Chapter IV: NEW YORK. (Allegro. Finale.) (7)

David Cairns had stepped into a telephone-booth in the main-hall of the _Smilax Club_ the following afternoon, to announce his presence in the building to Vina Nettleton. Waiting for the exchange-operator to connect, he heard two pages talking about Bedient and Mrs. Wordling. These were bright street-boys, very clever in their uniforms, and courteous, but street-boys nevertheless; and they had not noted the man in the booth. A clouded, noisome thing, David Cairns heard. Doubtless it had passed through several grades of back-stair intelligence before it became a morsel for Cairns' particular informers. Having heard enough to understand, he kicked the door shut, and Vina found him distraught that day....

It was in the dusk of that afternoon when Cairns met Bedient, whose happiness was eminent and shining as usual. Cairns gave him a chance to mention the episode which had despoiled his own day, but Bedient seemed to have forgotten it remotely. It was because such wonderful things had been accomplished in his own life that Cairns was troubled. In no other man would he have objected to this sort of affair, though he might have criticised the trysting-place as a matter of taste. He had to bring up the subject.

Bedient's face clouded. "How did you hear?"

Cairns told, but spared details.

"I hoped it wouldn't get out on account of Mrs. Wordling," Bedient said. "I should have had the instinct to spare her from any such comments. I didn't know the laws of the park. It was a perfect night. We talked by the fountain. She was the first to suggest that we recross the street--and there we were--locked in."

Cairns asked several questions. Once he started impatiently to say that Mrs. Wordling had nothing to lose, but he caught himself in time. He saw that Bedient had been handled a bit, and had only a vague idea that he was embroiled in a scandal, the sordidness of which was apt to reach every ear but the principals'. At all events, the old Bedient was restored; in fact, if it were possible, he was brightened at one certain angle. Cairns had been unable to forbear this question:

"But, Andrew, who suggested going across to the park?"

"I can't just say," Bedient answered thoughtfully. "You see we smelled mignonette, and followed a common impulse. You should have seen the night to understand.... I say, David, can I do anything to straighten this out for Mrs. Wordling?"

"Only ignore it," Cairns said hastily. "I'll nip it--wherever it comes up. And the next time a woman asks----"

"But I didn't say----"

"The next time you smell mignonette, think of it as a soporific. Just yawn and say you've been working like a fire-horse on the Fourth.... You see, it isn't what happens that gets out to the others, including those we care about, but what is imagined by minds which are not decently policed."

"Crowds are cruel," Bedient mused.

Cairns had found it hard not to be spiteful toward one whom he considered had abused his friend's fineness.... They dined at the Club. The talk turned to a much fairer thing. Bedient saw (with deep and full delight) that Cairns had sighted his island of that Delectable Archipelago, and was making for it full-sailed. An enchanting idea came to Bedient (the fruit of an hour's happy talk), as to the best way for Cairns to make a landing in still waters....

Bedient was detailing the plan with some spirit, when Cairns' hand fell swiftly upon his arm.... At a near table just behind, Mrs. Wordling was sitting with a gentleman. Neither had noticed her come in. Mrs. Wordling turned to greet them. She was looking her best, which was sensational.

NINETEENTH CHAPTER

IN THE HOUSE OF GREY ONE

Bedient went one morning to the old Handel studio in East Fourteenth Street. The Grey One had asked him to come. Bedient liked the Grey One. He could laugh with Mrs. Wordling; Vina Nettleton awed him, though he was full of praise for her; he admired Kate Wilkes and had a keen relish for her mind. The latter had passed the crisis, had put on the full armor of the world; she was sharp and vindictive and implacable to the world; a woman who had won rather than lost her squareness, who showed her strength and hid her tenderness. He had rejoiced in several brushes with Kate Wilkes. There was a tang to them. A little sac of fiery acid had formed in her brain. It came from fighting the world to the last ditch, year after year. Her children played in the quick-passing columns of the periodicals--ambidextrous, untamable, shockingly rough in their games, these children, but shams slunk away from their shrill laughter. In tearing down, _she_ prepared for the Builder.

Bedient was not at all at his best with Kate Wilkes; indeed, none of the things that had aroused Vina and Beth and David, like sudden arraignments from their higher selves, came to his lips with this indomitable veteran opposite; still he would go far for ten minutes talk with her. She needed nothing that he could give; her copy had all gone to the compositor, her last forms were locked; and yet, he caught her story from queer angles on the stones, and it was a transcript from New York in this, the latest year of our Lord....

Bedient's "poise and general decency" disturbed the arrant man-hater she had become; she called him "fanatically idealistic," and was inclined to regard him at first as one of those smooth and finished Orientalists who have learned to use their intellects to a dangerous degree. But each time she talked with him, it seemed less possible to put a philosophical ticket upon him. "He's not Buddhist, Vedantist, neo-Platonist," she declared, deeply puzzled. Somehow she did not attract from him, as did Vina Nettleton, the rare pabulum which would have proved him just a Christian. Finally, from fragments brought by Vina, the Grey One, and David Cairns, she hit upon a name for him that would do, even if intended a trifle ironically at first: _The Modern_. She was easier after that; became very fond of him, and only doubted in her own thoughts, lest she hurt his work with the others, the good of which she was quick to see.... "He does not break training," she said at last. "He cut out a high place and holds it easily. Suppose he is _The Modern_?" she asked finally. "If he is, we who thought ourselves modern, should laugh and clap our hands!" This was open heresy to the Kate Wilkes of the world. "I thought I was past that," she sighed. "Here I am getting ready to be stung again."

Certain of her barbed sentences caught in Bedient's mind: "Women whom men avoid for being 'strong-minded' are apt to be strongest in their affections. You can prove this by the sons of clinging vines."... "Beware of the man who discusses often, and broods much, upon his spiritual growth, when he fails to make his wife happy."... "A man's courage may be just his cowardice running forward under the fear of scorn from his fellows."... "The most passionate mother is likely to be the least satisfied with just passion from her husband. Wedded to a man capable of real love, this woman, of all earth's creatures, is the most natural monogamist."... "A real woman had three caskets to give to a man she loved. One day she read in his eyes that he could take but the nearest and lowest; and that moment arose in her heart the wailing cry: 'The King is dead!'"... "The half-grown man never understands that woman is happiest, and at her best in all her services to him, when he depends upon her for a few of the finer things."...

Also Kate Wilkes had a way of doing a memorable bit of criticism in a sentence or two: Regarding MacDowell, the American composer, "He left the harvest to the others, but what exquisite gleanings he found!"... As to Nietschze; "He didn't see all; his isn't the last word; but he crossed the Forbidden Continent, and has spoken deliriously, half-mad from the journey."... And her beloved Whitman, "America's wisest patriot."...

* * * * *

Bedient liked the Grey One. He liked her that afternoon, when she asked if he cared to come up to Vina Nettleton's with her. There was real warmth in her manner from the first.... Always that illusion of having played with her long ago, stole into mind with her name or presence. (Once he had found her sobbing, about something she wouldn't tell. She had always been ready to give up things. The smile she had for _him_, would remain upon her lips, while she thought of something else. She would leave the others and wait for him to come and find her.) These things were altogether outside of human experience, a sweet and subtly attractive run of vagaries which had to do with a tall yellow-haired maid, now Marguerite Grey.... From something Cairns had said, Bedient knew she was unhappy. He saw it afresh when he entered the big still place where she was. She had been working, but dropped a curtain over the easel as he entered.

"Did I come at a wrong time?" he asked. "I can just as well come again."

"I don't know of any time so good. You may not want to come again."

She had not been weeping. He saw that with a quick look. It was deeper than that--something cold and slow and creeping, that made her reckless with hatred, and writhing. Answering Bedient's swift glance, she perceived that he had seen deeply, and was glad. It eased her; she hoped he had seen all, for she was sick with holding her own.... Meanwhile, her soft voice was telling him about her house. The pictures of her own here and there, were passed over quickly. Children, these, that the world had found wanting; badly-brought-up children that the world had frightened back to the parent roof where they warred with one another.

Back of all, Bedient saw a most feminine creature in the Grey One, naturally defenceless in her life against the world; a woman so preyed upon by moods that many a time she gladly would have turned devil, but was helpless to know how to begin; again and again plucked to the quick by the world. She had put on foreign scepticisms, and pitifully attempted to harden herself; but the hardening, try as she would, could not be spread evenly. It didn't protect her, as Kate Wilkes' did, only made her the more misunderstood. She did not have less talent than Vina or Beth; indeed, she had been considered of rather rich promise in Paris; but she had less developed energies and balance to use them, less physique. She lacked the spirit of that little thoroughbred, Vina Nettleton, and the pride and courage of Beth Truba. The Grey One had been badly hurt in that sadly sensitive period which follows the putting away of girlish things--when womanhood is new and wonderful. She was slow to heal. Few men interested her, but she needed a man-friend, some one to take her in hand. She had needed such a one for years. He would have been of little use, had he not come at this time. Bedient's eager friendliness for this woman was one of the most interesting things he had encountered in New York, a sort of fellowship which no one else had evoked. The Grey One had felt something of this, but had learned to expect so little, that she had not allowed herself to think about it. Only she had felt suddenly easier, perceiving the comprehension in his glance.

They had talked an hour, and were having tea. He admired some of her pictures unreservedly. They were like her voice to him--lingering, soft, mysteriously of the long-ago. Their settings were play-places that he might have imagined. She believed what he said, but did not approve of his perception. She had lost faith. It was the sailor part of him that liked her pictures.

"I had great dreams when I came to New York three years ago," she said somewhat scornfully. "For a time in Paris, I did things with little thought, and they took very well. I must have been happy. Then when I came here, all that period was gone. I was to be an artist--sheer, concentrated, the nothing-else sort of an artist. And things went so well for a time. That's queer when you think of it. The papers took me up. They gave me an exhibition at the _Smilax Club_, and not a few things were disposed of. In fact, when I learned that this studio was to be let, I was so prosperous as to consider it none too adequate for Margie Grey herself----

"Since then these things and others have been done, and they haven't struck the vogue at all. First, I thought it was just one of those changing periods which come to every artist, in which one does badly during the transition. I have continued to do badly. It was not a change of skin. I have become sour and ineffectual, and know it----"

"You won't mind if I say you are wrong?" Bedient asked quietly.

"No," she laughed. "Only please don't tell me that I'm only a little ahead of my time; that presently these things will dart into the public mood, and people will squabble among themselves to possess them----"

"I might have told you just that--if you hadn't warned me.... I like your woods; they're the sort of woods that fairies come to; and I like your fields and afternoons--I can hear the bees and forget myself in them. I _know_ they're good."

The Grey One whipped out a match and cigarette from the pocket of her blouse, lit it and stared at her covered easel. "You have your way, don't you?" she asked, and her lips were tightened to keep from trembling.

"It isn't a way," he said. "It's a matter of feeling. I never judge a book or picture, but when I _feel_ them, they are good to me. I would have stopped before some of these in any gallery, because I feel them. They make me steal away----"

"I'm hard-hearted and a scoffer," she said, holding fast. "It isn't that I want to be--oh, you are different. I don't believe you were ever _tired_!... I see what David Cairns meant about your coming up here out of the seas with a fresh eye--and all your ideals.... Don't you see--we're all tired out! New York has made us put our ideals away--commercial, romantic--every sort of ideal.... Oh, it's harder for a woman to talk like this than for a man; she's slower to learn it. When a woman does learn it, you may know she carries scars----"

The Grey One arose. She looked tall and gaunt, and her eyes had that burning look which dries tears before they can be shed. He did not hasten to speak.

"It's crude to talk so to you, but you came _to-day_," she went on. "I had about given up. The race--oh, it's a race to sanctuary right enough--but so long!... In the forenoons one can run, but strength doesn't last."

With a quick movement, the Grey One tossed up the covering from the easel. He saw a girl in red, natty figure, piquant face. It was not finished. She was to stand at the head of a saddle-horse, as yet embryonic. She stepped hastily to a little desk and poked at a formidable pile of business-looking correspondence.

"Do these look like an artist's communications?" she asked in the dry pent way that goes with burning eyes.... "They are not, but letters to one who paints for lithographers' stones! See here----"

And now she lifted a couch-cover, and drew from beneath a big portfolio which she opened on the floor before him. It was filled with flaring magazine covers, calendars, and other painted products having to do with that expensive sort of advertising which packing-houses and steel-shops afford. _Girls_--girls mounted side and astride, girls in racing-shells and skiting motor-boats, in limousines and runabouts, in dirigibles and 'planes;--seaside, mountain and prairie girls; house-boat, hunting and skating girls; even a vivid parlor variety--all conventional, colorful and unsigned.

"Eight years in Europe for these," she said in a dragging, morbid tone. "And the letters on the table say I may do more, as the managers of shirt-waist factories might say to poor sewing-women when business is good. And they pay piece-work prices just the same; and they want girls, not real girls, but things of bright paint like these! Oh, they know what they want--and they must be common in order to suit--girls of just paint----"

"And women of just flesh," said Bedient. "New York has shown me that about so many men!"

This startled her--made her forget the sailor part. It was particularly in the range of her mood that moment, and seemed finished.

"You're going to feel a lot better, and soon," he went on. "It's going to be much better than you think----"

She drew suddenly back, hatred altering her features as a gust of wind on the face of a pool.

"You mean my marriage?" she asked, clearing her voice.

"I did not know that you were to be married," he said quickly. "I'm sorry not to have been clearer. I meant the days to come through your work--and nothing more."

"A few have heard that I'm to be married," she said. "I thought you had heard. As a matter of fact, it is not settled. Oh, I have croaked to you terribly--please forgive me!"

"That first night, I felt that we were old friends at once," he added, rising and standing before her. "The next day, you said it was just like a dream--the night before--and it was the same to me. We went up to Miss Nettleton's on the minute, just as if we were old playmates, and you had said, 'Let's----'... So to-day, you have only told an old friend things--trying things--exactly as you should. And I--I think you're brave to have done so well--for so long. I like New York better. I'm coming again. I like your pictures. They are not just paint.... Hasn't anyone told you--don't you know--that it wouldn't hurt you at all to do the others--if your real pictures were just paint? And since you are driven to do them, and don't do them out of greed, nor through commonness, nor by habit, they can't hurt your real work? I really believe, too, that it is what you have done that will help you, and bring the better times, and not what anyone else will do.... I seem to be talking a great deal--as I could not at all, except for the sense of an old friend's authority, and to one I have found rare and admirable. Believe me, I have very good eyes,--New York has not printed its metal soul upon you."

The Grey One had listened with bowed head. A tall woman is at her loveliest, standing so. She regarded his face searchingly for an instant, smiled, and turned away.

* * * * *

Bedient asked no one. He did not know that the race Marguerite Grey was running was with American dollars, and that the sanctuary she meant was only a debtless spinsterhood. He did not know that she dared not give up the Handel studio while she held a single hope of her vogue returning. Only the great, who are permitted eccentricities, dare return to their garrets. Nor did Bedient know that her marriage meant she had failed utterly, and that another must square her debts; that only out of the hate of defeat could she give herself for this price.... Still, Bedient knew quite enough.

It was a little later, after he had been truly admitted into the circle he loved so well, that Beth told him the story of the Grey One's first collision with the man world. It was a rainy afternoon; they were together in the studio he always entered with reverence.

"She is different from Vina," Beth said, speaking of Marguerite Grey. "She has been working fearfully and she's not made for such furious sessions as Vina Nettleton can endure. Vina seems replenished by her own atmosphere. She told me once that when her work is coming well, her whole body sings, all the functions in rhythm. Aren't people strange? That little soft thing with baby hands! Why, her physical labor alone some days would weary a strong man--and that is the thoughtless part.

"But I was telling you about the Grey One. Sometimes I think she is more noble than we understand--one of those strange, solitary women who love only once. At least, she seems to ask only success in her work, and what that will bring her." Beth thought a moment of the horrible alternative which she did not care to explain to Bedient. "A few years ago in Europe--just a young thing, she was, when she met her hero. He was a good man, and loved her. I knew them both over there. In the beginning, it was one of those really golden romances, and in Italy. One day, a woman came to the Grey One, and in the lightest, brassiest way, asked to be congratulated on her engagement, mentioning the man whose attentions Marguerite had accepted as a heavenly dispensation. This was in Florence. The woman hurried away that day for London. The Grey One, just a gullible girl, was left half dead. When her lover came, she refused to see him. He wrote a letter which she foolishly sent back, unopened. And she returned to Paris--all this in the first shock.... She did not hear from him again for two years. Word came that he was married--no, not to that destroyer, but to a girl who made him happy, let us hope. The Grey One penetrated then to the truth. He had only a laughing acquaintance with the other woman to whom he was one of several chances. Leaving Florence, she had crippled the Grey One. This is just the bare fact--but it is enough to show how the lie of a worthless woman--kept Marguerite from happiness. And she has remained apart.... It is said that the Grey One encountered the destroyer here in New York a few months ago, the first time since that day in Florence. So natural was evil to this woman, that she did not remember, but came forward gushingly--and would have kissed her victim...."

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

A CHEMISTRY OF SCANDAL

Beth had seen Andrew Bedient almost daily for three weeks. Many wonderful moments had been passed together; indeed, there were moments when he reached in her mind that height he had gained at once in the ideals of Vina Nettleton. But he was sustained in Vina's mind, while Beth encountered reactions.... "I believe he is beyond sex--or fast going beyond--though he may not know it," Vina had said in effect.... On the contrary, the Shadowy Sister had sensed a lover in the room. Beth had perceived what Vina meant--the mystic who worshipped woman as an abstraction--but it had also come to her, that he could love _one_.

Beth would not trust the Shadowy Sister, but was determined to judge Bedient according to world standards. Plainly she attracted him, but could not be sure that her attraction was unique, though she always remembered that he had told of his mother only to her. He had a different mood, a different voice almost, for each of the other women of their acquaintance. His liking for the Grey One mystified Beth; Vina Nettleton had charmed him, brought forth in a single afternoon many intimate things from his depths. He spoke pleasantly of Mrs. Wordling.

The Shadowy Sister was bewitched. To her a great lover had come--a lover who had added to a boy's delicacy and beauty of ideal, a man's certainty and power. This was the trusting, visionary part of Beth, that had not entered at all into the other romance. Beth refused now to be ruled by it. The world had hurt her. The fault was not hers, but the world's. The only profit she could see to be drawn from her miseries of the past was to use her head to prevent repetition. Hearts were condemned.

And yet, the contrasting conduct of the Shadowy Sister in this and that other romance, was one of the most astonishing things in Beth's experience. (Sailor-man had but to enter and speak, for Shadowy Sister to appear in kneeling adoration.)

Often Bedient was allowed to stay while she worked at other things. His own portrait prospered slowly, a fact in which the world might have found humor. And often they talked together long after the slanting light had made work impossible; their faces altered in the dim place; their voices low.... There were moments when the woman's heart stirred to break its silence; when the man before her seemed bravely a man, and the confines of his nature to hold magnificent distances. If she could creep within those confines, would it not mean truly to live?... But the years would sweep through her mind--grim, gray, implacable chariots--and in their dusty train, the specific memories of fleshly limitation and untruth. To survive, she had been forced to lock her heart; to hold every hope in the cold white fingers of fear; cruelly to curb the sweep of feminine outpouring, lest its object soften into chaos; and roused womanhood, returning empty--overwhelm. This is the sorriest instinct of self-preservation.

She would have said at this time that Andrew Bedient had not aroused the woman in her as the Other had done. Indeed, she paled at the thought that the Other had exhausted a trifle, her great force of heart-giving. There had been beauty in such a bestowal--pain and passion--but beauty, too.... Another strange circumstance: Bedient had made her think of the Other so differently. She had half put away her pride; she might have been too insistent for her rights. The Other really had improved miraculously from the poor boy who had come to their house. And to the artist's eye, he was commandingly masculine, a veritable ideal.... Bedient was different every day.

The visit to the gallery, too, had given Beth much to think over. What he had said about the pictures, especially before the one he had called _The Race Mother_, had revealed his processes of mind, and made her feel very small for a while. She saw that all her own talk had not lifted from herself, from her own troubles, and certain hateful aspects of the world; while his thoughts had concerned the sufferings of all women, and the fruitage that was to come from them. She had talked for herself; he for the race. But he had merely _observed_ the life of women, while she had lived that life.

Why did Andrew Bedient continue to show her seemingly inexhaustible sources of fineness, ways so delicate and wise that the Shadowy Sister was conquered daily, and was difficult to live with? It is true that Bedient asked nothing. But if the hour of asking struck, what should she say to him? (Here Shadowy Sister was firmly commanded to begone.) Beth had not been able to answer alone.... Could Vina Nettleton be right? Was her studio honored by a man who was beyond the completing of any woman? If so, why did Shadowy Sister so delight in him? Or was this proof that he was not designed to be the human mate of woman? These were mighty quandaries. Beth determined to talk about prophets when he came again.... Her friends told her she hadn't looked so well in years.

Beth drew forth at length a picture of the Other Man, that she had painted recently from a number of kodak prints. The work of a miniature had been put upon it. A laughing face, a reckless face, but huge and handsome. Before her, was the contrasting work of the new portrait. The two pictures interested her together.... Bedient was at the door. It was his hour. Beth placed the smaller picture upon the mantle, instead of in its hidden niche--and admitted the Shadowy Sister's Knight....

"I saw Vina yesterday," she observed, after work was begun. "She was still talking about prophets and those other things you said----"

"What a real interest she has," Bedient answered. "She has asked me for a _Credo_--in two or three hundred words--to embody the main outline of the talk that day. Perhaps it can be done. I'm trying."

"How interesting!"

"If one could put all his thinking into a few pages, that would be big work."...

After a pause, Beth said:

"Don't think I'm flippant if I ask: How do these men who, in their maturity, become great spiritual forces, escape being caught young by some perceiving woman?"

"I'm not so sure the question could be put better," Bedient said. "There is often a time in the youth of men, to whom illumination comes later, when they hang divided between the need of woman and some inner austerity that commands them to go alone."

"If they disobey, does the light fail to come?" Beth asked.

"It is less likely to come. But then, often the youth of such men is spent in some great passion for an unattainable woman, a distant star for the groping years. In other cases, women have divined the mystic quality, and instead of giving themselves, have held the young visionaries pure. Again, poverty, that grim stepmother of the elect, often intervenes. And to common women--such lovers are absurd, beyond comprehension. That helps.... Illumination comes between the age of thirty and forty. After that, the way is clear. They do not grope, they see; they do not believe, they feel and know."

Beth found these things absorbing, though she accepted them only tentatively. She saw they were real to him--as bread and wool and paint.

"There is an impulse, too, among serious young men to live the life of asceticism and restraint," Bedient added. "It comes out of their very strength. This is the hasty conclusion of monasteries----"

"Hasty?"

"Well--unfledged saints fall.... Their growth becomes self-centred. The intellect expands at the expense of soul, a treacherous way that leads to the dark.... And then--a man must father his own children beautifully before he can father his race."

"That sounds unerring to me," Beth said.

"Why, it's all the Holy Spirit driving the race!" Bedient exclaimed suddenly. "You can perceive the measure of it in every man. Look at the multitude. The sexes devour each other; marriage is the vulgarest proposition of chance. Men and women want each other--that is all they know. They have no exquisite sense of selection. In them this glorious driving Energy finds no beautiful surfaces to work upon, just the passions, the meat-fed passions. Here is quantity. Nature is always ruthless with quantity, as cities are ruthless with the crowds. Here is the great waste, the tearing-down, and all that is ghastly among the masses; yet here and there from some pitiful tortured mother emerges a faltering artist--her dream."

"You never forget her, do you,--that figure which sustains through the darkness and horror?"

"I cannot," he smiled. "No race would outlast a millenium without her. Such women are saviors--always giving themselves to men--silently falling with men."

"But about the artist?" Beth asked. "What is his measure of the driving Energy? How does it work upon him?"

"He has risen from the common," Bedient replied. "He feels the furious need of completion, some one to ignite his powers and perfect his expression. It is a woman, but he has an ideal about her. He rushes madly from one to another, as a bee to different blooms. The flesh and the devil pull at him, too; surface beauty blinds him, and the world he has come from, hates him for emerging. It is a fight, but he has not lost, who fails once. The women who know him are not the same again. The poor singer destroys his life, but leaves a song, a bit of fastidiousness. The world remembers the song, links it with the destroyed life, and loves both.

"But look at the mother-given prophets standing alone, militant but tender, the real producers! The spirit that sparks fitfully in the artist is a steady flame now. Their giving is to all, not to one. What they take of the world is very little, but through them to the world is given direct the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul and the Forerunner are the highest types, and in perspective. Their way is the way of the Christ, Who showed the world that unto the completed union of Mystic Womanhood and militant manhood, is added Godhood.

"There are immediate examples of men maturing in prophecy," Bedient concluded. "Men in our own lives almost--Whitman, Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth. See the poise and the service which came from their greater gifts. Contrast them with the beautiful boys who searched so madly, so vainly, among the senses--Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Poe. What noble elder brothers they are! More _con_tent, they have, more soul-age, more of the visioning feminine principle.... And see how flesh destroys! In the small matter of years they lived, the prophets more than doubled the age of the singers. Their greatest work was done in the years which the lyric-makers did not reach.... The great masses of the world have not yet the spark which shows itself in the singing poetic consciousness. Such men are mere males, leaning upon matter, soldiers and money-makers, pitifully unlit, chance children, without fastidiousness, but all on the road."

"There will be plenty, yes, more than plenty," said Beth, "to take the places of those, who confine their parenthood to the race."

Bedient was gone, and though his incorruptible optimism was working more than ever in her heart, that which she had sought to learn, had not come. Prophet or not, his smile at the door had left something volatile within her, something like girlhood in her heart. He had not overlooked the picture upon the mantel. Twice she had looked up, and found him regarding it.... It was the late still time of afternoon. Beth felt emotional. She ran over several songs on the piano, while the dusk thickened in the studio. One was about an Indian maiden who yearned for the sky-blue water; another about an Irish Kathleen who gave her lover to strike a blow for the Green; and still another concerned a girl who would rather lie in the dust of her lord's chariot than be the ecstasy of lesser man. Beth Truba's face was upturned to the light--to the last pallor of day. She was like a wraith singing and communing with the tuneful tragedies of women world-wide. But there was gaiety in her heart.... Then the knocker, the scurrying of dreams away, and the voice of Marguerite Grey in the dark.

"Most romantic--song, hour and all," she said, while Beth turned on the lamps.

"Beth Truba is naturally so romantic----"

"Possibly the piano could tell tales; I know my 'cello could," said the Grey One. "Beth, dear, I am touching wood, and praying to preserve 'an humble and a contrite heart,' but reeking with commerce. Sold three pictures--real pictures. The one that was hanging at Torvin's so long was sold four days ago, and Torvin immediately took two more----"

"Margie Grey, there are few things you could tell to make me happier," Beth exclaimed, coming forward with both hands out.

"I know it. That's why I came."

"With Torvin interested, anything is liable to happen. He's one of the few in New York who know, and those who buy carefully know he knows. Really we should celebrate.... Let's get Vina to go with us, and we three set out in search of an absurd supper----"

Beth phoned at once. Her part was utterly disconnected. She put up the receiver, smiling.

"What have you to say--about those two going out to dinner?"

"Vina and David Cairns?"

"Exactly."

A long, low talk followed, but Beth did not tell that she had spurred David to look deeply into Vina's case, through a remark made by Andrew Bedient.... The Grey One was emancipated, restless. She bloomed like a lily as she moved about the studio, above the shaded reading-lamps. Beth felt her happiness, the intensity of it, and rejoiced with her. Bedient came in for discussion presently, and the park episode. Beth, who had not heard, grew cold, and remembered her own call at Mrs. Wordling's apartment, with the poster.... The Grey One was speaking as if Beth had heard about the later park affair:

"... Sometimes that woman seems so obvious, and again so deep."

"I have failed to see the deep part," Beth ventured, turning her face from the light.

"Evidently she interests Mr. Bedient."

"I wonder if she really does?" Beth said idly. The Grey One was not a tale-bearer. She would not have spoken at all, except granting Beth's knowledge.

"I don't like to see him lose caste that way," the Grey One went on. "He's too splendid, and yet she's the sort that twirls men. She knows he has interested all of us, and doubtless wants to show _her_ strength. Possibly he hasn't thought twice about it. That's what Vina says. And then Mrs. Wordling was one of those first asked to meet him. I wish David Cairns hadn't done that----"

"David's idea was all right," Beth said slowly. "He thought one of her kind would set us all off to advantage. Then, I was painting her poster----"

"It would have been only a little joke in a man's club, but the _Smilax_ took to it as something looked and yearned for long.... Two things appear funny to me. Mrs. Wordling has lived at the Club part of the year for three years, and yet didn't know the Park was locked at midnight. And she, who has done all the crying about consequences, was the one who told me----"

Beth was beginning to understand. Here was an opening such as she had awaited: "What is her story?" she asked.

"Why, they met between eleven and twelve coming into the Club--one of those perfect nights. Wordling dismissed her carriage and talked a little while before going in. The Park looked inviting for a stroll--full moon, you know. They crossed. Wordling didn't know or had forgotten about midnight locking. 'His talk was so interesting,' she said.... It was after one, when Mr. Bedient hailed a page at the Club entrance."

"From inside the bars, across the street?" Beth asked.

"Of course. The boy came over with the keys."

"How clumsy and uninteresting, even innocence of that sort can be!" Beth remarked. "And Mrs. Wordling was so zealous for you to hear that she told you herself?"

"That _is_ rather humorous, isn't it?" the Grey One agreed. "Of course she supposed I had heard, and wanted to be sure the truth came to me. I think, too, she wanted me to know that Mr. Bedient had invited her to go to the shore for a few days--later. She asked if I thought she had better go----"

"And you told her?" Beth managed to say.

"Just as you would, that she was an adult and must use her own judgment."

"Exactly," said Beth, and then a sentence got away from her, though she contrived to garb it in a laugh. "He won't go to the shore with Mrs. Wordling!... Wait until I get my hat."

* * * * *

In the little room alone, she saw that the long dark road must be traversed again; the chains had fallen upon her anew--their former wounds yet unhealed.... The old lies and acting; the old hateful garment for the world to see; suffering beneath a smile. She must hear the voice of Beth Truba lightly observing and answering, while _she_--the heart of her--was deathly ill.

Her throat tightened; it seemed her breast must burst with old and new agonies. Once more she had given her full faith. This was clear now. She had been a weakling again, and tumultuously, in spite of an ugly warning! Had she not called at Wordling's apartment with the poster? Had she not heard the whispers, the overturned chair and scornfully fathomed the delayed answering of the door?... And to think she had almost succeeded in putting that rankling incident away, though he had not been in New York a month. And the shame of it, the recent hours she had spent, with this visionary thing; that _he_ was beyond mating with a woman of flesh--beyond her best--a forerunner with glad tidings for all women!... Forerunner, indeed, and twice caught in a second-rate woman's net of beguilings! Twice caught, and how many times uncaught?... And she had thought herself hard and sceptical in his presence.

The old romance looked clean and fair compared to this--the old lover, boyish and forgivable. He had not won by preaching.... Where was the Shadowy Sister now?

There was no quarter for Beth. She was a modern product, a twentieth century woman, an angry, solitary, world-trained woman, who could not make a concession to imperfect manhood. This was the key to all her agonies. She had asked manhood of mind, and could not accept less. The awful part was that she must do over again all the hateful strategies, all the concealing and worldliness--her body, mind and soul sorely crippled from before. That she must thus use her womanhood, her precious prime of strength. One experience had not hardened her enough. With what corrosion of self-hatred did she turn upon herself that moment!

Her intellect had faltered; the Shadowy Sister had betrayed; David Cairns had been consummately stupid; Vina Nettleton was soft with dreams, and not to be reckoned with in the world; Vina could tell her woes, but she, Beth Truba, must not scream nor fall. She must face the woman in the other room, sit across a lighted table for an hour, and talk and laugh. Her heart cried out against this, but pride uprose to whip--Beth's iron pride finished under the world's mastery. Slowly, rhythmically, the blows fell. Beth could not run away.

She stretched out her fingers, which were biting into her palms, drenched her face with cold water, breathed for a minute by the open window like a doe in covert.... There was ammonia, and she inhaled the potent fumes....

"_Pale hands I loved
Beside the Shalimar----"

hummed the Grey One, from the open sheet on the piano.

Beth faltered at the door, for the song hurled her back to an hour ago with bruising force. She re-entered the little room--to fix her hat....

"You weren't long, Beth," the Grey One said.

"No?... I'm glad of that, but speaking of glad things, let us not forget Torvin."

Beth was already turning out the lights.

"You look a little tired, dear," the Grey One said in the elevator.

"It's the time of day," Beth responded readily. After being in all day, and suddenly deciding to go out, haven't you felt a tension come over you as if you could hardly wait a minute?"

"Many times, dear, as if one must snatch hat and gloves and get into the street at any cost."

* * * * *

Beth came in alone about ten, sighed as the latch clicked, and sat down in the dark. But she rose again in a moment, for she didn't like the dark. She was worn out, even physically; and yet it was different now from the first reaction. Bedient had not continued to fit so readily to commonness, as in those first implacable moments in the little room. He had never judged anyone in her presence; had spoken well of everyone, even of Mrs. Wordling. He was no intimidated New Yorker, who felt he must conduct himself for the eyes of others.

Mrs. Wordling had not shown the quality to hold the fancy position she aspired to, in the little circle of artists at the Club; and retaliated by showing her power over the lion of this circle. She had challenged him to cross the street, knowing they would be locked in and that the Club would hear. She had desired this, having nothing to lose. For fear the Grey One had not heard, she had told the story. The recent agony in the little room was great, above the Wordling's expectations.... And now Beth faltered. Had Andrew Bedient asked her to join him somewhere on the shore? She could not see him asking this; and yet, regarded as a fiction plunge, it seemed bigger and more formidable than Wordling could devise.

This must wait. This must prove. If he went away--enough! She had been hasty and implacable once--this time she would wait.

Beth would have liked to talk with David Cairns, but she could not bring up such a subject. This was not her sort of talk-material with him. Plainly he would not mention it, in the hope that her ears had missed it entirely.

She had even felt a rage against the Grey One for bringing the news. This helped to show how maddened and unjust she was, in those first terrible moments. Piece by piece she had drawn the odious thing from her caller, who was by no means inclined to spread and thicken the shadow of an evil tale. Marguerite Grey was not a weigher of motives, nor penetrative in the chemistry of scandal. So many testimonies had come to her of the world's commonness that she had become flexible in judgment. What had been so terrible at first was to identify Andrew Bedient with these sordid things, so obvious and shallow. But was he identified with them? Rather, did he not feel himself sufficiently an entity to be safe in any company? Did he not trust her, and worth-while people, to grant him this much?... This was the highest point in the upsweep of her thoughts.

So the story extracted from the Grey One was held free from its fatal aspect, until time should dissolve the matter of the shore.... After all, the lamplight, usually soft and mellow in the gold-brown room, held an alien, unearthly glitter for Beth's strained eyes.... Was it that which kept the Shadowy Sister afar, as the light from the colored pane in the hall of his boyhood had frightened _him_?

TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER

THE SINGING DISTANCES

David Cairns was coming along. He had ridden his ego down stream, until he heard the rapids. Now he was towing it back. He planned to go just as far and as fast up stream as he could. The current, to him, had become the crowd. One can see the crowd as it brushes past, as one can never see it from the ruck.... Sometimes it came to him in a flash, that this new David Cairns was but another lie and pose--but this couldn't hold. It was a bit of deviltry that wouldn't stand scrutiny. There had been too much unfolding o' nights; too many gifts found upon the doorstep of his mind in the morning, revealing the sleepless activity of something identified with him, but wiser than he; too much cutting down of false cultures, and outpourings of sincere friendship, and general joy of giving. Then, there was some real clean-cut thinking that expressed itself with brevity and finish; and also, the wonder-working in his heart--the happiest thing that had ever befallen--his conception of the genius of woman in Vina Nettleton.

Cairns' experience with women was not nearly so large as it looked. He had known many women, but impersonally. He was late to mature, and all his younger energies were used for what he had believed to be the world's work, but what he now perceived were the activities of a vain, ego-driven intellect, that delighted to attract the passing eye by the ring of the anvil and a great show of unsleeved muscle. Much of this early work had kept him afield, and his calls home to New York had inflicted upon him the fatal stimulus for quantity. His still earlier years were passed in a home where a placid mother reigned, and a large family of sisters served. He, therefore, met the world's women without that mighty tang of novelty which features the young manhood of the unsistered.

He had undergone his mannish period of treason to women generally. These were the days when he believed in using force--punishing with words--"punch," he called it. This is a mental indelicacy which the ordinary man seldom outgrows. His crowning fact is that dynamite will loosen stumps and break rock. Therefore, all that is not dynamite is not proper man-stuff. Woman, to this sort, is something between "an angel and an idiot." She must be guarded from herself in all that has to do with thought and performance. As panderer and caterer, she emphatically belongs. Young men grasp this. If they reach middle age with it, only an angel can roll the stone away.

Cairns now realized he had been near to missing one of the greatest moments that come into the life of man. What chance has the ordinary male--half-grown, except physically--of ever glowing with real chivalry? To him women are easy, common, plentiful, without mystery or lofty radiance. How can the valor of humility brighten his quest? How can _he_ be a lover--who does not realize his poverty, his evil, the vastness of his need? What does it mean to the mere male, this highest of earthly gifts, the glance from a woman which ends his quest of her, the gift of herself? To be great and a man, and a lover, he must reach that point of declaration which holds: _Without her, I am an outcast; with her I can alter worlds!_ A transcendent moment of conquest is the winning of a woman, to such a spirit....

A frightful void stretches between mere man and reality.... Mere man must be baptized in spirit to feel the anguish that is woman's, to give her _real_ treasures to some male. Which are the greater artists and producers, the saviors of the race? Those heroines who survive the heart-break of man's indelicacy, and manage alone to give their treasures to their children. The art of such women lives, indeed. David Cairns was coming along.

The work that Andrew Bedient began in the Cairns mind and heart was being finished by Vina Nettleton. In great thirst of soul, he had come to her and been restored. He was very eager to leave all he had in the shelter of the palms.

"David," Bedient had said, "there is only one greater work for a man in the world than making a woman happy; and that--making _all_ women happier! It seems that an avatar must come for that soon. To-day the great gifts of women are uncalled for by men. They cannot take each other, save in physical arms. There is a barrier between the sexes. Man has not learned, or has forgotten, the heart-language. What a need for lovers! If one could look into the secret places of women, across the world's table, into the minds of women who hate and are restless, and whose desires rove; even into the minds of those who actually venture beyond the man-made pale, he would see over all the need of lovers!... Give a woman love, and she will give the world lovers, and we shall have brotherhood singing in our ears.... David, I ask you only to look at the genius born of woman, in and out of wedlock, during the first days of her mating with a man whom she believes to be all that she has cried out for. He may have destroyed every hope afterward, sacked every sanctuary, but, if she trembled close to her great happiness in the beginning, the child of such a beginning has glory upon his brow!"

Cairns was ready to see; ready to read this in the history of men. More than this, he was ready to flood fresh dawns of light into the tired eyes of Vina Nettleton, and upon her pallor make roses bloom. Moreover, he could discern in her an immortal artist, the conception of which changed him from a male to a man.

And of this seeing came another needed conception: that intellectual arrogance is the true modern devil; that the ancient devil, desire of flesh, is obvious, banal, and commonplace, compared to this.... He dared to bring his realizations to a woman, and found that she had a crown for each and every one. And he learned to talk to her about things vital to men and women, and found that this was the strangest, grandest and most providential hour in the world--this newest hour.

It was with a rich and encompassing delight that Cairns discovered Vina's fineness, endurance, delicacy, and intuition. He was humble before her spirit, for he had become sensitive to that which was mystic and ineffable. He saw through her, a sanction and authority for his own future years, her light upon the work he must do. The animation of his mind in her presence was pure with service. And Vina awakened, for she saw with trembling, what is a miracle to a modern woman's eyes, man's delight to honor that which is most truly woman's. So her girlhood crept back.

* * * * *