The Dark Star

“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.