The Stars Incline

One can be nineteen and still know a great deal of the world. Ruth Mayfield felt that she knew a great deal of the world. She could judge character, and taking care of Mother’s business affairs had helped a lot, and like most young women of nineteen she knew that if marriage offered no more to her than it had offered to her parents, she did not want to marry. Of course they hadn’t quarrelled or anything, but they lived such dull lives, and there were always money worries—and everything.

Ruth had never told her mother any of these things, especially after her father died and her mother had cried so much and had seemed to feel even worse than Ruth did, for Ruth had felt badly. She had been awfully fond of her father, really fonder of him than of her mother. He understood her better and it was he who had encouraged her to study art.

That was one of the things that set her apart from other girls in Indianapolis. She was an art student. One day she would do great things, she knew.

When she was a very little girl she had intended to write. She decided this because nothing gave her so much pleasure as reading, not the sort of books that delight the hours of the average childhood, but books which, had her mother ever taken the trouble to look at them, would have made her rather concerned for the future of the small reader. But Mrs. Mayfield never troubled to look. The books all came from the Indianapolis public library, so they must be all right. They were fairy tales at first and later mythology. The mythology of the Greeks and Romans which somehow never stepped out of the marble for her; and the intensely human mythology of the Icelanders and of the Celts which she liked better, and later the mythology of India which fascinated her most of all because it had apparently neither beginning nor end. While her mother and her mother’s friends were dabbling in Christian Science and “New Thought” she was lost in the mysteries of the transmigration of souls. Perhaps it was all this delving into the past that gave to her wide brown eyes what is called the spirituelle look—a look decidedly contradicted by her sturdy body; perhaps, too, it was extensive reading that finally decided her not to try to write, but to express herself in painting, a medium through which she could depict emotions and dramas rather than ideas and facts.

There came to her at the age of fourteen a development which, while it increased her faith in things supernormal and for a while fascinated her into a deeper delving into the religions of the East, had the final effect of frightening her away from things of the mind and turning her activities into more beautiful channels. She had read of the objectification of ideas and the materialization of thoughts and wanted to try to do these things herself, without quite knowing what exercise she should make of her knowledge even though it came to her. Like many people of a spiritual yet intense nature, of her five senses the sense of smell was the keenest. She liked flowers for their odour more than for colour or form. One winter day when she had returned home from school and was sitting alone with her books—looking out at the snow-laden trees instead of studying—she thought of spring and violets; she was tired of winter, eager for the spring to come again, and she tried to see violets, to catch their scent and their colour. She closed her eyes and shut out the winter room and the frost-rimmed window—all around her in great warm waves of fragrance rose the odour of violets—exquisite English violets with the freshness of the woods in them. She took deep breaths, keeping her eyes closed lest the miracle should fade. Then when she had quite satisfied herself that she really did smell violets she opened her eyes. All about her on the floor, on the table, covering her schoolbooks, they lay, great heaps of odorous purple blossoms mingled with rich green leaves. With a little cry of pleasure and amazement she stretched out her hands to gather them in and they were gone. The room was as it had been before, but the odour was not gone. For many minutes the fragrance of violets filled her nostrils. She was afraid to close her eyes again to bring back the vision, but the following day she tried again, and many times afterward. She tried different flowers, carnations and Chinese lilies. She could not always see the flowers, but she seldom failed with the odour. The game fascinated her so that she spent every moment that she could find alone in materializing flowers. Then came to her the desire to take the next step—to make other people realize her power. Her mother, being the least imaginative person she knew as well as the one most conveniently near, she decided to try with her. It was one evening when her father was not at home. Her mother was busy embroidering—one of those never to be finished articles of no conceivable use, which occupy the hands of women who have no active interest in life. Ruth was pretending to read. She dared not shut her eyes lest her mother should observe. But she bent unseeing eyes over her book and concentrated on the inner vision of the mystic—shutting out everything except the thought of violets. They were her mother’s favourite flower. For many seconds after she herself was surrounded by the odour of violets and could see them on her book, her mother did not speak. Then she looked up restlessly from her embroidery.