"Spirituality, a feminine quality?"

"To me, always," said Bedient, his eyes lit with sudden enthusiasm.

"The Holy Spirit _is_ Mystic Motherhood. It is divinely the feminine principle.... Look at the world's prophets, or take Saint Paul, for he is in finished perspective. Completely human he is, unconquerable manhood ignited by the luminous feminine quality of the soul. There he stands, the man born again of the Holy Spirit, or Mystic Motherhood....

Now look at Jesus, a step higher still, and beyond which our vision cannot mount. Here is the prophet risen to G.o.dhood--the union of Two, transcendent through that heavenly mystery--the adding of a Third!

Doesn't it clear for you startlingly now? It did for me. Here is the _Three in One in Jesus_--the G.o.dhood of the Father, the manhood of the Son, and the Mystic Motherhood of the Holy Spirit. So in the radiance of the Trinity--Jesus arose--'the first fruits of them that slept.'"

There was a light knock at the door. The face of the Grey One was like a wraith, motionless and staring at him. Vina Nettleton looked up from her soiled hands, which had streaked her face.... She moved suddenly to the door, but did not touch it.

"Go away," she said intensely. "I can see no one."

Her eyes seemed to burn along the frame. There was no answer from without, but a light step turning away.... a.s.sured that the visitor was gone, Vina turned back to Bedient.

"We mustn't be interrupted--nor must you go yet," she said with effort.

"I don't think anything ever happened to me so important. Oh, I don't mean for my work; believe me in _that_, won't you? Since a little girl, I have thought of these things. And here for two years they have been about me. To me the Third of the Trinity has been as a voice calling out of darkness. They told me when I was a bit of a girl that It was not for me to understand, and that terrible men committed the deadly sin of blasphemy through It----"

"Poor child," Bedient said, smiling at her. "They didn't know. Could anything be lovelier for one to think about? The Holy Spirit as the source of the divine principle in Woman, and Woman ever so eager to give the spiritual loaf to man! That's the richest thought to me. After _that_ is realized, all one's thinking must adjust itself to it; as in Hindu minds, all thoughts adjust to reincarnation, and flow from it....

There is a tender glow of spirit, a sort of ignition of the narrative, in every instance where a woman approaches the Christ in His mission on earth. And men seem to find no meaning in these wonderful things....

The women of this world _are_ the symbols and the vessels of the Holy Spirit. It is only through woman's love that It can be given to the race. I like to think of it this way: _As a woman brings a child to her husband, the father, so the Holy Spirit--Mystic Motherhood--is bringing the World to G.o.d, the Father. And Jesus is the first fruits_."

The women regarded each other in silence. Bedient stayed, until the tardy May dusk effaced the city, all but the myriad points of light.

ELEVENTH CHAPTER

TWO DAVIDS COME TO BETH

Beth Truba awoke late. Goliath of Gath had just fallen with obituary hiccoughs and a great clatter of armor.... She sat up, and reviewed recent events backward. The stone had sunk into the forehead. David came down to meet the giant smiling. There was no anger about it. The stone had been slung leisurely. Before that, the boy had been brought in from his sheep-herding to be anointed king. Samuel had seen it in a vision, and not otherwise.... David found Saul's armor irksome, took up his staff, and went to the brook for good, sizable stones, just as if he had spied a wolf slavering at the herds from the brow of the hill....

Beth laughed, and wondered why the Bible story had come back in her dream. There seemed no clue, not even when she contemplated the events of the rather remarkable evening preceding. Many minutes afterward, however, arranging her hair, she found herself repeating:

"_Now he was ruddy, and withal, of a beautiful countenance."_ Finally it came to her, and she was pleased and astonished: Throughout the evening, Beth had felt that some Bible description exactly fitted in her mind to the new impression of Bedient, but she could not think of it then. Her effort had brought it forth in the night, and the whole story that went with it.

Beth drank a bottle of milk, ashamed of the hour, though she had not slept long. She loved mornings; New York could never change her delight in the long forenoon. She was at work at two, and undisturbed for two hours. Beth's studio was the garret of an old mansion, a step from Fifth Avenue in the Thirties. Its effect, as one entered, was golden at midday, and turned brown with the first shadows.

Mrs. Wordling called at four. For a woman who had been scornfully a.n.a.lyzed by Kate Wilkes (who really could be vitriol-tongued) and ordered away from Vina Nettleton's door like an untimely beggar, Mrs.

Wordling looked remarkably well. In point of fact, Mrs. Wordling was ungovernably pretty. Moreover, she knew Kate Wilkes well enough to understand that she was too busy to sketch the characters of other women except for their own benefit. As for Vina Nettleton, the cloistered, she could do as she liked, being great in her calling; besides, a woman who had a man-visitor so rarely as Vina Nettleton, might be expected to become snappy and excited. Bedient was proving a rather stiff drug. Mrs. Wordling now wished to observe his action upon Beth Truba. "I'll appear to regard it as a perfectly lady-like party, which it was," she mused, in the dingy interminable stairways,--the elevator being an uncertain quant.i.ty--"and run no risk of being thrown three nights."

"Beth, you're looking really right," Mrs. Wordling enthused.

"So good of you," said Beth. "Must be lovely out, isn't it?... The poster will be ready in three or four days.... Didn't we have a good time at David's party?"

"Such a good time----"

"Really must have, since we stayed until an unconscionable hour.

Half-past two when we broke up----"

"All of that, Beth."

The artist looked up from her work. Mrs. Wordling's acquiescences seemed modulated. The "Beths" were no more frequent than usual, however. The artist had grown used to this from certain people. It appeared that her name was so to the point, that many kept it juggling through their conversation with her, like a ball in a fountain.... The poster, Beth had consented to do in a weak moment. It was to be framed for theatre-lobbies. People whom Beth painted were seldom quite the same afterward to her. She seemed to learn too much. She had greatly admired Mrs. Wordling's good nature at the beginning. There was no objection now; only the actress had given her in quant.i.ty what had first attracted, and quant.i.ty had palled. Beth often wished she did not discern so critically.... Just now she divined that her caller wanted to discuss Cairns' friend. The result was that Mrs. Wordling left after a half-hour, with Bedient heavier and more undeveloped than ever in her consciousness. Always a considerable social factor in her theatrical companies, Mrs. Wordling was challenged by the people of the _Smilax Club_. She was not getting on with them, and the thought piqued.

Bedient, who had not greatly impressed her, had apparently struck twelve with the others. Therefore, he became at once both an object and a means. There was a way to prove her artistry....

Beth went on with her painting, the face of another whom she had found out. And painting, she smiled and thought. She was like a pearl in the good North light. Across the pallor of her face ran a magnetic current of color from the famous hair to the crimson jacket she wore, pinned at the throat by a soaring gull, with the tiniest ruby for an eye....

David Cairns called. He seemed drawn and nervous. Obviously he had come to say things. Beth knew his moods.

"David, we had a memorable time last night, you know that," she said.

"You know, too, that I have been, and am, friendly to Mrs. Wordling. As the party turned out, I'm interested to know just how you came to choose the guests. We drew rather close together for New Yorkers----"

"That's a fact."

"But the Grey One is engaged to be married. In theory, Kate Wilkes is a man-hater. Dear little Vina is consecrated to her 'Stations' for two years more. Eliminate me as, forborne, a spinster.... Yet you told me two or three days ago that you wouldn't be surprised if your friend took his lady back----"

"That may be true, Beth," he interrupted. "But I spoke hastily. It sounds crude and an infringement now. I really didn't know Bedient----"

"When you invited your guests--Mrs. Wordling?"

"I should have consulted someone----"

"Not at all, David. It was eminently right. I am not criticising, just interested."

"I've been revoluting inside. Mrs. Wordling happened three days ago, when I was first thinking out the party. I didn't know we were to get into real things. 'Ah, here's a ripe rounding influence,' said I. 'Do come, Mrs. Wordling.' Maybe I _did_ figure out the contrast she furnished. She's friendly and powerfully pretty and, why, I see it now, one of the Wordlings of this world would have taken Andrew Bedient into camp years ago, if he were designed for that kind of woman. Why, that's the kind of woman he doubtless knows----"

"Do you know what I think?" Beth inquired. "I think you should be punished for using Mrs. Wordling or anyone else as a foil. That's a Wordl--a woman's strategy."

"I know it, Beth," Cairns said excitedly. "But I didn't think of it until afterward. I wouldn't do it again."

She was startled, saw too late that this was no time for showing him his crudities.

"You're a dear boy----" she began.

"No, I'm not, Beth. Oh, it isn't the only thing--that has been rammed home to me.... _Me_; there's so much _me_ mixed up in my mind, so much tiresome and squalid _me_, that I wonder every decent person hasn't cut me long since for a bore and a nuisance. Why, I had become all puny and blinded--_my_ stomach, _my_ desires, markets, memories, ambitions, doubts, rages, rights, poses and conceits. I really need to tell some one, to unveil before some one who won't wince, but treasure the little moral residuum----"

"You have done well to come to Beth," she said, leaning forward and patting his shoulder with the thin stem of her brush, though a woman always feels her years when a man brings woes such as these to her....

It was Beth's weakness (or strength) that she could never reveal the intimacies of her heart. Only sometimes in half-humorous generalities, she permitted things to escape, thinking no one understood.

"Thanks, Beth. I'm grateful," Cairns said. "I seem to have missed for a long time the bigger dimension in people, books, pictures, faces, even in the heart. It's a long time since I set out this way, a down-grade, and the last few days, I've heard the rapids. I'm going back, as far and as fast as I can up-stream. And this is no lie; no pose."

"I repeat, you're a dear boy----"

"Oh, it's Bedient who jerked me up straight. I'd have gone on.... And to think I made him wait over an hour, when he first called.... He's the finest bit of man-stuff I've ever known, Beth."

She found herself relieved, that he had given to the stranger the praise.

"... And, Beth, if you want to dig for his views, you'll get them. He says New York plucks everything green; opinionates on the wing, makes personal capital out of another's offering, refusing to wait for the fineness of impersonal judgment. He asks nothing more stimulating than the capacity to say on occasion, 'I don't know,' flat and unqualified.

He sees everywhere, the readiness to be clever instead of true. So many New Yorkers, he says, are like fishes, that, knowing water, disclaim the possibility of air.

"You know, Beth, Bedient never encountered what America was thinking and reading, until a few months ago down on his Island.