“THROUGH DESIRE FOR HER”

David Cairns left Beth at her elevator, and walked down the Avenue toward Gramercy. It was still an hour from midnight. As he had hoped, Bedient was at the Club. The library was deserted, and they sat down in the big chairs by the open window. The only lights in the large room were those on the reading table. The quiet was actually interesting for down-town New York.

“I’ve been out hunting up music,” Bedient said. “There is a place called the Columbine where you eat and drink; and a little Hungarian violinist there with his daughter surely they can’t know how great they are! He played the Kreutzer Sonata, the daughter accompanying as if it were all in the piano, and she just let it out for fun, and then they played it again for me

Cairns laughed at his joy. Bedient suddenly leaned forward and regarded him intently through the vague light. “David,” he said, “you’re looking fit and happy, and I’m very glad to see you.” This was a way of Bedient’s at unexpected moments.... “Do you know, it’s a marvellous life you live,” he went on, “looking inward upon the great universe of ideas constantly, balancing thought against thought, seeking the best vehicle, and weighing the effects for or against the Ultimate Good

“It appears that you had to come up here to show me

“It’s good of you to say so, David, but you had to be Cairns and not New York! A woman would have shown you

Cairns had met before, in various ways, Bedient’s unwillingness to identify himself with results of his own bringing about. Beth had long realized his immaturity, yet she had not spoken. Cairns saw this now.

“A woman would have shown me ?” he repeated.

“That the way to heaven is always against the crowd,” Bedient finished.... “A few days after I came to New York, you joined me at the Club. You said you couldn’t work; that you found your mind stealing away from the pages before you. I knew you were getting closer to real work then. David, when you find yourself stealing mentally away to follow some pale vision or shade of remembrance, don’t jerk up, thinking you must get back to work. Why, you’re nearer real work in following the phantoms than mere gray matter ever will unfold for you. Creating is a process of the depths; the brain is but the surface of the instrument that produces. How wearisome music would be, if we knew only the major key! How terrible would be sunlight, if there were no night! Out of darkness and the deep minor keys of the soul come those utterances vast and flexible enough to contain reality.”

“Why don’t you write, Andrew?” Cairns asked.

“New York has brought one thought to my mind with such intensity, that all others seem to have dropped back into the melting-pot,” Bedient answered.

“And that one?”

“The needs of women.”

“I have heard your tributes to women

“I have uttered no tributes to women, David!” Bedient said, with uncommon zeal. “Women want no tributes; they want truth.... The man who can restore to woman those beauties of consciousness which belong to her which men have made her forget just a knowledge of her incomparable importance to the race, to the world, to the kingdom of heaven and help woman to make men see it; in a word, David, the man who can make men see what women are, will perform in this rousing hour of the world the greatest good of his time!”

“Go on, it is for me to listen!”

“You can break the statement up into a thousand signs and reasons,” said Bedient. “We hear such wonderful things about America in Asia in India. Waiting for a ship in Calcutta, I saw a picture-show for the first time. It ran for a half hour, showing the sufferings of a poor Hindu buffeted around the world a long, dreary portion of starvation, imprisonment and pain. The dramatic climax lifted me from the chair. It was his heaven and happiness. His stormy passage was ended. I saw him standing in the rain among the steerage passengers of an Atlantic steamer and suddenly through the gray rushing clouds, appeared the Goddess of Liberty. He had come home at last to a port of freedom and peace and equality

“God have mercy on him,” murmured Cairns.

“Yes,” said Bedient, “a poor little shaking picture show, and I wept like a boy in the dark. It was my New York, too.... But we shall be that all that the world in its distress and darkness thinks of us, we must be. You know a man is at his best with those who think highly of him. The great world-good must come out of America, for its bones still bend, its sutures are not closed.... You and I spent our early years afield with troops and wars, before we were adult enough to perceive the bigger conflict the sex conflict. This is on, David. It must clear the atmosphere before men and women realize that their interests are one; that neither can rise by holding down the other; that the present relations of men and women, broadly speaking, are false to themselves, to each other, and crippling to the morality and vitality of the race.

“You have seen it, for it is about you. The heart of woman to-day is kept in a half-starved state. That’s why so many women run to cultists and false prophets and devourers, who preach a heaven of the senses. In another way, the race is sustaining a tragic loss. Look at the young women from the wisest homes the finest flower of young womanhood our fairest chance for sons of strength. How few of them marry! I tell you, David, they are afraid. They prefer to accept the bitter alternative of spinsterhood, rather than the degrading sense of being less a partner than a property. They see that men are not grown, except physically. They suffer, unmated, and the tragedy lies in the leakage of genius from the race.”

Cairns’ mind moved swiftly from one to another of the five women he had called together to meet his friend.

“David,” Bedient added after a moment, “the man who does the great good, must do it through women, for women are listening to-day! Men are down in the clatter examining, analyzing, bartering. The man with a message must drive it home through women! If it is a true message, they will feel it. Women do not analyze, they realize. When women realize their incomparable importance, that they are identified with everything lovely and of good report under the sun, they will not throw themselves and their gifts away. First, they will stand together a hard thing for women, whose great love pours out so eagerly to man stand together and demand of men, Manliness. Women will learn to withhold themselves where manliness is not, as the flower of young womanhood is doing to-day.... I tell you, David, woman can make of man anything she wills by withholding herself from him.... Through his desire for her!... This is her Power. This is all in man that electricity is in Nature a measureless, colossal force. Mastering that (and to woman alone is the mastery), she can light the world. Giving away to it ignorantly, she destroys herself.”

... So much was but a beginning. Their talk that night was all that the old Luzon nights had promised, which was a great deal, indeed.... It was not until Cairns was walking home, that he recalled his first idea in looking in upon Bedient that night a sort of hope that his friend would talk about Vina Nettleton in the way Beth had suggested. “How absurd,” he thought, “that is exactly the sort of thing he would leave for me to find out!”