The Dark Star

The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective

rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the

average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing

which must ever remain a mystery to man.

The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the

lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward

bathing and changing his attire.

No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows;

the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts

of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the

opposite wall; the rue Soleil d'Or was very silent in the July

afternoon.

And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and

trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and

real; and could not.

For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had

read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he

personally had known all those people concerned in this wild,

exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the

printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as

chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably

sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of

today.

Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception

blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his

imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid

and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal,

the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain

benumbed and sceptical.

And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical,

laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the

drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him--and

went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in

the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made

intellectually blasé, found himself without sufficient capacity to

comprehend it.

There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay

there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals

from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the

metamorphosis of Rue Carew.

Where was the thin girl he remembered--with her untidy chestnut hair

and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth--dressed in garments the only

mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs

whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?

To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl

in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an

ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep

out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.