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.