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.
Bedient firmly believed that if women were granted (a heavenly
dispensation, it would have to be) a decade of happiness beginning now,
a decade of lovers of their own choosing, men of delicacy and wisdom,
that thirty years from now there would be that poise and sweetness in
the world that dreamers descry in far future ages. And here and there
would be a beyond-man, indeed; and here and there cosmic, instead of
mere self-consciousness.
He believed that the greatest miracle for the unsealed eye in this day,
was that woman had emerged from a degraded past with this powerful
present vitality; the capacity to hope and dream and suffer and be
aroused; that she had the fervor and power of visioning _left_ to be
aroused! Surely this was the Third of the Trinity sustaining her....
Bedient began to study with sympathy and regard those groups of women,
willing to sacrifice the best of their natures and descend into man's
spheres of action, there to wring from man on his own ground the
privileges so doggedly withheld. He saw that their sacrifice was
heroic; that their cause was "in the air"; that this was but one
startling manifestation of a great feminist seething over the world;
and yet every brightness of evolution depended, as he saw it, upon
woman being herself, retaining first of all those stores of beauty and
spirit which are designed to be her gifts to manhood and the race. In
the eyes of the future, he believed, these women would stand as the
inspired pioneers of a rending transition period.
The note that came from Beth Truba, saying that she would see him about
the portrait at two on Tuesday, Bedient regarded as one of the happiest
things that ever befell. It was delivered at the Club by messenger that
Monday night. Very well he knew, that she gracefully might have
declined, and would have, had she not been able to look above a certain
misleading event.
There were moments in which he seemed always to have known Beth Truba.
Had he come back after long world-straying?
There was a painting of Bernhardt in an upper gallery at the Club, that
he had regarded with no little emotion during past days. The face of
the greatest actress, so intensely feminine, in strangely effective
profile between a white feathery collar and a white fur hat, had made
him think of Beth Truba in a score of subtle ways. They told him that
the painting had been done by a young Italian, who had shown the good
taste to worship the creator of _La Samaritaine_.... Bedient wished he
could paint the russet-gold hair and the lustrous pallor of ivory which
shone from Beth's skin, and put upon the canvas at the last, what had
been a revelation to him, and which had carried credentials to the
Bedient throne, to the very crown-cabinet of his empire, the fine and
enduring spirit in her brilliant eyes.
They met in the studio on the business basis. It was a gray day, one of
those soft, misty, growing days. She was a trifle taller than he had
thought. Something of the world-habit was about her, or world-wear, a
professionalism that work had taught her, and a bit of humor now and
then. The studio was filled with pictures, many studies of her own,
bits of Paris and Florence, many flowers and heads. There was one door
which opened into a little white room. The door was only partly open,
and it was shut altogether presently. Bedient had only looked _within_
it once, but reverently. Besides, there was a screen which covered an
arcanum, from which tea and cakes and sandwiches came on occasion. An
upright piano, some shelves of books, an old-fashioned mantle and
fire-place; and the rest--pictures and yellow-brown hangings and
lounges. He wondered if anyone ever saw Beth's pictures so deeply as
he.... She was in her blouse. The gray light subdued the richness of
her hair, but made her pallor more luminous. She was very swift and
still in her own house.
A chair was placed for him, and Beth went back to her stool under the
light. Occasionally she asked him to look at certain pictures in her
room, studying him as he turned. She told him of adorable springtimes
in Florence; how once she had asked a beautiful Italian peasant boy to
help her with an easel, and some other matters, up a long flight of
marble steps, and he had answered, with drowsy gentleness, "Please ask
another boy, Signorina. I have dined to-day."... And Bedient watched,
when her head was bowed over the board upon her knee. Her hair, so
wonderful now in the shadows, made amazing promises for sunlit days.
Uncommon energy was in his heart, and a buoyant activity of mind that
formed, one after another, ideals for her happiness.
"Yesterday at this time," she said finally, "Vina Nettleton was here.
She spoke of your great help in her work----"
"Her studio was thrilling to me.... Altogether, getting back to New
York has been my greatest experience."
"You have been away very long?"
"So long that I don't remember leaving, nor anything about it, except
the boats and whistles, the elevated railways and the Park, and certain
strains of music. I remember seeing the animals, and the hall of that
house----"
"Where the light frightened you?"
"Yes. And I remember the bees.... I have ridden through and about the
Park several times, but I can't seem to get anything back. I felt like
asking questions, as I did long ago, of my mother."
Beth wanted to tell him that she would ride with him sometime and
answer questions, but he seemed very near the deep places, and she
dared not urge nor interrupt.
"It was very clear to me then, that we needed each other," he added. "A
child knows that. She must have answered all the questions in the
world, for I was always satisfied. I wonder that she had time to think
about her own things.... Isn't it remarkable, and I don't remember
anything she said?"
Bedient seemed to be thinking aloud, as if this were the right place to
talk of these things. They had been in the foreground of his mind
continually, but never uttered before.
"It was always above words--our relation," he went on presently.
"Though we must have talked and talked--it is not the words I
remember--but realizations of truth which came to me afterward, from
them. What a place for a little boy's hand to be!...
"I remember the long voyage, and she was always near. There were many
strange things--far too strange to remember; and then, the sick room.
She was a long time there. I could not be with her as much as I wanted.
It was very miserable all around, though it seems the people were not
unkind. They must have been very poor. And then, one night I knew that
my mother was going to die. I could not move, when this came to me. I
tried not to breathe, tried to die too; and some one came in and shook
me, and it was all red about my eyes.
"They took me to her, but I couldn't tell what I knew, though she saw
it. And this I remember, though it was in the dark. The others were
sent away, and she made a place for me on her arm, and she laughed, and
whispered and whispered. Why, she made me over that night on her arm!
"She must have whispered it a thousand times--so it left a lasting
impression. Though I could not always see her, _she would always be
near_! That remains from the night, though none of the words ever came
back. I never lost that, and it was true.... Do you see how great she
was to laugh that night?... And how she had to struggle to leave that
message on such a little boy's mind?... More wonderful and wonderful it
becomes, as I grow older. She was dying, and we had been such dependent
lovers. She was not leaving me, as it _had_ been with us, nor in any
way as she liked....
"She must have grappled with all the forces that drive the world that
night!... First, I was happy on her arm--and then, through the long
hours, and mysteriously, she implanted her message.... And see what
came of it--see her strength! The actual parting was not so
terrible--she had builded a fortress around me against that--not so
terrible as the hours before, when I tried not to breathe."
Beth did not raise her eyes as he paused. She could not speak. The
little boy had come home to her mind--like a wraith-child of her own.
She was shaken with a passion of pity.