Fate Knocks at the Door Part 17

"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 pa.s.sage was ended. I saw him standing in the rain among the steerage pa.s.sengers of an Atlantic steamer--and suddenly through the gray rushing clouds, appeared the G.o.ddess of Liberty. He had come home at last--to a port of freedom and peace and equality----"

"G.o.d 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 s.e.x 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, a.n.a.lyzing, 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 a.n.a.lyze, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed without temptation from one to another of the vast traps which catch the mult.i.tude; 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 grat.i.tude 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 l.u.s.ts, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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.

One morning--it was one of the first of the May mornings--there was 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 rea.s.sure, 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 t.i.tle."

"But, why do you try to fit such a poor shivering little t.i.tle?"

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 pa.s.sing 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.