Chapter IV: NEW YORK. (Allegro. Finale.) (5)

"Beth," he said solemnly, "no one knows better than I, that it is you who send the bees away."

She laughed at him. "We found each other out in time, David.... Too much artist between us. We'd surely taint each other, don't you see?"

"I never could see that----"

"That's being polite; and one must be polite.... We are really fine friends, better than ever after to-day, and that's something for a pair of incomplete New Yorkers."

There was a pause.

"Beth," said Cairns. "Shall I bring Bedient over to-morrow?"

"No, please. At least not to-morrow."

He was surprised. Beth saw it; saw, too, that he had observed how Bedient talked to her last night. Mrs. Wordling had not missed comment here.... Cairns must not think, however, that she would avoid Andrew Bedient. She fell into her old resource of laughing at the whole matter.

"I can't afford to take any chances, David. He's _too_ attractive. Falling in love is pure dissipation to one of my temperament, and I have too many contracts to fill. I'm afraid of your sailor-man. Think of the character you built about him to-day in this room. If he didn't prove up to that, what a pity for us all! And if he did, what a pity for poor Beth, if he started coming here!... Anyway, I've ceased to be a bachelor-girl. I'm a spinster.... That word hypnotizes me. I'm all ice again. I shall know Mr. Bedient ethically and not otherwise."

Cairns laughed with her, but something within hurt. His relation with Beth Truba had been long, and increasingly delightful, since the ordeal of becoming just a friend was safely past. He realized that only a beautiful woman could speak this way, even in fun to an old friend.... His work dealt with wars, diplomacy and politics; his fictions were twenty-year-old appeals, so that Beth felt her present depth of mood to be fathoms deeper than his story instinct.

"You know, David, I've said for years there were no real lovers in the world," she went on lightly. "But your friend was full of touches last night such as one dreams of: that colored pane in the hall-way, when he was a little boy somewhere, and the light that frightened him from it.... 'One of the Chinese knifed me, but he died.'... That big 'X' of the _Truxton_ flung stern up, as she sank; ... and about the old Captain wriggling his shoulder bashfully for his young friend's arm at the last.... It is altogether enticing, in the light of what you have brought to-day. Really you must take him away. Red-haired spinsters mustn't be bothered, nor imprisoned in magic spring weather. When does he return to his Island?"

"He hasn't spoken of that, but I do know, Beth, that Bedient will never sink back into the common, from your first fine impressions. I've known him for years, you see----"

She put down her brush and said theatrically, "I feel the fatal premonitive impulses.... Spinster, spinster; Beth Truba, spinster!... That's my salvation."

"You're the finest woman I know," Cairns said. "You know best, but I doubt if Bedient will go back to Equatoria without seeing more of you----"

"Did he speak of such a thing?"

"That isn't his way----"

"I am properly rebuked."

... Cairns was at the door. "Did you say, Beth, that the Grey One is engaged to be married?"

"Pure tragedy. The man is fifty and financial.... She's a courageous girl, but I think under her dear smile is a broken nerve. She has about reached the end of her rope. The demand for her work has fallen off. One of those inexplicable things. She had such a good start after returning from Paris. And now with Handel's expensive studio, probably not less than three thousand a year for that, debt and unsought pictures are eating out her heart. There's much more to the story--I mean leading up. Help her if you can, or she must go to the arms and house of a certain rich man.... What a blithe thing is Life, and how little you predatory men know about it!"

They regarded each other, their thoughts poised upon an _If_. Beth spoke first:

"If your friend----"

"But Bedient didn't look into the eyes of the Grey One when he told his tale of the sea," Cairns said, leaving.

TWELFTH CHAPTER

TWO LESSER ADVENTURES

A few nights after the party, Bedient was left to his own devices, Cairns being appointed out of town. He attended the performance of a famous actress in _Hedda Gabler_.... Bedient was early. The curtain interested him. It pictured an ancient Grecian ruin, a gloomy, heavy thing, but not inartistic. Beneath was a couplet from Kingsley:

"So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again,
Ancient and holy things fade like a dream."

Sensitive to such effects, he sat, musing and contemplative, when suddenly his spirit was imperiously aroused by the orchestra. The 'celli had opened the _Andante_ from the C Minor Symphony. For ten minutes, the music held his every sense.... It unfolded as of old, but not its full message. There was a meaning in it _for him_! He heard the three voices--man, woman and angel. It was the woman's tragedy. The lustrous Third Presence was for her. The man's figure was obscure, disintegrate.... Bedient was so filled with the mystery, that the play had but little surface of his consciousness during the first act. He enjoyed it, but could not give all he had. Finally, as _Hedda_ was ordering the young writer to drink wine to get "vine-leaves in his hair," there was an explosion back of the scenes. Bedient, as did many others, thought at first it belonged to the piece. The faces of the players fell away in thick gloom, the voices sank into crazy echoes, and the curtain went down. Bedient's last look at the stage brought him the impression of squirming chaos. Fire touched the curtain behind, disfiguring and darkening the pictured ruin. Then a woman near him screamed. The back of a chair snapped, and now scores took up the woman's cry.

The crowd caught a succession of hideous ideas: of being trapped and burned, of inadequate exits, murderous gases, bodies piled at the doors--all the detailed news-horror of former theatre disasters. And the crowd did all it could to repeat the worst of these. Bedient encountered an altogether new strength, the strength of a frenzied mass, and to his nostrils came a sick odor from the fear-mad. The lights had not been turned on with the fall of the curtain. Untrained to cities, Bedient was astonished at the fright of the people, the fright of the men!... The lines of _Hedda_ recurred to him, and he called out laughingly:

"Now's the time for 'vine-leaves in your hair,' men!"

He moved among the seats free from the aisle. A body lay at his feet. Groping forward, his hand touched a woman's hair. He smiled at the thought that here was one for _him_ to help, and lifted her, turning to look at the glare through the writhing curtain. There were voices behind in that garish furnace; and now the lights filled the theatre again. Bedient quickly made his way with others to a side exit, the red light of which had not attracted the crowd.

The woman was light in his arms. She wore a white net waist, and her brown hair was unfastened. She had crushed a large bunch of English violets to her mouth and nostrils, to keep out the smoke and gas. A peculiar thing about it was, Bedient did not see her face. In the alley, he handed his burden to a man and woman, standing together at the door of a car, and went back. One of the actors had stepped in front of the stage, and was calling out that the fire was under control, that there was no danger whatever. The roar from the gallery passages subsided. Only a few were hurt, since the theatre was modern and the main exit ample.... Bedient returned to the side-door but the woman he had carried forth was gone, probably with the pair in the car. He decided to see the end of _Hedda Gabler_ another time. The _Andante_, the Grecian ruin and vine-leaves were curiously blended in his mind....

Though several days had passed since the Club affair, he had not seen Beth Truba again. This fact largely occupied his thinking. He would not telephone nor call, without a suggestion from her. The moment had not come to bring up her name to David Cairns, who, since his talk with Beth, had of course nothing to offer. So Bedient revolved in outer darkness.... The morning after _Hedda Gabler_ he found a very good chestnut saddle-mare in an up-town stable, and rode for an hour or two in the Park, returning to the Club after eleven. At the office, he was told that Mrs. Wordling had asked for him to go up to her apartment, as soon as he came in. Five minutes later, he knocked at her door.

"Is that you, Mr. Bedient?" she called. The voice came seemingly from an inner room; a cultivated voice, with that husky note in it which charms the multitude. Had he not a good mental picture of Mrs. Wordling, he would have imagined some enchanted Dolores.... "How good of you to come! Just wait one moment."

The door opened partially after a few seconds, and he caught the gleam of a bare arm, but the actress had disappeared when he entered. Bedient was in a room where a torrential shower had congealed into photographs.

"I can't help it," she said at last, emerging from the inner room, unhooked.... "I've been trying to get a maid up here for the past half-hour.... I think there's only three or four between the shoulder-blades--won't you do them for me?"

She backed up to him bewitchingly.... Mrs. Wordling was in the twenty-nine period. If the thing can be imagined, she gave the impression of being both voluptuous and athletic. There was a rose-dusk tone under her healthy skin, where the neck went singing down to the shoulder, singing of warm blood and plenteous. Hers was the mid-height of woman, so that Bedient was amusedly conscious of the length of his hands, as he stood off for a second surveying the work to do.

"What's the trouble; can't you?"

There was a purring tremble in her tone that stirred the wanderer, only it was the past entirely that moved within him. The moment had little more rousing for him, than if he were asked to fasten a child's romper.... Yet he did not miss that here was one of the eternal types of man's pursuit--as natural a man's woman as ever animated a roomful of photographs--a woman who could love much, and, as Heine added, _many_.

"I'll just throw a shawl around, if you can't," she urged, nudging her shoulder.

"Far too warm for shawls," he laughed. "I was only getting it straight in my mind before beginning. You know it's tricksome for one accustomed mainly to men's affairs.... There's one--I won't pinch--and the second--anytime you can't find a maid, Mrs. Wordling--I'm in the Club a good deal--there they are, if they don't fly open----" and his hands fell with a pat on each of her shoulders.

Facing him, Mrs. Wordling encountered a perfectly unembarrassed young man, and a calm depth of eye that seemed to have come and gone from her world, and taken away nothing to remember that was wildly exciting.... At least three women of her acquaintance were raving about Andrew Bedient, two artists with a madness for sub-surface matters having to do with men. Mrs. Wordling believed herself a more finished artist in these affairs. She wanted to prove this, while Bedient was the dominant man-interest of the Club.

And now he surprised her. He was different from the man she had pictured. Equally well, she could have located him--had he kissed her, or appeared confused with embarrassment. Most men of her acquaintance would have kissed her; others would have proved clumsy and abashed, but none could have passed through the test she offered with both denial and calm.... She wanted the interest of Bedient, because the other women fancied him; she wanted to show them and "that hag, Kate Wilkes," what a man desires in a woman; and now a third reason evolved. Bedient had proved to her something of a challenging sensation. He was altogether too calm to be inexperienced. Every instinct had unerringly informed her of his bounteous ardor, yet he had refrained. That which she had seen first and last about him--the excellence of his masculine attractions--had suddenly become important because no longer impersonal. Mrs. Wordling was fully equipped to carry out her ideas.

"You did that very well," she said, dropping her eyes before his steady gaze, "for one experienced only with men-matters. And now, I suppose you want to know why I took the pains to ask you here; oh, no, not to hook me up.... I didn't know you would get back so soon; I had just left word a few moments before you came.... Wasn't it great the way a dreadful disaster was averted at the _Hedda Gabler_ performance last night?... Did you see the morning paper?"

"No," said Bedient. "I was out early."

"Why, it appears that after the explosion, when everyone was crushing toward the doors, some man in the audience took the words of _Hedda_ and steadied the crowd with them, as men and women struggled in the darkness.... 'Now's the time for vine-leaves!' he called out. An unknown--wasn't he lovely?"

She placed the paper before him, and he read a really remarkable account of "the vine-leaf man" magnetizing the mob and carrying out a fainting girl. It was absurd to him, though Ibsen's subtlety, queerly enough, gave the story force.... No face of the audience had impressed him; none had appeared to notice him in the dark. He wondered how the newspaper had obtained the account.... There was a light, quick knock at the door.

"It isn't very often that a newspaper story is gotten up so effectively," Mrs. Wordling was saying. Apparently she had not heard the knock. Her voice, however, had fallen in a half-whisper, more penetrating than her usual low tones. "Do you suppose the hero will permit his name to be known?"

The knock was repeated in a brief, that-ends-it fashion. Mrs. Wordling with a sudden streak of clumsiness half overturned a chair, as she sped to the door. Bedient did not at once penetrate the entire manoeuver, but his nerve and will tightened with a premonition of unpleasantness.

Beth Truba was admitted. Quite as he would have had her do, the artist merely turned from one to the other a quick glance, and ignored the matter; yet that glance had stamped him with her conception of his commonness.

"I could just as well have sent the poster over," Beth said, "but, as I 'phoned, it is well to see, if it suits exactly, before putting it out of mind----"

"Lovely of you, dear. I'm so glad Mr. Bedient is here to see it!" Mrs. Wordling's brown eyes swam with happiness.

Beth was in brown. Her profile was turned to Bedient, as she unrolled the large, heavy paper.... The work was remarkable in its effect of having been done in a sweep. The subtle and characteristic appeal of the actress (so truly her own, that she would have been the last to notice it) had been caught in truth and cleverly, the restlessness of her empty arms and eager breast. The face was finer, and the curves of the figure slightly lengthened; the whole in Beth's sweeping way, rather masterful.

"Splendid!" Mrs. Wordling exclaimed, and to Bedient added: "It's for the road. Isn't it a winner?"

"Yes, I do like it," Bedient said.

Beth was glad that he didn't enlarge.

"I must be on my way, then," she said. "I'm going into the country to-morrow for the week-end.... We're getting the old house fixed up for the winter. Mother writes that the repairs are on in full blast, and that I'm needed. Last Saturday when I got there the plumbers had just come. Very carefully they took out all the plumbing and laid it on the front lawn; then put it back.... Good-by."

"Good-by, and thank you, Beth."

"I am glad that it pleases you, Mrs. Wordling." Her tone was pleasantly poised.

Bedient missed nothing now. He did not blame Mrs. Wordling for using him. He saw that she was out of her element with the others; therefore not at her best trying to be one with them. In her little strategies, she was quite true to herself. He could not be irritated, though he was very sorry. Of course, there could be no explanation. His own innocence was but a humorous aspect of the case. The trying part was that look in Beth Truba's eyes, which told him how bored she was by this sort of commonness.

Then there was to-morrow and Sunday with her away. In her brown dress and hat, glorious and away.

Bedient went away, too.

THIRTEENTH CHAPTER

ABOUT SHADOWY SISTERS

Beth Truba hadn't the gift of talking about the things that hurt her. She had met all her conflicts in solitudes of her own finding; and there they had been consummated, like certain processes of nature, far from the gaze of man. She had found the world deranged from every girlish ideal. Full grown young men could be so beautiful to her artist's eyes, that years were required to realize that these splendid exteriors held more often than not, little more than strutting half-truths and athletic vanities.

Whistler, the master, had entered the class-room unannounced, where Beth was studying, as a girl in Paris. Glancing about the walls, his eyes fastened upon a sketch of hers. He asked the teacher for the pupil who did it, and uplifted Beth's face to his, touching her chin and forehead lightly.

Then he whistled and said: "Off hand, I should say that you are to become an artist; but now that I look closely into your face, I am afraid you will become a woman."

Tentatively, she was an artist; she would not grant more.... A little while before, she had been very close to becoming a woman. None but the Shadowy Sister knew how near. (The Shadowy Sister was an institution of Beth's--her conscience, her spirit, her higher self, or all three in one. She came from an old fairy-book. A little girl had longed for a playmate, even as Beth, and one day beside a fountain appeared a Shadowy Sister. She could stay a while, for she loved the little girl, but confessed it was much happier where _she_ lived.)... Shadowy Sisters for little girls who have no playmates, and for women who have no confidantes.

Under Beth's mirth, during the recent talk with David Cairns, had been much of verity. She was carrying an unhealed wound, which neither he nor the world understood. In Andrew Bedient she had discerned a fine and deeply-endowed nature--glimpses--as if he were some great woman's gift to the world, her soul and all. But Beth's romantic nature had been desolated so short a time ago, that she despised even her willingness to put forth faith again.... Such fruit must perish on the vine, if only common hands attend the harvest.

Women like Beth Truba learn in bitterness to protect themselves from possibilities of disillusionment. They hate their hardness, yet hardness is better than rebuilding sanctuaries that have been brutally stormed. For one must build of faith, radium-rare to those who have lost their intrinsic supply.

The Other Man had been a find of Beth's. He had come to her mother's house years ago--a boy. He had seemed quick to learn the ways of real people, and the things a man must know to delight a woman's understanding. In so many ways, the finishing touches of manhood were put upon him gracefully, that Beth gloried in the work of adding treasures of mind and character. She had even made his place in the world, through strong friends of her own winning.

Beth was a year or two older. The boy had grown splendid in appearance, when she discovered she was giving him much that he must hold sacredly, or inflict havoc upon the giver.... In moments when she was happiest, there would come a thought that something would happen.... The young man did not fully understand what caused the break. This may be the key to the very limitation which made him impossible--this lack of delicacy of perception. Certainly he did not know the greatness of Beth's giving, nor the fineness she had come to expect from him.... She did not exactly love him less, but rather as a mother than a maid, since she had to forgive.

A woman may love a man whom she is too wise to marry. There are man-comets, splendid, flashing, unsubstantial, who sweep into the zones of attraction of all the planet sisterhood; but better, if one cannot have a sun all to oneself, is a little cold moon for the companion intimate.... Something that the young man had said or done was pure disturbance to Beth, compatible with no system of development. She had sent him from her, as one who had stood before her rooted among the second-rate.

Only Beth knew the depth of the hurt. All the feminine of her had turned to aching iron. The Shadowy Sister seemed riveted to a hideous clanking thing, and all the dream-children crushed.

Her friends said: "Who would have thought that after making such a _man_ of her protégé, Beth would refuse to marry him? Ah, Beth loves her pictures better than she could love any mere man. She was destined to be true to her work. Only the great women are called upon to make this choice. Nature keeps them virgin to reveal at the last unshadowed beauty. This refusal is the signet of her greatness."

Beth heard a murmur of this talk and laughed bitterly.

"No," she said to her studio-walls. "It's only because Beth is a bit choosey. She isn't a very great artist, and if she were, she wouldn't hesitate to become Mrs. Right Man, though it made her falter forever, eye and hand."

In her own heart, she would rather have had her visions of happiness in children, than to paint the most exquisite flowers and faces in the comprehension of Art.... For days, for weeks, she had remained in her studio seeing no one. Some big work was rumored, and she was left alone with understanding among real people, just as was Vina Nettleton.... But she was too maimed within to work. She wanted to rush off to Asia somewhere, and bury herself alive, but pride kept her at home. As soon as she was able to move and think coherently, she sought her few friends again. Even her dearest, Vina Nettleton, had realized but a tithe of the tragedy.

* * * * *

Beth Truba reached her studio again Monday noon. Among the letters in her post-box, was one she felt instinctively to be from Andrew Bedient, though it was post-marked Albany. She hesitated to open the letter at first, for fear that he had attempted to explain his presence in Mrs. Wordling's room. This would affix him eternally to commonness in her mind. He had a right to go to Mrs. Wordling's room, but she had thought him other than the sort which pursues such obvious attractions. Especially after what Cairns had said, she was hurt to meet him there.... Beth found herself thinking at a furious rate, on the mere hazard that the letter was from Bedient....

Were there really such men in the world as the Bedient whom Cairns pictured, and believed in? Personally, she didn't care to experiment, but there was a strange reliance in the thought that there _were_ such men.... The fine nature she wanted to believe in--wouldn't have written!... This one letter alone remained unopened--when the telephone rang.

It was Cairns, who inquired if she had heard aught of his friend.... "I reached town Saturday morning," Cairns went on, "and found a note that he would be away for the day and possibly Sunday; didn't say where nor why. He left no word at the Club. In fact, Mrs. Wordling called me just now to inquire, volunteering that Bedient had been in her world Friday. Excuse me for bothering you. I've an idea this is his way when a gale is blowing in his brain. He pushes out for solitude and sea-room."

Beth had not offered to assist. The Albany letter might not be his. It stared at her now from the library-table, full-formed black writing. There were no two ways about a single letter. It was the writing of a man who had not covered continents of white paper. "Miss Beth Truba" had been put there to stay, with a full pen, and as if pleasing to his sight. She was thinking--it would be well if Mrs. Wordling were always inquiring; and that the day would be spoiled if he had undertaken to explain things in this letter....

Beth crossed to the table, placed the paper-cutter under the flap and slit it across. Just at this moment, the door of the elevator-shaft opened on her floor--and her knocker fell. She tossed the letter under the leather cover of the table, and admitted Vina Nettleton.

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER

THIS CLAY AND PAINT AGE

A new light had come into the studio of Vina Nettleton; and only when at last the light became too strong, and the struggle too close, had she left it to seek her friend Beth Truba. She had not been sleeping, nor remembering to eat; but she had been thinking enough for seven artists, in the long hours, when the light was bad for work. And now the packing was worn from her nerve-ends, so that she wept easily, like a nervous child, or a man undone from drink.

The new force of Andrew Bedient had found in her a larger sensitiveness than even in David Cairns. That long afternoon which he had spent in her place of working and living was to her a visitation, high above the years. She had been amazed at the Grey One, for preserving a semblance of calm. The gratefulness that she had faltered was but a sign of what she felt.

The figures of Jesus in her room, she had been unable to touch. Bedient had made her see the _Godhood_ of the Christ. John the Baptist, who had attained the apex of manhood and prophecy, had called himself unworthy to loose the latchet of His shoes, and this before Jesus had put on the glory of the Father.

All the others were amazingly nearer to her. She saw the bleak Iscariot as never before, and his darkened mother emerged a step out of the gloom of ages. The Romans moved, as upon a stage, before her, unlit battling faces, clashing voices and armor; and the bearded Jews heavily collecting and confuting. She saw the Eleven, and nearest the light, the frail John, the brother of James,--sad young face and ascetic pallor.... And in the night, she heard that great Voice crying in the wilderness, that mighty Forerunner, the returned Elias; next to Christ Himself, this Baptist, who leaped in the womb of the aged Elizabeth, when the Mother of the Saviour entered her house in the hill country! This cataclysmic figure, not of the "Stations," was dominant in the background of them all. She saw him second to the Christ (for was he not a prophet in the elder Scripture?) in being called to the Father's Godhood; and Saint Paul, of that nameless thorn in the flesh, following gloriously on the Rising Road!

There was a new and loving friendliness in the Marys. She could pray to _them_, and wait for greater purity to image the Saviour, as they saw Him.... And one night from her fire-frame, staring down into the lurid precipices of the city, the awful question preyed upon her lips, "Are you Jews and Romans that you must have again the blood of the Christ, to show you the way to God?"... She was weeping, and would have swooned, but something in her consciousness bade her look above. There were the infinite worlds, immensities of time and space and evolving souls; and urging, weaving, glorifying all, was the Holy Spirit, Mystic Motherhood.... And back in the dark of her studio, she turned among creations and visions and longings. Next morning she sat upon the floor and wept, because she could not have her child of soul, only children of clay.... Hours afterward she was fashioning a cross with her fingers, and was suddenly crushed with anguish because she had not been there to carry the cross for Him, to confront the soldiery and take the cruel burden, and hear His Voice, Whom she knew now to be the Son of God.

* * * * *

The women embraced in that rare way which is neither formal nor an affectation. They had long liked and admired each other.

"Why, Vina,--it has been weeks--how did you manage to leave?"

"I haven't done much--for days," Vina said, ducking from under her huge hat, and tossing it with both hands upon the piano-top. "Not since he came up with the Grey One and spoiled my little old ideas. Let's have some tea?"

Beth laughed at the other, until Vina moved into the circle of light, and her face showed paler and more transparent than ever. She sat down upon Beth's working-stool, elbows on knees, and stared trance-like at her friend.

"Why, you dear little dreamer, what's the matter?" Beth asked quickly. "Who is the destructive _he_?"

"The sailor-man David Cairns called us together to see. He's been in the shadows among the panels ever since. What he said I keep hearing again and again----"

Beth laughed at the remarkable way Bedient was besieging her own studio, without appearing in person. "But Vina, you've been living like a Hindu holy man, and no one can do that in New York, not even Hindus. I order you to eat thrice daily and tire yourself physically----"

"I eat," Vina said, looking bored and helpless at the thought. "I eat and I do enough physical work to tire a stone-mason----"

"But I can see through you to the bone! I think you only imagine you take nourishment. Oh, Vina, I know your life--handling huge hard things and making them lovely with pure spirit. I must take better care of you. Tell me all about it, if it will help."

"Beth, please don't talk about pure spirit, meaning me. I used to be able to stand it, but not any more. The Grey One does that. I seem to suggest it to flesh and blood people.... I'm sure he didn't see me so. He looked at me, as if to say, oh, I don't know what!... I wish I _were_ fish-cold! I'm all overturned.... I just met Mary McCullom on the way over."

Beth had forgotten the name for the moment. She thought Vina was about to tell her of Bedient.

"Don't you remember Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile, painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly bereft and unfortunate children?"

"Oh, yes," said Beth. "I heard she had married----"

"That's just it.... Do you remember how she used to look--pinched, evaporated, as one looks in a factory blue-light? I remember calling upon her, as she was giving up her last studio. We sat on a packing-case, while they took out her pictures, one child after another, foundlings which had come to her, and which no one would take nor buy----"

"Vina, you're cruel to her!"

"Listen, and you'll see whom I'm cruel to.... I remember telling her that day what a fearsome, ineffectual thing art is anyway.... How spooky thin she looked, and her face was yellow in patches! My heart was wrung with her, the image of a little woman with no place, no heart to go to, all her dreams of girlhood turned to ghosts, fit only to run from. Then she admitted that she might marry, that a man wanted her, but her wail was that she was mean and helpless, a failure; as such it was cowardly to let the man have her, hardly a square thing for a girl to do. Well, I perked her up on that.... She took him; I don't even know him by sight, but he's a man, Beth Truba! Mind you, here was a woman who said she was so dismayed and distressed and generally bowled over by living twenty-seven years, that she hadn't the heart left to love anybody. But he took her, and he's a man----"

"That seems to charm you," Beth ventured. "'He took her, and he's a man.'"

"It does, for I just left her, and she's a wicked flaunt of womanly happiness. I tell you, she has been playing with angels, all daintily plumped out, eyes shining, hands soft and white, her neck all round and new, lips red, and her voice low and ecstatic with the miracle of it all. And 'Oh, Vina,' she whispered, 'I almost die to think I might have refused him! You helped me not to. He loves me, and oh, he's so wonderful!'... I kissed her in an awed way--and asked about him.... 'Oh, he's just a nurseryman--trees, you know, but he lo--we're so happy!'... Oh, Beth," Vina finished in a lowered voice, "something eternal, something immortal happens, when a man brings love to a thirsting woman!"

"Not tea, but strong tea," Beth observed. "Perhaps you think that's a pretty story--and perhaps it is," she added indefinitely.

Vina seemed hardly to hear. Many matters were revolving in her tired mind, and as soon as she caught a loose end, she allowed words to come, for there was some relief in thinking aloud.

"Hasn't the world done for us perfectly, Beth?" she demanded finally. "Everything is arranged for men, to suit men--it's a man's world--and we're foreigners. We're forced to stand around and _mind_, before we understand. If we speak our own language, we're suspected of sedition. And then we don't stand together. We're continually looking for some kind male native, and only now and then one of us is lucky.... Hideous and false old shames are inflicted upon us. We are hungry for many things, but appear shameless, if we say so... Beth, has it ever occurred to you that we come--I mean fair and normal women--we come from a country where there are lots of little children--?"

"The kingdom of heaven, you mean, Vina?"

"Possibly that's it. And when we get here we miss them--want them terribly. It's all _through_ us--like an abstraction. We know the way better than the natives here, but they have laws which make us dependent upon them for the way.... It has not lifted to an abstraction with our teachers, Beth. A crude concrete thing to them, a matter of rules broken or not. We must submit, or remain lonely, reviled foreigners.... Sometimes we discover a native who _could_ bring us back our own, but he's probably teaching the nearest...."

"We've got to stand together, we foreigners," Beth said laughingly. "All our different castes must stand together first--and keep the natives waiting--until in their very eagerness, they suddenly perceive that we know best----"

"It's not for us--that happy time," Vina added hopelessly. "We are the sit-tight, hold-fast pilgrims. We belong to the clay-and-paint age----"

"It's something to see that----"

"Oh, how truly _he_ sees it!"

"Your Sailor-man, does he see that, too?"

"Has he been _seeing_ other things--in your studio?" Vina asked hastily.

"Oh, no, he hasn't been here, but he has been telling David Cairns things about writing.... David has really been born again."

"Do you know, Beth," Vina declared with intensity, "he has been such an inspiration to me, that I'm afraid my 'Stations' will look like a repaired wall, half new and half old plaster."

"My work will stand an inspiration, too."

"Beth----"

"Yes."

"You know what I think of your work, but I believe the Sailor-man could give you that inspiration----"

"Perhaps I can get it through you and David Cairns," remarked Beth, who was beginning to see, and with no little amazement, that to Vina the inspiration was spiritual, impersonal. This made Bedient's influence all the more exciting.

"Oh, he'll come to you, right enough. I supposed he had.... You know I was making my James and Matthews, my Peters and Jews and Romans quite contentedly in that bleak way it has been done a thousand times. But he made me see them! And the slopes of Calvary, and Gethsemane hunched in the darkness, and the Christ kneeling in a faint starry light; he made me see Him kneeling there, His Spirit, like a great mother's loving heart, standing between an angry Father and the world, a wilful child----"

"Yes," came softly from Beth.

"And it's almost too much for me now--the Passion, the Agony, the Crime and the Night--too much for me and clay. It would be, if it were not for the glowing Marys. They're for _us_, Beth----"

"That's sweet of you, Vina.... It won't be too much. You're in the reaction now. After that passes you will do the 'Stations' as they have never been done. And God's poor people will pass before your work for years and years to come; and something, as much as they can bear of the thrilling anguish of this new light of yours, will come to them, as they pray before the Eternal Tragedy."

"But that isn't all, Beth!... There's another; a terrible side. I sort of had myself in hand until he came, sort of felt myself two thousand years old, back among them. But he has made me a pitiful modern again, a woman who has tried and refuses to try longer, to be happy with clay dolls. And Mary McCullom----"

"Is submerged in tea--past resuscitation.... That modern madness will pass, too, dear. 'Member how those Italian giants used to have periods of madness while they decorated the everlasting cathedrals? No modern man could come into your studio and break your work for long, Vina. You know we promised each other that none could." Beth shivered at her memory. Vina had made her forget for a moment.

"But we said in our haste then, that all men were just natives----"

"Many wise women say so at their leisure----"

"But Mary McCullom----"

"Taboo----"

"Well, then, _he_ made me see there were real men in the world," Vina declared with slow defiance.

"Oh."

"You're sure to misunderstand. Please listen carefully. He is as far _to me_--from being that kind of a real man--as a mere native. Do you understand?... I could worship through him, as through a pure priest----"

"Vina, you're a passionate idealist!"

"You don't know him. I think he is beyond sex--or going beyond. Perhaps he doesn't know it.... Oh, we've been hurt a little, by boys who failed to grow into men, and so we took to our breasts painted and molded images, saying there _are_ no real men. And here in our midst comes more than we ask or dream--a Prophet in the making. That's very clear to me, and you'll see it!... The result--a clearer vision into clay and its possibilities, and an expanded conception of my subjects--that's one point and a wonderful one. I'm grateful, but there's another.... Oh, Beth, I'm sick unto nausea with repression. Why, should I deny it; I want a real lover among men, and I want live dolls!"

A trenchant moment to Beth Truba. No one, so well as she, could perceive the tragedy of this gifted woman, whom the right man had missed in the crush of the world's women. A real artist, but a greater woman.... More than this was revealed to Beth. Her own Shadowy Sister was speaking to her with Vina Nettleton's tongue, as Beth Truba could never speak of another...

The Grey One, too, had her tragedy; and Kate Wilkes had hers long ago, a strong woman, whose cup of bitterness had overflowed in her veins; who had come so to despise men, as to profess disliking children. Indeed, that moment, Beth Truba seemed to hear the whispered affirmations of tragedy from evolved women everywhere....And whither was tending the race, if only the Wordlings of the world were to be satisfied--if Wordlings were all that men cared for? What was to become of the race, if the few women who loved art, and through art learned really to love their kind, were forever to be denied? And here was Vina Nettleton with the spiritual power to concentrate her dream into an avatar (if into the midst of her solitary labors, a great man's love should suddenly come)!... Did the Destiny Master fall asleep for a century at a time, that such a genius for motherhood should be denied, while the earth was being replenished with children of chance, branded with commonness and forever afraid?

Beth Truba shook herself from this crippling rush of thoughts, and started to her feet.

"Vina, you've been drinking deep of power. You're a giantess reeking with mad contagions. Also, you're a heretic. Allow me to remind you that we are spinsters; born and enforced, and decently-to-be-buried _spinsters_. It isn't the Sailor-man, but the spring of the year, that makes us a bit feverish. We should go to the catacombs for this season, when this devil's rousing is in the air.... If you have anything further to say, purely in regard to artistic inspirations, you may go on----"

Vina sat rigidly before her, wan and white-lipped as if her emotions were burned out. Presently she began to talk again in her trailing pensive way:

"I had been working deep and doggedly for days, hardly noticing who came in or out. When the Grey One entered with him, I felt myself bobbing, whirling up into light surface water. I hardly spoke the first half hour. I remembered the night before, when he told that fine story straight into your eyes. I thought him wonderful then, and it occurred to me that you were in for it. But it was different when he came into my shop--something intimate and important. His eyes roved from one 'Station' to another, while the Grey One exploited me in her absurd, selfless fashion. She's a third in our trouble Beth.

"Presently he asked me how I knew the Christ had such wonderful hands; then he talked of the Forerunner and Saint Paul, who could have done so much, had they been there during the Passion, and of the women who _were_ there. It was strange to have him come into the studio--to me--with all these pictures developed through silent years. It seems to me something tremendous must come of it... Someone knocked, and frenziedly I ordered the intruder away, without opening the door."

And now Vina repeated the belief of Bedient that impressed her so deeply: that the Holy Spirit is the source of the divine principle in woman; that the Marys of this world are the symbols of that Mystic Motherhood--the third of the Trinity--which will bring the races of the world to God, as a woman brings children to her husband.

"Everything he said glowed with this message," she went on. "His every thought brought out that women are the holders of the spiritual loaf; that prophets are the sons of strength of great spiritual mothers; that artists and poets are prophets in the making, and that unto the purest and greatest of the prophets must come at last Godhood--the Three in One; and of this Jesus is the Exemplar; His life and death and rising, His whole Mission, should make us see with _human_ eyes, the Way of Truth."

"I see, dear girl," Beth said softly, "_why_ you could not open the door to anyone... Then the, Mission of Jesus was vicarious? I had about given up hope of comprehending that."

"Yes. He lived and moved and bled and died and rose before the eyes of common men!" Vina exclaimed. "One has to _bleed_ for such eyes! Without the living sacrifice, only the rare souls here and there, with the highest prophetic vision, could have risen clearly to understand these things.... Thus the growth of spirituality was quickened among the lowly multitudes. The coming of the Christ is the loveliest manifestation of the divine feminine principle within Him--the Holy Spirit. Did he not become a Spiritual Mother of the world? Was not Godhood the next step for such a finished Spirit? His awful agony was that these tremendous mysteries of His illumination were enacted in the hideous low pressures of human understanding. That he could endure this for the world's eye, is his greatness, his Godhood!"

"And Mr. Bedient comes out of India with this Christian conception?"

"Beth," Vina said solemnly, "I believe there is meaning in that, too. The beauty and simplicity of that Sacrifice has been husked in dogmas for centuries, and we here have not torn them all away. He had just the Book and the Silence, and his own rare mind!"

* * * * *

"But, Vina, how could these things of pure religious fervor and beauty bring about that other rebellion of yours--the Mary McCullom one?"

"Oh, in a hundred ways; I'm all tired out now, but they'll come back. In a hundred ways, Beth, he spoke of women--with that same fervor and beauty. Just as he cleared and made exalted the Mystic Motherhood of the Christ, he pointed out how it works among _us_. Why, he says that there is nothing worth reading nor regarding nor listening to in the world of art, that has not that visioning feminine quality. The artist must be evolving through spirit, before his book or painting or symphony begins to live. All the rest of art is a mere squabbling over the letter of past prophecies, as the Jews did with the living Christ in their streets!... What a mother he must have had! I seemed to see her--to sense her--beside him. It was as if _she_ looked into my heart and the Grey One's heart, and with her hand on her big boy's head, said to us, smiling and happily: 'This is _my_ art--and he lives! You have but to look into your own hearts, you listening women, to know that he lives!'... Oh, Beth, her work does live to bless her! Can't you see how dead-cold the clay felt to my fingers after that?"

"Did he speak of his mother?"

"No."

Beth arose. "Vina," she said, "we are absolutely detached from the centres of sanity. We shall now walk Broadway, not the Avenue, but Broadway, to get back to markets and mere men. You're too powerful for this poor little room----"

"You always talk and laugh, Beth, but you're confronted and you know it. Confronted--that's the thing! Woman or artist--there's no word so naked and empty to me as just _artist_----"

"Only _spinster_," Beth suggested, shivering.

Vina stretched out her frail arms wearily, and her eyes suddenly fastened upon a fresh heather-plant on the corner of the writing-table. "Oh, please, drop a veil over that little bush," she pleaded. "It's arrayed like a bride----"

"A bridal veil, dear?"

"'No, no, a shawl, a rug!"

* * * * *

Beth returned alone at dusk. In some ways the afternoon was memorable. It was hard for her to keep her doubts about Bedient. Most of all that impressed her was Vina's sense of the mother's nearness to the man. She had thought of that at once, as she listened to his story. And he had not told Vina nor the Grey One about his mother... She sat down at her table and drew forth the opened but unread letter from Albany.

"Woman or artist," she whispered bitterly, "as if one could not be both!...It is only because a woman-and-artist requires a man who can love artistically. Few men can do that--and anything else beside.... Can you, Sailor-man?... Not if you explain to me why I found you at Wordling's.... Perhaps I can forgive you, after all the lovely things you've said. Anyway I shall tell no one...."

"Dear Miss Truba: I want to have a portrait painted of myself. I'm convinced that you can do it very well. Will you undertake the work? I shall be back in New York shortly after this letter reaches you Monday, and will wait at the Club until I hear from you. Yours, Andrew Bedient."

There was an instant in which she was conscious of something militant, something of the quiet power of the man who does not go home empty-handed. In his leaving the city Saturday, she perceived one who wishes to avoid the appearance of evil, and is content to leave his movements unexplained, trusting to another's perception.

"Vina is right," she said slowly. "'Confronted' is the word."

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

THE STORY OF THE MOTHER

Andrew Bedient had entered the company of lovers.... There have been great lovers who were not otherwise great men, but never a great man who was not a great lover.... On the night he had first seen Beth Truba across the table, deep within there had been a swift ignition of altar-flames that would never cease to burn. Often in his reading and thinking, in pictures he had seen, and in his limited adventures into music; wherever, in fact, man had done well in the arts, the vision of some great woman was behind the work for his eyes; famous and lovely women long-dead, whose kisses are imperishable in tone or pigment or tale; women who called to themselves for a little space the big-souled men of their time, and sent them away illustrious. And these men forever afterward brought their art to witness that such women are the way to the Way of Life.

Bedient had rejoiced to discover the two women in every great man's life: the woman who visioned his greatness in the mothering; and the woman who saw it potentially afterward--and ignited it. How often the latter loosed a landslide of love at the ignition, and how seldom she stepped aside to let it pass!

All this thinking for years upon the beauty and fineness of women was focussed now.... The depth of his humility, and the vastness of his appreciation were the essential beginnings of the love of this hour, just as they would be, if he were ready to perform some great creative expression in art. The boyhood of a genius is a wild turning from one passionate adoration to another among the masters of his art; often his gift of appreciation is a generation ahead of his capacity to produce. And love is the genius of mothering, the greatest of all the arts. The love that a man inspires in a woman's heart is _her_ expression of the Holy Spirit. According to the degree and beauty of that love, does the woman's child lift its head above the brute; according to the greater or lesser expression of this Mystic Motherhood in the world, at a certain hour, must be determined the morality of the race.

A fortnight in New York had terrorized Bedient. He perceived that men had not humility, nor passionate appreciation for anything; that they were dazed with their own or other men's accumulations; that they destroyed every dream of woman, drove the kingdom of heaven from her heart, with their comings and their goings and their commonness. He came to believe that this was an age of impossible men, impossible lovers, artists, and critics, because they had not the delicacy and wisdom to accept the finer forces, which women bring into the world for men.

Indeed, he saw that this was woman's gray hour of restless hoping, pitiful dreaming and untellable pain; that out of these must come the new generation. Then it appeared to him with splendid cheer, that woman had not fallen to these modern miseries, but _risen_ to them, from a millenium of serfdom, untimely outraging, hideous momentary loving, brute mastery, ownership and drudgery.... These of to-day were finer sufferings; this an age of transition in which she was passing through valleys of terrible shadow, but having preserved her natural greatness through the milleniums, she could not fail now with her poor gleanings of real love to give the world a generation of finer-grained men.

Women, then, he thought, have a natural greatness which man cannot destroy. If men were able to destroy it, the sources of the saving principle of the race would be shut off. But marvellously can man _inspire_ this natural greatness, make it immense and world-swaying by bringing out the best of women, and yet how few have this chivalry! Here was the anguish, the failure. With his mind filled with these illimitable possibilities, Bedient was overcome with his insight of New York, the awfulness of ignorance and cruelty in the ordinary relations of man with woman.