and shallows above the broken dam.
Perspective was unknown to her; of classic composition she was also serenely ignorant, so the absence of these in her picture did not annoy her. On the contrary, there was something hideously modern and recessional in her vigorous endeavour to include in her drawing everything her grey eyes chanced to rest on. She even arose and gently urged a cow into the already overcrowded composition, and, having accomplished its portrait with Cezanne-like fidelity, was beginning to look about for Adoniram to include him also, when her mother called to her, holding out a pair of old gloves.
“Dear, we are going to save a little money this year. Do you think you could catch a few fish for supper?”
The girl nodded, took the gloves, laid aside her pencil and paper, picked up the long bamboo pole from the verandah floor, and walked slowly out into the garden.
A trowel was sticking in the dry earth near the flower bed, where poppies, and pansies, and petunias, and phlox bordered the walk.
Under a lilac the ground seemed moister and more promising for vermicular investigation; she drew on her gloves, dug a few holes with the trowel, extracted an angleworm, frowned slightly, holding it between gloved fingers, regarding its contortions with pity and aversion.
To bait a hook was not agreeable to the girl; she managed to do it, however, then shouldering her pole she walked across the road and down to the left, through rank grasses and patches of milkweed, bergamot, and queen’s lace, scattering a cloud of brown and silver-spotted butterflies.
Alder, elder, and Indian willow barred her way; rank thickets of jewelweed hung vivid blossoming drops across her path; woodbine and clematis trailed dainty snares to catch her in their fairy nets; a rabbit scurried out from behind the ruined paper mill as she came to the swift, shallow water below the dam.
Into this she presently plumped her line, and the next instant jerked it out again with a wriggling, silvery minnow flashing on the hook.
Carrying her pole with its tiny, glittering victim dangling aloft, Rue hastily retraced her steps to the road, crossed the bridge to the further end, seated herself on the limestone parapet, and, swinging her pole with both hands, cast line and hook and minnow far out into the pond. It was a business she did not care for – this extinguishing of the life-spark in anything. But, like her mill work, it appeared to be a necessary business, and, so regarding it, she went about it.
The pond above the half-ruined dam lay very still; her captive minnow swam about with apparently no discomfort, trailing on the surface of the pond above him the cork which buoyed the hook.
Rue, her pole clasped in both hands between her knees, gazed with preoccupied eyes out across the water. On the sandy shore, a pair of speckled tip-ups ran busily about, dipping and bobbing, or spread their white, striped wings to sheer the still surface of the pond, swing shoreward with bowed wings again, and resume their formal, quaint, and busy manners.
From the interstices of the limestone parapet grew a white bluebell – the only one Rue had ever seen. As long as she could remember it had come up there every year and bloomed, snow-white amid a world of its blue comrades in the grass below. She looked for it now, saw it in bud – three sturdy stalks sprouting at right angles from the wall and curving up parallel to it. Somehow or other she had come to associate this white freak of nature with herself – she scarcely knew why. It comforted her, oddly, to see it again, still surviving, still delicately vigorous, though where among those stone slabs it found its nourishment she never could imagine.
The intense blue of the sky had altered since noon; the west became gradually duller and the air stiller; and now, over the Gayfield hills, a tall cloud thrust up silvery-edged convolutions toward a zenith still royally and magnificently blue.
She had been sitting there watching her swimming cork for over an hour when the first light western breeze arrived, spreading a dainty ripple across the pond. Her cork danced, drifted; beneath it she caught the momentary glimmer of the minnow; then the cork was jerked under; she clasped the pole with all her strength, struck upward; and a heavy pickerel, all gold and green, sprang furiously from the water and fell back with a sharp splash.
Under the sudden strain of the fish she nearly lost her balance, scrambled hastily down from the parapet, propping the pole desperately against her body, and stood so, unbending, unyielding, her eyes fixed on the water where the taut line cut it at forty-five degrees.
At the same time two men in a red runabout speeding westward caught sight of the sharp turn by the bridge which the ruins of the paper mill had hidden. The man driving the car might have made it even then had he not seen Ruhannah in the centre of the bridge. It was instantly all off; so were both mud-guards and one wheel. So were driver and passenger, floundering on their backs among the rank grass and wild flowers. Ruhannah, petrified, still fast to her fish, gazed at the catastrophe over her right shoulder.
A broad, short, squarely built man of forty emerged from the weeds, went hastily to the car and did something to it. Noise ceased; clouds of steam continued to ascend from the crumpled hood.
The other man, even shorter, but slimmer, sauntered out of a bed of milkweed whither he had been catapulted. He dusted with his elbow a grey felt hat as he stood looking at the wrecked runabout; his comrade, still clutching a cigar between his teeth, continued to examine the car.
“Hell!” remarked the short, thickset man.
“It’s going to rain like it, too,” added the other. The thunder boomed again beyond Gayfield hills.
“What do you know about this!” growled the thickset man, in utter disgust. “Do we hunt for a garage, or what?”
“It’s up to you, Eddie. And say! What was the matter with you? Don’t you know a bridge when you see one?”
“That damn girl–” He turned and looked at Ruhannah, who was dragging the big flapping pickerel over the parapet by main strength.
The men scowled at her in silence, then the one addressed as Eddie rolled his cigar grimly into the left corner of his jaw.
“Damn little skirt,” he observed briefly. “It seems to worry her a lot what she’s done to us.”
“I wonder does she know she wrecked us,” suggested the other. He was a stunted, wiry little man of thirty-five. His head seemed slightly too large; he had a pasty face with the sloe-black eyes, button nose, and the widely chiselled mouth of a circus clown.
The eyes of the short, thickset man were narrow and greyish green in a round, smoothly shaven face. They narrowed still more as the thunder broke louder from the west.
Ruhannah, dragging her fish over the grass, was coming toward them; and the man called Eddie stepped forward to bar her progress.