THE PLAN OF THE BUILDER

New York had brought Andrew Bedient rather marvellously into his own. He awoke each morning with a ruling thought. He lived in a state of continual transport; he saw all that was savage in his race, and missed little that was beautiful. Work was forming within him; he felt all the inspiritings, all the strange pressures of his long preparation. He realized that his thirty-three years had been full years; that all the main exteriors of man’s life had passed before him in swift review, as a human babe in embryo takes on from time to time the forms of the great stations of evolution. He had passed without temptation from one to another of the vast traps which catch the multitude; nor tarried at a single one of the poisoned oasis of sense. Mother Earth had taken him to her breast; India had lulled his body and awakened his spirit; he had gone up to his Sinai there.

He looked back upon the several crises in which he might have faltered, and truly it seemed to him that he had been guided through these, by some wiser spirit, by something of larger vision, at least, than his own intelligence. Humility and thankfulness became resurgent at the memory of these times. Books of beauty and wisdom had come to his hand, it seemed, at the certain particular instants when he was ready. Exactly as he had been spared the terrible temptations of flesh in his boyhood years, so had he preserved a humble spirit in his intellectual attainments. It was not he, but the poise that had been given him, through which he was enabled to cry out in gratitude this hour; for the soul of man meets a deadlier dragon in intellectual arrogance than in the foulest pits of flesh. The Destiny Master can smile in pity at a poor brain, brutalized through bodily lusts, but white with anger is the countenance that regards a spirit, maimed and sick from being yoked together with a proud mind. Angels burst into singing when that spirit is free.

His health was a perfect thing; of that kind that men dream of, and boys know, but do not stop to feel. He could smell the freshness of pure water in his bath or when he drank; there was delight in the taste of common foods; at night in his high room, higher still than the studio of Vina Nettleton, there were moments when the land-wind seemed to bring delicacies from the spring meadows of Jersey; or blowing from the sea, he sensed the great sterile open. He was tireless, and could discern the finest prints and weaves at bad angles of light.

He moved often along the water-fronts and through abandoned districts; a curious sense of unreality often came over him in these night rambles, as if he were tranced among the perversions of astral light. He gave a great deal, but saw that if he gave his life nightly, even that would not avail. His money was easily passed into another hand; that would not do little vessels of oil overturned upon an Atlantic of storm. These were but tentative givings; they denied him nothing. Bedient saw that he must give more than this, and waited for the way.... The most poignant and heart-wringing experience for him in New York was suddenly to find himself in the midst of the harried human herd, when it was trying to play. One can best read a city’s tragedy at its pleasure-places.

...Beth Truba was his great ignition. His love for her overflowed upon all things.... The hour or more in her studio became the feature of his day. Bedient was not shown the work on the portrait. Beth didn’t altogether like the way it progressed. Sometimes, she talked as she worked (sitting low beneath the skylight, so that every change of light was in her hair, while the spring matured outside). Deep realities were often uttered thus, sentences which bore the signet of her strong understanding, for they passed through the stimulated faculties of the artist, engrossed in her particular expression. Thus the same intelligence which colored her work, distinguished her sayings.... Bedient daily astonished her. Again and again, she perceived that he had come to New York, full of power from his silences apart. She wanted him to preserve his freshness of vision. His quiet expressions thrilled her.

“The women I know, married or unmarried, are nearly all unhappy,” she said, one day. “My younger friends, even among girls, are afraid. They see that men are blinded by things they can taste and see and touch speed, noise and show. The married women are restless and terrified by spiritual loneliness. The younger women see it and are afraid.”

“’Had I but two loaves of bread, I should sell one to buy white hyacinths,’” Bedient quoted; “I like to think of that line of Mahomet’s.... Women are ready for white hyacinths the bread of life.... But this spiritual loneliness is a wonderful sign. The spirit floods in where it can where it is sought after and the children of women who are hungry for spiritual things, are children of dreams. They must be. They may not be happy, but they will feel a stronger yearning to go out alone and find ‘the white presences among the hills.’”

Beth was silent.

“Yearning is religion,” Bedient added. “Hunger of the heart for higher things will bring spiritual expansion. Look at the better-born children to-day. I mean those who do not have every chance against them. I seem to catch a new tone in the murmur of this rousing generation. They have an expanded consciousness. It is the spiritual yearnings of motherhood.”

“But what of the woman who will not take the bowl of porridge that ordinary man gives her?” Beth demanded. “So many women dare not cannot and then their dreams, their best, are not reflected in the consciousness of the new race.”

Bedient smiled, and Beth regarded her work intently, for an echo of the confessional had come back to her from her own words.

“That is a matter so intensely individual,” he replied. “We are at the beginning of the woman’s era, and with every transition there are pangs to be suffered by those who are great enough. These great ones are especially prepared to see how terrible is their denial from the highest privileges of woman. And yet they may be spiritual mothers, centres of pure and radiant energy. Every work of genius has been inspired by such a woman. And if, as sometimes happens, a true lover does come, the two are so happy that the temperature of the whole race warms through them.”

“What an optimist!” she said, but when alone, it came to her that he had been less certain than usual in this answer. Perhaps, he had felt her stress upon realizing the personal aspect; perhaps he had too many things to say, and was not ready. It was a matter intensely individual. However, this was the only time he had failed to carry her critical attention.

Bedient saw that the years had locked one door after another about the real heart of Beth Truba. His work was plain to unlock them one by one. How the task fascinated; he made it his art and his first thought.

“You change so,” she complained laughingly, after there had been several sittings. “I’m afraid I shall paint you very badly because I am trying so hard. You don’t look at all the same as you did at first. Therefore all the first must be destroyed.”

Bedient knew if his work prospered, all that had been before would be redeemed.

One morning it was one of the first of the May mornings there was something like heart-break in the room. Up on the skylight, the sparrows were debating whether it would rain or not. There was tension in the air which Bedient tried to ease from every angle. Consummately he set about to restore and reassure, but she seemed to feel her work was faring ill; that life was an evil thing. All the brightness that had suffused her mind from his presence, again and again, had vanished apparently, leaving not the slightest glow behind.

“Don’t bother to work on this to-day,” he said. “I am not in the slightest hurry and you are to do it wonderfully. Please be sure that I know that.... Will you go with me to the Metropolitan galleries to-day?”

Beth smiled, and went on deliberating before the picture. Presently, the tension possessed her again. She looked very white in the North light.

“Did you ever doubt if you were really in the world?” she asked after a moment, but did not wait, nor seem to expect an answer.... “I have,” she added, “and concluded that I only thought I was here queer sense of unreality that has more than once sent me flying to the telephone after a day’s work alone to hear my own voice and be answered. But, even if one proves that one is indeed here, one can never get an answer to the eternal What for?... I shall do a story, sometime, and call it Miss What For.... A young girl who came into the world with greatness of vitality and enthusiasm, alive as few humans are, and believing in everything and everybody. Before she was fully grown, she realized that she was not sought after so much as certain friends whose fathers had greater possessions. This was terrible. It took long for her to believe that nothing counted so much as money. It made the world a nightmare, but she set to work to become her own heiress.... In this struggle she must at last lose faith. This can be brought about by long years, smashing blows and incredible suffering, but the result must be made complete to fit the title.”

“But, why do you try to fit such a poor shivering little title?”

She smiled wearily. “I was trying, perhaps, to picture one of your spiritual mothers, centres of pure and radiant energy, in one of the other moments, that the world seldom sees. The power is almost always turned on, when the world is looking.”

She had made him writhe inwardly, as no one else could.

“But there are many such women,” she went on, “victims of your transition period, caught between the new and the old, helpers, perhaps, of the Great Forces at work which will bring better conditions; but oh, so helpless!... They may bring a little cheer to passing souls who quickly forget; they may even inspire genius, as you say, but what of themselves when they, all alone, see that they have no real place in the world, no lasting effect, leaving no image, having no part in the plan of the Builder?”

Bedient arose. Beth saw he was not ready to answer.

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

“It’s really gray, and the sparrows have decided upon a shower.”

She regarded him whimsically.

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

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

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

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

“You must. Why, even Taine, Sainte Beuve, and Gautier didn’t know him! They glorified his work just so long as it had to do with fleshly Paris, but called him mad in his loftier altitudes where they couldn’t follow.”

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

“You have not been here before?” she asked.

“No.”

“You don’t know who did those pictures?”

“No.”

“Puvis de Chavannes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I ask you to look how every evil, every combination of hell, has arisen to tear at the flanks of the race, for this is history. Yet a few women, and a few men, the gifts of women, have arisen to save.... Do you think that war or money, or lust of any kind, shall destroy us now, in this modern rousing hour, with woman at last coming into her own when they have never yet in the darkest hour of the world, vanquished a single great dream of a pure woman? And now women generally are rising to their full dreams; approaching each moment nearer to that glorious formula for the making of immortals....”

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

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