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Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

by Will Levington Comfort · English · Gutenberg #11655 · 651,728 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

Author: Will Levington Comfort


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11655]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FATE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR: A NOVEL ***

Fate Knocks At The Door




_A Novel_

By

Will Levington Comfort


Author of

"Routledge Rides Alone,"
"She Buildeth Her House," etc.


1912


In speaking of the first four notes of the opening movement, Beethoven
said, some time after he had finished the Fifth Symphony: "So pocht das
Shicksal an die Pforte" ("Thus Fate Knocks at the Door"); and between
that opening knock, and the tremendous rush and sweep of the Finale,
the emotions which come into play in the great conflicts of life are
depicted.

--From Upton's _Standard Symphonies_.



To

THE MOTHERS OF MEN



Contents

  I. ASIA. (_Allegro con brio_.)

     First Chapter: The Great Wind Strikes
     Second Chapter: The Pack-Train in Luzon
     Third Chapter: Red Pigment of Service
     Fourth Chapter: That Adelaide Passion
     Fifth Chapter: A Flock of Flying Swans
     Sixth Chapter: That Island Somewhere
     Seventh Chapter: _Andante con Moto_--Fifth
     Eighth Chapter: The Man from _The Pleiad_

 II. NEW YORK. (_Andante con moto_.)

     Ninth Chapter: The Long-Awaited Woman
     Tenth Chapter: The Jews and the Romans
     Eleventh Chapter: Two Davids Come to Beth
     Twelfth Chapter: Two Lesser Adventures
     Thirteenth Chapter: About Shadowy Sisters
     Fourteenth Chapter: This Clay-and-Paint Age
     Fifteenth Chapter: The Story of the Mother
     Sixteenth Chapter: "Through Desire for Her."
     Seventeenth Chapter: The Plan of the Builder
     Eighteenth Chapter: That Park Predicament
     Nineteenth Chapter: In the House of Grey One
     Twentieth Chapter: A Chemistry of Scandal
     Twenty-first Chapter: The Singing Distances
     Twenty-second Chapter: Beth Signs the Picture
     Twenty-third Chapter: The Last Ride Together
     Twenty-fourth Chapter: A Parable of Two Horses

III. EQUATORIA. (_Allegro. Scherzo_.)

     Twenty-fifth Chapter: Bedient for _The Pleiad_
     Twenty-sixth Chapter: How Startling is Truth
     Twenty-seventh Chapter: The Art of Miss Mallory
     Twenty-eighth Chapter: A Further Note from Rey
     Twenty-ninth Chapter: At _Treasure Island Inn_
     Thirtieth Chapter: Miss Mallory's Mastery
     Thirty-first Chapter: The Glow-worm's One Hour
     Thirty-second Chapter: In the Little Room Next
     Thirty-third Chapter: The Hills and the Skies
     Thirty-fourth Chapter: The Supreme Adventure
     Thirty-fifth Chapter: Fate Knocks at the Door

 IV. NEW YORK. (_Allegro. Finale_.)

     Thirty-sixth Chapter: The Great Prince House
     Thirty-seventh Chapter: Beth and Adith Mallory
     Thirty-eighth Chapter: A Self-Conscious Woman
     Thirty-ninth Chapter: Another _Smilax_ Affair
     Fortieth Chapter: Full Day Upon the Plain




FATE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR




I

ASIA

_Allegro con brio_



FIRST CHAPTER

THE GREAT WIND STRIKES

Andrew Bedient, at the age of seventeen, in a single
afternoon,--indeed, in one moment of a single afternoon,--performed an
action which brought him financial abundance for his mature years.
Although this narrative less concerns the boy Bedient than the man as
he approaches twice seventeen, the action is worthy of account, beyond
the riches that it brought, because it seems to draw him into somewhat
clearer vision from the shadows of a very strange boyhood.

April, 1895, the _Truxton_, of which Andrew was cook, found herself
becalmed in the China Sea, midway between Manila and Hong Kong, her
nose to the North. She was a smart clipper of sixty tons burden, with a
slightly uptilted stern, and as clever a line forward as a pleasure
yacht. She was English, comparatively new, and, properly used by the
weather, was as swift and sprightly of service as an affectionate
woman. Her master was Captain Carreras, a tubby little man of
forty-five, bald, modest, and known among the shipping as "a perfect
lady." He wore a skull-cap out of port; and as constantly, except
during meals, carried one of a set of rarely-colored meerschaum-bowls,
to which were attachable, bamboo-stems, amber-tipped and of various
lengths.

The little Captain was fastidious in dress, wearing soft shirts of
white silk, fine duck trousers and scented silk handkerchiefs, which he
carried in his left hand with the meerschaum-bowl. The Carreras
perfume, mingled with fresh tobacco, was never burdensome, and unlike
any other. The silk handkerchief was as much a feature of the Captain's
appearance as the skull-cap. To it was due the really remarkable polish
of the perfect clays so regularly cushioned in his palm. Always for
dinner, the Captain's toilet was fresh throughout. Invariably, too, he
brought with him an unfolded handkerchief upon which he placed, at the
farther end of the table when the weather was fair (and in the socket
of the fruit-bowl when the weather-frames were on), a ready-filled
pipe. This he took to hand when coffee was brought.

His voice was seldom raised. He found great difficulty in expressing
himself, except upon affairs of the ship; yet, queerly enough, there
were times when he seemed deeply eager to say the things which came of
his endless silences. As unlikely a man as you would find in the
Pacific, or any other merchant-service, was this Carreras; a gentleman,
if a very bashful one; a deeply-read and kindly man, although it was
quite as difficult for him to extend a generous action, directly to be
found out,--and his mind was continually furnishing inclinations of
this sort,--as it was to express his thoughts. Either brought on a
nervous tension which left him shaken and drained. The right woman
would have adored Captain Carreras, and doubtless would have called
forth from his breast a love of heroic dimension; but she would have
been forced to do the winning; to speak and take the initiative in all
but the giving of happiness. Temperate for a bachelor, clean
throughout, charmingly innocent of the world, and a splendid seaman. To
one of fine sensibilities, there was something about the person of
Captain Carreras of softly glowing warmth, and rarely tender.

Bedient had been with him as cook for over a year, during which the
_Truxton_ had swung down to Australia and New South Wales, and called
at half the Asiatic and insular ports from Vladivostok to Bombay. Since
he was a little chap (back of which were the New York memories, vague,
but strange and persistent), there had always been some ship for
Bedient, but the _Truxton_ was by far the happiest.... It was from the
_Truxton_ just a few months before that he had gone ashore day after
day for a fortnight at Adelaide; and a wee woman five years older, and
a cycle wiser, had invariably been waiting with new mysteries in her
house.... Moreover, on the _Truxton_, he had nothing to do with the
forecastle galley--there was a Chinese for that--and Captain Carreras,
fancying him from the beginning, had quartered him aft, where, except
on days like this, when Mother Earth's pneumatic cushion seemed limp
and flattened, there was a breeze to hammock in, and plenty of candles
for night reading.

Then the Captain had a box of books, the marvel of which cannot begin
to be described. Andrew's books were but five or six, chosen for great
quantity and small bulk; tightly and toughly bound little books of
which the Bible was first. This was his book of fairies, his Aesop; his
book of wanderings and story, of character and mystery; his
revelations, the source of his ideality, the great expander of
limitations; his book of love and adventure and war; the book
unjudgable and the bed-rock of all literary judgment. He knew the Bible
as only one can who has played with it as a child; as only one can who
has found it alone available, when an insatiable love of print has
swept across the young mind. Nothing could change him now; this was his
book of Fate.

Except for those vision-times in the big city, Andrew could not
remember when he had not read the Bible, nor did he remember learning
to read. He seemed to have forgotten how to read before he came to sea
at seven, but when an old sailor pointed out on the stern of the
jolly-boat, the letters that formed the name of his first ship--it had
all come back to the child; and then he found his first Bible. Slowly
conceiving its immensity, its fullness _for him_--he was almost lifted
from his body with the upward winging of happiness. It was his first
great exaltation, and there was a sacredness about it which kept him
from telling anybody.... And now all the structures of the great
Scripture were tenoned in his brain; so that he knew the frame of every
part, but the inner meanings of more and more marvellous dimension
seemed inexhaustible. Always excepting the great Messianic Figure--the
white tower of his consciousness--he loved Saint Paul and the
Forerunner best among the men....

There was also a big book in the Captain's chest--_Life and Death on
the Ocean_--quarto-sized and printed in agate. It was filled with
mutiny, murder, storm, open-boat cannibalism and agonies of thirst,
handspike and cutlass inhumanities. No shark, pirate nor man-killing
whale had been missed; no ghastly wreck, derelict nor horrifying
phantom of the sea had escaped the nameless, furious compiler. For four
days and nights, Andrew glared consumingly into this terrible book, and
when he came to the writhing "Finis," involved in a sort of typhoon
tailpiece--he was whipped, and never could bring himself to touch the
book again. One reading had burned out his entire interest. It was not
Life nor Death nor Ocean, as he had seen them in ten solid years at
sea. He had given the book his every emotion, and discovered it gave
nothing back; but had shaken, terrified, played furious _tarantellas_
upon his feelings--and replenished naught. So he turned for unguent to
his Book of Books. Here was the strong steady light in contrast to
which the other was an "angled spar." True, here crawled hate, avarice,
lust, flesh and its myriad forms of death--not in their own elemental
darkness--but as scurrying vermin forms suddenly drenched with
light.... There were other and really wonderful books in Captain
Carreras' chest--a bashful welcome to his cabin, and such eager lending
from the Captain himself!

This had become a pleasant feature in the young man's life--the queer
kindly heart of the Captain. There were few confidences between them,
but a fine unspoken regard, pleasing and permanent like the Carreras
perfume. Bedient's desire to show his gratitude and admiration was
expressed in ways that could not possibly shock the Captain's
delicacy--in the small excellences of his art, for instance. To say
that the boy was consummate in the limited way of a ship's cook does
not overstate his effectiveness. He did unheard-of things--even fruit
and berry-pies, from preserves two years, at least, remote from vine
and orchard. The two mates and boatswain, who also messed aft, bolted
without speech, but marvelled between meals. To these three, the
tension of the Captain's embarrassment became insupportable, beyond
four or five minutes; so that Carreras, a discriminating, though not a
valiant trencherman, was always the last to leave the table.

And once after a first supper at sea out of Singapore (there had been a
green salad, a fish baked whole, a cut of ham with new potatoes, and a
peach-preserve tart), the Captain put down his napkin and coffee-cup,
drank a _liqueur_, reached for his pipe and handkerchief, and suddenly
encountering the eyes of Andrew, who lit a flare for him, jerked up
decisively, as one encountering a crisis. His face became hectic, and
the desperate sentence he uttered was almost lost in the frantic
clearing of his throat:

"You're a very prime and wonderful chap, sir!"

Moreover, Bedient's arm had been pressed for an instant by the softest,
plumpest hand seaman ever carried. Coughing alarmingly in the first
fragrant cloud from his Latakia and Virginia leaf, the Captain beat
forth to recover himself on deck.

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Truxton_ was now six days out of Manila. For the past thirty-six
hours, she might as well have been sunk in pitch, for any progress she
made.... The ship's bell had just struck four. Bedient had finished
clearing away tiffin things, and stepped on deck. The planking was like
the galley-range he had left, and the fresh white paint of the three
boats raised in blisters. The sea had an ugly look, yellow-green and
dead, save where a shark's fin knifed the surface. The crew was lying
forward under the awnings--a fiend-tempered outfit of Laskars and
Chinese. Captain Carreras appeared on deck through the companion-way
still farther aft and nodded to Bedient. Then both men looked at the
sky, which was brassy above, but thickening in the North. It augmented
darkly and streakily--like a tub of water into which bluing is added
drop by drop.... A Chinese arose and tossed a handful of joss-tatters
into the still air. And now the voice of the Captain brought the rest
of the crew to its feet.

The China Sea can generate much deviltry to a square mile. The calm of
death and the burn of perdition are in its bosom. Cholera, glutted with
victims, steals to his couch in the China Sea; and since it is the pool
of a thousand unclean rivers, the sins of Asia find a hiding-place
there. It has ended for all time the voyages of brave mariners and
mighty ships, and become a vault for the cargoes, and a tomb for the
bones of men. The China Sea fostered the pirate, aided him in his
bloody ways, and dragged him down, riches and all. Bed of disease,
secret-place of the unclean, and graveyard of the seas; yet, this
yellow-breasted fiend, ancient in devil-lore, can smile innocently as a
child at the morning sun, and beguile the torrid stars to twinkling.

It was in this black heart that was first conceived the Tai Fung
(typhoon), and there the great wind has its being to-day, resting and
rising.

The Captain's eyes were deep in the North. Bedient's soul seemed to
sense the awful solemnity on the face of the waters. He was unable
afterward to describe his varying states of consciousness, from that
first moment. He remembered thinking what a fine little man the Captain
was; that their sailing together was done.... A sympathetic disorder
was brewing deep down on the ocean floor; the water now had a charged
appearance, and was foul as the roadstead along the mouths of the
Godivari--a thick, whipped, yeasty look. The changes were very rapid.
Every few seconds, Bedient glanced at the Captain, and as often
followed his gaze into the churning, blackening North.

A chill came into the deathly heat, but it was the cold of caverns, not
of the vital open. The heat did not mix with it, but passed by in
layers--a novel movement of the atmospheres. Had the coolness been
clean and normal, the sailors would have sprung to the rigging to
breathe it, and to bare their bodies to the rain--after two days of
hell-pervading calm--but they only murmured now and fell to work.

An unearthly glitter, like the coloring of a dream, wavered in the East
and West, while the North thickened and the South lay still in
brilliant expectation.... In some hall-way when Bedient was a little
boy, he recalled a light like this of the West and East. There had been
a long narrow pane of yellow-green glass over the front door. The light
used to come through that in the afternoon and fill the hall and
frighten him. It was so on deck now.

The voices of the sailors had that same unearthly quality as the
light--ineffectual, remote. Out of the hold of the _Truxton_ came a
ghostly sigh. Bedient couldn't explain, unless it was some new and
mighty strain upon the keel and ribs.

A moment more and the Destroyer itself was visible in the changing
North. It was sharp-lined--a great wedge of absolute night--and from
it, the last vestiges of day dropped back affrighted. And Bedient heard
the voice of It; all that the human ear could respond to of the awful
dissonances of storm; yet he knew there were ranges of sound above and
below the human register--for they awed and preyed upon his soul.... He
thought of some papers dear to him, and dropped below for them. The
ship smelled old--as if the life were gone from her timbers.

Above once more, he saw a hideous turmoil in the black fabric--just
wind--an avalanche of wind that gouged the sea, that could have shaken
mountains.... The poor little _Truxton_ stared into the End--a puppy
cowering on the track of a train.

And then It struck. Bedient was sprawled upon the deck. Blood broke
from his nostrils and ears; from the little veins in his eyes and
forehead. Parts of his body turned black afterward from the mysterious
pressure at this moment. He felt he was being _born again into another
world_.... The core of that Thing made of wind smashed the _Truxton_--a
smash of air. It was like a thick sodden cushion, large as a
battle-ship--hurled out of the North. The men had to breathe it--that
seething havoc which tried to twist their souls free. When passages to
the lungs were opened, the dreadful compression of the air crushed
through, tearing the membrane of throat and nostril.

Water now came over the ship in huge tumbling walls. Bedient slid over
the deck, like a bar of soap from an overturned pail--clutching, torn
loose, clutching again.... Then the Thing eased to a common hurricane
such as men know. Gray flicked into the blackness, a corpse-gray sky,
and the ocean seemed shaken in a bottle.

Laskars and Chinese, their faces and hands dripping red, were trying to
get a boat overside when Bedient regained a sort of consciousness. The
_Truxton_ was wallowing underfoot--as one in the saddle feels the
tendons of his mount give way after a race. The Captain helped a huge
Chinese to hold the wheel. The sea was insane.... They got the boat
over and tumbled in--a dozen men. A big sea broke them and the little
boat like a basket of eggs against the side of the ship.

Another boat was put over and filled with men. Another sea flattened
them out and carried the stains away on the surge. There were only nine
men left and a small boat that would hold but seven. Bedient helped to
make a rigging to launch this over the stern. He saw that the thing
might be done if the small craft were not broken in two against the
rudder.

The Captain made no movement, had no thought to join these stragglers.
He was alone at the wheel, which played with his strength. His face was
calm, but a little dazed. It did not occur to him other than to go down
with his ship--the old tradition. The fatuousness of this appealed
suddenly to Bedient. Carreras was his friend--the only other white man
left. The two mates and boatswain had tried out the first two
boats--eagerly.

Bedient ran to the wheel, tore the Captain from it and carried him in
his arms toward the stern. A Chinese tried to knife him, but the man
died, _as if_ struck by a flying bit of tackle. Bedient recaptured the
Captain, who during the brief struggle had dumbly turned back to the
wheel. It was all done in thirty seconds; Carreras was chucked into the
stern-seat of the little boat, where he belonged. The body of a Laskar
cushioned the craft from being broken against the rudder. And now they
were seven.

The _Truxton_ had been broken above and below. She strangled--and was
sucked down. Bedient saw her stern fling high like an arm; saw the big
"X" in the centre of the name in the whitish light.

He remembered hearing that typhoons always double on their tracks; and
that a ship is not done that manages to live through the first charge.
This one never came back. They had five days of thirst and equatorial
sun. Two men died; two fell into madness; Captain Carreras, Andrew
Bedient and a Chinese made Hong Kong without fatal hurt.

Captain and cook took passage for London. The former declared he was
through with the sea, except as a passenger. In twenty-five years he
had never encountered serious accident before; he had believed himself
accident-proof; and learning differently, did not propose to lose a
second ship. He could bring himself to say very little about Bedient's
action of the last moment on deck, but he asked the young man to share
his fortunes. Captain Carreras intended to stay for a while at his
mother's house in Surrey, but realized he could not stand that long....
Bedient told him he was not finished with Asia yet. On the day they
parted, the Captain said there would be a letter for Bedient, on or
before July first of every year, sent care the "_Marigold, New
York_."... The old embarrassment intervened at the last moment--but the
younger man did not miss the Captain's heart-break.



SECOND CHAPTER


THE PACK-TRAIN IN LUZON

The first letter from Captain Carreras was a real experience for
Bedient. Hours were needed to adjust the memories of his timid old
friend to this flowing and affectionate expression. Captain Carreras,
shut in a room with pen and white paper, loosed his pent soul in
utterance. A fine fragrant soul it was, and all its best poured out to
his memorable boy.

The letter had been written in England, of which the Captain was
already weary. He must have more space about, he confessed; and
although he did not intend to break his pledge on the matter of
navigating, he was soon to book a passage for the Americas. He imagined
there was the proper sort of island for him somewhere in those waters.
He had always had a weakness for "natives and hot weather." Bedient was
asked to make his need known in any case of misfortune or extremity.
This was the point of the first letter, and of all the letters....

At length Captain Carreras settled in Equatoria, a big island well out
of travel-lines in the Caribbean. The second and third letters made it
even plainer that the old heart valves ached for the young man's
coming. A mysterious binding of the two seems to have taken place in
the months preceding the day of the great wind; and in that instant of
stress and fury the Captain realized his supreme human relationship. It
grew strong as only can a bachelor's love for a man. Indeed, Carreras
was probably the first to discover in Andrew Bedient a something
different, which Bedient himself was yet far from realizing.... The
latter wished that the letters from the West Indies would not always
revert to the strength of his hands. It brought up a memory of the
despoiled face of the Chinese with the knife, and of the inert figure
afterward on the planking.... Bedient knew that sometime he would go to
find his friend.

Three years after the great wind, the excitement in Manila called
Bedient across the China Sea. There had been a _coup_ of the American
fleet, and soldiers from the States were on the way to the Islands....
In the following weeks, there was much to do and observe around that
low large city of Luzon, the lights of which Andrew had seen many times
at night from the harbor and the passage--lights which seemed to lie
upon still waters. When Pack-train Thirteen finally took the field from
the big corral, to carry grub and ammunition to the moving forces and
the few outstanding garrisons, Bedient had already been tried out and
found excellent as cook of the outfit.

It is to be doubted if history furnishes a more picturesque service
than that which fell to Luzon pack-trains throughout the following two
years. It was like Indian fighting, but more compact, rapid and
surprising. The actions were small enough to be seen entire; they fell
clean-cut into pictures and were instantly comprehensive. As the
typhoon confirmed Carreras, this Luzon service brought to Bedient an
important relation--his first real friendship with a boy of his own
age.

In the fall of 1899, David Cairns, the youngest of the American
war-correspondents, stood hungry and desolate in the plaza of the
little town of Alphonso, two days' cavalry march below Manila--when
Pack-train Thirteen arrived with provisions. The mules swung in with
drooping heads and lolling tongues, under three-hundred-pound packs.
The roars of Healy, the boss-packer, filled the dome of sky where a
young moon was rising in a twilight of heavenly blue--dusk of the gods,
indeed. A battalion of infantry in Alphonso had been hungry for three
days--so the Train had come swiftly, ten hours on the trail, and forced
going. It was a volunteer infantry outfit, and apt to be a bit lawless
in the sight of food. Some of the men began pulling at the packs. Healy
and his iron-handed, vitriol-tongued crew beat them back with the
ferocity of devils--and had the battalion cowed and whimpering, before
the officers withdrew the men and arranged an orderly issue of rations.

Meanwhile, David Cairns watched the tall, young cook, lean, tanned, and
with an ugly triangle of fresh sunburn under his left shoulder-blade,
where his shirt had been torn with a thorn that day. He loosed the
_aparejos_ and _mantas_, containing the kitchen-kit; almost magically a
fire was started. Water was heating a moment later and slabs of bacon
began to writhe.... Savage as he was from hunger, it was marvellously
colorful to the fresh-eyed Cairns--his first view of a pack-train. The
mules, relieved of their burdens, were rolling on the dusty turf.
Thirty mountain-mules, under packs one-third their own weight, and
through the pressure of a Luzon day; dry, empty, caked with
sweat-salt--yet there were not a few of those gritty beasts that went
into the air squealing, and launched a hind-foot at the nearest rib or
the nearest star, or pressed close to muzzle the bell-mare--after the
restoring roll. Then, some of the packers drove them down to water,
while others made ready the forage and grain-bags; infantry fires were
lit; the provisions turned over; detachments came meekly forward for
rations, and the lifting aroma of coffee enchanted the warm winds.
Cairns remembered all this when the sharp profile of battle-fronts grew
dull in memory.

And now Bedient had three great pans of bacon sizzling, a young
mountain of brown sugar piled upon a _Poncho_, a big can of hard-tack
broken open, and the coffee had come to boil under his hands--three
gallons at least. The watered mules had to do just so much kicking, so
much braying at the young moon; had to be assured just so often,
through their queer communications, that the bell-mare was still in the
land of picket-line--before nose-bags were fastened. Then, with all the
pack rigging in neat piles before the picket-line, and the untouched
stores covered and piled, the packers came in with their mess-tins and
coffee-cups.

Bedient had seen the hunger in the eyes of David Cairns, the empty
haversack, and noted that he was neither officer nor enlisted man.
Bedient had plenty of water, but with a smile he offered the other a
pail and pointed to the stream. This was a pleasantry for the eyes of
Boss Healy. Cairns appeared presently through the infantry, and around
the end of the picket-line--a correspondent serving mule-riders with
all the enthusiasm of a pitifully-tightened belt.... The packers were
at their pipes and cigarettes and were spreading blanket-rolls, and
groups of "chucked" infantry had warmed into singing--when the two boys
sat down to supper. The cook said:

"I'm Andrew Bedient--and are you a correspondent?"

"A cub--and pretty nearly a starved cub.... There's been nothing to
buy, you know, and this outfit was hung up here grubless. The trails
aren't open enough to travel alone. Some of the officers might have
taken me in----"

"We have plenty. The packers hadn't had their coffee when I gave you
the pail," Bedient whispered. "They hate the doughboys. I wanted them
to see you weren't enlisted.... I should say the trails _weren't_ open
for travelling alone. The niggers peppered at us all day. Healy rides
through anything--says we make better time when the natives are
shooting----"

"I saw how he went through the bunch that started to help you unpack,"
Cairns said laughing.

 ... Theirs was a quick love for each other. They had not known how
lonely their hearts were, until they encountered this fine mutual
attraction. Together they cleaned up the supper things, and spread
their blankets side by side.... Later, when only the infantry sentries
were awake, and the packers' running guard (and a little apart, the
interminable glow from Healy's cigarettes), the two were still
whispering, though the day had been terrific in physical expenditure.
So aroused and gladdened by each other were they, that intimate matters
poured forth in the fine way youths have, before the control and
concealment is put on. Grown men imprison each other.... Their low
tones trembled with emotion while the night whitened with stars. Cairns
wished that something of terror or intensity might happen. He hated a
knife to the very pith of his life, but now he would have welcomed a
passage of steel in the dark--for a chance to defend the other.

And the cook had that absolute, laughing sort of courage. Cairns
divined this--a courage so sure of itself that no boastful explanations
were needed. They talked about men, books, their yearnings, the recent
fights. Cairns was enthralled and mystified. Bedient did not seem to
hope for great things in a worldly way, while the correspondent was
driven daily by ambition and its self-dreams. Life apparently had shown
this cook day by day what was wisest and easiest to do--the ways of
little resistance. He appeared content to go on so; and this challenged
Cairns to explain what he meant to do with the next few years. Bedient
heard this with fine interest, but no quickening. Cairns was insatiable
for details of a life that had been spent in Asia and upon ships of the
Eastern seas. Everything that Bedient said had a shining exterior of
mystery to the American. His vague memories of New York; the
water-fronts that had since called his steps; different ships and
captains; the men about him, Healy and the packers; his entire
detachment from relatives, and his easy familiarity with the great
unhasting years--all these formed into a luminous envelope, containing
the new friend.

"I was always fed somehow," Bedient whispered, as he told about the dim
little lad that was himself. "There was always some one good to me. I
'member one old sailor with rings in his ears----"

The David Cairns of twenty likewise gave all gladly. Queerly enough, he
found the other especially fascinated in anything he told of his mother
and sisters, and the life at home in New York, made easy by the
infinite little cushions of wealth and culture. A youth eight months
away on his first campaign can talk with power on these matters.
Here Cairns was wonderful and authoritative and elect to
Bedient--particularly in the possession of a living, breathing Mother.
This filled the cup of dreams in a way that the dominant exterior
matters of the young correspondent's mind--newspaper beats, New York
honors, great war stories, and a writer's name--could never have done.
Bedient was clearly an inveterate idealist. His dreams were strangely
lustrous, but distant, not to be touched nor handled--an impersonal
kind of dreaming. Cairns was not so astonished that the other had been
of uncommon quality in the beginning, but that his life had not _made_
him common was a miracle, no less.

Elements of glory were in this life he had lived, but those who
belonged to it, whom Cairns had observed heretofore, were
thick-skinned; men of unlit consciousness and hardened hearts,
gruelling companions to whom there was no deadly sin but physical
cowardice, and only muscular virtues. Bedient was not of these, neither
in body, mind nor memory, aspiration, language nor manner. And yet
_they_ believed in him, accepted him in a queer, tentative, subdued
fashion; and he spoke to them warmly, and of them with affection. All
this needed a deeper and more mellowed mind than Cairns' to
comprehend; though it challenged him from the first moment in that
swiftly-darkening night. "It's too good to be true," was his
oft-recurring sentence.... Though apart, Bedient was not scoffed. Could
it be that he was so finished as a cook, as a friend, as an
indefatigable--so rhythmically superior, that the packers took no
offense at his aloofness? Certainly, Bedient felt no necessity of
impressing his values upon his companions, as do those who have come
but a little way in culture.

Somehow, Alphonso smelled of roses that night, as the two lay together
in that little plaza, where the mules were picketed and the satisfied
infantry slept. In the jungle (which seemed very close in the
moonlight), bamboo stalks creaked soothingly and stroked each other in
the soft night winds, and the zenith sky boiled with millions of
white-hot worlds.... Are not the best dreams of this earth to be heard
from two rare boys whispering in the night? They have not been
frightened by their first real failure, and the latest, most delicate
bloom of the race has not yet been brushed from their thoughts. Curled
within their minds, like an endless scroll, are the marvellous
scriptures of millenniums, and yet their brain-surfaces are fresh for
earth's newest concept.... What are they whispering? Their voices
falter with emotion over vague bits of dreaming. They ask no greater
stimulus to fly to the uttermost bounds of their limitations--than each
other and the night. Reason dawns upon their stammered expressions, and
farther they fly--thrilling like young birds, when their wings for the
first time catch the sustaining cushions of air.... These are the
vessels of the future--seals yet unbroken.



THIRD CHAPTER


RED PIGMENT OF SERVICE

Bedient explained that he had come to the Philippines pleased with the
thought of seeing his own people, the Americans. He realized that he
was not seeing them at their best under martial law. The pair exchanged
narratives of action. Cairns pictured his first time under fire,
ending:

"... First you see the smoke; then you hear the bullets--then the
_sound_ of the guns last----"

"Yes, that's the order," said Bedient, who laughed softly, and
presently was telling of a recent and terrible baptism of fire. The
Pack-train had spurred to the rescue of a small party of sick and
footsore, making their way to garrison.

"Why that was the Pony Pack Massacre!" Cairns exclaimed. "I heard about
it--one of the worst affairs we've had over here--and you saw it?"

"I wish I hadn't," Bedient answered. "The little party of Americans
were down when I first saw them. Six or seven of the sixteen were dead;
nearly all the rest wounded. The natives had fired from three
sides--and would have finished their work with knives, except for
Thirteen. The American lieutenant in charge was clear-grained. He had
been trying to withdraw toward the town and carry his wounded--think of
that. There were not two others besides himself unscathed. I'll never
forget him--striding up and down praying and cursing--his first fight,
you know--and his boy's voice--'Be cock sure they're dead, fellows,
before you leave 'em behind for the bolos!... For the love of God don't
leave your bunkies behind for the butchers!'

"In a half minute, I saw it all--what a thing for white men to be
gathered for slaughter on a trail over here. The boys knew it--and
fought horribly against it...."

Cairns started to say something about this, but the words didn't come
quickly enough, and Bedient went on:

"There is a picture of that day which always means _war_ to me. The
soldier was hit mortally just as I got to him, but didn't fall at once,
as one does when the spine or brain is touched. As my hands went out to
him, he got it again and lost his legs, as if they were shot from
under. His body, you see, fell the length of his legs. This second
bullet was a Remington slug that shattered his hip. He had a full
canteen strung over his shoulder, infantry fashion. The bullet that
dropped him sitting on the trail, had gone through this to his hip. The
canteen was spurting water. Mind you, it was the other wound that was
killing him. There he sat dying on the road. I felt like dying for
him--felt that I couldn't bear it if it took long. He was in my
arms--and the canteen was emptying itself through the bullet-holes.
Then he seemed to hear the water flopping out on the sand, and wriggled
around to look at his hip, and I heard him mutter thickly: 'Look--look
at the b-bl-blood run!'"

Cairns felt that his companion suffered in this telling--that behind
the dark, the face close to his was deadly pale. He couldn't quite
understand the depths of Bedient's horror. It was war. All America was
behind it. One boy can't stand up against his nation. It was all very
queer. He felt that Bedient had a crystal gameness, but here was the
sensitiveness of a girl. Cairns thought of the heroes he had read of
who were brave as a lion and gentle as a woman, and these memories
helped him now to grasp his companion's point of view.... Hesitating,
Bedient finished:

"You know, to me all else was hushed when I felt that boy in my arms.
It was like a shouting and laughing suddenly ceased--as when a company
of boys discover that one of their playmates is terribly hurt.... I
imagine it would be like that--the sudden silence and sickness. It was
all so unnecessary. And that boy's mother--he should have been in her
arms, not mine. Poor little chap, he was all pimpled from beans, which
are poison to some people. He shouldn't have been hurt like that....
There was another who had needed but one shot. The Remington had gone
into his throat in front the size of a lead-pencil--and come out behind
like a tea-cup. The natives had filed the tip of the lead, so that it
accumulated destruction in the ugly way. It was like some one putting a
stone in a snow-ball--so vicious. You can't blame the natives--but the
war-game----"

Boss Healy growled at them to go to sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cairns remained with the Pack-train after that until the Rains. Never
did a boy have more to write about in three months. Every phase and
angle of that service, now half-forgotten, unfolded for his eyes. And
the impossible theme running through it all, was the carabao--the great
horned sponge that pulls vastly like an elephant and dies easily like a
rabbit--when the water is out.... They make no noise about their dying,
these mountains of flesh, merely droop farther and farther forward
against the yoke, when their skins crack from dryness; the whites of
their eyes become wider and wider--until they lay their tongues upon
the sand. The Chinese call them "cow-cows" and understand them better
than the Tagals, as they understand better the rice and the paddies.

Once Thirteen was yanked out of Healy's hand--as no volley of native
shots had ever disordered. The mules were in a gorge trotting into the
town of Indang. Natives in the high places about, were waiting for the
Train to debouch upon the river-bank--so as to take a few shots at the
outfit. Every one expected this, but just as the Train broke out of the
gorge into the open, at the edge of the river-bed--there was a great
sucking transfiguration from the shallows, a hideous sort of giving
birth from the mud.

It was just a soaked carabao rising from his deep wallow in the stream,
but that she-devil, the gray bell-mare, tried to climb the cliffs about
it. The mules felt her panic, as if an electrode ran from her to the
quick of every hide of them. When the fragments of the Train were
finally gathered together in Indang, they formed an undone, hysterical
mess. The packers were too tired to eat, but sat around dazed, softly
cursing, and smoking cigarettes; as they did one day after a big fight,
in which one of their number, Jimmy the Tough, was shot through the
brain. For days the mules were nervous over the delicate condition of
the bell.

Study of Andrew Bedient and weeks in which he learned, past the waver
of a doubt, that his friend was knit with a glistening and imperishable
fabric of courage, brought David Cairns to that high astonishing point,
where he could say impatiently, "Rot!"--as his former ideals of manhood
rose to mind. It was good for him to get this so young.... One morning
something went wrong with Benton, the farrier. He had been silent for
days. Bedient had sensed some trouble in the little man's heart, and
had often left Cairns to ride with him. Then came the evening when the
farrier was missed. It was in the mountains near Naig. At length, just
as the sun went down, the Train saw him gain a high cliff--and stand
there for a moment against the red sky. Bedient reached over and
gripped Cairns' arm. Turning, the latter saw that his friend's eyes
were closed. The remarkable thing was that not one of the packers
called to Benton--but all observed the lean tough little figure of one
of the neatest men that ever lived afield--regarded in silence the hard
handsome profile. Finally Benton drew out his pistol and looked at it,
as if to see that the oil had kept out the dust from the hard day on
the trail. Then he looked into the muzzle and fired--going over the
cliff, as he had intended, and burying himself.

"Some awful inner hunger," Bedient whispered hours afterward. "You see,
he couldn't talk--as you and I do.... I've noticed it so long--that
these men can't talk to one another--only swear and joke."

Early the next morning Cairns awoke, doubtless missing Bedient
subconsciously. It was in the first gray, an hour before Healy kicked
his outfit awake. Bedient was back in camp in time to start breakfast,
having made a big detour to reach the base of the gorge. It wasn't a
thing to speak about, but he had made a pilgrimage to the pit where the
farrier had fallen.... Another time, Cairns awoke in the same way. It
was the absence of Bedient, not the actual leaving, that aroused him.
The Train had camped in a little nameless town. Cairns, this time,
found his companion playing with a child, at the doorway of one of the
shacks of the village. Inside, was an old man sick with
_beri-beri_--swollen, features erased, unconscious; and an old woman
who also had been too weak to flee before the American party. These
two, the child, and a few pariah dogs were all that remained. You could
have put the tiny one in a haversack comfortably. A poor little mongrel
head that shone bare and scabby in places, but big black eyes, full of
puzzles and wonderings; and upon his arms and legs, those deep humors
which come from scratching in the night. The infant sat upon a banana
leaf--brown and naked and wonderful as possible--and Bedient knelt
before him smiling happily, and feeding hard-tack that had been
softened in bacon-gravy.

Cairns saw the old woman's face. It was sullen, haggard. The eyes were
no strangers to hunger nor hatred. She watched the two Americans, as
might a crippled tigress, that had learned at last how weak was her
fury against chains. He saw that same look many times afterward in the
eyes of these women of the riverbanks--as the white troops moved past.
There was not even a sex-interest to complicate their hatred.

One day Thirteen overtook a big infantry column making a wide ford in
the river before Bamban. It was high noon, but they found during the
hold-up, a bit of shade and breeze on a commanding hill. Cairns and
Bedient kicked off their shoes into the tall, moist grass, and
luxuriously poked their feet into the coolness; and presently they were
watching unfold a really pretty bit of action.

A thin glittering cloud of smoke across the river showed where the
trenches of the natives were. The Americans in the river, held their
rifles and ammunition-belts high, and wriggled their hips against the
butting force of the stream. It all became very business-like. The
battalion first across, set out to flank the native works; a rapid-fire
gun started to boom from an opposite eminence, and the infantry took to
firing at the emptying trenches. The Tagals were poked out of their
positions, and in a sure leisurely way that held the essence of
attraction.

After all, it was less the actual bits of fighting that cleared into
memories of permanence, than certain subtleties of the campaign: a
particular instant of one swift twilight, as in the plaza at Alphonso;
a certain moment of a furious mid-day, when the sun was a python
pressure, so that the scalp prickled with the congested blood in the
brain, and men lifted their hats an inch or two as they rode,
preserving the shade, but permitting the air to circulate; some
guttural curse from a packer who could not lift his voice in the heat,
nor think, but only curse, and grin in sickly fashion....

There were moments, reminders of which awoke Cairns in a sweat for many
nights afterward: One day when he was badly in need of a fresh mount,
he saw just ahead of the Train--a perfect little sorrel stallion
fastened to the edge of the trail. He dismounted to change saddles. The
Train was straggling along under an occasional fire. Cairns found that
the pony was held by a tough wire, that led into the jungle. Such was
the braiding at the throat, that only a sapper could have handled it.
The correspondent started to follow the wire into the thicket--when
Bedient caught him by the shoulder and half-lifted him from the ground.
There was strength in that slim tanned hand that had nothing to do with
the ordinary force of men. The cook smiled, but disdained explanation.
It all dawned upon Cairns a second later. He would have followed the
wire to the end in the jungle--where the trap of knives would
spring.... The bolo-men need but a moment.... It was only two or three
days later that one of the packers dropped behind the Train to tighten
a cinch. No one had noticed, and Thirteen filed on.

"For Christ's sake--don't!" they heard from behind.

Wheeling, they found that the man had seen the end--as he had called
out in that horrible echoing voice. He was not more than fifty yards
behind the rear packer--and pinned to the trail. A bolo had been
hammered with a stone--through the upper lip and the base of the brain,
two or three inches into the earth.... He had been butchered besides.

At the end of a terrific ten days, Thirteen was crawling at nightfall
into the large garrison at Lipa. Men and mules had been lost in the
recent gruelling service. The trails and the miles had been long and
hard; much hunger and thirst, and there was hell in the hearts of men
this night. Even Bedient was shaking with fatigue; and Cairns beside
him, felt that there wasn't the brain of a babe in his skull. His
saddle seemed filled with spikes. His spur was gone, and for hours he
had kept his half-dead, lolling-tongued pony on the way, by frequent
jabbing from a broken lead-pencil.... And here was Lipa at last, the
second Luzon town, and a corral for the mules. As they passed a
nipa-shack, at the outer edge, a sound of music came softly forth. Some
native was playing one of the queer Filipino mandolins. The Train
pushed on, without Cairns and Bedient. All the famine and foulness and
fever lifted from these two. They forgot blood and pain and glaring
suns. The early stars changed to lily-gardens, vast and white and
beautiful, and their eyes dulled with dreams.

They did not guess, at least Cairns did not, that the low music brought
tears that night--because they were in dreadful need of it, because
they were filled with inner agony for something beautiful, because they
had been spiritually starved. And all the riding hard, shooting true
and dying game--those poor ethics of the open--had not brought a crumb,
not a crumb, of the real bread of life. Nor could mountains of mere
energy nor icebergs of sheer nerve! In needing the bread of life--they
were different from the others, and so they lingered, unable to speak,
while a poor little Tagal--"one of the niggers"--all unconsciously
played. "Surely," they thought, "his soul is no dead, dark thing when
he can play like that."

       *       *       *       *       *

 ... So often, Bedient watched admiringly while Cairns wrote. The
correspondent didn't know it, but he was bringing a good temporal fame
to Thirteen and himself in these nights. He had a boy's energy and
sentiment; also a story to tell for every ride and wound and shot in
the dark. The States were attuned to boyish things, as a country always
is in war, and a boy was better than a man for the work.... Often
Bedient would bring him a cup of coffee and arrange a blanket to keep
the wind from the sputtering candles. The two bunks were invariably
spread together; and Bedient was ever ready for a talk in the dark,
when Cairns' brain dulled and refused to be driven to further work,
even under the whip of bitter-black coffee.... They were never to
forget these passionate nights--the mules, the mountains, nor the
changing moon. Cairns was tampering with a drug that is hard to give
up, in absorbing the odor and color of the oriental tropics. It filled
his blood, and though, at the time, its magic was lost somewhat in the
great loneliness for the States, and his mother and sisters--still, he
was destined to know the craving when back on consecrated ground once
more, and the carnal spirit of it all, died from his veins.

The most important lesson for Cairns to grasp was one that Andrew
Bedient seemed to know from the beginning. It was this: To make what
men call a good soldier means the breaking down for all time of that
which is thrillingly brave and tender in man.

Healy is a type--a gamester, a fiend, a catapult. With a yell of
"Hellsfire!" like a bursting shell, he would rowel his saddle-mule and
lead the Train through flood or flame. His was a curse and a blow. He
seemed a devil, condemned ever to pound miles behind him--bloody miles.
Sometimes, there was a sullen baleful gleam in the black eye, shaded by
a campaign hat, but more often it was wide-open and reckless like a man
half-drunk. Rousingly picturesque in action, a boy would exclaim, "Oh,
to be a man like that!" but a _man_ would look at him pityingly and
murmur, "God forbid!"... No other had the racy oaths of this
boss-packer. Here was his art. Out of all his memories of Healy and the
Train, one line stands out in the mind of Cairns, bringing the picture
of pictures:

Again, it was a swift twilight among the gorges between Silang and
Indang. It was after the suicide of the farrier, and there were sores
and galls under the packs. If one cannot quickly start the healing by
first intention, a sore back, in this climate, will ruin a mule. In a
day or two, one is all but felled by the stench and corruption of the
worm-filled wound--when the _aparejo_ is lifted.... Just before the
halt this night, an old gray mule, one of the tortured, had strayed
from the bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the
work. Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty
creatures. If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in
twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this
temperamental monster--the mules appear morally refreshed for any fate.

Miraculous toilers, sexless hybrids--successful ventures into Nature's
arcanum of cross-fertilization--steady, humorous, wise, enduring, and
homely unto pain! The bond of their whole organization is the bell. It
is the source inseparable in their intelligence from all that is lovely
and of good report--not the sound, but what the sound represents. And
this is the mystery: mare or gelding doesn't seem to matter, nor age,
color, temper; just something set up and smelling like a horse.
Thirteen's crest-jewel was an old roan Jezebel that smothered with
hatred at the approach of the least or greatest of her slaves. She had
a knock-out in four feet--but Beatrice, she was, to those mules.

When Healy found the old gray missing, he remembered she was badly off
under the packs. It was an ordeal to halt and search, for Silang meant
supper and pickets. But the boss led the way back--and his eye was
first to find her.... There she was, silhouetted against the sunset as
poor Benton had been--seventy or eighty feet above the trail. Her head
was down, her tongue fallen. The old burden-bearer seemed to have
clambered up the rocks--through some desperate impulse for a breeze--or
to die! She lifted her head as the hoofs rang below--but still looked
away toward some Mecca for good mules. You must needs have been there
to get it all--the old gray against the red sky--and know first-hand
the torture of the trails, the valor of labor, the awfulness of Luzon.
To Cairns and Bedient there was something deep and heady to the
picture, as they followed the eyes of Healy--and then his yell that
filled the gorges for miles:

"Come down here--you scenery-lovin' son of----"

That was just the _vorspiel_. Mother Nature must have fed color to
Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse
dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English
flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all
nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was
hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled
and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a
sudden obsession, and went howling heinously dawn the gorge. Healy
rolled a cigarette with his free hand, and the old gray let herself
down, half-falling....

And then--the end of campaigning. The rains began gradually that
season, so that the last days were steamy and sickening with the heavy
sweet of tropical fragrance. Between clouds at night, the stars broke
out more than ever brilliant and near, in the washed air. There were
moments when the sky appeared ceiled with phosphor, which a misty cloud
had just brushed and set to dazzling. Something in the soil made them
talk of girls--and Bedient drew forth for Cairns (to see the hem of her
garment)--a certain hushed vision named Adelaide.... At last, the Train
made Manila, wreck that it was, after majestic service; and the great
gray mantle, a sort of moveless twilight, settled down upon Luzon and
the archipelago. Within its folds was a mammoth condenser, contracting
to drench the land impartially, incessantly, for sixty days or more.
And now the fruition of the rice-swamps waxed imperiously; the carabao
soaked himself in endless ecstasy; the rock-ribbed gorges of Southern
Luzon filled with booming and treachery. Fords were obliterated.
Hundreds of little rivers, that had not even left their beds marked
upon the land, burst into being like a new kind of swarm; and many like
these poured into the Pasig, which swelled, became thick and angry with
the drain of the hills, the overflow of the rice-lands, and the filth
and fever-stuff of the cities. At last, the constant din of the rain
became a part of the silence.



FOURTH CHAPTER


THAT ADELAIDE PASSION

Andrew Bedient did not call at all these Asiatic and insular ports and
continue to meet only men. Indeed, he did not fail to encounter those
white women who follow men to disrupted places, where blood is upon the
ground,--nor those native women inevitably present. A man fallen to the
dregs usually finds a woman to keep him company, but it is equally true
that man never climbs so high that, looking upward, he may not see a
woman there.

A little before the _Truxton's_ last voyage, the clipper had remained
in port for a fortnight at Adelaide, New South Wales. A woman in that
city was destined to mean a great deal to the boy of seventeen.... It
would be very easy to say that here was a creature whose way is the way
of darkness. The striking thing is that Adelaide (in the thoughts of
Bedient afterward, she gradually appropriated the name of her city) did
not know she was evil.... Such a woman, it is curious to note, has
appeared in the boyhood of many men of power and eminent equipment.

Adelaide was small and fragrant. Though formerly married, she was true
to her kind in being childless. All her interests were in senses of her
own; or in the senses of men and women who fell beneath her eye; pale,
narrow temples were hers, but crowded with what sensational memories! A
hundred and a few odd pounds, every ounce vivid with health and
rhythmic with desire; every thought a kiss loved, missed, or hoped for;
a frail little flame that needed only time to destroy an arena of
gladiators. Curving, pearly nails with flecks of white in them, a light
low laugh, a sweet low voice! Perhaps this was her charm, a sort of
_samosen_ tone--low lilting minors that have to do with dusk and
gardens and starlight....

There is not even a laughing pretense here that Adelaide was a real
woman; but real women, even in this era of woman, often fail to
remember what pure attractions to man, are their silences and their
minor tones.

Just a fortnight--but what a tearing it was to leave her! Old Mother
Nature must have writhed at this parting--groaned at the sight of the
boy staring back from the high stern of the _Truxton_, at the stars
lowering over the city and the woman, Adelaide. Possibly she retained
something from the depth of his individuality.... Bedient would not
have said so; but there is no doubt that her importance in his life was
that of a _mannequin_ upon which to drape his ideals. Had he seen her,
in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of
disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant
beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.

A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body--such
was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of
inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her sex,--colorless
enough to most grown men,--was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it
shining with his idealism.... Frail arms held out to him; cool arms
that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her
own....

Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the
latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have--lovelier than royalty
and fine as genius--the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all
unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the
foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea.
Winds from the South were her kisses--almost all the kisses he knew for
years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing
the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her--and the
little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the
morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out
impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She
had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her
for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected
cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she
held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or
no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through
those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick
and despicable with excess.

Bedient often questioned himself--why he had not given up his berth on
the _Truxton_ and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships
in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not
come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable
_something_ which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This
was not to be fathomed then--nor willed away. The roots of his
integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at
thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and
denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange
antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless.
Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.

The time came when he heard other women--blessed women--speak of the
Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their
eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling
shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the
ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this--yet
preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the
South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair.
From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty
and dimension of a Helen.

Other experiences, up to the real romance--and these were surprisingly
few--were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame...When the first
American soldiers were being lightered ashore in Manila harbor, in
fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came
over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the
Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of
the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman on the
_Escolta_. It was at dusk, and she was crossing the narrow pavement
from the post-office entrance to her carriage-door. Their eyes met
frankly. She was wise, under thirty, very slender, perfectly dressed;
pretty, of course, but more than that; her little perfections were
carried far beyond the appreciation of any but women physically
faultless as herself.

Bedient was impressed with something passionate and courageous,
possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this
impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin,
in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her
lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick
dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such
a woman in Manila.... She lowered her eyes, started for her
carriage--then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh
white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight
in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.

"Wouldn't you like to drive with me on the _Luneta_?" she asked
pleasantly, and there was a low tone in her voice which made her
instantly different.

"Why, yes, I should like to."

Her carriage was a _victoriette_, small to match the ponies--black
stallions, noteworthy for style and spirit even in Manila, where one's
equipage is the measure of fortune.... Bedient found that he could be
silent without causing an abatement of her pleasure. And, indeed, she
seemed a little embarrassed, too, although he did not accept this.
Vaguely he was ruffled by the thought that he had merely been chosen as
the principal of a nightly adventure.... This was untrue.

It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the
night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent
atmosphere--with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his
thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable
present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder
of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged
through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did
not remember. She could laugh charmingly.... To her, the Hour uprose.
Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved
to be)--to make her very own!... She had taught herself to live by the
hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would
soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to
women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love
of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no
material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this
promised to be. Here was a big intact passion which she called unto
herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her;
this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with
dreams--as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love--of a
sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his
wrist--and told the native to drive them home.

 ... They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the
Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house.
There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the
establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn
down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they
were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the
balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and
across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the
horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist.... The
piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through
the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The
fragments were mellifluous....

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon.
He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in
the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first
to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous.
She did not ask a second time.... There was just one other perilous
moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she
turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:

"You're a dear boy!... I haven't kissed anyone like that--oh, in long,
long!... It makes me feel like a woman--how silly of me!"

Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered
candles. "Isn't it silly of me--isn't it--_isn't it_?" she kept
repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in
frightened fashion.... She was reaching amazing deeps of him. The best
of her was his, for she could give greatly. It was wonderful, if
momentary. He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his
fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh. The need of her
flamed high within him. She was delight in every movement and
expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced.... She had
banished the one encroachment of sordidness. The high passion of this
moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children. Some
strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build. They had come to
an end of words....

A knock at the door broke the _notturno appassionato_. She had left
word not to be called for any reason. Furiously now she rushed across
the room.... Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but
heard the frightened voice uttering the word, "Brigadier----." The
answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but
the voice at the door whimpered, "Only it was _the General_----!"...

It was all hideously clear. Bedient was left sterile, polar. The door
slammed shut; the woman faced him--and understood. There was no
restoring _this_ ruin.... She now damned military rank and her
establishment in a slow, dreadful voice. Her knuckles seemed driven
into her temples. She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted--to have
her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from
him--and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute
before.... Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was
not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her
concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture
of the Brigadier in her mind. He _saw_ the man afterward--a fat and
famous soldier.... She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in
and the small white teeth snapped upon it.

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last
vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to
say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it.... And in the street
he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant
rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her
seizures."...

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was
not at all himself.... In all the months that followed meeting David
Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible
for words--though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a
hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the
first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by
rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in
service--was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of
hunting up Cairns in China.... It was dusk again, that redolent hour.
Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins--that coffee roused
him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection,
that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and
senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a
Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the
river-banks--yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young
manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point
of the shoulder--a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head--was
enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not
desire--but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon
full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic
visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world,
to find the Woman--somewhere.

Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world's
women--a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar space is needed
to hold it all. Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the
creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite
all these potentials of love.... In this mood his mind reverted to that
isle of the sea--the woman, and the room that was her house.... He was
sitting in the plaza before the _Hotel d'Oriente._ A little
bamboo-table was before him and a long glass of claret and fruit-juice.
The night was still; hanging-lanterns were lit, though the darkness was
not yet complete. There was a mingling of mysterious lights and shadows
among the palm-foliage that challenged the imagination--like an
unfinished picture.... Only a few of the tables were occupied. The
native servants were very quiet. Bedient heard a girlish voice out of
the precious and perilous South.

 ... It was not Adelaide. He had only started to turn, when his
consciousness told him that. But the voice was much like hers--the same
low and lazy loveliness in the formation of certain words. The appeal
was swift. Bedient did not turn, though he sat tingling and
attentive.... At this time not a few of the American officers had been
joined by their wives in Manila, and most of these were quartered at
the _Oriente_.... He knew the man's voice, too, but in such a different
way--the voice of a soldier heard afield.

What was said had little or no significance--a man's tolerant,
sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable
nothings from his companion. It was the ardor in her tones--the sort of
completion of sensuous happiness--and the strange kinship between her
and the woman he had known--these, that brought to Bedient a sudden
madness of hunger to hear such words for his own....

The man had but recently come in from field-work. The woman was fresh
from a transport voyage from the States. He talked laughingly of the
"niggers" his company had met--of small, close fighting and surprises.
She wanted to hear more, more,--but alone. She was pressing him, less
with words than manner, to come into the hotel and relate his
adventures, where they could be quite alone.... She had been so
passionately lonely without him--back in Washington ... and the long
voyage.... Her voice enthralled Bedient.

They were married. The man laughed often. The tropics had enervated
him, though he made no such confession. He wanted drink and lights. To
him, the present was relishable. Their chairs scraped the tiles before
Bedient turned.... They had not risen. She caught his eyes. Hers were
not eyes of one who would be lonely in Washington nor during a long
transport voyage. She was very young, but a vibrant feminine, her
awakening already long-past. There was just a glimpse of light hair, a
red-lipped profile and slow, shining dark eyes. She was not even like
Adelaide, but a blood sister in temperament. Bedient saw this in her
hands, wrists, lips and skin, in the pure elemental passion which came
from her every tone and motion. One of the insatiate--yet frail
and lovely and scented like a carnation; a white flower,
red-tipped--sublimate of earthy perfume.

Bedient had seen the man in the field, a young West Point product, with
a queer, rabbit face, lots of men friends, the love of his company, and
a remarkable kind of physical courage--a splendid young chap, black
from the heats, who was being talked about for his grisly humor under
fire. This officer had seen his men down--and stayed with them.... His
was a different and deeper love. He did not hurry. It seemed as if she
would take his hand, after all, and lead him into the hotel. Just a
little girl--little over twenty.

For the first time it struck Bedient that he must leave. He was
startled that he had not left. His only palliation for such a venture
into two lives--was the memories her voice roused. His lips tightened
with scorn of self. And yet the thought became a fury as he walked
rapidly through the dark toward the river--what it would mean to have a
woman want him that way!.... His thoughts did not violate the soldier's
domain. Quite clean, he was, from that; yet she had shown him afresh
what was in the world. It was nearing midnight; sentries of the city,
still under martial law, ordered him off the streets before he realized
passing time.... And the hours did not bring to his mind the woman of
the Block-House, nor anyone of those flaming desert-women who love so
fiercely and so fruitlessly; whose relations with men do not weave, but
only bind the selvage of the human fabric....

       *       *       *       *       *

Bedient was glad to get away to sea.... David Cairns, overtaken in
China, had changed a little. It appears that the very best of young men
must change when they begin to wear their reputation. Riding with
Thirteen had made easily the best newspaper fodder which the Luzon
campaigns furnished, and the sparkling wine of recognition eventually
found its own. It must be repeated that only a boy-mind can depict war
in a way that fits into popular human interest.

The David Cairns whom Bedient met at the Taku forts, near the mouth of
the Pei-ho, had a bit of iron tonic in his veins. His sentences were
shorter, less faltering and more frequent. He _knew_ things that he had
formerly held tentatively. His conceptions (during night-talks) were
called in quickly from the dream-borders, and given the garb and weight
of matter. The stamina of decision had hardened. He was eager to call
Bedient his finest friend, but he had forgotten for the time the
amazing subtleties which at first had deepened and broadened this
wanderer's place in his inner life. A touch of success and the steady
drive of ambition had gradually moved the abiding place of Cairns'
consciousness from his heart to his brain. Few would have detected
other than manliness and improvement. Bedient did not trust himself to
think much about it, for fear he would do his friend an injustice. The
fact that he could not see Cairns differently in the latter's first
fame-flush, and observing past doubt, that he was lifted for the
world's eyes, helped Bedient to realize that he was a bit weird in
judgment. At all events, something was gone from the friendship. He was
sore at heart, more than ever alone.... The two separated a second time
in Peking after the relief of the Legations. Bedient went to Japan,
where he made the acquaintance of an old Buddhist priest--a scabby,
long-nailed Zarathustra who roamed the boxwood hills above Nikko, and
meditated.

Bedient was farther from such things now, but he could not avoid noting
that Japan is an old and easy shoe for the passions. The women of Japan
are but finished children, preserving a sense of innocence in their
bestowals. Many little Adelaides in fragrance, without will, without
high hopes, only momentary and baby hopes--children happy in the little
happinesses they give and take. This is the extraordinary feature of an
empire of dangerous half-grown men. Moreover, above the delicate charm
of sex, these little creatures are so remote and primitive in race and
idea, so intrinsically foreign and undeveloped--that one leaves the
fairest with a mitigated pang...

Bedient never repeated an action which once had brought home to him the
sense of his own evil. The emotions here narrated are but moments in
years. He accounted them quite as legitimate in the abstract as the
strange visionings of his higher life, as yet untold. These latter have
to do with his maturity, as wars and passions have to do with the
approach to maturity in the life of men. To Bedient, evil concerned
itself with the unclean. Wherever uncleanness (to him a pure
destructive principle) revealed itself there was a balance of power in
his nature which turned him from it, despite any concomitant
attraction. The original Adelaide was a superb answer to the more
earthy of his three natures; so utterly confined to her one plane as to
be innocent of others. In the two Manila twilights which saw the
dominance of his physical being, it was the Adelaide element which
roused; and the scars they left behind marked the scorch of memories.

The fact that there were moments in which Bedient smoldered helplessly
in a world of possible women is significant in the character of one
destined to fare forth on the Supreme Adventure. It is true, he was
preserved in comparative purity though he roamed unbridled around the
world. Perhaps it was the same instinct which held him apart from men
in their lower moments of indulgence. He could linger where there was
wine until the dregs of the company were stirred by the stimulus. All
delight left him then, and he found himself alone. His leaving was
quite as natural as the departure from a stifling room of one who has
learned to relish fresh air.... It was during his Japan stay that
Bedient pleased himself often with the thought that somewhere in the
world was a woman meant for him--a woman with a mind and soul, as well
as flesh. If the waiting seemed long--why should he not be content,
since she was waiting, too? He would know her instantly. The slightest
errant fancy of doubt would be enough to assure him that she was _not_
the One....

Send a boy out on a long journey (even to Circe and Calypso, and past
the calling rocks of the sea), but if his mother has loved into his
life, the rare flower of fastidiousness, he will come back, with
innocence aglow beneath the weathered countenance. It is the sons of
strong women who have that fineness which makes them choice, even in
their affairs of an hour. A beautiful spirit of race guardianship is
behind this fastidiousness.... Miraculously, it seems to appear many
times in the sons of women who have failed to find their own
knight-errants. Missing happiness, they have taken disillusionment from
common man; yet so truly have they held to their dreams, that _ever_
their sons must go on searching for the true bread of life.



FIFTH CHAPTER


A FLOCK OF FLYING SWANS

One day (it was before he knew David Cairns) Bedient picked up the
_Bhagavad Gita_ from a book-stand in Shanghai. It was limp, little,
strong, and looked meaty. As he raised his eyes wonderingly from a
certain sentence, he encountered the glance of the fat old German
dealer.

"Will this little book stand reading more than once, sir?" Bedient
asked.

"Ja--but vat a little-boy question! Ven you haf read sefen times the
year for sefen years--you a man vill haf become."

Bedient had been through the Song of the Divine One many times before
he heard of it from anyone else. He had liked to think of it as a
particular treasure which he shared with the queer old German, sick
with fat. Now, it was the old Japanese sage who had turned the young
man's mind to the comparative moderns--Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, and
several others--and it was with a shock of joy he discovered that
almost all of these light-bringers had _lived_ with his little book. So
queerly things happen.... However, the _Bhagavad Gita_ gave him a
brighter sense of the world under his feet, of a Force other than its
own balance and momentum, and of its first fruits--the soul of man....
_In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth_--that morning star of
Hebrew revelation was not at all dimmed; indeed, it shone with fairer
lustre in the more spacious heavens of the Farther East.

Directly from his old Japanese teacher, and subtly from the _Bhagavad
Gita_ and the modern prophets, Bedient felt strongly urged to India.
This culminated in 1903, when he was twenty-five years old. Hatred of
Russia was powerfully fomenting through the Japanese nation at this
time. Bedient grew sick at the thought of the coming struggle, but
delayed leaving for several weeks, in the hope of seeing David Cairns,
who, surely enough, was one of the first of the war-correspondents to
reach Tokyo late that year. Cairns had put on pounds and power, and
only Bedient knew at the end of certain fine days together, that the
beauty of their first relation had not returned in its fullness....
They parted (a third time during five years) in the wintry rain on the
water-front at Yokohama, Cairns remaining and Bedient taking ship for
Calcutta.

Up into the Punjab he went with the new year; and there, all but lost
trace of time and the world. _He seemed to have come home_--an
ineffable emotion. When they told him quite seriously that the Ganges
was sent from heaven, and had wandered a thousand years in the hair of
Shiv before flowing down upon the plains with beauty and plenty and
healing for sin-spent man--Bedient instantly comprehended the meaning
of the figure: that the hair of Shiv was the Himalayas, whose peaks
continually rape the rain-clouds. And the lotos--name, fragrance and
sight of this flower--started a little lyrical wheel tinkling in his
mind, turning off snatches of verses that sung themselves; and
fluttering bits of romance, half-religious and altogether impersonal;
and strange pictures, lovely, though all but effaced.

Indeed, he was one with the Hindus in a love for the bees, the silence,
the mountains, rivers, the moon, and the heaven-protected cattle, in
whose great soft eyes he found the completion of animal peace.... The
legend that the bees had come from Venus, with the perfect cereal,
wheat, as patterns of perfection from that farther evolved
planet--fascinated, became the _leit-motif_ of his thoughts for weeks.
Earth had earned a special dispensation, it was said, and bright
messengers came with a swarm and a sheaf, each milleniums advanced
beyond any species of its kind here.

From a little boy he had loved the bees. Afternoons long ago (this was
clear to him as the memory of that sinister hall-way of yellow-green
light which returned on the afternoon of the great wind) he had lain
upon the grass somewhere, and heard the hum of the honey-gatherers in
thistle and clover. The hum was like the far singing of a child-choir,
and the dreamings it started then were altogether too big for the
memory mechanism of a little boy's head; but the vastness and wonder of
those dreamings left a kind of bushed beauty far back in his mind. He
had loved the bees as he had loved the _Bhagavad Gita_, thinking it
peculiarly his own attraction, but when the world's great poets and
prophets became known to him through their writings, he discovered,
again with glad emotion, that bees had stirred the fancy of each,
stimulated their conceptions of service and communistic blessedness;
furnished their symbols for laws of beauty and cleanliness,
brotherhood, race-spirit, the excellence of sacrifice--a thousand
perfect analogies to show the way of human ethics and ideal
performance.... But beyond all their service to literature, he
perceived that these masters among men had _loved_ the bees. This was
the only verb that conveyed Bedient's feelings for them; and he found
that they literally swarmed through Hindu simile in its expressions of
song and story and faith.

Northward, he made his leisure way almost to the borders of Kashmir,
before he found his place of abode--Preshbend, a little town of many
Sikhs, which clung like a babe to the sloping hip of a mountain. He was
taken on by the English of the forestry service, and liked the ranging
life; liked, too, the rare meetings with his fellow-workers and
superiors, quiet, steady-eyed men, quick-handed and slow of speech.
With all his growth and knowledge of the finer sort, Bedient carried no
equipment for earning a living--except through his hands. There was no
hesitation with him in making a choice--between patrolling a forest,
and the columns of a ledger. All the indoor ways of making money that
intervene between the artisan and artist were to him out of the
question. When asked his occupation, he had answered, "Cook."

One week in each month he spent in the town, and he came to love
Preshbend and the people; the tall young men, many taller than he, and
the great lean-armed, gaunt-breasted Sikh women. The boys were so
studious, so simple and gentle, compared with the few others he had
known, and the women such adepts at mothering! Then the shy, slender
girls, impassable ranges between him and any romantic sense; yet, he
was glad to be near them, glad to hear their voices and their laughter
in the evenings.... He loved the long shadow of the mountains, the
still dusty roads where the cattle moved so softly that the dust never
rose above their knees; the smell of wood-smoke in the dusk, the
legends of the gods, scents of the high forest, the thoughts which
nourished his days and nights, and the brilliant stars, so steady and
eternal, and so different from the steaming constellations of
Luzon;--he loved it all, and saw these things, as one home from bitter
exile.

And then with the cool dark and the mountain winds, after the long,
pitiless day of fierce, devouring sunlight, the moon glided over the
fainting world with peace and healing--like an angel over a
battle-field.... The two are mystic in every Indian ideal of beauty,
and alike cosmic--woman and the moon.

There was a certain trail that rose from Preshbend, and ended after an
hour's walk in a high cliff of easy ascent. Bedient often went there
alone when the moon was full--and waited for her rising. At last
through a rift in the far mountains, a faint ghost would appear, and
waveringly whiten the glacial breast of old _God-Mother_--the highest
peak in the vision of Preshbend. Just a nucleus of light at first, like
a shimmering mist, but it steadied and brightened--until that snowy
summit was configured in the midst of her lowlier brethren on the
borders of Kashmir--and Bedient, turning from his deep reflections,
would find the source of the miracle, trailing her glory up from the
South.

Often he lost the sense of personality in these meditations. His eyes
turned at first upon that dead, dark mountain, which presently caught
the reflection of the moon (in itself a miracle of loveliness); then
the moon which held the reflection of the hidden sun, which in its turn
reflected the power of All; and he, a bit of suppressed animation among
the rocks of the cliff, audaciously comprehending that chain of
reflections and adding his own! The marvel of it all carried him a
dimension beyond the responsiveness of mere brain-tissue, and for hours
in which he was not Bedient, but _one_ with some Unity that swept over
the pageant of the universe, his body lay hunched and chill in the cold
of the heights.... That was his first departure, and he was in his
twenty-eighth year.

Another time, as he watched old _God-Mother_, he suddenly felt
_himself_ an instrument upon which played the awful yearning of the
younger peoples of Europe and America. Greatly startled, he saw them
hungering for this vastness, this beauty and peace; yet enchanted among
little things, condemned to chattering and pecking at each other, and
through interminable centuries to tread dim hot ways of spite and
weariness, cruelty and nervous pain. He, Bedient, had found peace here,
but it was not for him to take always. He seemed held by that awful
yearning across the world; as if he were an envoy commissioned to find
Content--to bring back the secret that would break their
enchantment.... No, he was not yet detached from his people; he could
only accept tentatively these mighty virtues of wonder and silence,
gird his loins with them and finally take back the rich tidings.... Was
he dwelling in silence to walk in power over there? This excited and
puzzled him at first. Bedient as a bearer of light was new....

Yet hunger was growing within for his own people; a passion to tell
them; rather to make them see that all their aims and possessions were
not worth one moment, such as he had spent, watching the breast of old
_God-Mother_ whiten, with the consciousness of God walking in the
mountain-winds, the scent of camphor, lotos, sandal and wild-honey in
His garments. A passion, indeed, grew within him to make his people see
that real life has no concern with wrestlings in fetid valleys, but up,
up the rising roads--poised with faith, and laughing with power--until
through a rift in the mountains, they are struck by the light of God's
face, and shine back--like the peaks of Kashmir to the moon.

And another night it came to him that he had something to say to the
women of his people. This thought emerged clean-cut from the deeps of
abstraction, and he trembled before it, for his recent life had kept
him far apart from women. And now, the thought occurred that he was
better prepared to inspire women--because of this separateness. He had
preserved the boyish ideal of their glowing mystery, their lovely
cosmic magnetism. India had stimulated it. All the lights of his mind
had fallen upon this ideal, all the colors of the spectrum and many
from heaven--certain swift flashes of glory, such as are brought, in
queer angles of light, from a butterfly's wing. He had been mercifully
spared from moving among the infinitudes of small men who hold such a
large estimate of the incapacity and commonness of women.... Even among
the Sikh mothers (Bedient did not dream how his spirit prospered during
these Indian years) his ideal was strengthened. He found among the
mothers of the Punjab a finer courage than ever the wars had shown
him--the courage that bends and bears--and an answering sweetness for
all the good that men brought to their feet....

So one night at last he found himself thanking God in the great
silence--that he could see the natural greatness of women; that he was
alive to help them; that he could pity those who knew only the toiling,
not the mystic, hands of women; pity those--and tell them--who knew her
only as a sense creature.... And swiftly he wanted to tell women--how
high he held them--that one man in the world had kept his vision of
them brighter and brighter in substance and spirit. He had the queer,
almost feminine, sense, of their needing to know this, and of
impatience to give them their happiness. Perhaps they did not
continually hold this in mind; perhaps the men of their world had
taught them to forget.... They would be happier for his coming. He
would put into each woman's heart--_as only a man could do_--a
quickened sense of her incomparable importance; make her remember that
mothering is the loveliest of all the arts; that only in the lower and
savage orders of life the male is ascendant; that as the human race
evolves in the finer regions of the spirit--when growth becomes centred
in the ethereal dimension of the soul--woman, invariably a step nearer
the great creative source, must assume supremacy.... Among the dark
mountains the essence of all these thoughts came to him during many
nights.

He would make women happier by restoring to them--their own. He must
show how dreadful for them to forget for an instant--that they are the
real inspirers of man; that they ignite his every conception; that it
is men who follow and interpret, and the clumsy world is to blame
because the praise so often goes to the interpreter, and not to the
inspiration. But praise is a puny thing. Women must see that they only
are lovely who remain true to their dreams, for of their dreams is made
the spiritual loaf, the real vitality of the race; that by remaining
true to their dreams, though starved of heart, the sons that come to
them will be the lovers they dream of--and bring the happiness _they_
missed, to the daughters of other women. For love is spirit--the stuff
of dreams--and love is Giving.... He must bring to women again, lest
they forget, this word: that never yet has man sung, painted,
prophesied, made a woman happy, nor in any way woven finer the spirit
of his time, but that God first covenanted with his mother for the
gift--and, more often than not, the gift was startled into its supreme
expression by the daughter of another.... All in a sentence, it summed
at last, to Bedient alone,--a flaming sentence for all women to hear:
_Only through the potential greatness of women can come the militant
greatness of men_.

And so things appeared unto him to do, as he watched the miracle of the
moon bringing forth the lineaments of the old _God-Mother_; and so the
cliff became his Sinai. On this last night, for a moment at least, he
felt as must an immortal lover who has seen clearly the way of
chivalry--the task which was to be, as the Hindus say, the fruit of his
birth.... Thus he would go down, face glowing with new and luminous
resolves.... And once dawn was breaking as he descended, and the whir
of wings aroused him. Looking upward he saw (as did Another of
visions), in the red beauty of morning--a flock of swans flying off to
the South.

       *       *       *       *       *

Gobind must not be forgotten--old Gobind, who appeared in Preshbend at
certain seasons, and sat down in the shade of a camphor-tree, old and
gnarled as he; but a sumptuous refuge, as, in truth was Gobind in the
spirit. The natives said that the austerities of Gobind were the envy
of the gods; that he could hold still the blood in his veins from dusk
to dawn; and make the listener understand many wonderful things about
himself and the meaning of life.

The language had come to Bedient marvellously. Literally it flowed into
his mind, as in the rains a rising river finds its old bed of an
earlier season.

"This is your home, Wanderer," Gobind told him. "Long have you
travelled to and fro and long still must you wander, but you will come
back again to the cool shadows, and to these--" Gobind lifted his hand
to point to the roof of the world. The yellow cloth fell away from his
arm, which looked like a dead bough blackened from many rains. "For
these are your mountains and you love these long shadows. All Asia and
the Islands you have searched for these shadows, and here you are
content, for your soul is Brahman.... But you are not ready for Home.
You are not yet tired. Long still must you wander. Some sin of a former
birth caused you to sink into the womb of a woman of the younger
peoples. You have yet to return to them--as one coming down from the
mountains, after the long summer, brings a song and a story for the
heat-sick people of the plains to hear at evening----"

This was the substance of many talks. It was always the same when
Gobind shut his eyes.

"You say I shall come back here, good Gobind?" Bedient asked.

"Yes, you will come back here to abandon the body----"

"Alone?"

"Yes."

Bedient was filled with grave questions. One can always put a mystic
meaning to the direct saying of a Hindu holy man, but there seemed no
equivocation here. The young man was slow to believe that all his
dreaming must come to naught. It seemed as if his whole inner life had
been built about the dream of a woman; and of late she had seemed
nearer than ever, and different from any woman, he had ever known--the
mate of his mind and soul and flesh. For a long time he progressed no
farther than this, for falling into his own thoughts, he would find
only the aged body of Gobind before him--the rest having stolen away on
night-marches of deep moment, while he, Bedient, had tried to realize
his life loneliness. At last he could think of nothing else throughout
the long day, and he went early in the semi-light and sat before the
holy man. The dusk darkened, and a new moon rose, but Gobind did not
rise to mere physical consciousness that night, though Bedient sat very
still before him for hours. The bony knees of the old ascetic, covered
with dust, were moveless as the black roots of the camphor-tree; and a
dog of the village sat afar off on his haunches and whined at
intervals, waiting for the white man to go, that he might have the
untouched supper, which a woman of Preshbend had brought to Gobind's
begging-bowl.

And again the next night Bedient came, but Gobind was away playing with
the gods of his youth--just the old withered body there--and the dog
whining.

But the third night, the eyes of Gobind filled with his young
friend----

"You say, good father Gobind," Bedient said quickly, "that I shall come
back here alone to die?"

"Yes," the _Sannyasin_ answered simply, but a moment later, he
shivered, and seemingly divined all that was in the young man's mind,
for he added: "You will learn to look _within_ for the woman.... You
would not find favor--in finding her without.... It is not for you--the
red desire of love!"

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during these years in India that Bedient began to put down the
thoughts which delighted him during the long rides through the forest;
and something of the thrill of his reflections, as he watched old
_God-Mother_ from his cliff. He found great delight in this, and his
mind was integrated by expression. He recalled many little pictures of
the early years--not the actions, but the reflections of action. It was
fascinating. He found that his journal would bulk big presently, so he
took to polishing as he went along; chose the finest, toughest Indian
parchment--and wrote finely as this print--for it was clear to him that
he had entered upon what was to prove a life-habit.

The letters from Captain Carreras had become more frequent in late
years; in fact, there was almost always a letter en route either from
Preshbend or Equatoria.... The Captain wanted him to come; stronger and
stronger became the call. So far as money was concerned, he had done
extraordinarily well. He always wrote of this half-humorously.... At
last when Bedient was beginning his seventh year in the Punjab, there
came a letter which held a plaint not to be put aside.

Bedient was in his thirty-second year; and just at this time old Gobind
left his body for a last time beneath the camphor-tree. The young man
had sat before him the night before, and the holy man had told him in
symbolism--that the poor murky river of his life had made its last bend
through the forests, and was swiftly flowing into the sea of time and
space. Though he sat long after silence had settled down, Bedient did
not know (so softly and sweetly did the old saint depart) that the
_Sannyasin_ was tranced in death instead of meditation. It was not
until the next morning, when he heard the Sikh women of the village
weeping--one above all--that he understood. It was not a shock of grief
to these women, for such is their depth that the little matters which
concern all flesh and which are inevitable, cannot be made much ado of.
Still it was feminine and beautiful to him, their weeping; and possibly
the one who wept loudest had mothered old Gobind in her heart, and
there was emptiness in the thought that she could not fill his
begging-bowl again. Bedient, as well as others of the village, knew
that to Gobind, death was a long-awaited consummation; that he was gone
only from the physical eye of the village. _That_ missed him--as did
Bedient, who had loved to sit at the fleshly feet of the holy man....
But he loved all Preshbend, too.

And at length, he set out on foot for Lahore--often looking back.



SIXTH CHAPTER


THAT ISLAND SOMEWHERE

ALL these impressive years, from seventeen to thirty-two, had brought
Andrew Bedient nothing in the civilized sense of success. It is quickly
granted that he was a failure according to such standards. He had never
been in want nor debt, nor so poor that he could not cover another's
immediate human need if presented; yet the reserve energy of all these
years, in fact, of his whole life, as represented in gold, amounted to
less than three hundred dollars. Probably, outside of Asia, there was
not a white man who had accumulated three hundred dollars with less
thought; certainly in Asia there was none, white or black, who carried
this amount with less vital concern. Up the years, he had given no
thought to the oft-expressed eagerness of Captain Carreras to help him
in a substantial way. He had always felt that he would go to his
friend--at times had hungered for him--and now he answered the call.

Fifteen years since he had taken the hand of Captain Carreras and
laughingly refused to share the other's fortunes! Bedient remembered
how bashfully, but how genuinely, that had been suggested. Then the
Captain's manner had become crisp and nervous to hide his heart-break,
and the order was given with all the authority of the quarter-deck,
that Bedient must never fail in any extremity to make known his need.
But there had been no need--save for the friendship....

Strange old true heart that could not forget! Bedient felt it in every
letter. Thousands of acquaintances, but not a friend nor relative! He
thought about Bedient every day; an old man's heart turned to the boy
whose hands had suddenly fallen upon him with such amazing power.
Occasionally in the letters, there was an obvious effort to cover this
profundity of affection with a surface of humor, but it always broke
through before a page was blotted.... Equatoria, and his really
remarkable acquisitions there, were invariably matters for light
touches. He had picked up big lands for almost nothing; and he found
himself presently in strong favor with what was probably the most
stable government Equatoria had ever known. The Captain's original
purpose of acquiring the mineral rights of certain rich rivers had
greatly prospered. Yes, there was gold in the river-beds....
Incidentally, to keep his hands "from mauling the natives," he had
caused to be planted at different times, several thousand acres of
cacao trees, all of which were now bearing. The Captain explained
naïvely that these had turned out rather handsomely, since the natives
harvested the nuts for him at a ludicrously low figure, and Holland
sent ships twice a year for the product. "Just suggest anything to this
soil, and the answer is perennials. We can't bother with stuff that has
to be planted more than once," he observed. Bedient returned many times
to the letter that told about the goats. Part of it read:

"There was a rocky strip of land in the fork of two rivers--several
thousand acres--that almost shut itself off, so narrow and rocky was
the neck.... For a long time this big bottle of land troubled
me--couldn't think of any use to put it to--until somebody mentioned
goats. In a fit of industry, I shipped over a few goat families from
Mexico, turned them loose in the natural corral--and forgot all about
them for a couple of years. You see, the natives are fruit-eaters, and
it's too hot for skins. My men occasionally brought me word that the
goats were doing well. Finally, I sent a party over to pile a few more
rocks at the mouth. They came back pale and awed, begging me to come
and look. I went. I tell you, boy, there were parades, caravans,
pageants of goats in there--all happy in the stone-crop.... I haven't
dared to look for a year or more, but with a good marine-glass from the
upper window of the _hacienda_, you can see a portion of the tract.
They're hopping about over there--thick as fleas!... That's the way
everything multiplies. Come and extricate me from the goat problem!...
Dear lad, I do need you--not for goats, nor for fruit, nor mining, nor
chocolate interests, not to be my cook--forgive the mention of a
delightful memory--but as a lonely old man needs a boy--his boy."

       *       *       *       *       *

Only a half-day in New York on the way down to Equatoria, or the
alternative of waiting over a ship, meaning eight days later with
Captain Carreras. Bedient could not bring his mind to the latter delay
at this stage of the journey, though the metropolis called to him
amazingly. Here he had been born; and here was the setting of many
early memories, now seen through a kind of faëry dusk. With but an hour
or so in lower Manhattan, he swept in impressions like a panorama-film,
his mind held to no single thought for more than an instant. The finest
outer integument had never been worn from his nerves, so that nothing
of the pandemonium distressed; but what his oriental training called
the illusion of it all--really dismayed. It seemed as if the millions
were locked in some terrible slavery, which they did not fully
understand, only that they must hurry, and never cease the devouring
toil. In the hideous walled cities of China, the same thought had often
come to Bedient--that these myriads had been condemned by the sins of
their past lives, blindly to gather together and maim each others'
souls.

Still there was some big meaning for him in New York. Bedient realized
that sooner or later he would return. Toward the end of the afternoon,
as he looked back from the deck of the Dryden steamer _Hatteras_, he
realized that New York had dazed him; that something of the grand
gloom, something of the granite, had entered his heart. Perhaps it was
well for him to have these glimpses, and to hurry away to adjust
himself in the silence--before he took up his place in New York again.

A week later the _Hatteras_ awaited dawn, sixty miles off the northern
coast of Equatoria. Treacherous coral reefs extend that far out to sea,
and the lights of the passage into port are few. This is an ugly part
of the Caribbean in high seas. Moreover, the coral has a way of
changing its ramifications; its spires build rapidly in the warm
surface water.

All the forenoon the liner crawled in toward the harbor, and at last
through the blazing noon, Bedient saw Coral City in a foreground of
palm-decked hills. Certain fresh-tinned roofs close to the water-front
reflected the sun like a burning-glass. Nearer still, a few white
buildings on the seaward slopes shone through the heat haze with the
vividness of jewels--whitened walls gleaming among the palms and
colorful turrets of pure Spanish line. The strip of beach, white as a
road of shells, lost itself on either side of the city in its own
dazzling light. Films of heat danced upon the painted roofs. The sky
was a blinding azure that tranced the hills and harbor with its
brilliance, silence and magic.

Clouds of yellow mud boiled up from the bottom of the oozy harbor as
the _Hatteras_ dropped her hook; and the sharks moved about, all the
more shuddery in their tameness. Two launches were making for the
steamer, and Bedient, sheltering his eyes from the light, discovered
the little Captain standing well-forward on the nearest--a puffy,
impatient face, pathetically unconscious of its own workings in
anxiety. Bedient's uplifted hand caught the other's eye as the launch
neared. The old adventurer needed a second or two to take in the tall
figure and the changed countenance--then a look of gladness, full, deep
and tender with embarrassment, crowned the years and the long journey.

Bedient had to remember hard, after dozens of fluent and delightful
letters, that he must encounter the old bashfulness again.... Plainly
the Captain showed the years. There was the dark dry look of some inner
consuming, and the trembling mouth was lined and assertive where
formerly it was unnoticed in the general cheer. There was a break in
rotundity. Perhaps this, more than anything else, put a strange hush
upon the meeting. Bedient was glad he had not delayed longer; and he
saw he must break through the embarrassment, as the boy and the cook of
years ago would not have thought of doing. The old perfume sought his
nostrils delicately with a score of memories.

The Captain seemed to have an absurd number of natives at his disposal.
Bedient's small pieces of baggage were prodigiously handled. A carriage
was provided, and the two drove up the main thoroughfare, _Calle Real_.
The little city was appointed and its streets named by the Spanish.
Parts of it were very old, and Bedient liked the setting, which was new
to him--the native courtesy and the mellowness of architecture which
that old race of conquerors has left in so many isles of the Western
sea.

At the head of the rising highway shone a gilded dome, a sort of crown
for the city. Bedient had seen it shining from the harbor, and supposed
it to be the capitol. The building stood upon an eminence like a
temple. _Calle Real_ parted to the right and left at its gates. Their
carriage passed to the right, and within the walls were groves of
palms, gardens of rose, rhododendron, jasmine, flames of poinsettia,
and a suggestion of mystic glooms where orchids breathed--fruit,
fragrance, fountains.

"The Capitol?" laughed the Captain. "No, my boy, those little
rain-rotted, stone buildings near the water-front are the government
property. However, you never can tell about Equatoria. There are folks
who believe that this stone palace of Señor Rey is fated to become the
Capitol. It might happen in two ways. Señor Rey might overturn the
government and move headquarters to his own house. You see, he loves
fine things too well to reside back yonder. Or, the government
overturning Celestino Rey--would ultimately move up here on the hill."

Bedient laughed softly. It was all delightfully young to him. "Then
Señor Rey aspires?"

"That's the idea--only we put it 'conspires' down here.... It is really
a remarkable institution--this of Señor Rey's," Carreras went on. He
forgot himself in a narrative. "Now, if you were in New York and had a
hundred thousand dollars of another man's money, and wanted to
relax--you would come here to Equatoria, and put up with Celestino Rey.
To all appearances, _The Pleiad_ is a hotel, but in reality it's just a
club for those who have taken the short cut to fortune--the direct and
amiable way of loot. There's so much red tape in Equatoria that a New
York warrant for arrest would be about as compelling in our city as a
comic valentine.

"So you see, Andrew, those who used to fly to Mexico now come here.
This is the most interesting colony of crime-cultured gentlemen in the
world--ex-cashiers, penmen, promoters and gamblers, all move in those
great halls and gardens. There are big games. Señor Rey is an artist in
many ways, not only as a master of gambling chances. His palace is
filled with art treasures from all lands. He was a pirate in these
waters--yes, within your years. I heard of him in Asia as the most
murderous pirate the Caribbean had ever known--and this was the Spanish
Main. Of course, stories build about a picturesque figure. The Señor
must be seventy years old now, but a man of mystery, fabulously
rich.... Just a little while ago, he brought over a fresh bride from
South America. They say she's a thriller to look at. The Spaniard calls
her his 'Glow-worm'----"

"Truly a honeymoon name," Bedient observed.

"You see," the Captain concluded, "I can speak of _The Pleiad_ only
from the outside. That's the Señor's name for his establishment,
possibly because there are seven wings to his castle, but others say it
was the name of a gold-ship that he took in the early days. Anyway, Rey
and I don't neighbor. He's becoming formidable, I'm told, in the
politics of the Island. He's at the head of a very powerful colony
nevertheless, and no matter what its inter-relations are, it hangs
together against the law and the outside world. Rey wants more say back
yonder at headquarters, and our Dictator, Jaffier, all things
considered, is a very good man, but old and stubborn and impolitic. He
won't be driven even by Celestino Rey, who in turn is not a man to be
denied. He is probably richer than Equatoria, and then Coral City lives
off this institution as Monaco lives off Monte Carlo. He doubtless
commands the whole lower element of the town. The word is, Celestino
Rey intends to run the Island first-hand--if he can't run it through
the powers that are."

All of which Bedient found of interest, inasmuch as he was passing
through the heart of these strange affairs. Having any part in them
seemed unearthly remote. The carriage was taking the gradual rise
behind a pair of fine ponies, and the view behind, over _The Pleiad_ to
the sapphire water, was noble. The horizon, beyond the harbor
distances, was a blazing intensity of light that stung the eyes to
quick contraction. The Captain sat back in the cushions, weary from
talking, but his face was happy, and he took in the exterior, and
something of the inner proportions, of the young man, with a sense of
awe. He did not try to explain yet--even to himself.

The _hacienda_ was slightly over twenty miles interior. Bedient was
entranced by the sunset from the heights. Then the slow ride to the
Carreras House through the darkened hills: the smell of warm earth from
the thick growths by the trail-side; little stars slipping into place
like the glisten of fireflies in a garden, or gems in a maiden's hair;
a scandalously-naked new moon lying low, like an arc of white-hot wire
in the purple twilight, and always behind them, a majestic splash of
jewel-edged crimson which showed the West.

And presently, from a high curve in the road, they saw the lights of
the _hacienda_ bold upon its eminence--and a dark valley between. Into
this night they descended, for the last course of the journey; and as
the ponies clattered upward again, white-coated natives came forth to
meet them. Bedient was further astonished at their volubility and easy
laughter. They spoke a debased Spanish, which the Captain had fallen
into,--as difficult of understanding for one whose medium was pure
Castilian as for one who spoke English. There was that mystery upon the
environs that always comes to one who reaches his destination in the
darkness. And to Bedient the sensation was not wholly of joy. These
were wild hills, not without grandeur, but there was something of
chaos, too, to him who came from the roof of the world. He missed the
peace of the greater mountains. His heart hungered to go out to the
natives crowding around--white-toothed men and women of incessant
laughter--but the tones of their voices checked the current. It was
emptiness--but nothing he had to give seemed able to enter.

The Captain was ill with fatigue. His face--the weakness expressed in
the smiling mouth--remained before Bedient's mind, as he followed a
giggling native boy to the large upper room which was for him. Rows of
broad windows faced the South and East, while a corridor ran to the
North for the cool wind at night. Electric lights and glistening black
floors--the first effect came from these. Then the details: rugs that
matched, by art or accident, as perfectly as a valley of various
grain-fields pleases the eye from a mountain-side; a great teak bed,
caned with bamboo strips and canopied with silk net, yards of which one
could crush in his hand, so nearly immaterial was this mosquito fabric;
sumptuous steamer-chairs; a leather reading-couch that could be moved
to the best breeze or light with a touch of the finger; a broad-side of
books and a vast writing-table, openly dimensioned to defy litter--the
whole effect was that of coolness and silence and room. Everything a
man needed seemed to be there and breathing spaciously.... Turning
through a draped door, the astonished wanderer found completeness
again--everything that makes a bath fragrant and refreshing--even to
Carreras scent and a set of perfect English razors.... It was all new
to Bedient. For an hour he _tried_ things--and still there were drawers
and cases of undiscovered novelties and luxuries--details of wealth
which make delightful and uncommon the mere processes of living. Very
much restored in his fresh clothing, and eagerly, he went down to
dinner.

The little man was waiting with expectant smile under a dome of
sheltered lights in the dining-hall. Something of his dazed, ashen look
brought back to Bedient the afternoon of the great wind--the Captain
expecting to stick to his ship.... The table was set for two, and on
one corner was the fresh handkerchief and the rose-dark meerschaum
bowl. Bedient took his old place at the other's chair until the Captain
was seated--and both were laughing strangely.... The ships from Holland
brought all manner of European delicacies. Fresh meats and Northern
vegetables arrived every eight days in the refrigerators of the
alternating Dryden steamers, _Hatteras_ and _Henlopen_, from New York.
Most tropical fruits were native to Equatoria--those thick, abbreviated
red bananas, and small oranges with thin skin of _suede_ finish, so
sharply sweet that one never forgets the first taste. These were served
in their own foliage.

Much of the solid and comfortable furnishing of the _hacienda_ had come
from the old English house of the Carreras' in Surrey. The Captain's
cook, Leadley, and his personal factotum, Falk, were English. A dozen
natives kept the great house in order; and their white dress was as
fresh and pleasing as the stewards of an Atlantic liner. As a matter of
fact, Captain Carreras had softened in this kingly luxury, the infinite
resourcefulness of which was startling to Bedient, who had known but
simplicities all his years, and who even in the Orient had been his own
servant.

The Captain lit his pipe but forgot to keep it going. His eyes turned
to Bedient again and again, and each time with deeper regard. Often he
cleared his voice--but failed to speak. The young man plunged into the
heart of things--and finally with effort, the other interrupted.

"You are not what I expected--forgive me, Andrew----"

"You mean I've disappointed you? Thinking a long time about
one--sometimes throws the mind off the main road of reality--"

"Dear God, not disappointed.... The Man has come to you in a different
way than I expected, that's all. What has India been doing to you?"

"It made New York very strange to me," said Bedient.

"You are like an Oriental," Carreras added. "Oh, they are all mad up in
The States.... It's very good to have you back. I wonder why it
was--that I never doubted you'd come?" Here the Captain swallowed some
wine without adequately preparing his throat, and fell to coughing.
Then he rose with the remark that he had experienced altogether too
much joy for one old man, in a single day--and started for bed in
confusion. Bedient sat back laughing softly, but noting the feeble
movement of the other's limbs, quickly gave his arm. Up they went
together.... In the big room alone, Bedient put on night garments; and
unsatisfied, crossed after a time to the Captain's quarters. He found
the old man sitting in the dark by the window, the meerschaum
glowing.... It may have been the darkness altogether; or that Bedient
as a man gave the other an affection that the boy could not; in any
event that night, they found each other across the externals.

This was the cue for further grand talks--pajamas and darkness. Often,
if it were not too late, they would hear the natives singing in their
cabins. The haunting elemental melody of the African curiously blended
with the tuneful and cavalierish songs of Spain and fitted into the
majestic nights. The darkies sang to the heart of flesh. In such
moments, Equatoria was at her loveliest for Bedient--but the clear
impersonal meditations did not come to him. In a hundred ways he had
been given understanding during the first fortnight, of that something
he had missed the first night on the Island. These people were infant
souls. They were children, rudimentary in every thought. Theirs were
sensations, not emotions; superstitions, not faiths. Their
consciousness was never deeper than the skin. And fresh from his
spacious years in India, where everything is old in spirit, where more
often than not the beggar is a sage,--to encounter in this land of
beauty, a people who were but babes in the thought of God--gave to
Bedient the painful sense that his inner life was dissipating. There
was no Gobind to restore him. It was as if the Spirit had favored the
East; that Africa and the Western Isles had been cast apart as unfit
for the experiment of the soul.

Moments of poignant sorrow were these when Bedient realized he was not
of the West; that he irrevocably missed the great inner _con_tent of
India, and would continue to hunger for it, until he returned, or
coarsened his sensibilities to the Western vibration. This last was as
far from him as the commoner treason to a friend. There were moments
when he feared Captain Carreras almost understood. That dear old seaman
through his solitudes, his natural cleanness and kindness, his real
love, and more than all, through those vague visions which come late to
men of simple hearts--had seemed, from several startling sayings, to
touch the very ache in the young man's breast. These approaches were
under the cover of darkness:

"There was something about you then, Andrew," (meaning the long-ago
days at sea,) "I haven't been able to forget.... Damme--I haven't done
well here--"

Bedient bent forward, perceiving that "here" meant his earthly life, as
well as Equatoria.

"I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did--before you
did. Here"--now the Captain meant Equatoria alone--"I have thought of
my stomach and my ease. My stomach has gone back on me--and there is no
ease. Over there, I might have--oh, I might have thought more--but I
didn't know enough, early enough. And you did--at seventeen, you did!
That's what made you. They're all mad up in The States, and they're
just little children down here.... I might have profited in India--"

That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a
year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York.... The
truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and
India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often
regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest in
Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he
listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so
well--and the changes that had passed under the eyes of the young man
in Manila and Japan.... When Bedient was relating certain events of
days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little
things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the
indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his
revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering
dark, the panic would strike home--and he would swing off with pitiful
humor about goats or some other Island affair....

Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he liked with mothers of
his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he
would conjure up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the little
Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas.... She was plump
and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but
still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually
by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking
her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and
heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate,
bigger than she dreamed--but alone and afraid.



SEVENTH CHAPTER


_ANDANTE CON MOTO_--FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to
read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him
deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the
same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had
access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And
Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has
grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and certain pickings
from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this.
With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among
short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the
stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and
pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make
her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a
chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The
clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of
self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were
forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all.
The minds and souls of real women--such were not matters for American
story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient,
who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence
seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real
literature--usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at
twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.

Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was
outside the range of consciousness--for better or worse--with the
country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals
of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty
into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's
vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this
young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.

And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded
in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her.... He should find her.
And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the
nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory
of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of
foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and
the gods--to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may
only venture to appraise, not to know)--so should he, Bedient, envision
the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was much to do at the _hacienda_. The Captain was past riding a
great deal, and the large hill and river property--the coffee, cacao,
cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an
overseer. Still Bedient slowly realized that the hundreds of natives in
touch with Captain Carreras' plantations worked about as well for him
as they knew. Single-handed, Carreras had done great things, and was
loved as a good doctor is loved. In spite of his huge accumulation of
land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to
improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to
Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer
possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings.
Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and
had no way to dispose of bullion.

Carreras had managed all his affairs so as to keep the government on
his side, and his revenues were no little part of the support of the
Capitol. This was his largest outlay, but in return he was
protected.... Deep disorder brooded in the present political silence;
all recalcitrants were gathering under Celestino Rey--but this
situation was only beginning to be understood.

At certain times of year, Carreras had in his employ the heads of five
hundred families, and had shown himself unique in paying money for
labor. This was un-Spanish. It gave him the choice of the natives. He
represented therefore a stable and prosperous element of the
population. His revenues were becoming enormous. The Hollanders paid
him a fortune annually for raw chocolate. This, with tree-planting and
culture, would double, for the soil seemed to contain the miraculous
properties of _alkahest_. The point of all this is, that Captain
Carreras had come to be regarded as the right wing of the government.
He arranged all his dealings on a friendly rather than a business
basis; his good-will was his best protection.... Bedient had been in
Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.

"I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something
amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since
you came, sir.... I used to think nothing of the ride down town--and
now it's a carriage.... Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony--and
tell me what it says when I get back."

As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not
efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent
orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard
a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman.
The Captain went again--followed the musicians to Boston and
Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one
direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players--a little fat
man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told
Bedient in this way:

"The _Hatteras_ was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went
into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,--but a souvenir
of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there
how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in
an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner
until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their
instruments.... It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man.
He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric
plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill,
don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder.
The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as
well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist--to
drive the stops. Between them, they got me where I was all run down
from that orchestra crowd. They said a child could learn the stops....
You should have heard my friends on the _Hatteras_--when the
orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon. They never forget that.
Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span
were goaded up the trail--and there she stands.

"Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred
music-rolls.... It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to
cable for power.... About those music-rolls--I had called for the best.
One does that blind, you know. But the best in music matters, it
appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains.... It's a pretty
piece of furniture. The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had
the electric-plant going.... I take it you have to be caught young to
deal with those stops.... You go after it, Andrew. It scares me and the
natives when it begins to pipe up. I had a time getting my household
back that first time. Maybe, I didn't touch the right button--or
I touched too many. You go after it, my boy--it's all
there--_appassionato--oboe--'consharto'--vox humana_ and the whole
system--"

 ... It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in
his life. Just a few old songs--always unfinished--but they had haunted
the depths of him, and made him think powerfully. Certain strains had
loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present
understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind.
And so he came to ask; "Are not all the landmarks of evolution
identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds? Is there not
an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man's soul, to all
that is true in music?"

Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a
tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's
helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and
encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he
knew then there _was_ an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key
to ghostly doors. A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift passage
of consciousness the breast of some savage mother. Night-birds
everywhere meant to him restless mystery.... Is sound a key to
psychology? Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man,
sometime to be interpreted through music--as yet the infant among the
arts?

The answer had come--why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for
him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young
medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and
there to concrete form--as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is
caught by a thorn. So they build around it--as flesh around spirit. But
it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient's mind--and knew
no set forms. So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a
picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or
pigments. Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks the feeling of
those who follow to see or hear.

These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things
of music.... _Ben Bolt_ brought back the memory of some prolonged and
desperate sorrow. The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its
effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody.
Once he had heard _Caller Herrin'_ grandly sung, and for the time, the
circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of
a bleak land and darker era. In this case the words brought him a
clearer picture--gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common
fisher folk.... Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness
was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite
examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson's, _Sweet and Low_,
which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly _tono_-graphed.... Once across
infantry campfires, _Juanita_ came, with a bleeding passion for
home--to him who had no home. There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to
him--songs and poems which wrung him as if he were an exile; Tom
Moore's _Sunflower Song_ incited at first a poignant anguish, as of a
sweetheart's dead face; and _Lead Kindly Light_ brought almost the
first glimmer of spiritual light across the desolate distances of the
world--like a tender smile from a greater being than man. And there
were baleful songs that ran red with blood, as the _Carmagnole_; and
roused past the sense of physical pain, like the _Marseillaise_. What
heroic sins have been committed in their spell! By no means was it all
uplift which the songs brought. There was one night when he heard
_Mandalay_ sung by some British seaman across the dark of a Japanese
harbor. They were going out, and he was coming into port....

These were his sole adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams
together. He had felt, _if the right person were near_, he could have
made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the
magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim
and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance.... So fresh a surface
did Bedient bring to the Carreras music-room.

The time had come when his nature hungered for great music. The
orchestrelle added to the Island something he needed soulfully.
Experimenting with the rolls, the stops and the power, he found there
was nothing he could not do in time. Music answered--trombone,
clarionet, horn, bassoon, hautboy, flute, 'cello answered. Volume and
tempo were mere lever matters. On the rolls themselves were
suggestions. Reaching this point, his exaltation knew no bounds. He
looked upon the great array of rolls--symphonies, sonatas, concertos,
fantasies, rhapsodies, overtures, prayers, requiems, meditations,
minuets--and something of that rising power of gratitude overcame him,
as only once before in his life--when he had realized that the Bible
was all _words_, and they were for him. From the first studious
marvellings, Bedient's mind lifted to adoring gratefulness in which he
could have kissed the hands of the toilers who had made this instrument
answer their dreams. Then, he fell deeply into misgiving. It seemed
almost a sacrilege for him to take music so cheaply; that he had not
earned such joy. But he could praise them in his heart, and he did with
every sound.

The orchestrelle unfolded to a spirit like this. Doubtless his early
renderings of random choice were weird, but more and more as he went
on, the great living things righted themselves in his consciousness,
for he had ear and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his
nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the
great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were
developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of
all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte
ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves--the
_Andante in F_, the three movements of the _Kreutzer Sonata_, a prayer
from _Otello_, the _Twelfth_ _Rhapsody,_ the _Swan Song_ and the
_Evening Star_, and finally _Isolde's Triumph over Death_--these were
ascendings, indeed--to the point of wings.

The stops so formidable at first became as stars in the dark.... Little
loves, little fears and sins and hopes were all he had known before;
and now he entered into the torrential temperaments of the
masters--magnificent and terrifying souls who dared to sin against God,
or die defying man; whose passions stormed the world; whose dirges were
wrung from heaven. Why, these men levelled emperors and aspired to
angels, violated themselves, went mad with music, played with hell's
own dissonances, and dared to transcribe their baptisms, illuminations,
temptations, Gethsemanes, even their revilings and stigmata.

The dirges lifted him to immensity from which the abysses of the world
spread themselves below. Two marches of Chopin, and the death-march of
Siegfried, the haunting suggestion of a soul's preparation for
departure in Schubert's _Unfinished_; the _Death of Aase_, the
_Pilgrim's Chorus_, one of Mozart's requiems, and that Napoleonic
_funèbre_ from the _Eroica_--these, with others, grouped themselves
into an unearthly archipelago--towering cliffs of glorious gloom, white
birds silently sweeping the gray solitudes above the breakers....

It was during the four days while Captain Carreras remained in Coral
City with Jaffier, that Bedient entered into the mysterious enchantment
of the _Andante_ movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He had played
it all, forgetting almost to breathe, and then returned to the second
movement which opens with the 'celli:

[Illustration: Musical notation]

Again and again it unfolded for him, but not its full message. There
was a meaning in it _for him_! He heard it in the night; three voices
in it--a man, a woman and a soul.... The lustrous third Presence was an
angel--there for the sake of the woman. She was in the depths, but
great enough to summon the angel to her tragedy. The man's figure was
obscure, disintegrate.... Bedient realized in part at least that this
was destined to prove his greatest musical experience....

Captain Carreras found much to do in the city, but he did not tell
Bedient that the real reason for his remaining four days was that he
couldn't sooner summon courage for the long ride home. He spoke but
little regarding the reasons Jaffier had called him.

"He's afraid of Celestino Rey, and likely has good reason," said the
Captain wearily. "The old pirate is half-dead below the knees, but his
ugly ambition still burns bright. He thinks he ought to be drawing all
the Island tributes, instead of the government. Jaffier expects
assassination. On this point, it would be well to watch for the death
of Rey. These two old hell-weathered Spaniards are worth watching--each
tossing spies over the other's fences, and openly conducting affairs
with melting courtesy toward each other--but I don't seem to have much
appetite for the game. There was a time when I would have stopped work
and helped Jaffier whip this fellow. But I hardly think he'll take our
harvests and the river-beds just yet--"

They talked late. The Captain alternated from his bed to a chair,
seemed unwilling for Bedient to leave and unable to sleep or find ease
anywhere. He was over-tired, he explained, and hearing about Bedient's
experience with the _Andante con moto_, insisted upon it being played
that night....

"It's very soothing," Carreras said, when Andrew returned to the upper
apartment. "I think I can sleep now. Off to bed with you, lad."

So lightly did Bedient sleep, however,--for the music haunted his
brain,--that he was aroused by the bare feet of a servant in the
hall-way, before the latter touched his door to call him. Captain
Carreras had asked for him. The glow of dawn was in the old man's
quarters, and he smiled in a queer, complacent way from his bed, as if
a long-looked-for solution to some grave problem had come in the night,
and he wanted his friend to guess. A hand lifted from the coverlet, and
Bedient's sped to it; yet he saw that something more was wanted. The
Captain's shoulder nudged a little, and the smile had become wistful.
He did not fail to understand the need, but other realizations were
pressing into his brain. So the Captain nudged his shoulder again
bashfully. Bedient bent and took him in his arms.

It was death. Bedient had known it from the first instant of entering,
but he was not prepared. He could not speak--only look into the tender,
glowing smile. Captain Carreras finally turned his eyes into the
morning:

"You know it was very foolish of me--very--to think I could make you
happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly,
but very low, as if he had saved strength for what he wished to say....
"You were a long time coming, but I knew you would come--knew it would
be just like this--in your arms. Queer, isn't it? And all the waiting
years, I kept piling up lands and money, saying: 'This shall be his
when he comes.'... It was a little hard at first to know you didn't
care--you couldn't care--that one, and ten, were all the same to you.
And last night, I saw it all again. Had I brought you word that
Celestino Rey had the government and that confiscation of these lands
were inevitable, you would never have compared it in importance with
finding that part of the symphony. It's all right. I wouldn't have it
changed...."

Andrew listened with bowed head, patting the Captain's shoulder gently,
as he sustained.

"But I have given you more than money, boy. And this you know--as a
man, who knew money better, could never understand. I have given you an
old man's love for a son--but more than that, too,--something of the
old man's love for the mother of his son.... I thought only women had
the delicacy and fineness--you have shown me, sir.... It is all done,
and you have made me very glad for these years--since the great wind
failed to get us--"

Then he mingled silences with sentences that finally became
aimless--seas, ships, cooks, and the boy who had nipped him from the
post he meant to hold--and a final genial blending of goats and
symphonies, on the borders of the Crossing. Then he nestled, and
Bedient felt the hand he had taken, try to sense his own through the
gathering cold.... It was very easy and beautiful--and so brief that
Bedient's arm was not even tired.

An hour afterward, Falk came in for orders--and withdrew.

Bedient had merely nodded to him from the depths of contemplation....
At last, he heard the weeping of the house-servants. And there was one
low wailing tone that startled him with the memory of the Sikh woman
who had wept for old Gobind.



EIGHTH CHAPTER


THE MAN FROM _THE PLEIAD_

Bedient drew from Falk a few days afterward that the Captain had
planned almost exactly as it happened. Since the beginnings of unrest
in Equatoria, he had transferred his banking to New York; so that in
the event of defeat in war, only the lands and _hacienda_ would revert,
upon the fall of the present government. Falk could not remember (and
his services dated back fifteen years, at which time he left Surrey
with the Captain) when the master did not speak of Bedient's coming.

"But for your letters, sir, Leadley and I would have come to think of
you as--as just one of the master's ways, Mister Andrew."

Falk was a middle-aged serving-class Englishman, highly trained and
without humor. Leadley, the cook, and a power in his department, dated
also from Surrey, which was his county. These men had learned to handle
the natives to a degree, and the entire responsibility of the
establishment had fallen upon them during the absences of the Captain.
As chief of house-servants and as cook, these two at their best were
faultless, but the life was very easy, and they were given altogether
too many hands to help. Moreover, Falk and Leadley belonged to that
queer human type which proceeds to burn itself out with alcohol if left
alone. The latter years of such servants become a steady battle to keep
sober enough for service. Each man naturally believed himself an
admirable drinker.

Natives came from the entire Island to smoke and drink and weep for the
Captain. Dictator Jaffier sent his "abject bereavement" by pony
pack-train, which, having formed in a sort of hollow square, received
the thanks of Bedient, and assurances that his policy would continue in
the delightful groove worn by the late best of men. The reply of
Jaffier was the offer of a public funeral in Coral City, but Bedient
declined this, and the body of his friend was turned toward the East
upon the shoulder of his highest hill....

Presently Bedient read the Captain's documents. Falk and Leadley were
bountifully cared for; scores of natives were remembered; the policy
toward Jaffier outlined according to the best experience; and the bulk,
name, lands, bonds, capital and all--"to my beloved young friend,
Andrew Bedient."... At the request and expense of the latter, the New
York bankers sent down an agent to verify the transfer of this great
fortune. A month passed--a foretaste of what was to come. Bedient,
prepared for greater work than this, was lonely in the sunlight.

He knew that he must soon begin to live his own life. His every faculty
was deeply urging. Equatoria had little to do with the realities for
which he had gathered more than thirty years' equipment. He felt a
serious responsibility toward his fortune, though absolutely without
the thrill of personal possession. The just administration of these
huge forces formed no little part of his work, and in his entire
thinking on this subject, New York stood most directly in the need of
service. It was there that the Captain's accumulated vitality must be
used for good.

Early in the second month, Bedient came in at noon from a long ride
across the lands, and reaching the great porch of the _hacienda_, he
turned to observe a tropic shower across the valley. The torrent
approached at express speed. It was a clean-cut pouring, several acres
in extent. Bedient watched it fill the spaces between the little hills,
sweep from crest to crest, and bring out a subdued glow in the wild
verdure as it swept across the main valley. Sharp was the line of dry
sunlit air and gray slanting shower. Presently he heard its pounding,
and the dustless slopes rolled into the gray.... Now he sniffed the
acute fragrance that rushed before it in the wind, and then it climbed
the drive, deluged the _hacienda,_ and was gone.... In the moist,
sweet, yellow light that filled his eyes, Bedient, fallen into deeps of
contemplation, saw the face of a woman.

He went inside and looked up the Dryden sailings. The _Hatteras_ would
clear, according to schedule, in ten days. That meant that the
_Henlopen_ was now in port. His eyes had looked first for the former,
since it had brought him down, and was the Captain's favorite.... Yes,
the _Henlopen_ was due to sail to-morrow at daylight.... He told Falk
he would go.... In that upper room across from his own, he bowed his
head for a space, and the fragrance still there brought back the
heaving cabin of the _Truxton_.... Then he rode down to Coral City in
the last hours of daylight.

His devoirs were paid to Dictator Jaffier, who confided that he had
purchased a gunboat and search-light on behalf of the government. Its
delivery was but ten days off, and with it he expected to keep that old
sea-fighter, Celestino Rey, better in order.... Bedient had the evening
to himself. In one of the _Calle Real_ cafés, he was attracted by the
face and figure of a young white man, of magnificent proportions and
remarkably clean-cut profile. The stranger sipped iced claret, watched
the natives moving about, and seemed occasionally to forget himself in
his thinking.

He looked more than ever a giant in the midst of the little tropical
people, and seemed to feel his size in the general diminutive setting.
Yet there was balance and fitness about his splendid physical
organization, which suggested that he could be quick as a mink in
action. He chaffed the native who waited upon him, and his face
softened into charming boyishness as he laughed. His mouth was fresh as
a child's, but on a scale of grandeur. Bedient found himself smiling
with him. Then there was that irresistible folding about the eyes when
he laughed, which is Irish as sin, and quite as attractive. Left to
himself he fell to brooding, and his brow puzzled over some matter in
the frank bored way of one pinned to a textbook. Bedient sat down at
the other's table. Acquaintance was as agreeably received as offered.

The stranger's name was Jim Framtree. He had been on the Island for
several weeks, and intended to stay for awhile. He liked Equatoria well
enough--as well, in fact, as a man could like any place, when he was
barred from the real trophy-room in the house of the world, New York.

"I'm sailing for New York in the morning," Bedient said.

Framtree shivered and fell silent.

"You've found work that you like here?" Bedient asked simply.

The other glanced at him humorously, and yet with a bit of intensity,
too,--as if searching for the meaning under such an unadorned question.

"I seem to have caught on with Señor Rey at _The Pleiad_," he replied.

"Ah--"

"I'm afraid you're making a mistake, sir," Framtree added quickly. "I'm
not barred from New York on any cashier matter. You know when something
you want badly--and can't have--is in a town--that isn't the place for
you.... Even if you like that town best on earth.... What I mean is,
I'm not using _The Pleiad_ as a hiding proposition."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Bedient said.

"I suppose it would be natural--down here----"

"But I _saw you first_."

"Um-m."

"I was only thinking," Bedient resumed, "that if the establishment of
Señor Rey palled upon you at any time, I'd like to have you come up and
see me in the hills.... I'd be glad to have you come, anyway. I may not
be very long in New York--"

       *       *       *       *       *

"That's mighty good of you," Framtree declared, and yet it was obvious
that he could not regard the invitation as purely a friendly impulse,
even if he wished to. "I remember now. I've heard of your big place up
there."

"Perhaps, I'd better explain that I wasn't thinking of Island
politics--when I asked you.... Queer how one has to explain things down
here. I've noticed that it's hard for folks to go straight at a thing."

Framtree laughed again, and tried hard to understand what was in the
other's mind. Bedient's simplicity was too deep for him. They talked
for an hour, each singularly attracted, but evading any subject that
would call in the matters of political unrest. Each felt that the other
wanted to be square, but Bedient saw that it would be useless to
impress upon Framtree how little hampered he was by Jaffier.... At
daybreak the next morning, the fruity old _Henlopen_ pointed out toward
the reefs, and presently was nudging her way through the coral passage,
as confidently as if the trick of getting to sea from Coral City was
part of the weathered consciousness of her boilers and plates.




II

NEW YORK

_Andante con moto_



NINTH CHAPTER


THE LONG-AWAITED WOMAN

Bedient went directly to the house-number of David Cairns in West
Sixty-seventh Street, without telephoning for an appointment. It
happened that the time of his arrival was unfortunate. Something of
this he caught, first from the look of the elevator attendant, who took
him to the tenth floor of a modern studio-building; and further from
the man-servant who answered his ring at the Cairns apartment.

"Mr. Cairns sees no one before two o'clock, sir," said the latter,
whose cool eye took in the caller.

Bedient hesitated. It was now twelve-forty-five. He felt that Cairns
would be hurt if he went away. "Tell him that Andrew Bedient is here,
and that I shall be glad to wait or call again, just as he prefers."

And now the servant hesitated. "It is very seldom we disturb him, sir.
Most of his friends understand that he is not available between nine
and two."

Bedient was embarrassed. The morning in the city had preyed upon him.
Realizing his discomfort, and the petty causes of it, he became
unwilling to leave. "I am not of New York and could not know. I think
you'd better tell Mr. Cairns and let him judge----"

The servant had reached the same conclusion. Bedient was shown into a
small room, furnished with much that was peculiarly metropolitan to
read.... He rather expected Cairns to rush from some interior, and
waited ten minutes, glancing frequently at the door through which the
servant had left.... His heart had bounded at the thought of seeing
David, and he smiled at his own hurt.... A door opened behind him. The
writer came forward quietly, with warm dignity caught him by both
shoulders and smilingly searched his eyes. Bedient was all kindness
again. "Doubtless his friends come in from Asia often," he thought.

"Andrew, it's ripping good to see you.... Why didn't you let me know
you were coming?"

"I didn't want you to alter your ways at all."

"You see, I have to keep these morning hours----"

"Go back--I'll wait gladly, or call when you like."

"Don't go away, pray, unless there is something you must do for the
next hour or so."

       *       *       *       *       *

In waiting, Bedient did not allow himself to search for anything
theatric or unfeeling at the centre of the episode. Cairns had moved in
many of the world atmospheres, and had done some work which the world
noted with approval. Moreover, he had called from Bedient bestowals of
friendship which could not be forgotten.... "I have been alone and in
the quiet so much that _I_ can remember," Bedient mused, "while he has
been rushing about from action to action. Then New York would rub out
anybody's old impressions."

As the clock struck, Cairns appeared ready for the street. He was a
trifle drawn about the mouth, and irritated. Having been unable to work
in the past hour, the day was amiss, for he hated a broken session and
an allotment of space unfilled. Still, Cairns did not permit the other
to see his displeasure; and the distress which Bedient felt, he
attributed to New York, and not the New Yorker....

The mind of David Cairns had acquired that cultivated sense of
authority which comes from constantly being printed. He was a
much-praised young man. His mental films were altogether too many, and
they had been badly developed for the insatiable momentary markets to
which timeliness is all. Very much, he needed quiet years to synthesize
and appraise his materials.... Bedient, he regarded as a luxury, and
just at this moment, he was not in the mood for one. Cairns drove
himself and his work, forgetting that the fuller artist is driven....
Luzon and pack-train memories were dim in his mind. He did not forget
that he had won his first name in that field, but he did forget for a
time the wonderful night-talks. A multitude of impressions since, had
disordered these delicate and formative hours. Only now, in his
slow-rousing heart he felt a restlessness, a breath of certain lost
delights.

It was a sappy May day. The spring had been late--held long in wet and
frosty fingers--and here was the first flood of moist warmth to stir
the Northern year into creation. Cairns was better after a brisk walk.
Housed for long, unprofitable hours, everything had looked slaty at
first.

"Where are you staying, Andrew?"

"_Marigold_."

"Why do you live 'way down there? That's a part of town for business
hours only. The heart of things has been derricked up here."

"I'm very sure of a welcome there," Bedient explained. "My old friend
Captain Carreras had Room 50, from time to time for so many years, that
I fell into it with his other properties. Besides, all the pirates,
island kings and prosperous world-tramps call at the _Marigold._ And
then, they say--the best dinner----"

"That's a tradition of the Forty-niners----"

"I have no particular reason for staying down there, even if I keep the
room. I'll do that for the Captain's sake.... I'm not averse to
breezing around up-town."

"Ah----" came softly from Cairns.

"I'd like to know some _folks_," Bedient admitted.

Cairns was smiling at him. "You'll have to have a card at my clubs.
There's _Teuton's, Swan's_ and the _Smilax_ down Gramercy way....
Perhaps we'd better stop in at the _Swan's_ for a bite to eat. The idea
is, you can try them all, Andrew, and put up at the one you fit into
best----"

"Exactly," breathed Bedient.

"You won't like the _Smilax_ overmuch," Cairns ventured, "but you may
pass a forenoon there, while I'm at work. Stately old place, with many
paintings and virgin silence. The women artists are going there more
and more----"

"I like paintings," said Bedient.

They walked across _Times Square_ and toward the Avenue, through
Forty-second. Cairns waited for the quiet to ask:

"Andrew, you haven't found Her yet--The Woman?"

"No. Have you?"

"Did--I used to have one, too?"

"Yes."

"Andrew, do you think She's in New York?" Cairns asked.

"It's rather queer about that," Bedient answered. "I was watching a
rain-storm from the porch of the _hacienda_ seven or eight days ago,
when it came to me that I'd better take the first ship up. I sailed the
next morning."

This startled Cairns. He was unaccustomed to such sincerity. "You mean
it occurred to you that She was here--the One you used to tell me about
in Asia?"

"Yes."

Cairns now felt an untimely eagerness of welcome for the wanderer. A
renewal of Bedient's former attractions culminated in his mind, and
something more that was fine and fresh and permanent. He twinged for
what had happened at the apartment.... Bedient was a man's man, strong
as a platoon in a pinch--that had been proved. He was plain as a sailor
in ordinary talk, but Cairns knew now that he had only begun to
challenge Bedient's finer possessions of mind.... Here in
New York, a man over thirty years old, who could speak of the
Woman-who-must-be-somewhere. And Bedient spoke in the same ideal,
unhurt way of twenty, when they had spread blankets together under
strange stars... Cairns knew in a flash that something was gone from
his own breast that he had carried then. It was an altogether uncommon
moment to him. "So it has not all been growth," he thought. "All that
has come since has not been fineness."... He felt a bit denied, as if
New York had "gotten" to him, as if he had lost a young prince's
vision, that the queen mother had given him on setting out.... He was
just one of the million males, feathering nests of impermanence, and
stifling the true hunger for the skies and the great cleansing
migratory flights....

All this was a miracle to David Cairns. He was solid; almost English in
his up-bringing to believe that man's work, and established affairs,
thoughts and systems generally were right and unimpeachable. He heard
himself scoffing at such a thing, had it happened to another.... He
stared into Bedient's face, brown, bright and calm. He had seen only
good humor and superb health before, but for an instant now, he
perceived a spirit that rode with buoyancy, after a life of loneliness
and terror that would have sunk most men's anchorage, fathoms deeper
than the reach of the longest cable of faith.

"I think I'm getting to be--just a biped.... I'm glad you came up....
Here we are at _Swan's_," said Cairns.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like most writers, David Cairns was intensely interesting to himself.
His sudden reversal from bleak self-complacence to a clear-eyed view of
his questionable approaches to real worth, was strong with bitterness,
but deeply absorbing. He was remarkable in his capacity to follow this
opening of his own insignificance. It had been slow coming, but
ruthlessly now, he traced his way back from one breach to another, and
finally to that night in the plaza at Alphonso, when he had been
enabled to see service from a unique and winning angle, through the
pack-train cook. That was the key to his catching on; that, and his boy
ideals of war had lifted his copy from the commonplace. He remembered
Bedient in China, in Japan, and in his own house--how grudgingly he had
appeared in his working hours. He felt like an office-boy who has made
some pert answer to an employer too big and kind to notice. Now and
then up the years, certain warm thoughts had come to him from those
island nights, but he had forgotten their importance in gaining his
so-called standing.

Andrew Bedient was nothing like the man he had expected to find. He
remembered now that he might have looked for these rare elements of
character, since the boyhood talks had promised them, and power had
emanated from them.... Still, Bedient had grown marvellously, in
strange, deep ways. Cairns could not fathom them all, but he realized
that nothing better could happen to him than to study this man. Indeed,
his mind was fascinated in following the rich leads of his friend's
resources. He consoled himself for his shortcomings with the thought
that, at least, he was ready to see....

They talked as of old, far into the night. Cairns found himself
endeavoring with a swift, nervous eagerness to show his _best_ to
Andrew Bedient, and to be judged by that best. He spoke of none of the
achievements which the world granted to be his; instead, the little
byway humanities were called forth, for the other to hear--buds of
thought and action, which other pressures had kept from fertilizing
into seed--the very things he would have delighted in relating to a
dear, wise woman. Something about Bedient called them forth, and Cairns
fell into new depths. "I thought it was pure sex-challenge which made a
man bring these things to a woman." (This is the way he developed the
idea afterward.) "But that can't be all, since I unfolded so to
Bedient.... He has me going in all directions like a steam-shovel."

Cairns was arranging a little party for his friend. In the meantime,
his productive quantity sank from torrent to trickle. His secretary,
who knew the processes of the writer's mind as the keys of his machine,
and had adjusted his own brain to them through many brisk sessions,
fell now through empty space. He had no resources in this room, where
he had been driven so long by the mental force of another. Having
suffered himself to be played upon, like the instrument before him, he
died many deaths from _ennui_.... So Cairns and the secretary stared
helplessly at each other across the emptiness; and New York rushed on,
with its mad business, singing spitefully in their ears: "You for the
poor-farms. You'll lose your front, and your markets. Your income is
suffering; the presses are waiting; editors dependent...."

Cairns left the house on the third morning after Bedient's coming,
having dictated two or three letters.... Bedient was across the street
from the _Smilax Club_ in the little fenced-in park--Gramercy. Cairns
told his work-difficulty.

"Don't you think it would be good for you, David," Bedient asked, "to
let the subconscious catch up?"

Cairns was interested at once. "What do you mean?"

"I've been thinking more than a little about you and New York. One
thing is sure: New York is pretty much wrong, or I'm insane----"

"You're happy about it," Cairns remarked. "Tell me the worst."

"People here use their reflectors and not their generators," Bedient
said. "They shine with another's light, when they should be
incandescent. The brain in your skull, in any man's skull, is but a
reflector, an instrument of his deeper mind. There's your genius,
infinitely wiser than your brain. It's your sun; your brain, the moon.
All great work comes from the subconscious mind. You and New York use
too much moonshine."

Both men were smiling, but to Cairns, nevertheless, it seemed that his
own conscience had awakened after a long sleep. This wanderer from the
seas had twigged the brain brass which he had long been passing for
gold value. He saw many bits of his recent work, as products of
intellectual foppery. He recalled a letter recently received from an
editor; which read: "That last article of yours has caught on. Do six
more like it." He hadn't felt the stab before. He had done the
six--multiplied his original idea by mechanical means....

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....

"Dear God, how lonely He was!" Bedient said after a moment, as he
regarded a picture of the Christ alone on the Mount, and the soldiers
ascending to make the arrest "There were two who might have sustained
in His daily death agonies. I have always wished they could have been
near Him throughout the Passion. _They_ would not have slept, that
darkest of nights while He prayed! I mean Saint Paul, who of course did
not see the Jesus of history, and John the Baptist, who was given to
know Him but an hour at the beginning. They were the greatest mortals
of those days.... They were above the attractions of women of flesh. Do
you see what I mean? They were humanly complete, beyond sex! Their
grandeur of soul meant a _union within themselves_ of militant manhood
and mystic womanhood. Illumination really means that. They could have
sustained and ministered unto the Christ with real tenderness.

"Invariably, I think, this is true: It is a woman, or _the woman in
man_ that recognizes a Messiah.... Look at those males of singing
flesh--the ultra-masculine Romans--how blind and how torpid they were
to Him; and the materialistic Jews, ponderously confronting each other
with stupid forms and lifeless rituals, while their Marys and Magdalens
and Miriams followed the Master and waited upon Him!... I always found
a kind of soulful feminine in John, the apostle--not the Forerunner,
but the brother of James. He was weak in those days of the Passion, but
became mighty afterward, and divinely tender, the apostle whom Jesus
loved, to whom he intrusted His Mother.... But look into the
arch-feminine ideal of the Christ Himself--that night on the Mount of
Olives, when all Earth's struggle and anguish passed through Him,
clothing itself with His pity and tenderness, before it reached the eye
of the Father. What ineffable Motherhood!"

The room wrought strangely upon Bedient. He had never spoken at such
length before, nor so eagerly. Vina Nettleton spoke for the first time
almost, since she had welcomed him. "You help me greatly," she said
with difficulty. "I cannot tell you exactly. I didn't know why, but
last night I hoped you would come here. Oh, it wasn't to help me with
this--not selfishly in the work, not that--but I seemed to know you
knew the things you have said just now."

Bedient was thrilled by her sincerity.... The low voice of the Grey One
now repeated:

"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 Godhood--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 Godhood 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.... Assured 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 God, 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
analyzed 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 quantity--"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 quantity what had
first attracted, and quantity 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.
B

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