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 aeolian 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.