The Dark Star

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.