Bedient went on. "They probably bothered a great deal after I stole
away, and tried to find me. But they didn't.... And I went down where
there were ships. I think the ships fascinated me, because _we_ had
come on one. I slipped aboard, and fell asleep below. The sailors found
me after we had cleared. They were very good, and called me 'Handy.'...
I think my mother must have taught me my letters, for when an old
sailor, with rings in his ears, pointed out to me the name of the ship
on the jolly-boat, the letters came back to me. I was soon reading the
Bible. That was the book I cut my teeth on, as they say.... And one
time, as we were leaving port, I thought I had better have a name. One
of the men had asked me, you see, and I was only able to say, 'Handy.'
And just then, we passed an old low schooner. She had three masts; her
planking was gray and weathered, and her seams gaped. On her stern, I
saw in faded sprawly letters, that had been black:
"ANDREW BEDIENT
"Of--somewhere, I couldn't make out. So I took that for my name. It
fitted 'Handy' and the little boy's idea of bigness and actuality,
because I had seen it in print.... I never saw the old schooner again.
I don't know the port in which she lay at the time; nor the port where
my mother died. You see, I was very little.... Everyone was good to me.
And it is true that my mother was near.... There were places and times
that must have put dull care into her eyes, but she was the true
sentry. I only _knew_ when I was asleep."
It was beautiful to Beth, the way he spoke. His heart seemed to say,
"God love her!" with every sentence.
Her lips breathed the words, her eyes had long questioned:
"And your father?"
The room suddenly filled with her fateful words.
"My father?" he repeated. "He was never with my mother. I did not
understand until long afterward, but she meant me to understand--that
she was not married. She impressed it upon my consciousness _for_ me to
understand--when I was older."
Beth could have knelt in her humility that moment.
"Please forgive me for asking," she faltered.
"It was right. I intended to tell you."
Some strange, sustaining atmosphere came from him. His words lifted
her. Beth saw upon his brow and face the poise and fineness of a
love-child.... With all the mother's giving there had been no name for
him; and he had told her with all the ease and grace of one who knows
in his heart--a mother's purity of soul.... It was hard for Beth to
realize, with Bedient sitting there, that the world makes tragic
secrets of these things he had told her; that lives of lesser men have
been ruined with the fear of such discoveries.... Nothing of so intense
and intimate appeal had ever come to her studio, as the heroism of this
mother, impressing upon her tortured and desperate child, that though
taken from him, she would be near always.... The sensitive Vina had
seemed to see the mother _near_ him, her hand upon his head, saying
with a laugh, "This is my Art--and he _lives_!"
Beth spoke at last: "You honor me, Mr. Bedient, in telling me these
deep things."
"This seemed the place," he said, leaning forward. "It's extraordinary
when I recall I have only been here an hour or so. It would seem absurd
to some women, but the story knew where it belonged.... In fact, it is
hard for me to remember that this is our first talk alone.... Perhaps
you should know, that I've never spoken of my mother to anyone else....
I never could find the port where she died."
They learned that they could be silent together.... Beth knew that she
would have extended conference with the Shadowy Sister when alone. Big
things were enacting in the depths. There was another thing that Vina
had said regarding the appeal of Bedient personally to her, which
required much understanding.... Beth had found herself thinking (in
Bedient's presence) that she might have been hasty and imperious in
sending the Other away. She had been rather proud of her iron courage
up to this hour. Of course, it was ridiculous that Bedient should
recall the Other, and after months suggest her unreasonableness; yet
these things recurred.... Moreover, a moment after Bedient's entering,
there had been no embarrassment between them. Not only had they dared
be silent, but they had not tried each other out tentatively by talking
about people they knew. Then he had said it was hard for him to
remember this was their first talk together alone. Beth realized that
here was a subject who would not bore her before his portrait was
finished.
"Does David Cairns know Miss Nettleton very well?" Bedient asked, as he
was leaving.
She smiled at the question, and was about to reply that they had been
right good friends for years, when it occurred that he might have a
deeper meaning.
Bedient resumed while she was thinking: "I know that he admires her
work and intelligence, but he never spoke to me of any further
discoveries. Perhaps he wouldn't.... He's a singularly fine chap, finer
than I knew.... I noticed a short essay in your stand that contains a
sentence I cannot forget. It was about a rare man who 'stooped and
picked up a fair-coined soul that lay rusting in a pool of tears.'"
"Browning," she said excitedly.
"Yes.... Good-by and thank you.... To-morrow?"
"Yes."
* * * * *
He left her in the whirl of this new conception. She was taking dinner
with David Cairns that night. David, she felt, had arranged this for
further urging in the matter of her seeing his friend. And now she
smiled at the surprise in store for him; then for a long time, until
the yellows and browns were thickly shadowed about her, Beth sat very
still, thinking about the Vina Nettleton of yesterday, and the altered
and humble David Cairns of the past fortnight.... In the single saying
of Bedient's, that he had found Cairns finer than he knew, there was a
remarkable, winsome quality for her perception. Bedient had started the
revolution which was clearing the inner atmospheres of his friend; and
yet, he refused any part.
David took her for dinner to a club far down-town--a dining-room on the
twentieth floor, overlooking the rivers and the bay, the shipping and
the far shores pointed off with lights.... They waited by a window in
the main hall for a moment while a smaller room was being arranged.
Forty or more business men were banqueting in a glare of light and
glass and red roses--a commercial dinner with speeches. The talk had to
do with earnings, per cents, leakages, markets and such matters. The
lower lid of many an eye was updrawn in calculation.
Beth shivered, for she saw avarice, cunning, bluff, campaigning with
humor and natural forces. "The starry night and the majestic rivers
might just as well be plaster-walls," she whispered. "What terrible
occupations are these to make our brothers so dull, bald and
stodgy-looking?"
"It's their art," said Cairns. "They start in merrily enough, but it's
a fight out in the centre of the current. You see them all of one
genial dining-countenance, yet this day they fought each other in the
streets below, and to-morrow again.... It's not only the sweep of the
current, but each other, they have to fight.... Oh, it's very easy for
an artist to look and feel superior, Beth, but we know very well how
much is sordid routine in our own decenter games--and suppose we had
been called to money-making instead. It would catch us young, and we'd
either harden or fail."
... They were taken to a place of stillness and the night-view was
restoring.... Though Cairns had just left Bedient, he had not been told
about the portrait nor the first sitting. Beth wondered if Bedient
foresaw that she would appreciate this. She was getting so that she
could believe anything of the Wanderer. For a long time they talked
about him.... Cairns already was emerging from the miseries of
reaction; new ways of work had opened; he was fired with fresh growth
and delights of service. Beth was charmed with him.... At last she
said:
"Nor has Mr. Bedient missed those rare and subtle things which make
Vina Nettleton the most important woman of my acquaintance."
The sentence was a studied challenge.
"You mean in her work?" he said, under the first spur.
"Did I say _artist_? I meant woman--'most important woman'----"
"That's what you said."
"Yes, I thought so----" Beth shaded the interior light from her eyes to
regard the night through the open window. "It was misty gray all day,
and yet it is clear now as a summer night."
"And so Bedient sees more than a remarkable artist in Vina?" Cairns
mused.
"That much is for the world to see.... Why, those dollar-eating
gentlemen in the big room could see that, if they interested themselves
in her kind of work. But they are not trained to know real women. Their
work keeps them from knowing such things. When they marry a real woman,
it's an accident, largely. A diadem of paste would have caught their
eyes quite as quickly. Sometimes I think they prefer paste jewels....
Only here and there a man of deep discernment reads the truth--and is
held by it. What a fortune is that discernment! A woman may well
tremble before that kind of vision, for it is her own, empowered with a
man's understanding----"
"Why, Beth, that's Bedient's mind exactly!" Cairns exclaimed. "A
woman's vision of the finest sort, empowered with a man's
understanding----"
"Of the finest sort," Beth finished laughingly. "By the way, that's a
good definition of a prophet, isn't it?"
"It does work out," he said, thinking hard.
Beth observed with interest at this point, that Bedient had confined
his discussion of the visioning feminine principle to Vina. There were
several approaches to his elevation.
"How glorious it is to see things, David!" she exclaimed happily. "Even
to see things after they are pointed out. And you--I'm really so glad
about you! You're coming along so finely, and putting away boyish
things."
She reached across the table and dropped her hand upon his sleeve.
"It's so tonic and bracing to watch one's friend burst into bloom!... I
needed the stimulus, too. You are helping me."
It was Cairns' turn to shade his eyes for a clearer view of the night.
SIXTEENTH CHAPTER
"THROUGH DESIRE FOR HER"
David Cairns left Beth at her elevator, and walked down the Avenue
toward Gramercy. It was still an hour from midnight. As he had hoped,
Bedient was at the Club. The library was deserted, and they sat down in
the big chairs by the open window. The only lights in the large room
were those on the reading table. The quiet was actually interesting for
down-town New York.
"I've been out hunting up music," Bedient said. "There is a place
called the _Columbine_ where you eat and drink; and a little Hungarian
violinist there with his daughter--surely they can't know how great
they are! He played the _Kreutzer Sonata_, the daughter accompanying as
if it were all in the piano, and she just let it out for fun, and then
they played it again for me--"
Cairns laughed at his joy. Bedient suddenly leaned forward and regarded
him intently through the vague light. "David," he said, "you're looking
fit and happy, and I'm very glad to see you." This was a way of
Bedient's at unexpected moments.... "Do you know, it's a marvellous
life you live," he went on, "looking inward upon the great universe of
ideas constantly, balancing thought against thought, seeking the best
vehicle, and weighing the effects--for or against the Ultimate
Good----"
"It appears that you had to come up here--to show me----"
"It's good of you to say so, David, but you had to be Cairns and not
New York! A woman would have shown you----"
Cairns had met before, in various ways, Bedient's unwillingness to
identify himself with results of his own bringing about. Beth had long
realized his immaturity, yet she had not spoken. Cairns saw this now.
"A woman would have shown me----?" he repeated.
"That the way to heaven is always against the crowd," Bedient
finished.... "A few days after I came to New York, you joined me at the
Club. You said you couldn't work; that you found your mind stealing
away from the pages before you. I knew you were getting closer to real
work then. David, when you find yourself stealing mentally away to
follow some pale vision or shade of remembrance, don't jerk up,
thinking you must get back to work. Why, you're nearer real work in
following the phantoms than mere gray matter ever will unfold for you.
Creating is a process of the depths; the brain is but the surface of
the instrument that produces. How wearisome music would be, if we knew
only the major key! How terrible would be sunlight, if there were no
night! Out of darkness and the deep minor keys of the soul come those
utterances vast and flexible enough to contain reality."
"Why don't you write, Andrew?" Cairns asked.
"New York has brought one thought to my mind with such intensity, that
all others seem to have dropped back into the melting-pot," Bedient
answered.
"And that one?"
"The needs of women."
"I have heard your tributes to women----"
"I have uttered no tributes to women, David!" Bedient said, with
uncommon zeal. "Women want no tributes; they want truth.... The man who
can restore to woman those beauties of consciousness which belong to
her--which men have made her forget--just a knowledge of her
incomparable importance to the race, to the world, to the kingdom of
heaven--and help woman to make men see it; in a word, David, the man
who can make men see what women are, will perform in this rousing hour
of the world--the greatest good of his time!"
"Go on, it is for me to listen!"
"You can break the statement up into a thousand signs and reasons,"
said Bedient. "We hear such wonderful things about America in Asia--in
India. Waiting for a ship in Calcutta, I saw a picture-show for the
first time. It ran for a half hour, showing the sufferings of a poor
Hindu buffeted around the world--a long, dreary portion of starvation,
imprisonment and pain. The dramatic climax lifted me from the chair. It
was his heaven and happiness. His stormy passage was ended. I saw him
standing in the rain among the steerage passengers of an Atlantic
steamer--and suddenly through the gray rushing clouds, appeared the
Goddess of Liberty. He had come home at last--to a port of freedom and
peace and equality----"
"God have mercy on him," murmured Cairns.
"Yes," said Bedient, "a poor little shaking picture show, and I wept
like a boy in the dark. It was my New York, too.... But we shall be
that--all that the world in its distress and darkness thinks of us, we
must be. You know a man is at his best with those who think highly of
him. The great world-good must come out of America, for its bones still
bend, its sutures are not closed.... You and I spent our early years
afield with troops and wars, before we were adult enough to perceive
the bigger conflict--the sex conflict. This is on, David. It must clear
the atmosphere before men and women realize that their interests are
_one_; that neither can rise by holding down the other; that the
present relations of men and women, broadly speaking, are false to
themselves, to each other, and crippling to the morality and vitality
of the race.
"You have seen it, for it is about you. The heart of woman to-day is
kept in a half-starved state. That's why so many women run to cultists
and false prophets and devourers, who preach a heaven of the senses. In
another way, the race is sustaining a tragic loss. Look at the young
women from the wisest homes--the finest flower of young womanhood--our
fairest chance for sons of strength. How few of them marry! I tell you,
David, they are afraid. They prefer to accept the bitter alternative of
spinsterhood, rather than the degrading sense of being less a partner
than a property. They see that men are not grown, except physically.
They suffer, unmated, and the tragedy lies in the leakage of genius
from the race."
Cairns' mind moved swiftly from one to another of the five women he had
called together to meet his friend.
"David," Bedient added after a moment, "the man who does the great
good, must do it _through_ women, for women are listening to-day! Men
are down in the clatter--examining, analyzing, bartering. The man with
a message must drive it home through women! If it is a true message,
they will _feel_ it. Women do not analyze, they realize. When women
realize their incomparable importance, that they are identified with
everything lovely and of good report under the sun, they will not throw
themselves and their gifts away. First, they will stand together--a
hard thing for women, whose great love pours out so eagerly to
man--stand together and demand of men, Manliness. Women will learn to
withhold themselves where manliness is not, as the flower of young
womanhood is doing to-day.... I tell you, David, woman can make of man
anything she wills--by withholding herself from him.... _Through his
desire for her_!... This is her Power. This is all in man that
electricity is in Nature--a measureless, colossal force. Mastering that
(and to woman alone is the mastery), she can light the world. Giving
away to it ignorantly, she destroys herself."
... So much was but a beginning. Their talk that night was all that the
old Luzon nights had promised, which was a great deal, indeed.... It
was not until Cairns was walking home, that he recalled his first idea
in looking in upon Bedient that night--a sort of hope that his friend
would talk about Vina Nettleton in the way Beth had suggested. "How
absurd," he thought, "that is exactly the sort of thing he would leave
for me to find out!"
SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER
THE PLAN OF THE BUILDER
New York had brought Andrew Bedient rather marvellously into his own.
He awoke each morning with a ruling thought. He lived in a state of
continual transport; he saw all that was savage in his race, and missed
little that was beautiful. Work was forming within him; he felt all the
inspiritings, all the strange pressures of his long preparation. He
realized that his thirty-three years had been full years; that all the
main exteriors of man's life had passed before him in swift review, as
a human babe in embryo takes on from time to time the forms of the
great stations of evolution. He had passed without temptation from one
to another of the vast traps which catch the multitude; nor tarried at
a single one of the poisoned oasis of sense. Mother Earth had taken him
to her breast; India had lulled his body and awakened his spirit; he
had gone up to his Sinai there.
He looked back upon the several crises in which he might have faltered,
and truly it seemed to him that he had been guided through these, by
some wiser spirit, by something of larger vision, at least, than his
own intelligence. Humility and thankfulness became resurgent at the
memory of these times. Books of beauty and wisdom had come to his hand,
it seemed, at the certain particular instants when he was ready.
Exactly as he had been spared the terrible temptations of flesh in his
boyhood years, so had he preserved a humble spirit in his intellectual
attainments. It was not he, but the poise that had been given him,
through which he was enabled to cry out in gratitude this hour; for the
soul of man meets a deadlier dragon in intellectual arrogance than in
the foulest pits of flesh. The Destiny Master can smile in pity at a
poor brain, brutalized through bodily lusts, but white with anger is
the countenance that regards a spirit, maimed and sick from being yoked
together with a proud mind. Angels burst into singing when that spirit
is free.
His health was a perfect thing; of that kind that men dream of, and
boys know, but do not stop to feel. He could smell the freshness of
pure water in his bath or when he drank; there was delight in the taste
of common foods; at night in his high room, higher still than the
studio of Vina Nettleton, there were moments when the land-wind seemed
to bring delicacies from the spring meadows of Jersey; or blowing from
the sea, he sensed the great sterile open. He was tireless, and could
discern the finest prints and weaves at bad angles of light.
He moved often along the water-fronts and through abandoned districts;
a curious sense of unreality often came over him in these night
rambles, as if he were tranced among the perversions of astral light.
He gave a great deal, but saw that if he gave his life nightly, even
that would not avail. His money was easily passed into another hand;
that would not do--little vessels of oil overturned upon an Atlantic of
storm. These were but tentative givings; they denied him nothing.
Bedient saw that he must give more than this, and waited for the
way.... The most poignant and heart-wringing experience for him in New
York was suddenly to find himself in the midst of the harried human
herd, when it was trying to play. One can best read a city's tragedy at
its pleasure-places.
...Beth Truba was his great ignition. His love for her overflowed upon
all things.... The hour or more in her studio became the feature of his
day. Bedient was not shown the work on the portrait. Beth didn't
altogether like the way it progressed. Sometimes, she talked as she
worked (sitting low beneath the skylight, so that every change of light
was in her hair, while the spring matured outside). Deep realities were
often uttered thus, sentences which bore the signet of her strong
understanding, for they passed through the stimulated faculties of the
artist, engrossed in her particular expression. Thus the same
intelligence which colored her work, distinguished her sayings....
Bedient daily astonished her. Again and again, she perceived that he
had come to New York, full of power from his silences apart. She wanted
him to preserve his freshness of vision. His quiet expressions thrilled
her.
"The women I know, married or unmarried, are nearly all unhappy," she
said, one day. "My younger friends, even among girls, are afraid. They
see that men are blinded by things they can taste and see and
touch--speed, noise and show. The married women are restless and
terrified by spiritual loneliness. The younger women see it and are
afraid."
"'Had I but two loaves of bread, I should sell one to buy white
hyacinths,'" Bedient quoted; "I like to think of that line of
Mahomet's.... Women are ready for white hyacinths--the bread of
life.... But this spiritual loneliness is a wonderful sign. The spirit
floods in where it can--where it is sought after--and the children of
women who are hungry for spiritual things, are children of dreams. They
must be. They may not be happy, but they will feel a stronger yearning
to go out alone and find 'the white presences among the hills.'"
Beth was silent.
"Yearning is religion," Bedient added. "Hunger of the heart for higher
things will bring spiritual expansion. Look at the better-born children
to-day. I mean those who do not have _every_ chance against them. I
seem to catch a new tone in the murmur of this rousing generation. They
have an expanded consciousness. It is the spiritual yearnings of
motherhood."
"But what of the woman who will not take the bowl of porridge that
ordinary man gives her?" Beth demanded. "So many women dare
not--cannot--and then their dreams, their best, are not reflected in
the consciousness of the new race."
Bedient smiled, and Beth regarded her work intently, for an echo of the
confessional had come back to her from her own words.
"That is a matter so intensely individual," he replied. "We are at the
beginning of the woman's era, and with every transition there are pangs
to be suffered by those who are great enough. These great ones are
especially prepared to see how terrible is their denial from the
highest privileges of woman. And yet they may be spiritual mothers,
centres of pure and radiant energy. Every work of genius has been
inspired by such a woman. And if, as sometimes happens, a true lover
does come, the two are so happy that the temperature of the whole race
warms through them."
"What an optimist!" she said, but when alone, it came to her that he
had been less certain than usual in this answer. Perhaps, he had felt
her stress upon realizing the personal aspect; perhaps he had too many
things to say, and was not ready. It _was_ a matter intensely
individual. However, this was the only time he had failed to carry her
critical attention.
* * * * *
Bedient saw that the years had locked one door after another about the
real heart of Beth Truba. His work was plain--to unlock them one by
one. How the task fascinated; he made it his art and his first thought.
"You change so," she complained laughingly, after there had been
several sittings. "I'm afraid I shall paint you very badly because I am
trying so hard. You don't look at all the same as you did at first.
Therefore all the first must be destroyed."
Bedient knew if his work prospered, all that had been before would be
redeemed.