Chapter 8

All things considered, it was rather an important affair--the party that night at the _Smilax Club_. Cairns began with the idea of asking ten people, but the more he studied Bedient's effect upon himself, the more particular he became about the "atmosphere." Just the men he wanted were out of reach, so he asked none at all, but five women. Four of these he would have grouped into a sentence as "the most interesting women in New York," and the fifth was a romantic novelty in a minor key, sort of "in the air" at the Club.

So there were seven to sit down to the round table in the historic Plate Room. The curving walls were fitted with a lining of walnut cabinets. Visible through their leaded-glass doors, were ancient services of gold and silver and pewter. The table streamed with light, but the faces and cabinets were in shadow.... Directly across from Bedient sat Beth Truba, the most brilliant woman his visioning eyes ever developed.

The sight of her was the perfect stimulus, an elixir too volatile to be drunk, rather to be breathed. Bedient felt the door of his inner chambers swing open before fragrant winds. The heart of him became greatly alive, and his brain in grand tune. It is true, she played upon his faculties, as the Hindus play upon the _vina_, that strange, sensitive, oriental harp with a dozen strings, of which the musician touches but one. The other strings through sympathetic vibration furnish an undertone almost like an æolian harmony. You must listen in a still place to catch the mystic accompaniment. So it was in Bedient's mind. Beth Truba played upon the single string, and the others glorified her with their shadings. And the plaint from all humanity was in that undertone, as if to keep him sweet.

She was in white. "See the slim iceberg with the top afire!" Cairns had whispered, as she entered. Other lives must explain it, but the Titian hair went straight to his heart. And those wine-dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like a night-sky above a prairie-fire, said to him, "Better come over and see if I'm tamable."

"I can see, it's just the place I wanted to be to-night," she said, taking her chair. "We're going to have such a good time!"

And Kate Wilkes drawled this comment to Cairns: "In other words, Beth says, 'Bring on your lion, for I'm the original wild huntress.'"

Kate Wilkes was a tall tanned woman rather variously weathered, and more draped than dressed. She conducted departments of large feminine interest in several periodicals, and was noted among the "emancipated and impossible" for her papers on Whitman. The romantic novelty was Mrs. Wordling, the actress, and the other two women were Vina Nettleton, who made gods out of clay and worshipped Rodin, and Marguerite Grey, tall and lovely in a tragic, flower-like way, who painted, and played the 'cello.

"Meeting Bedient this time has been an experience to me," Cairns said, toward the end of dinner. "I called together the very finest people I knew, because of that. He had sailed for ten years before I knew him. That was nearly thirteen years ago. Not that there's anything in miles, nor sailing about from port to port.... He has ridden for the English since, through the great Himalayan forests--years so strange that he forgot their passing.... We are all good friends; in a sense, artists, together, so I can say things. One wants to be pretty sure when one lets go from the inside. I didn't realize before how rarely this happens with us.

"The point is, Bedient has kept something through the years, that I haven't. I'm getting away badly, but I trust what I mean will clear up.... Bedient and I rode together with an American pack-train, when there was fighting, there in Luzon. He was the cook of the outfit, and he took me in, a cub-correspondent. I look back now upon some of those talks (with the smell of coffee and forage and cigarettes in the night air) as belonging to the few perfect things. And last night and the night before, we talked again----"

Cairns' eye hurried past Mrs. Wordling, but he seemed to find what he wanted in the glances of the others, before he resumed:

"Without knowing it, Bedient has made me see that I haven't been keeping even decently white, here in New York. I found out, at the same time, that I couldn't meet him half-way, when he brought the talk close. Back yonder in Luzon, I used to. Here, after the years, I couldn't. Something inside is green and untrained. It shied before real man-talk.... Bedient came into a fortune recently, the result of saving a captain during a long-ago typhoon. His property is down in Equatoria, where he has been for some months. So he has had a windfall that would be unmanning to most, yet he comes up here, just as unspoiled as he used to be----"

"David," Bedient pleaded, "you're swinging around in a circle. Be easy with me."

"You've kept your boy's heart, that's what I'm trying to get at," Cairns added briefly.

Kate Wilkes dropped her hand upon Bedient's arm, and said, "Don't bother him. It looks to me as if truth were being born. You'd have to be a city man or woman to understand how rare and relishable such an event is."

"Thanks, Kate," said Cairns. "It's rather difficult to express, but I see I'm beginning to get it across."

"Go on, please."

Cairns mused absently before continuing:

"Probably it doesn't need to come home to anyone else, as it did to me.... I've been serving King Quantity here in New York so long that I'd come to think it the proper thing to do. Bedient has kept to the open--the Bright Open--and kept his ideals. I listened to him last night and the night before, ashamed of myself. His dreams came forth fresh and undefiled as a boy's--only they were man-strong and flexible--and his voice seemed to come from behind the intention of Fate.... I wouldn't talk this way, only I chose the people here. I think without saying more, you've got what I've been encountering since Bedient blew up Caribbean way."

Cairns leaned back in his chair with a glass of _moselle_ in his hand and told about the big lands in Equatoria, about the two Spaniards, Jaffier and Rey, trying to assassinate each other under the cover of courtesy; about the orchestrelle, the mines and the goats. Cleverly, at length, he drew Bedient into telling the typhoon adventure.

It was hard, until Beth Truba leaned forward and ignited the story. After that, the furious experience _lived_ in Bedient's mind, and most of it was related into her eyes. When he described the light before the break of the storm, how it was like the hall-way of his boyhood, where the yellow-green glass had frightened him, Beth became paler if possible, and more than ever intent. Back in her mind, a sentence of Cairns' was repeating, "His voice seemed to come from behind the intention of Fate."... Finally when Bedient told of reaching Equatoria, and of the morning when Captain Carreras nudged bashfully--wanting his arm a last time--Beth Truba exclaimed softly:

"Oh, no, that really can't all be true, it's too good!" and her listening eyes stirred with ecstasy....

She liked, too, his picture of the _hacienda_ on the hill.... The party talked away up into the top of the night and over; and always when Bedient started across (in his heart) to tame the wine-dark eyes--lo, they were gone from him.

TENTH CHAPTER

THE JEWS AND THE ROMANS

Kate Wilkes lived at the _Smilax Club_, as did Vina Nettleton, and, for the present, Mrs. Wordling. The actress was recently in from the road. Her play had not run its course, merely abated for the hot months. She was an important satellite, if not a stellar attraction. About noon, on the day following the party for Bedient, Mrs. Wordling appeared in the breakfast room, and sat down at the table with Kate Wilkes, who was having her coffee.

"What an extraordinary evening we had," the actress remarked. "David's party was surely a success."

"Rather," assented Miss Wilkes, who felt old and nettled. She seemed of endless length, and one would suppose that her clothes were designed so that not one bone should be missed. Mrs. Wordling was not an especial favorite with her.

"They made it up beautifully between them, didn't they?" the actress observed, as she squeezed orange-juice into her spoon.

"What?"

"That story."

"Who?"

"Why, that story--that friendship, storm-at-sea, Equatoria story--done jointly by Messrs. Cairns and Bedient."

"You think they rehearsed it, then?" Kate Wilkes asked softly.

"Why, of course. It unfolded like a story--each piling on clever enthusiasm for the other."

There was a slight pause.

"And so you think David Cairns simulated that fine touch, about discovering through his friend, what damage New York was doing him?" Kate Wilkes' manner was lightly reflective.

"Of course. Don't you remember how he stumbled until you helped him going?"

"You think--as I understand it----" Miss Wilkes had become queerly penetrative, and spoke in a way that made one think of a beetle being pinned through the thorax, "----that David Cairns merely used his artistic intelligence for our entertainment; that Andrew Bedient is merely an interesting type of sailor and wanderer who has struck it rich?"

"Why, yes, Kate, that's the way it got over to me. We all know David Cairns is selling everything he writes at a top-figure; that he is eminently successful, quite the thing in many periodicals, finely pleased with himself as a successful man----"

"Wordling," said Kate Wilkes, leaning toward her, "what kind of people do you associate with in your work?"

"The best, dear,--always the best. People who think, and who love their work."

Slowly and without passion the elder woman now delivered herself:

"People who _think_ they think and who love themselves!... I have tried to make myself believe you were different. You are not different, Wordling. You are true to your kind, and not distinguished from them. David Cairns never rehearsed a part with Andrew Bedient. Men as full of real things as these two do not need rehearsals. Bedient came up from his Island, and all unconsciously made his old companion realize that he was not breathing the breath of life here in New York. Cairns wept over it, and made up his mind to try again; and fine chap that he is, he called a few of his friends together, to give us a chance to see the thing as he saw it. I call it an honor that he invited me. I see you do not. Unfortunately this is one of those differences of opinion which are at the base of things.... Luck to you, Wordling," she finished, rising. "I feel seedy and have a busy afternoon ahead."

Mrs. Wordling laughed delightedly, though boiling lava ran within and pressed against the craters. Alone, she asked herself what Kate Wilkes had done to get away with eccentricities, to which only those of stardom are entitled.

"Hag," she muttered, after such conning.

* * * * *

Bedient was early abroad in the city, having felt entirely above the need of sleep. He was less serene than usual, but with compensations. There was a peculiar fear in his mind that New York was laughing at him a bit. Perhaps, Cairns had pressed down a little too hard on the queer unhurt quality he was alleged to possess. In a word, Bedient sensed the humor of Mrs. Wordling, and could not yet know that she, of the entire company, monopolized the taint.

The _Smilax Club_ pleased him, and he had permitted Cairns to put him up there.

That flame of a woman, Beth Truba, was the spirit of his every thought. Her listening had drawn the soul from him. The great thing had happened; and yet it was different from the way he had visioned it.... Never had a woman so startled him with the sense of the world's fullness--in that she was in the world. That he had found her was his first achievement, true reward of deathless faith; and yet it was all so different. She was different. She had not known him.

In the amplitude of his wanderings, one conception had grown slightly out of proportion. He saw this now, and smiled affectionately at the old thought: "When The Woman appears, I shall not be alone in the gladness of the moment."... Those were mountain-tops of dreaming upon which he strode without reckoning. It would have been absurd, had Beth Truba given him a sign. This was not India, nor the Dream Ranges.... She had faced life, lived it among the teeming elements of this vast city. The world had wrought upon her, while she wrought her place in the world. She was finished, an artist, a woman of New York, wise, poised, brilliant. It was the world's ideals, and not those of the silence and the spirit, altogether, that governed her manner and dress and movement. She had not lived in the silence; therefore that which was of the silence had been kept among the deep inner places of her life. The secrets of her heart were deeper than mere man's leaden fathomings. Even had he appeared unto her as an illumination--only Beth Truba would have known.

He did not come into great peace in her presence. No matter what she dreamed of, or desired, the lover could only come to her in the world's approved ways. So, all the accumulated beauty of idealism counted nothing in this first stage of Bedient's quest. Instead of the peace of her presence, he was filled with restless energies, past all precedent. Quite in a boyish way, he wanted to do things for her, huge and little things, forgetting not the least, and performing each succeeding action with a finer art.

Beth Truba was the first woman who ever appealed to Bedient, without recalling in some way the Adelaide passion. There was hardly a trace of that element in the new outpouring. If it is true that a woman calls from man a love-token in her own image, Beth Truba was marble cold. The larger part of his first giving was above the flesh, a passion to bestow beautiful things, the happiness of others. That she might ever have any meaning to him beyond receiving these gifts, scarcely entered, as yet, his thrilled consciousness. It _had_ startled him that she was seemingly free; that she had reached full womanhood in solitary empire. He dared be glad of this, but he could not grasp it, unless she were vowed to spinsterhood by some irrevocable iron of her will; or perhaps some king of men had come, and she had given her word.... Bedient could not understand how any discerning masculine mind could look upon Beth Truba, and go his way without determining his chance. He felt (and here he was "warm," as they say in the children's game) that David Cairns must be one of the men who had seen Beth Truba and not conquered. Perhaps Cairns would tell him regarding these things, but they were altogether too sacred to broach, except in the finest possible moment.

He had returned to the club early in the afternoon, and was standing at one of the windows, his eyes turned toward the green square opposite. He was thinking of the enchantress, and how she would admire the shower-whipped hills of Equatoria and all that wild perfumed beauty.... His name was softly spoken by one of the regal shadows of the night before, Marguerite Grey.

"If I hadn't seen you or Mr. Cairns again," she began, "I'd have come to think of last night almost as a dream."

"That's queer, Miss Grey," he answered, taking her hand. "It's like a dream to me, too."

"I didn't feel like working to-day," she said. "The routine appalled me, so I came over to look in upon Vina Nettleton. Her studio is above. Have you seen her 'Stations of the Cross'?"

"No."

"Her four years' task--for the great Quebec cathedral?... You really must. It's an experience to watch her work, and Vina's worth knowing--pure spirit.... Would you like to go up with me?"

Alternating fascinations possessed Bedient, as the elevator carried them upward.... These were his real playmates, these people of pictures and statues. He had come a long way through different lights and darkness to find them. He did not know their ways of play, but well knew he should like them when he learned, and that their play would prove prettier than any he had ever known.... And this tall, still woman beside him--almost as tall as he, of rarest texture, and with a voice sensuously soft, having that quality of softness which distinguishes a charcoal from a graphite line--this woman seemed identified in some remoteness of mind with long-ago rainy days, of which there had been none too many.... Her voice seemed to lose direction in his fancy, loitering there, strangely enticing.... _"Would you like to go up with me?"_... And these were Beth Truba's friends....

A bell was touched in the high hall, and Vina Nettleton's plaintive tone trailed forth:

"Won't you come right in--please--into my muddy room?"

A large room opening upon a steel fire-frame, where two could sit, and a view of the city to the North. Commandingly near on the left arose the Metropolitan Tower. The studio itself had an unfinished look, with its step-ladders and scaffolding and plaster-panels. In the midst of such ponderous affairs, stood a frail creature in a streaky blouse, exhibiting her clayey hands and smiling pensively. It was only when you looked at the figures in the panels, and at the models in clay, that Vina Nettleton appeared to belong to these matters of a contractor. Marguerite Grey was saying:

"When I get too weary, or heart-sick, tired of my own work, in the sense of being bored by its commonness----"

"Wicked woman," murmured Vina.

"When the thought comes that I should be a cashier in a restaurant," the other went on, in her sadly smiling way, speaking altogether to Bedient, "I come to this place. Here is an _artist_, Mr. Bedient. Vina has been working at these things for two years. She has still two years to finish within her contract. These are her prayers; they will live in the transept of a great cathedral."

"Don't mind the Grey One, Mr. Bedient," Vina Nettleton said lightly. "We are dear friends."

Bedient lost himself in the study of the veins which showed through the delicate white skin of Vina's temples. He was moved to personal interest by this woman's work. The room was intense with the figures about, and the artist's being. He was sure Marguerite Grey did not know all that concerned her friend, the full meaning, for instance, of the shadows that began at the inner corners of her eyes and flared like dark wings outward. There was something tremendous in the frail, small creature, an inner brightness that shone forth through her white skin, as light through porcelain. Bedient granted quickly that there was power here to make the world remember the name of Vina Nettleton; but he knew she was not giving _all_ to these creatures of clay. He had never sensed such a mingling of emotions and spirit.... "Pure spirit," the Grey One had said. Possibly it was so to the world, but he would have said that the spirit of Vina Nettleton was fed by emotion--seas, woods, fields, skies and rivers of emotion--and that mighty energies, unused by the great task, roamed in nightly anguish.

Bedient moved raptly among the panels. He wondered how the artist had made the light fall upon the dull clay, always where the Christ stood or walked or hung.... "And how did you know He had such beautiful hands?" he asked.

Vina Nettleton looked startled, and the Grey One came closer, saying: "I'm glad you see that. To me the hands are a particular achievement. Do you notice the fine modelling at the outer edges of the palms, and the trailing length of the fingers?"

"Yes," said Bedient, "as if you could not quite tell where the flesh ended and the healing magnetism began."

Vina Nettleton sat down upon one of the steps of a ladder and stared at him. The Grey One added:

"And yet you cannot say they are overdone. They are the hands of an artist, but not assertively so."

"It is my limitation that I don't know," he said, "but how is that effect obtained, that suggestion of psychic power?"

"Part is your sensitiveness of eye and understanding," the Grey One answered, "and the rest comes from our little woman making a prayer of her work; from taking an image of Him and the Others into the dark; of light, ascetic sleep and putting away the dreams of women----"

Scarlet showed under the transparent skin of the Nettleton temples now--as if putting away the dreams of women were not an unqualified success.

"It is all interesting. I am grateful to you both for letting me come," Bedient said with strange animation, eager yet full of hesitancy. "More wonderful than the hands, is the Face, which Miss Nettleton has kept averted throughout her entire idea. That's the way the Face appears to me. The disciples and the multitudes must have seen it so, except on rare, purposeful occasions.... He must have been slight and not tall, and delicate as you see Him. It was not that He lacked physical endurance, but He was worn, as those about Him did not understand, with constant inner agony. That was His great weariness.... It was not an imposing Figure. Nothing about Him challenged the Romans. They were but abandoned boys who bowed to the strength that roars, and the bulk that makes easy blood-letting. Even in custody, He was beneath the notice of most Romans, so inflamed and brutish from conquest were they; and Pilate, though the Tragic Instrument, was among the least ignoble of them----'"

Bedient felt vaguely the interest of Vina Nettleton in what he was saying. It was a remarkable moment. His mind was crowded with a hundred things to say; yet he was startled, diffident, in spite of the joy of speaking these things aloud.

"What a hideous time of darkness!" he added in the silence. "The Jews were but little better than the Romans. They were looking for a king, a Solomon sort of king with temples and trappings and sizable authorities. Isn't it divine irony, that the Messianic Figure should appear in the very heart of this racial weakness of the Jews? And their lesson seems still unlearned. New York brings this home to-day.... So, to the Jews and the Romans, He was insignificant in appearance. His beauty was spiritual, which to be recognized, requires spirituality--a feminine quality.

"And among the disciples: Hasn't it occurred to you again and again how their doubting egos arose, when His face was turned away? Poor fellows, they were bothered with their stomachs and their places to sleep; they quarrelled with the different villagers, and doubtless wished themselves back a hundred times to their fishing-banks and kindred employments, when the Christ moved a little apart from them. I can see them (behind His back), daring each other to approach and make known their fancied injustices and rebellions. It was so with the multitudes before they looked upon His countenance.

"But when He turns, whether in sorrow or in anger, the look is invincible.... That is always true, whether the Face is turned upon one, or the Twelve, or the multitude--in the crowded market-place, or by the sea where the many were fed, or on the Mount--perfect tributes of silence answered His direct attention, and all spiteful, petty ego outcroppings vanished.... So there were two Figures: One, a man, slender, tired and tortured; and an Angel Countenance, before whose lustrous communications all men were abased according to their spirit."

He paused, but the women did not speak....