The Dark Star

Her father came in on his crutches; she hurried from the table, syrup jug in one hand, cruet in the other, and lifted her face to be kissed; then she brought hot plates, coffeepot, and platters, and seated herself at the table where her father and mother were waiting in silence.

When she was seated her father folded his large, pallid, bony hands; her mother clasped hers on the edge of the table, bowing her head; and Ruhannah imitated them. Between her fingers she could see the cat under the table, and she watched it arch its back and gently rub against her chair.

“For what we are about to receive, make us grateful, Eternal Father. This day we should go hungry except for Thy bounty. Without presuming to importune Thee, may we ask Thee to remember all who awake hungry on this winter day… Amen.”

Ruhannah instantly became very busy with her breakfast. The cat beside her chair purred loudly and rose at intervals on its hind legs to twitch her dress; and Ruhannah occasionally bestowed alms and conversation upon it.

“Rue,” said her mother, “you should try to do better with your algebra this week.”

“Yes, I do really mean to.”

“Have you had any more bad-conduct marks?”

“Yes, mother.”

Her father lifted his mild, dreamy eyes of an invalid. Her mother asked:

“What for?”

“For wasting my time in study hour,” said the girl truthfully.

“Were you drawing?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Rue! Again! Why do you persist in drawing pictures in your copy books when you have an hour’s lesson in drawing every week? Besides, you may draw pictures at home whenever you wish.”

“I don’t exactly know why,” replied the girl slowly. “It just happens before I notice what I am doing… Of course,” she explained, “I do recollect that I oughtn’t to be drawing in study hour. But that’s after I’ve begun, and then it seems a pity not to finish.”

Her mother looked across the table at her husband:

“Speak to her seriously, Wilbour.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew looked solemnly at his long-legged and rapidly growing daughter, whose grey eyes gazed back into her father’s sallow visage.

“Rue,” he said in his colourless voice, “try to get all you can out of your school. I haven’t sufficient means to educate you in drawing and in similar accomplishments. So get all you can out of your school. Because, some day, you will have to help yourself, and perhaps help us a little.”

He bent his head with a detached air and sat gazing mildly at vacancy – already, perhaps, forgetting what the conversation was about.

“Mother?”

“What, Rue?”

“What am I going to do to earn my living?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you mean I must go into the mill like everybody else?”

“There are other things. Girls work at many things in these days.”

“What kind of things?”

“They may learn to keep accounts, help in shops–”

“If father could afford it, couldn’t I learn to do something more interesting? What do girls work at whose fathers can afford to let them learn how to work?”

“They may become teachers, learn stenography and typewriting; they can, of course, become dressmakers; they can nurse–”

“Mother!”

“Yes?”

“Could I choose the business of drawing pictures? I know how!”

“Dear, I don’t believe it is practical to–”

“Couldn’t I draw pictures for books and magazines? Everybody says I draw very nicely. You say so, too. Couldn’t I earn enough money to live on and to take care of you and father?”

Wilbour Carew looked up from his reverie:

“To learn to draw correctly and with taste,” he said in his gentle, pedantic voice, “requires a special training which we cannot afford to give you, Ruhannah.”

“Must I wait till I’m twenty-five before I can have my money?” she asked for the hundredth time. “I do so need it to educate myself. Why did grandma do such a thing, mother?”

“Your grandmother never supposed you would need the money until you were a grown woman, dear. Your father and I were young, vigorous, full of energy; your father’s income was ample for us then.”

“Have I got to marry a man before I can get enough money to take lessons in drawing with?”

Her mother’s drawn smile was not very genuine. When a child asks such questions no mother finds it easy to smile.

“If you marry, dear, it is not likely you’ll marry in order to take lessons in drawing. Twenty-five is not old. If you still desire to study art you will be able to do so.”

“Twenty-five!” repeated Rue, aghast. “I’ll be an old woman.”

“Many begin their life’s work at an older age–”

“Mother! I’d rather marry somebody and begin to study art. Oh, don’t you think that even now I could support myself by making pictures for magazines? Don’t you, mother dear?”

“Rue, as your father explained, a special course of instruction is necessary before one can become an artist–”

“But I do draw very nicely!” She slipped from her chair, ran to the old secretary where the accumulated masterpieces of her brief career were treasured, and brought them for her parents’ inspection, as she had brought them many times before.

Her father looked at them listlessly; he did not understand such things. Her mother took them one by one from Ruhannah’s eager hands and examined these grimy Records of her daughter’s childhood.

There were drawings of every description in pencil, in crayon, in mussy water-colours, done on scraps of paper of every shape and size. The mother knew them all by heart, every single one, but she examined each with a devotion and an interest forever new.

There were many pictures of the cat; many of her parents, too – odd, shaky, smeared portraits all out of proportion, but usually recognisable.

A few landscapes varied the collection – a view or two of the stone bridge opposite, a careful drawing of the ruined paper mill. But the majority of the subjects were purely imaginary; pictures of demons and angels, of damsels and fairy princes – paragons of beauty – with castles on adjacent crags and swans adorning convenient ponds.

Her mother rose after a few moments, laid aside the pile of drawings, went to the kitchen and returned with her daughter’s schoolbooks and lunch basket.

“Rue, you’ll be late again. Get on your rubbers immediately.”

The child’s shabby winter coat was already too short in skirt and sleeve, and could be lengthened no further. She pulled the blue toboggan cap over her head, took a hasty osculatory leave of her father, seized books and lunch basket, and followed her mother to the door.

Below the house the Brookhollow road ran south across an old stone bridge and around a hill to Gayfield, half a mile away.

Rue, drawing on her woollen gloves, looked up at her mother. Her lip trembled very slightly. She said:

“I shouldn’t know what to do if I couldn’t draw pictures… When I draw a princess I mean her for myself… It is pleasant – to pretend to live with swans.”

She opened the door, paused on the step; the frosty breath drifted from her lips. Then she looked back over her shoulder; her mother kissed her, held her tightly for a moment.

“If I’m to be forbidden to draw pictures,” repeated the girl, “I don’t know what will become of me. Because I really live there – in the pictures I make.”

“We’ll talk it over this evening, darling. Don’t draw in study hour any more, will you?”

“I’ll try to remember, mother.”

When the spindle-limbed, boyish figure had sped away beyond sight, Mrs. Carew shut the door, drew her wool shawl closer, and returned slowly to the sitting-room. Her husband, deep in a padded rocking-chair by the window, was already absorbed in the volume which lay open on his knees – the life of the Reverend Adoniram Judson – one of the world’s good men. Ruhannah had named her cat after him.

His wife seated herself. She had dishes to do, two bedrooms, preparations for noonday dinner – the usual and unchangeable routine. She turned and looked out of the window across brown fields thinly powdered with snow. Along a brawling, wintry-dark stream, fringed with grey alders, ran the Brookhollow road. Clumps of pines and elms bordered it. There was nothing else to see except a distant crow in a ten-acre lot, walking solemnly about all by himself.

… Like the vultures that wandered through the compound that dreadful day in May … she thought involuntarily.

But it was a far cry from Trebizond to Brookhollow. And her husband had been obliged to give up after the last massacre, when every convert had been dragged out and killed in the floating shadow of the Stars and Stripes, languidly brilliant overhead.

For the Sublime Porte and the Kurds had had their usual way at last; there was nothing left of the Mission; school and converts were gone; her wounded husband, her baby, and herself refugees in a foreign consulate; and the Turkish Government making apologies with its fat tongue in its greasy cheek.

The Koran says: “Woe to those who pray, and in their prayers are careless.”

The Koran also says: “In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful: What thinkest thou of him who treateth our religion as a lie?”

Mrs. Carew and her crippled husband knew, now, what the Sublime Porte thought about it, and what was the opinion of the Kurdish cavalry concerning missionaries and converts who treated the Moslem religion as a lie.

She looked at her pallid and crippled husband; he was still reading; his crutches lay beside him on the floor. She turned her eyes to the window. Out there the solitary crow was still walking busily about in the frozen pasture. And again she remembered the vultures that hulked and waddled amid the débris of the burned Mission.

Only that had been in May; and above the sunny silence in that place of death had sounded the unbroken and awful humming of a million million flies…

And so, her husband being now hopelessly broken and useless, they had come back with their child, Ruhannah, to their home in Brookhollow.

Here they had lived ever since; here her grey life was passing; here her daughter was already emerging into womanhood amid the stark, unlovely environments of a country crossroads, arid in summer, iron naked in winter, with no horizon except the Gayfield hills, no outlook save the Brookhollow road. And that led to the mill.

She had done what she could – was still doing it. But there was nothing to save. Her child’s destiny seemed to be fixed.

Her husband corresponded with the Board of Missions, wrote now and then for the Christian Pioneer, and lived on the scanty pension allowed to those who, like himself, had become incapacitated in line of duty. There was no other income.

There was, however, the six thousand dollars left to Ruhannah by her grandmother, slowly accumulating interest in the Mohawk Bank at Orangeville, the county seat, and not to be withdrawn, under the terms of the will, until the day Ruhannah married or attained, unmarried, her twenty-fifth year.

Neither principal nor interest of this legacy was available at present. Life in the Carew family at Brookhollow was hard sledding, and bid fair to continue so indefinitely.

The life of Ruhannah’s father was passed in reading or in gazing silently from the window – a tall, sallow, bearded man with the eyes of a dreaming martyr and the hands of an invalid – who still saw in the winter sky, across brown, snow-powdered fields, the minarets of Trebizond.

In reading, in reflection, in dreaming, in spiritual acquiescence, life was passing in sombre shadows for this middle-aged man who had been hopelessly crushed in Christ’s service; and who had never regretted that service, never complained, never doubted the wisdom and the mercy of his Leader’s inscrutable manœuvres with the soldiers who enlist to follow Him. As far as that is concerned, the Reverend Wilbour Carew had been born with a believing mind; doubt of divine goodness in Deity was impossible for him; doubt of human goodness almost as difficult.

Such men have little chance in a brisk, busy, and jaunty world; but they prefer it should be that way with them. And of these few believers in the goodness of God and man are our fools and gentlemen composed.

On that dreadful day, the Kurd who had mangled him so frightfully that he recovered only to limp through life on crutches bent over him and shouted in his face:

“Now, you Christian dog, before I cut your throat show me how this Christ of yours can be a god!”

“Is it necessary,” replied the missionary faintly, “to light a candle in order to show a man the midday sun?”

Which was possibly what saved his life, and the lives of his wife and child. Your Moslem adores and understands such figurative answers. So he left the Reverend Mr. Carew lying half dead in the blackened doorway and started cheerfully after a frightened convert praying under the compound wall.

CHAPTER III

IN EMBRYO

A child on the floor, flat on her stomach in the red light of the stove, drawing pictures; her mother by the shaded lamp mending stockings; her father reading; a faint odour of kerosene from the glass lamp in the room, and the rattle of sleet on roof and window; this was one of her childhood memories which never faded through all the years of Ruhannah’s life.

Of her waking hours she preferred that hour after supper when, lying prone on the worn carpet, with pencil and paper, just outside the lamp’s yellow circle of light, her youthful imagination kindled and caught fire.

For at that hour the magic of the stove’s glowing eyes transformed the sitting-room chairs to furtive watchers of herself, made of her mother’s work-table a sly and spidery thing on legs, crouching in ambush; bewitched the ancient cottage piano so that its ivory keys menaced her like a row of monstrous teeth.

She adored it all. The tall secretary stared at her with owlish significance. Through that neutral veil where lamplight and shadow meet upon the wall, the engraved portrait of a famous and godly missionary peered down at her out of altered and malicious eyes; the claw-footed, haircloth sofa was a stealthy creature offering to entrap her with wide, inviting arms; three folded umbrellas leaned over the edge of their shadowy stand, looking down at her like scrawny and baleful birds, ready to peck at her with crooked handles. And as for Adoniram, her lank black cat, the child’s restless creative fancy was ever transforming him from goblin into warlock, from hydra to hippogriff, until the earnestness of pretence sent agreeable shivers down her back, and she edged a trifle nearer to her mother.

But when pretence became a bit too real and too grotesque she had always a perfect antidote. It was merely necessary to make a quick picture of an angel or two, a fairy prince, a swan, and she felt herself in their company, and delightfully protected.

There was a night when the flowing roar of the gale outside filled the lamplit silence; when the snow was drifting level with the window sills; when Adoniram, unable to prowl abroad, lay curled up tight and sound asleep beside her where she sat on the carpet in the stove radiance. Wearied of drawing castles and swans, she had been listening to her father reading passages aloud from the book on his knees to her mother who was sewing by the lamp.

Presently he continued his reading:

“I asked Alaro the angel: ‘Which place is this, and which people are these?’

“And he answered: ‘This place is the star-track; and these are they who in the world offered no prayers and chanted no liturgies. Through other works they have attained felicity.’”

Her mother nodded, continuing to sew. Ruhannah considered what her father had read, then:

“Father?”

“Yes–” He looked down at her absently.

“What were you reading?”

“A quotation from the Sacred Anthology.”

“Isn’t prayer really necessary?”

Her mother said:

“Yes, dear.”

“Then how did those people who offered no prayers go to Heaven?”

Her father said:

“Eternal life is not attained by praise or prayer alone, Ruhannah. Those things which alone justify prayer are also necessary.”

“What are they?”

“What we really think and what we do– both only in Christ’s name. Without these nothing else counts very much – neither form nor convention nor those individual garments called creed and denomination, which belief usually wears throughout the world.”

Her mother, sewing, glanced gravely down at her daughter:

“Your father is very tolerant of what other people believe – as long as they really do believe. Your father thinks that Christ would have found friends in Buddha and Mahomet.”

“Do such people go to Heaven?” asked Ruhannah, astonished.

“Listen,” said her father, reading again:

“‘I came to a place and I saw the souls of the liberal, adorned above all other souls in splendour. And it seemed to me sublime.

“‘I saw the souls of the truthful who walked in lofty splendour. And it seemed to me sublime.

“‘I saw the souls of teachers and inquirers; I saw the friendly souls of interceders and peacemakers; and these walked brilliantly in the light. And it seemed to me sublime–’”

He turned to his wife:

“To see and know is sublime. We know, Mary; and Ruhannah is intelligent. But in spite of her faith in what she has learned from us, like us she must one day travel the common way, seeking for herself the reasons and the evidences of immortality.”

“Perhaps her faith, Wilbour–”

“Perhaps. But with the intelligent, faith, which is emotional, usually follows belief; and belief comes only from reasoning. I think that Ruhannah is destined to travel the way of all intelligence when she is ready to think for herself.”

“I am ready now,” said the girl. “I have faith in our Lord Jesus, and in my father and mother.”

Her father looked at her:

“It is good building material. Some day, God willing, you shall build a very lofty temple with it. But the foundation of the temple must first be certain. Intelligence ultimately requires reasons for belief. You will have to seek them for yourself, Ruhannah. Then, on them build your shrine of faith; and nothing shall shake it down.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And I cannot explain. Only this; as you grow older, all around you in the world you will become aware of people, countless millions and millions of people, asking themselves – ready with the slightest encouragement, or without it, to ask you the question which is the most vital of all questions to them. And whatever way it is answered always they ask for evidence. You, too, will one day ask for evidence. All the world asks for it. But few recognise it as evidence when it is offered.”

He closed his book and dropped a heavy hand upon it.

“Amid the myriad pursuits and interests and trades and professions of the human race, amid their multitudinous aspirations, perplexities, doubts, passions, endeavours, deep within every intelligent man remains one dominant desire, one persistent question to be answered if possible.”

“What desire, father?”

“The universal desire for another chance – for immortality. Man’s never-ending demand for evidence of an immortality which shall terminate for him the most tremendous of all uncertainties, which shall solve for him the most vital of all questions: What is to become of him after physical death? Is he to live again? Is he to see once more those whom he loved the best?”

Ruhannah sat thinking in the red stove light, cross-legged, her slim ankles clasped in either hand.

“But our souls are immortal,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“Our Lord Jesus has said it.”

“Yes.”

“Then why should anybody not believe it?”

“Try to believe it always. Particularly after your mother and I are no longer here, try to believe it… You are unusually intelligent; and if some day your intelligence discovers that it requires evidence for belief seek for that evidence. It is obtainable. Try to recognise it when you encounter it… Only, in any event, remember this: never alter your early faith, never destroy your childhood’s belief until evidence to prove the contrary convinces you.”

“No… There is no such evidence, is there, father?”

“I know of none.”

“Then,” said the girl calmly, “I shall take Christ’s evidence that I shall live again if I do no evil… Father?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any evidence that Adoniram has no soul?”

“I know of none.”

“Is there any that he has a soul?”

“Yes, I think there is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely.”

“I wonder,” mused the girl, looking gravely at the sleeping cat.

It was the first serious doubt that Ruhannah had ever entertained in her brief career.

That night she dreamed of the Yellow Devil in Herr Wilner’s box, and, awaking, remembered her dream. It seemed odd, too, because she had not even thought of the Yellow Devil for over a year.

But the menacing Mongol figure seemed bound to intrude into her life once more and demand her attention as though resentful of long oblivion and neglect; for, a week later, an old missionary from Indo-China – a native Chinese – who had lectured at the Baptist Church in Gayfield the evening previous, came to pay his respects to the Reverend Wilbour Carew. And Rue had taken the Yellow Devil from the olive-wood box that day and was busily making a pencil drawing of it.

At sight of the figure the native missionary’s narrow almond eyes opened extremely wide, and he leaned on the table and regarded the bronze demon very intently.

Then he took from his pocket and adjusted to his button nose a pair of large, horn spectacles; and he carefully examined the Chinese characters engraved on the base of the ancient bronze, following them slowly with a yellow and clawlike forefinger.

“Can you read what is written there?” inquired the Reverend Mr. Carew.

“Yes, brother. This is what is written: ‘I am Erlik, Ruler of Chaos and of All that Was. The old order passes when I arrive. I bring confusion among the peoples; I hurl down emperors; kingdoms crumble where I pass; the world begins to rock and tip, spilling nations into outer darkness. When there are no more kingdoms and no more kings; no more empires and no emperors; and when only the humble till, the blameless sow, the pure reap; and when only the teachers teach in the shadow of the Tree, and when the Thinker sits unstirring under the high stars, then, from the dark edges of the world I let go my grasp and drop into those immeasurable deeps from which I came – I, Erlik, Ruler of All that Was.’”

After a silence the Reverend Mr. Carew asked whether the figure was a very old one.

“It is before the period called ‘Han’ – a dynasty during which the Mongols were a mighty people. This inscription is Mongol. Erlik was the Yellow Devil of the Mongols.”

“Not a heathen god, then?”

“No, a heathen devil. Their Prince of Darkness.”

Ruhannah, pencil in hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to her for his scowling portrait.

“I wonder what he thinks of America,” she said, partly to herself.

The native missionary smiled, picked up the Yellow Devil, shook the figure, listening.

“There is something inside,” he said; “perhaps jewels. If you drilled a hole in him you could find out.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew nodded absently:

“Yes; it might be worth while,” he said.

“If there is a jewel,” repeated the missionary, “you had better take it, then cast away the figure. Erlik brings disaster to the land where his image is set up.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew smiled at his Chinese and Christian confrère’s ineradicable vein of superstition.

CHAPTER IV

THE TRODDEN WAY

There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the knitting mill at the end of it.

So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now, and her destiny a simple one – to work, to share the toil and the gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores, some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or maybe a minister – she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any one of these.