The Dark Star

“When there is a better light I should like to show you some of my studies,” she ventured. “No, not now. I am too vain to risk anything except the kindest of morning lights. Because I do hope for your approval–”

“I know they’re good,” he said. And, half laughingly: “I’m beginning to find out that you’re a rather wonderful and formidable and overpowering girl, Ruhannah.”

“You don’t think so!” she exclaimed, enchanted. “Do you? Oh, dear! Then I feel that I ought to show you my pictures and set you right immediately–” She sprang to her feet. “I’ll get them; I’ll be only a moment–”

She was gone before he discovered anything to say, leaving him to walk up and down the deserted room and think about her as clearly as his somewhat dislocated thoughts permitted, until she returned with both arms full of portfolios, boards, and panels.

“Now,” she said with a breathless smile, “you may mortify my pride and rebuke my vanity. I deserve it; I need it; but Oh! – don’t be too severe–”

“Are you serious?” he asked, looking up in astonishment from the first astonishing drawing in colour which he held between his hands.

“Serious? Of course–” She met his eyes anxiously, then her own became incredulous and the swift colour dyed her face.

“Do you like my work?” she asked in a fainter voice.

“Like it!” He continued to stare at the bewildering grace and colour of the work, turned to another and lifted it to the light:

“What’s this?” he demanded.

“A monotype.”

“You did it?”

“Y-yes.”

He seemed unable to take his eyes from it – from the exquisite figures there in the sun on the bank of the brimming river under an iris-tinted April sky.

“What do you call it, Rue?”

“Baroque.”

He continued to scrutinise it in silence, then drew another carton prepared for oil from the sheaf on the sofa.

Over autumn woods, in a windy sky, high-flying crows were buffeted and blown about. From the stark trees a few phantom leaves clung, fluttering; and the whole scene was possessed by sinuous, whirling forms – mere glimpses of supple, exquisite shapes tossing, curling, flowing through the naked woodland. A delicate finger caught at a dead leaf here; there frail arms clutched at a bending, wind-tossed bough; grey sky and ghostly forest were obsessed, bewitched by the winnowing, driving torrent of airy, half seen spirits.

“The Winds,” he said mechanically.

He looked at another – a sketch of the Princess Naïa. And somehow it made him think of vast skies and endless plains and the tumult of surging men and rattling lances.

“A Cossack,” he said, half to himself. “I never before realised it.” And he laid it aside and turned to the next.

“I haven’t brought any life studies or school drawings,” she said. “I thought I’d just show you the – the results of them and of – of whatever is in me.”

“I’m just beginning to understand what is in you,” he said.

“Tell me – what is it?” she asked, almost timidly.

“Tell you?” He rose, stood by the window looking out, then turned to her:

“What can I tell you?” he added with a short laugh. “What have I to say to a girl who can do —these– after two years abroad?”

Sheer happiness kept her silent. She had not dared hope for such approval. Even now she dared not permit herself to accept it.

“I have so much to say,” she ventured, “and such an appalling amount of work before I can learn to say it–”

“Your work is – stunning!” he said bluntly.

“You don’t think so!” she exclaimed incredulously.

“Indeed I do! Look at what you have done in two years. Yes, grant all your aptitude and talents, just look what you’ve accomplished and where you are! Look at you yourself, too – what a stunning, bewildering sort of girl you’ve developed into!”

“Jim Neeland!”

“Certainly, Jim Neeland, of Neeland’s Mills, who has had years more study than you have, more years of advantage, and who now is an illustrator without anything in particular to distinguish him from the several thousand other American illustrators–”

“Jim! Your work is charming!”

“How do you know?”

“Because I have everything you ever did! I sent for the magazines and cut them out; and they are in my scrapbook–”

She hesitated, breathless, smiling back at him out of her beautiful golden-grey eyes as though challenging him to doubt her loyalty or her belief in him.

It was rather curious, too, for the girl was unusually intelligent and discriminating; and Neeland’s work was very, very commonplace.

His face had become rather sober, but the smile still lurked on his lips.

“Rue,” he said, “you are wonderfully kind. But I’m afraid I know about my work. I can draw pretty well, according to school standards; and I approach pretty nearly the same standards in painting. Probably that is why I became an instructor at the Art League. But, so far, I haven’t done anything better than what is called ‘acceptable.’”

“I don’t agree with you,” she said warmly.

“It’s very kind of you not to.” He laughed and walked to the window again, and stood there looking out across the sunny garden. “Of course,” he added over his shoulder, “I expect to get along all right. Mediocrity has the best of chances, you know.”

“You are not mediocre!”

“No, I don’t think I am. But my work is. And, do you know,” he continued thoughtfully, “that is very often the case with a man who is better equipped to act than to tell with pen or pencil how others act. I’m beginning to be afraid that I’m that sort, because I’m afraid that I get more enjoyment out of doing things than in explaining with pencil and paint how they are done.”

But Rue Carew, seated on the arm of her chair, slowly shook her head:

“I don’t think that those are the only alternatives; do you?”

“What other is there?”

She said, a little shyly:

“I think it is all right to do things if you like; make exact pictures of how things are done if you choose; but it seems to me that if one really has anything to say, one should show in one’s pictures how things might be or ought to be. Don’t you?”

He seemed surprised and interested in her logic, and she took courage to speak again in her pretty, deprecating way: