something like heart-break in the room. Up on the skylight, the
sparrows were debating whether it would rain or not. There was tension
in the air which Bedient tried to ease from every angle. Consummately
he set about to restore and reassure, but she seemed to feel her work
was faring ill; that life was an evil thing. All the brightness that
had suffused her mind from his presence, again and again, had vanished
apparently, leaving not the slightest glow behind.
"Don't bother to work on this to-day," he said. "I am not in the
slightest hurry and you are to do it wonderfully. Please be sure that I
know that.... Will you go with me to the Metropolitan galleries
to-day?"
Beth smiled, and went on deliberating before the picture. Presently,
the tension possessed her again. She looked very white in the North
light.
"Did you ever doubt if you were really in the world?" she asked after a
moment, but did not wait, nor seem to expect an answer.... "I have,"
she added, "and concluded that I only thought I was here--queer sense
of unreality that has more than once sent me flying to the telephone
after a day's work alone--to hear my own voice and be answered. But,
even if one proves that one is indeed here, one can never get an answer
to the eternal--_What for_?... I shall do a story, sometime, and call
it _Miss What For_.... A young girl who came into the world with
greatness of vitality and enthusiasm, alive as few humans are, and
believing in everything and everybody. Before she was fully grown, she
realized that she was not sought after so much as certain friends whose
fathers had greater possessions. This was terrible. It took long for
her to believe that nothing counted so much as money. It made the world
a nightmare, but she set to work to become her own heiress.... In this
struggle she must at last lose faith. This can be brought about by long
years, smashing blows and incredible suffering, but the result must be
made complete--to fit the title."
"But, why do you try to fit such a poor shivering little title?"
She smiled wearily. "I was trying, perhaps, to picture one of your
spiritual mothers, centres of pure and radiant energy, in one of the
_other_ moments, that the world seldom sees. The power is almost always
turned on, when the world is looking."
She had made him writhe inwardly, as no one else could.
"But there _are_ many such women," she went on, "victims of your
transition period, caught between the new and the old, helpers,
perhaps, of the Great Forces at work which will bring better
conditions; but oh, so helpless!... They may bring a little cheer to
passing souls who quickly forget; they may even inspire genius, as you
say, but what of themselves when they, all alone, see that they have no
real place in the world, no lasting effect, leaving no image, having no
part in the plan of the Builder?"
Bedient arose. Beth saw he was not ready to answer.
"A visit to the galleries is tempting," she said. "It may give me an
idea.... I never had quite such a patron. You are so little curious to
see what I have done, that I sometimes wonder why you wanted the
portrait, and why you came to me for it.... I wonder if it's the day or
my eyes--it's so much easier to talk aimlessly than to work----"
"It's really gray, and the sparrows have decided upon a shower."
She regarded him whimsically.
"And you look so well in your raincoat," he added.
They took the 'bus up the Avenue.... She pointed out the tremendous
vitalities of the Rodin marbles, intimated their visions, and remarked
that he should hear Vina Nettleton on this subject.
"She breaks down, becomes livid, at the stupidity of the world, for
reviling her idol on his later work, especially the bust of Balzac,
which the critics said showed deterioration," Beth told him, "As if
Rodin did not know the mystic Balzac better than the populace."
"It has always seemed that the mystics of the arts must recognize one
another," Bedient said.... "I do not know Balzac----"
"You must. Why, even Taine, Sainte Beuve, and Gautier didn't _know_
him! They glorified his work just so long as it had to do with fleshly
Paris, but called him mad in his loftier altitudes where they couldn't
follow."
It was possibly an hour afterward, when Bedient halted before a certain
picture longer than others; then went back to another that had
interested him. Moments passed. He seemed to have forgotten all
exteriors, but vibrated at intervals from one to another of these--two
small silent things--_Le Chant du Berger_ and another. They were
designated only by catalogue numbers. Beth, who knew them, would have
waited hours.... Presently he spoke, and told her long of their
effects, what they meant to him.
"You have not been here before?" she asked.
"No."
"You don't know who did those pictures?"
"No."
"Puvis de Chavannes."
"The name is but a name to me, but the work--why, they are out of the
body entirely! I can feel the great silence!" he explained, and told
her of his cliff and _God-mother_, of Gobind, the bees, the moon, the
standing pools, the lotos, the stars, the forests, the voices and the
dreams.... They stood close together, talking very low, and the
visitors brushed past, without hearing.
"If not the greatest painter, Puvis de Chavannes is the greatest mural
painter of the nineteenth century," Beth said. "Rodin, who knew Balzac,
also knew Puvis de Chavannes.... '_The mystics of the arts know one
another_,'" she added. "I saw Rodin's bust and statue of these men in
Paris."
To Beth, the incident was of inestimable importance in her conception
of Bedient.... A Japanese group interested him later--an old vender of
sweetmeats in a city street, with children about him--little girls bent
forward under the weight of their small brothers. Beth regarded the
picture curiously and waited for Bedient to speak.
"It's very real," he said. "The little girls are crippled from these
weights. The boy babe rides his sister for his first views of the
world.... Look at the sweet little girl-faces, haggard from the burden
of their fat-cheeked, wet-nosed brothers. A birth is a miss over
there--a miss for which the mother suffers--when it is not a boy. The
girls of Japan carry their brothers until they begin to carry their
sons. You need only look at this picture to know that here is a people
messing with uniforms and explosives, a people still hot with the ape
and the tiger in their breasts."
Beth was thinking that America was not yet aeons distant from this
Japanese institution, the male incubus of the girl child. She did not
speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio--of the
edginess of her temper. "Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual
mothers," she thought. She might have been very happy, but for a mental
anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning.... Hours had flown
magically. It was past mid-afternoon.... There was one more picture
that had held him, not for itself, but like the Japanese scene, for the
thoughts it incited.... An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over
the embers of a low fire. In the glow, the weary old face revealed a
bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained. The twisted
hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a
little child--which was not there.
"I would call her _The Race Mother_," Bedient said reverently. "She is
of every race, and every age. She has carried her brothers and her
sons; given them her strength; shielded them from cold winds and
dangerous heats; given them the nourishment of her body and the food
prepared with her hands. Their evils were her own deeper shame; their
goodness or greatness was of her conceiving, her dreams first. Her sons
have turned to her in hunger, her mate in passion, but neither as their
equal. For that which was noble in their sight and of good report, they
turned to men. In their counsels they have never asked her voice; they
suffered her sometimes to listen to their devotions, but hers were
given to them_.
"They were stronger. They chose what should become the intellectual
growth of the race. Having no part in this, her mind was stunted,
according to their standards. She had the silences, the bearing, the
services for others, the giving of love. She loved her mate sometimes,
her brothers often, her sons always,--and served them. Loving much, she
learned to love God. Silences, and much loving of men, one learns to
love God. Silences and services and much loving of her kind--out of
these comes the spirit which knows God.
"So while her men, like children with heavy blocks, were passing their
intellectual matters one to the other, she came to know that love is
giving; that as love pours out in service, the Holy Spirit floods in;
that spaciousness of soul is immortality; that out of the spaciousness
of soul, great sons are born.... And here and there down the ages,
these great sons have appeared, veered the race right at moments of
impending destruction, and buoyed it on."
He had not raised his voice above that low animate tone, which has not
half the carrying quality of a whisper. Beth had hoped for such a
moment, for in her heart she knew that Vina Nettleton had felt this
power of his. With her whole soul, she listened, and the look upon his
face which she wanted for the portrait lived in her mind as he resumed:
"I ask you to look how every evil, every combination of hell, has
arisen to tear at the flanks of the race, for this is history. Yet a
few women, and a few men, the gifts of women, have arisen to save....
Do you think that war or money, or lust of any kind, shall destroy us
_now_, in this modern rousing hour, with woman at last coming into her
own--when they have never yet in the darkest hour of the world,
vanquished a single great dream of a pure woman? And now women
_generally_ are rising to their full dreams; approaching each moment
nearer to that glorious formula for the making of immortals...."
He smiled suddenly into her white face. "I tell you, Beth Truba," he
said, "there isn't a phase, a moment, of this harsh hour of transition,
that isn't majestic with promise!... It's a good picture.... Dear old
mother, in every province of the soul, she is a step nearer the Truth
than man. The little matters of the intellect, from which she has been
barred for centuries, she shall override like a Brunhilde. Even that
which men called her sins were from loving.... Gaunt mother with bended
back--she has stood between God and the world; she has been the vessel
of the Holy Spirit; she _is_ the Holy Spirit in the world; and when she
shall fully know her greatness, then prophets of her bearing shall walk
the earth."
They wound through the park in the rainy dusk, emerging in Fifty-ninth
Street; and even then, Beth did not care to ride, so they finished the
distance to her studio in the Avenue crowd.
EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
THAT PARK PREDICAMENT
More May days had passed. Bedient came in from one of his
night-strolls, just as an open carriage stopped in front of the Club,
and Mrs. Wordling called his name. He waited while she dismissed her
driver familiarly.... The Northern beauty of the night was full of
charm to him. A full moon rode aloft in the blue. He had been thinking
that there was cruelty and destruction wherever crowds gathered; that
great cities were not a development of higher manhood. He thought of
the sparcely tenanted islands around the world, of Australian, Siberian
and Canadian areas--of glorious, virgin mountain places and empty
shores--where these pent and tortured tens of thousands might have
breathed and lived indeed. All they needed was but to dare. But they
seemed not yet lifted from the herd; as though it took numbers to make
an entity, a group to make a soul. The airs were still; the night
serene as in a zone of peace blessed of God. The silence of Gramercy
gave him back poise which the city--a terrible companion--had torn
apart.
"That's old John, who never misses a night at my theatre door, when
that door opens to New York," Mrs. Wordling said. "He only asks to know
that I am in the city to be at my service night or day. And who would
have a taxicab on a night like this?... Let's not hurry in.... Have you
been away?"
"No, Mrs. Wordling."
"Don't you think you are rather careless with your friends?" she asked,
as one whom the earth had made much to mourn. "It is true, I haven't
been here many times for dinner (there have been so many invitations),
but breakfasts and luncheons--always I have peeked into the farthest
corners hoping to see you--before I sat down alone."
"I have missed a great deal, but it's good to be thought of," he said.
"You didn't mean, then, to be careless with your friends?"
"No."
"I thought you were avoiding me."
"If there were people here to be avoided, I'm afraid I shouldn't stay."
"But supposing you liked the place very much, and there was just one
whom you wished to avoid----"
He laughed. "I give it up. I might stay--but I don't avoid--certainly
not one of my first friends in New York----"
"Yes, I was a member of the original company, when David Cairns'
_Sailor-Friend_ was produced.... How different you seem from that
night!" she added confidentially. "How is it you make people believe
you so? You have been a great puzzle to me--to us. I supposed at first
you were just a breezy individual, whom David Cairns (who is a very
brilliant man) had found an interesting type----"
"So long as I don't fall from that, it is enough," Bedient answered.
"But why do you say I make people believe----?"
Mrs. Wordling considered. "I never quite understood about one part of
that typhoon story," she qualified. "You were carrying the Captain
across the deck, and a Chinese tried to knife you. You just mentioned
that the Chinese died."
"Yes," said Bedient, who disliked this part of the story, and had
shirred the narrative.
"But I wanted to hear more about it----"
"That was all. He died. There were only a few survivors."
Mrs. Wordling's head was high-held. She was sniffing the night, with
the air of a connoisseur. "Do you smell the mignonette, or is it Sweet
William? Something we had in the garden at home when I was little....
Are you afraid to go across in the park--with _me_?"
"Sailors are never afraid," he said, following her pointed finger to
the open gate.
They crossed the street laughingly. There had been no one at the Club
entrance.... They never determined what the fragrance was, though they
strolled for some time through the paths of the park, among the thick
low trees, and finally sat down by the fountain. The moonlight, cut
with foliage, was magic upon the water. Bedient was merry in heart. The
rising error which might shadow this hour was clear enough to him, but
he refused to reckon with it. He was interested, and a little troubled,
to perceive there was nothing in common in Mrs. Wordling's mind and
his. They spoke a different language. He was sorry, for he knew she
could think hard and suddenly, if he had the power to say the exact
thing. And that which he might have taken, and which her training had
designed her both to attract and exact, Bedient did not want. All her
sighs, soft tones, suddennesses and confidences fell wide; and yet, to
Mrs. Wordling, he was too challenging and mysterious for her to be
bored an instant. Their talk throughout was trifling and ineffectual,
as it had begun. Mrs. Wordling was not Bedient's type. No woman could
have dethroned Beth Truba this hour. Bedient was not sorry (nothing he
had said seemed to animate) when Mrs. Wordling arose, and led the way
to the gate... which had been locked meanwhile.
Mrs. Wordling was inclined to cry a little. "One couldn't possibly
climb the fence!" she moaned.
"They have keys at the Club, haven't they?" Bedient asked.
"Yes. All the houses and establishments on the park front have keys.
It's private--that far.... I should have known it would be locked after
midnight. Our talk was so interesting!... Oh, one will die of exposure,
and the whole Club will seethe."
Bedient patted her shoulder cheerfully, and led the way along the fence
through the thick greenery, until they were opposite the Club entrance.
He had not known the park was ever locked. He saw disturbance
ahead--bright disturbance--but steadily refused to grant it importance.
He was sorry for Mrs. Wordling.
"Let the Club seethe, if it starts so readily," he observed.
The remark astonished his companion, who had concluded he was either
bashful to the depths, or some other woman's property, probably Beth
Truba's.
"But you men have nothing to lose!" she exclaimed.
"I ask you to pardon me," Bedient said quickly. "I had not thought of
it in that way."
They were watching the Club entrance. One o'clock struck over the city.
Mrs. Wordling had become cold, and needed his coat, though she had to
be forced to submit to its protection. At last, a gentleman entered the
Club, and Bedient called to the page who appeared in the doorway. The
boy stepped out into the street, when called a second time. Bedient
made known his trouble. The keys were brought and richly paid for,
though Bedient did not negotiate. The night-man smiled pleasantly, and
cheered them, with the word that this had happened before, on nights
less fine.
* * * * *
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."