Chapter 11

Beth laughed at the remarkable way Bedient was besieging her own studio, without appearing in person. "But Vina, you've been living like a Hindu holy man, and no one can do that in New York, not even Hindus. I order you to eat thrice daily and tire yourself physically----"

"I eat," Vina said, looking bored and helpless at the thought. "I eat and I do enough physical work to tire a stone-mason----"

"But I can see through you to the bone! I think you only imagine you take nourishment. Oh, Vina, I know your life--handling huge hard things and making them lovely with pure spirit. I must take better care of you. Tell me all about it, if it will help."

"Beth, please don't talk about pure spirit, meaning me. I used to be able to stand it, but not any more. The Grey One does that. I seem to suggest it to flesh and blood people.... I'm sure he didn't see me so. He looked at me, as if to say, oh, I don't know what!... I wish I _were_ fish-cold! I'm all overturned.... I just met Mary McCullom on the way over."

Beth had forgotten the name for the moment. She thought Vina was about to tell her of Bedient.

"Don't you remember Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile, painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly bereft and unfortunate children?"

"Oh, yes," said Beth. "I heard she had married----"

"That's just it.... Do you remember how she used to look--pinched, evaporated, as one looks in a factory blue-light? I remember calling upon her, as she was giving up her last studio. We sat on a packing-case, while they took out her pictures, one child after another, foundlings which had come to her, and which no one would take nor buy----"

"Vina, you're cruel to her!"

"Listen, and you'll see whom I'm cruel to.... I remember telling her that day what a fearsome, ineffectual thing art is anyway.... How spooky thin she looked, and her face was yellow in patches! My heart was wrung with her, the image of a little woman with no place, no heart to go to, all her dreams of girlhood turned to ghosts, fit only to run from. Then she admitted that she might marry, that a man wanted her, but her wail was that she was mean and helpless, a failure; as such it was cowardly to let the man have her, hardly a square thing for a girl to do. Well, I perked her up on that.... She took him; I don't even know him by sight, but he's a man, Beth Truba! Mind you, here was a woman who said she was so dismayed and distressed and generally bowled over by living twenty-seven years, that she hadn't the heart left to love anybody. But he took her, and he's a man----"

"That seems to charm you," Beth ventured. "'He took her, and he's a man.'"

"It does, for I just left her, and she's a wicked flaunt of womanly happiness. I tell you, she has been playing with angels, all daintily plumped out, eyes shining, hands soft and white, her neck all round and new, lips red, and her voice low and ecstatic with the miracle of it all. And 'Oh, Vina,' she whispered, 'I almost die to think I might have refused him! You helped me not to. He loves me, and oh, he's so wonderful!'... I kissed her in an awed way--and asked about him.... 'Oh, he's just a nurseryman--trees, you know, but he lo--we're so happy!'... Oh, Beth," Vina finished in a lowered voice, "something eternal, something immortal happens, when a man brings love to a thirsting woman!"

"Not tea, but strong tea," Beth observed. "Perhaps you think that's a pretty story--and perhaps it is," she added indefinitely.

Vina seemed hardly to hear. Many matters were revolving in her tired mind, and as soon as she caught a loose end, she allowed words to come, for there was some relief in thinking aloud.

"Hasn't the world done for us perfectly, Beth?" she demanded finally. "Everything is arranged for men, to suit men--it's a man's world--and we're foreigners. We're forced to stand around and _mind_, before we understand. If we speak our own language, we're suspected of sedition. And then we don't stand together. We're continually looking for some kind male native, and only now and then one of us is lucky.... Hideous and false old shames are inflicted upon us. We are hungry for many things, but appear shameless, if we say so... Beth, has it ever occurred to you that we come--I mean fair and normal women--we come from a country where there are lots of little children--?"

"The kingdom of heaven, you mean, Vina?"

"Possibly that's it. And when we get here we miss them--want them terribly. It's all _through_ us--like an abstraction. We know the way better than the natives here, but they have laws which make us dependent upon them for the way.... It has not lifted to an abstraction with our teachers, Beth. A crude concrete thing to them, a matter of rules broken or not. We must submit, or remain lonely, reviled foreigners.... Sometimes we discover a native who _could_ bring us back our own, but he's probably teaching the nearest...."

"We've got to stand together, we foreigners," Beth said laughingly. "All our different castes must stand together first--and keep the natives waiting--until in their very eagerness, they suddenly perceive that we know best----"

"It's not for us--that happy time," Vina added hopelessly. "We are the sit-tight, hold-fast pilgrims. We belong to the clay-and-paint age----"

"It's something to see that----"

"Oh, how truly _he_ sees it!"

"Your Sailor-man, does he see that, too?"

"Has he been _seeing_ other things--in your studio?" Vina asked hastily.

"Oh, no, he hasn't been here, but he has been telling David Cairns things about writing.... David has really been born again."

"Do you know, Beth," Vina declared with intensity, "he has been such an inspiration to me, that I'm afraid my 'Stations' will look like a repaired wall, half new and half old plaster."

"My work will stand an inspiration, too."

"Beth----"

"Yes."

"You know what I think of your work, but I believe the Sailor-man could give you that inspiration----"

"Perhaps I can get it through you and David Cairns," remarked Beth, who was beginning to see, and with no little amazement, that to Vina the inspiration was spiritual, impersonal. This made Bedient's influence all the more exciting.

"Oh, he'll come to you, right enough. I supposed he had.... You know I 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.