Fenella

A NOVEL
BY HENRY LONGAN STUART
Author of Weeping Cross
NAY, MY MOTHER CRIED: BUT THEN THERE WAS A STAR DID DANCE AND BENEATH IT I WAS BORN
Garden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
MORGENGABE
Like the sudden, restless motion of a sleeper, a wave, marking the tide's height, broke out of the slumberous heart of the sea, and laid its crest low along the beach. Fenella, who had been swimming to shore, rose in the foam, like that other woman in the morning of the world, and began to walk slowly, wringing the salt water from her hair, toward the bleached bathing hut that stood, by itself, under a shoulder of the dunes. The backwash of the wave swirled past her bare ankles as she walked. Beyond the strip of beach that it had covered with weed and spume, the sand was hot and loose as ashes to the soles of her feet. The noontide sun seemed to rob the earth at once of motion, of sound, of color. It grizzled the long sharp grass with which the sand hills were sparsely covered, quenched the red roofs of the little cream-walled fishing village, and turned the watered lawn, which lay at the foot of the flaunting summer hotel quarter of a mile inland, to a level smudge of dark green. All sound was stilled—all movement in suspense—all beauty, even, deferred. At such an hour, the supreme of the sun's possession of the earth, none can stand, alone and without shelter in its untempered light, and not realize that he is intercepting an elemental force as relentless as it is impersonal. Upon these barren, ragged edges of the earth, where the land casts its detritus upon the sea, and the sea casts it back, transformed, upon the land, it is felt to be what it truly is—a power that blights as well as fosters—death no less than life. All that has its roots firmly fastened in the soil—that has a purpose unfulfilled—fruit to bear—pollen to sow, feels the impulse—spreads, aspires, swells, and scatters. All that is weak or ephemeral—whose purposes are frustrated or whose uses past, turns from that light and fervor—withers—bows its head—wilts at the fiery challenge. To it the sun is a torch—the earth an oven—noontide the crisis of its agony.