CHAPTER I

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.

“Have you been using perfume, Ruth?—you know I don’t approve of young girls—”

“No, Mother, I haven’t. I haven’t any to use.”

“I smell perfume—violet perfume—it’s more like real violets than just perfume—don’t you notice it? The whole room is heavy with it.”

She dropped her embroidery and moved about the room as if hunting for the flowers though she knew there were none there.

“It must have been my imagination—it’s gone now. Strange, I was sure I smelt violets. I must ask Doctor Gorton about it. It may be a dangerous symptom.”

Ruth did not speak. She was rather ashamed and not a little frightened. There was nothing of the mischievous about her. She did not want to play tricks. She had just wanted to test her power, but this was the last time that she consciously tried to use it. For some time the illusion of flowers persisted whenever she thought of them, but she tried not to think of them and before many months the experiment was a thing of the past. It persisted in Ruth only in a deep-rooted faith in the power of mind, and in the truth of many things that the average person considered superstition. When she heard of deaths and births and marriages—of good luck and bad luck—of coincidences and accidents, it seemed to her that behind the obvious and accepted causes of all these things she could trace an inner and spiritual reason—the working of forces that laughed at the clumsy working of material machinery. Yet she no longer delved. For a while she actually made a conscious effort to look at life in the ordinary way. She was helped in this by the death of her father, which placed her in a position of responsibility toward her invalid mother, and made her life too full of reality to leave much room for the occult and supernatural.

She hadn’t realized quite how much she had loved her mother until she died. Mother had been old-fashioned and fussy, but then all invalids were fussy, and she had been a dear about letting her go on with her studies after Father died, even though she wouldn’t move to Chicago as Ruth wished. They could have lived as cheaply in Chicago and Ruth could have gone to the art institute there, but Mother wouldn’t consent to the move. She wanted to stay near her friends. Ruth couldn’t understand that. Her mother’s friends were all such ordinary people. Kind-hearted, but quite hopelessly ordinary. It was curious that her mother’s death had realized for her one of her most cherished dreams. Mother knew that she was going to die. The doctors had told her so, and she had told Ruth. It made Ruth cry, but her mother didn’t shed any tears. That was why Ruth did. If her mother had cried Ruth would have been more controlled, but her mother was so unnaturally calm.

“When I am gone I want you to go to your father’s sister, Gloria Mayfield. I hate to send you there, but there’s no one else of your blood, and you’re too young to live alone. Gloria has retired from the stage and they say she is quite respectable now, and besides you won’t be dependent on her. Now that there will be no more doctors’ bills to pay, there will be enough money for you to live on, more than any young girl ought to have in her own hands. It is all in trust and you will have just the income until you are twenty-one.” Ruth made no comment to this. Having handled her mother’s business affairs she knew that her income would be very small indeed, but she and her mother had different ideas as to how much a young girl should spend. “Of course I expect you to pay your way with your aunt,” her mother went on. “But you must live with some older woman and she is your father’s sister.”

She said it as if the fact that Gloria Mayfield was her father’s sister answered all arguments.

“Where does Aunt Gloria live, Mother?” asked Ruth. She accepted the fact that her mother would die soon without making an effort to persuade either herself or her mother that there was any hope that the doctors might be mistaken. She had known for years that her mother would not live long. Doctors, New Thought, Christian Science, and Theosophy had all been appealed to without having any appreciable effect on her mother’s health. Ruth being perfectly healthy was inclined to have faith in the New Thought. She disliked the Science because of the word Christian, but was inclined to believe that any one of these numerous things might have helped if used alone. When her father had died first it had seemed unreal—impossible almost, for Ruth and her father had always expected her mother to go first, though neither of them would have put such a thought into words. It was just an unspoken understanding between them.

“In New York,” Mrs. Mayfield had answered; and Ruth was ashamed that her first thought on hearing this amazing news was that in New York she could study in the best American art schools.

“How old is she?” asked Ruth. She had been a bit troubled by her mother’s words about an older woman. Ruth had no desire to go to New York to be controlled by some elderly female relative.

“I don’t know. I never saw her. In her younger days she was abroad a great deal, and then I never cared to meet her. She was younger than your father, quite a lot younger, but she must have reached years of discretion by this time. I hope so for your sake. Perhaps I’m not doing the right thing by telling you to go to her, but after all she is your father’s sister and will be your only relative after I am gone.”

“Have you written to her—do you want me to write?”

“No. I didn’t write to her before and I can’t start now. You will go to her after I’m gone as your father’s daughter. Your claim on her is through him, not me. You can write to her yourself as soon—as soon as you know. Her address is in that little red book on the desk—at least that was her address five years ago, when your poor father died. She didn’t come to the funeral, though she did write to me, and she may have moved since. She probably has. I think on the whole you’d better write now so that the letter will have time to follow her.”

Ruth did write and her aunt had not moved, for by a curious coincidence Aunt Gloria’s answer came on the very day that her mother died. At the time, concerned with her grief, Ruth didn’t read the letter very carefully, but afterward—after the funeral, and after all the innumerable details had been settled, she went back to it and read it again. She didn’t know exactly what to think of it. It filled her with doubts. Almost she persuaded herself to disregard her mother’s wish and not go to Aunt Gloria at all, but she had already told all her mother’s kind friends that that was what she would do. It gave her a logical excuse for refusing all of the offers of the well-meaning women who asked her to come and stop with them “for a few weeks at least until you are more yourself.”

Ruth realized that she had never felt so much herself as she did now—rather hopelessly alone and independent in a way that frightened her. These kind women were all her mother’s friends, not hers. She had none. She had always prided herself on being different from other girls and not interested in the things they cared for—boys and parties and dress. Even at the art school she had found the other students disappointingly frivolous. They had not taken their art seriously as she