"A visit to the galleries is tempting," she said. "It may give me an idea.... I never had quite such a patron. You are so little curious to see what I have done, that I sometimes wonder why you wanted the portrait, and why you came to me for it.... I wonder if it's the day or my eyes--it's so much easier to talk aimlessly than to work----"

"It's really gray, and the sparrows have decided upon a shower."

She regarded him whimsically.

"And you look so well in your raincoat," he added.

They took the 'bus up the Avenue.... She pointed out the tremendous vitalities of the Rodin marbles, intimated their visions, and remarked that he should hear Vina Nettleton on this subject.

"She breaks down, becomes livid, at the stupidity of the world, for reviling her idol on his later work, especially the bust of Balzac, which the critics said showed deterioration," Beth told him, "As if Rodin did not know the mystic Balzac better than the populace."

"It has always seemed that the mystics of the arts must recognize one another," Bedient said.... "I do not know Balzac----"

"You must. Why, even Taine, Sainte Beuve, and Gautier didn't _know_ him! They glorified his work just so long as it had to do with fleshly Paris, but called him mad in his loftier alt.i.tudes where they couldn't follow."

It was possibly an hour afterward, when Bedient halted before a certain picture longer than others; then went back to another that had interested him. Moments pa.s.sed. He seemed to have forgotten all exteriors, but vibrated at intervals from one to another of these--two small silent things--_Le Chant du Berger_ and another. They were designated only by catalogue numbers. Beth, who knew them, would have waited hours.... Presently he spoke, and told her long of their effects, what they meant to him.

"You have not been here before?" she asked.

"No."

"You don't know who did those pictures?"

"No."

"Puvis de Chavannes."

"The name is but a name to me, but the work--why, they are out of the body entirely! I can feel the great silence!" he explained, and told her of his cliff and _G.o.d-mother_, of Gobind, the bees, the moon, the standing pools, the lotos, the stars, the forests, the voices and the dreams.... They stood close together, talking very low, and the visitors brushed past, without hearing.

"If not the greatest painter, Puvis de Chavannes is the greatest mural painter of the nineteenth century," Beth said. "Rodin, who knew Balzac, also knew Puvis de Chavannes.... '_The mystics of the arts know one another_,'" she added. "I saw Rodin's bust and statue of these men in Paris."

To Beth, the incident was of inestimable importance in her conception of Bedient.... A j.a.panese group interested him later--an old vender of sweetmeats in a city street, with children about him--little girls bent forward under the weight of their small brothers. Beth regarded the picture curiously and waited for Bedient to speak.

"It's very real," he said. "The little girls are crippled from these weights. The boy babe rides his sister for his first views of the world.... Look at the sweet little girl-faces, haggard from the burden of their fat-cheeked, wet-nosed brothers. A birth is a miss over there--a miss for which the mother suffers--when it is not a boy. The girls of j.a.pan carry their brothers until they begin to carry their sons. You need only look at this picture to know that here is a people messing with uniforms and explosives, a people still hot with the ape and the tiger in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

Beth was thinking that America was not yet aeons distant from this j.a.panese inst.i.tution, the male incubus of the girl child. She did not speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio--of the edginess of her temper. "Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual mothers," she thought. She might have been very happy, but for a mental anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning.... Hours had flown magically. It was past mid-afternoon.... There was one more picture that had held him, not for itself, but like the j.a.panese scene, for the thoughts it incited.... An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over the embers of a low fire. In the glow, the weary old face revealed a bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained. The twisted hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a little child--which was not there.

"I would call her _The Race Mother_," Bedient said reverently. "She is of every race, and every age. She has carried her brothers and her sons; given them her strength; shielded them from cold winds and dangerous heats; given them the nourishment of her body and the food prepared with her hands. Their evils were her own deeper shame; their goodness or greatness was of her conceiving, her dreams first. Her sons have turned to her in hunger, her mate in pa.s.sion, but neither as their equal. For that which was n.o.ble in their sight and of good report, they turned to men. In their counsels they have never asked her voice; they suffered her sometimes to listen to their devotions, but hers were given to them_.

"They were stronger. They chose what should become the intellectual growth of the race. Having no part in this, her mind was stunted, according to their standards. She had the silences, the bearing, the services for others, the giving of love. She loved her mate sometimes, her brothers often, her sons always,--and served them. Loving much, she learned to love G.o.d. Silences, and much loving of men, one learns to love G.o.d. Silences and services and much loving of her kind--out of these comes the spirit which knows G.o.d.

"So while her men, like children with heavy blocks, were pa.s.sing their intellectual matters one to the other, she came to know that love is giving; that as love pours out in service, the Holy Spirit floods in; that s.p.a.ciousness of soul is immortality; that out of the s.p.a.ciousness of soul, great sons are born.... And here and there down the ages, these great sons have appeared, veered the race right at moments of impending destruction, and buoyed it on."

He had not raised his voice above that low animate tone, which has not half the carrying quality of a whisper. Beth had hoped for such a moment, for in her heart she knew that Vina Nettleton had felt this power of his. With her whole soul, she listened, and the look upon his face which she wanted for the portrait lived in her mind as he resumed:

"I ask you to look how every evil, every combination of h.e.l.l, has arisen to tear at the flanks of the race, for this is history. Yet a few women, and a few men, the gifts of women, have arisen to save....

Do you think that war or money, or l.u.s.t of any kind, shall destroy us _now_, in this modern rousing hour, with woman at last coming into her own--when they have never yet in the darkest hour of the world, vanquished a single great dream of a pure woman? And now women _generally_ are rising to their full dreams; approaching each moment nearer to that glorious formula for the making of immortals...."

He smiled suddenly into her white face. "I tell you, Beth Truba," he said, "there isn't a phase, a moment, of this harsh hour of transition, that isn't majestic with promise!... It's a good picture.... Dear old mother, in every province of the soul, she is a step nearer the Truth than man. The little matters of the intellect, from which she has been barred for centuries, she shall override like a Brunhilde. Even that which men called her sins were from loving.... Gaunt mother with bended back--she has stood between G.o.d and the world; she has been the vessel of the Holy Spirit; she _is_ the Holy Spirit in the world; and when she shall fully know her greatness, then prophets of her bearing shall walk the earth."

They wound through the park in the rainy dusk, emerging in Fifty-ninth Street; and even then, Beth did not care to ride, so they finished the distance to her studio in the Avenue crowd.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

THAT PARK PREDICAMENT

More May days had pa.s.sed. Bedient came in from one of his night-strolls, just as an open carriage stopped in front of the Club, and Mrs. Wordling called his name. He waited while she dismissed her driver familiarly.... The Northern beauty of the night was full of charm to him. A full moon rode aloft in the blue. He had been thinking that there was cruelty and destruction wherever crowds gathered; that great cities were not a development of higher manhood. He thought of the sparcely tenanted islands around the world, of Australian, Siberian and Canadian areas--of glorious, virgin mountain places and empty sh.o.r.es--where these pent and tortured tens of thousands might have breathed and lived indeed. All they needed was but to dare. But they seemed not yet lifted from the herd; as though it took numbers to make an ent.i.ty, a group to make a soul. The airs were still; the night serene as in a zone of peace blessed of G.o.d. The silence of Gramercy gave him back poise which the city--a terrible companion--had torn apart.

"That's old John, who never misses a night at my theatre door, when that door opens to New York," Mrs. Wordling said. "He only asks to know that I am in the city to be at my service night or day. And who would have a taxicab on a night like this?... Let's not hurry in.... Have you been away?"

"No, Mrs. Wordling."

"Don't you think you are rather careless with your friends?" she asked, as one whom the earth had made much to mourn. "It is true, I haven't been here many times for dinner (there have been so many invitations), but breakfasts and luncheons--always I have peeked into the farthest corners hoping to see you--before I sat down alone."

"I have missed a great deal, but it's good to be thought of," he said.

"You didn't mean, then, to be careless with your friends?"

"No."

"I thought you were avoiding me."

"If there were people here to be avoided, I'm afraid I shouldn't stay."

"But supposing you liked the place very much, and there was just one whom you wished to avoid----"

He laughed. "I give it up. I might stay--but I don't avoid--certainly not one of my first friends in New York----"

"Yes, I was a member of the original company, when David Cairns'

_Sailor-Friend_ was produced.... How different you seem from that night!" she added confidentially. "How is it you make people believe you so? You have been a great puzzle to me--to us. I supposed at first you were just a breezy individual, whom David Cairns (who is a very brilliant man) had found an interesting type----"

"So long as I don't fall from that, it is enough," Bedient answered.

"But why do you say I make people believe----?"

Mrs. Wordling considered. "I never quite understood about one part of that typhoon story," she qualified. "You were carrying the Captain across the deck, and a Chinese tried to knife you. You just mentioned that the Chinese died."

"Yes," said Bedient, who disliked this part of the story, and had shirred the narrative.

"But I wanted to hear more about it----"

"That was all. He died. There were only a few survivors."

Mrs. Wordling's head was high-held. She was sniffing the night, with the air of a connoisseur. "Do you smell the mignonette, or is it Sweet William? Something we had in the garden at home when I was little....

Are you afraid to go across in the park--with _me_?"

"Sailors are never afraid," he said, following her pointed finger to the open gate.