BETH AND ADITH MALLORY

Beth Truba dreamed:

She had been traveling for days and years, over plains, through the rifts of high mountains, across rivers and through great lonely silences, with just a dog for a companion. A white dog with small black spots, very playful and enduring, and though not large, he was very brave to contend with all that was fearful. At night he curled up close to her and licked her hand, and in the morning before the weary hours, he played about and made her laugh.

They came at last to a great desert. There was no other way, but to cross, if she hoped ever to reach her journey’s end.... On and on, through the burning brightness they went, forgetting their hunger in the greater thirst. The nights were dreadful with a drying, dust-laden wind, and the days with destroying brilliance. At length one mid-day, the dog could go no further.

He sat down upon his haunches and looked at her, his tail brushing the sand eyes melting with love for her. She put her hand upon his head, and the dry tongue touched her fingers.... She must leave him. He seemed to understand that she must go on; his eyes told her his sufferings in that he could not be with her. And so she went on alone.

When she turned he was watching, but he had sunk down upon the sand. Only his head was raised a little. Still she saw the softness of the eyes; and his ears, that had been so sharp in the happy days, had dropped close about his head.

On she went, looking back, until the spot on the sand where he lay was gone from her eyes. And she knew what it meant to be alone. The days were blazing, and the nights filled with anguish to die. At last her hour came.... So glad she was to sink down a last time and let the night cover her.... But the sound of running water water splashing musically upon the stones, and the breath of flowers awoke her after many hours. A cooling dawn was abroad, and in the lovely light she saw low trees ahead green palms around a fountain fruits and shade and flowers.... She arose, and from her limbs all weariness was gone. There was a quick bark, and her dog came bounding up and Beth awoke, thinking it was her soul that had returned to her, restored.

Beth realized that she had half-expected Bedient to re-enter that open door.... Reflecting upon the days, she found that he had done none of the things she had half-expected. Only, while she had believed herself comparatively unresponsive, he had filled her with a deep, silent inrushing. One by one he had swept away the ramparts which the world had builded before her heart. So softly and perfectly had he fitted his nature to her inner conception that she had not been roused in time. But the Shadowy Sister had known him for her prince of playmates.... She wondered how she could have been so wilful and so blind with her painter’s strong eyes. Even her pride had betrayed her. Wordling and the ocean could not continue to stand against all the good he had shown her.

Beth had run away for a few days. She could not bear her mother’s eyes, nor the studio where he had been. Better the house of strangers, two hours from New York up the Hudson.... She heard he had gone back to his Island.... The June days drowsed. The mid-days were slow to come to as far hills; and endless to pass as hills that turn into ranges. The sloping afternoons were aeon-long; and centuries of toil were told in the hum of the bees about her window, toil to be done over and over again; and sometimes from the murmur of the bees, would appear to her like a swiftly-flung scroll, glimpses of her other lives, filled like this with endless waiting for she was always a woman. And for what was she waiting?...

Often she thought of what Bedient had said about the women who refuse the bowl of porridge, and who therefore do not leave their children to brighten the race. These he had called the centres of new and radiant energy, the spiritual mothers of the race. And one night she cried aloud: “Would one be less a spiritual help, because she had a little of her own heart’s desire? Because she held the highest office of woman, would her outer radiance be dimmed? To be a spiritual mother, why must she be just a passing influence or inspiration a cheer for those who stop a moment to refresh themselves from her little cup, and hurry on about their own near and dear affairs, in which she has no share?... He stands in a big, bright garden and commands the spiritual mother to remain a waif out on the dusty highway. ’How much better off you are out there!’ he says. ’You can show people the Gate, and keep them from going the wrong way, on the long empty road. Nothing can hurt you, but yourself. It is very foolish of you to want to come in!’"...

She remembered that some fine thing had lit his eyes like stars at the parting. Time came when she wished she had seen him at the studio, or at her mother’s house, when he called before going away.... The sharp irony of her success brought tears and Beth Truba was rather choice of her tears. The portrait had made a stir at the Club, and the papers were discussing it gravely.

It brought back the days in which he had come to the studio, and what it had meant to her for him to move in and out. How dependent she had become upon his giving! The imperishable memories of her life had arisen from those days, while she painted his portrait. Beth realized this now days of strange achievement under his eyes errant glimpses of life’s inner beauty moments in which she had felt the power to paint even that delicate and fleeting shimmer of sunlight about a humming-bird’s wing, so intense was her vision their talks, and the ride well she knew that these would be the lights of her flagging eyes treasures of the old Beth, whose pictures all were painted.

It was hard to have known the joy of communion with his warm heart, and deeply seeing mind and now to accept the solitude again. She felt that his going marked the end of her growth; that now it was a steady downgrade, body and mind.... Some time, long hence, she would meet him again.... She would be “Beth-who-used-to-paint-so-well.” They would talk together. The moment would come to speak of what they might have been to each other, save for the Wordlings of this world. She would weep no, she would burst into laughing, and never be able to stop! It would be too late. A woman must not be drained by the years if she would please a man of flesh. She could not keep her freshness after this; she had not the heart to try.... Thus at times her brain kept up a hideous grinding.... She could feel the years!... Jim Framtree saw them.

She had found a note from him two days old under her studio-door. He had telephoned repeatedly, and taken the trip over to Dunstan to see her.... Would she not allow him to call? And now Beth discovered an amazing fact:

She had been unable to keep her mind upon him, even during the moment required to read his single page of writing. She wrote that he might come....

She heard his voice in the hall. The old janitor of the building had remembered him. Beth’s hands, which had lain idle, began leaping strangely from the inner turmoil. She wished now she had met him somewhere apart from the studio. His tone brought back thoughts too fast to be tabulated, and his accent was slightly English. She divined from this he had been out of the country possibly had returned to New York on a British ship. How well she knew his plastic intelligence! It was so characteristic and easy for him this little affectation.... She was quite cold to him. Bedient had put him away upon the far-effacing surfaces of her mind.

The knocker fell. Rising, she learned her weakness. As she crossed the room the mirror showed her a woman who has met many deaths.

He greeted her with excited enthusiasm, but the tension which her change in appearance caused, was imperfectly concealed by his words and manner.... She knew his every movement, his every thought before it was half-uttered, as a mother without illusions knows her grown son, who has failed to become the man she hoped. They talked with effort about earlier days. He treated her with a consideration he had never shown before. The challenge of sex was missing. Duty, and an old and deep regard these Beth felt from him. She attributed it to the havoc of a few weeks upon her face. She wished he would not come again; but he did.

It was the next morning and she was painting. Again the knocker and his cheery greeting. Beth sat down to work and then thoughts of the two men came to her. She should not have tried to paint, with Framtree in the room.... Thoughts arose, until she could not have borne another. The colors of her canvas flicked out, leaving a sort of welted gray of flesh, from which life is beaten. She rubbed her eyes.

“Jim,” she said at last, “why did you come back?”

He came forward, and stood over her. “I wanted to see if there was any change, Beth, any chance.”

She regarded him, noted how effective is humility with such magnificent proportions of strength.

“There isn’t, Jim,” she answered. “At least, not the change you look for. I’m sorry if you really wanted it, but I think in time you’ll be glad

“Never, Beth.”

She smiled.

Framtree hesitated, as if there were something further he would like to say. He refrained, however.... Beth gave her hand, which he kissed for old love’s sake.

On the following Sunday morning, Adith Mallory’s Equatorian news-feature appeared. The entire truth and all the names were not needed to make this as entertaining a Sunday newspaper story as ever drew forth her fanciful and flowing style. It was Equatoria that caught and held Beth’s eye, and she saw Andrew Bedient in large movement behind the tale. The feature was dated in Coral City ten days before. Beth was so interested that she wanted to meet the correspondent, and wondered if Miss Mallory had returned to New York. She dropped a card with her telephone number, and the next morning Miss Mallory ’phoned. Her voice became bright with animation upon learning that Beth was upon the wire.

“There’s no one in New York whom I’d rather talk with this moment, Miss Truba.”

“And why?”

“That portrait at the Smilax Club I saw it yesterday. I’m writing about it.... The face I know and you have done it tremendously! I can’t tell you how it affected me. Don’t bother to come down here. Let me go to you.”

“I shall be glad to see you, Miss Mallory, this afternoon?”

“Yes, and thank you.”

The call had brightened Beth’s mood somewhat. A bundle of letters had been dropped through her door as she talked. Beth saw the quantity of them and remembered it was Monday’s first mail. She busied about the studio for a moment.... Letters, she thought, these were all she had to represent her great investments of faith. Letters the sum of her longings and vivid expectations. No matter what she wanted or deserved a voice, a touch or a presence it had all come to this, the crackle of letter paper. What a strange thing to realize! A fold of paper instead of a hand a special delivery instead of a step upon the stair a telegram instead of a kiss!...

“I belong in a cabinet,” she sighed. “I guess I’m a letter-file instead of a lady."...

There was a large square envelope from Equatoria.... With stinging cheeks, Beth resented the buoyant happiness of the first few lines. Until a clearer understanding came, it seemed that he was blessing her refusal of him. How unwarranted afterward this thought appeared! The letter lifted her above her own suffering. Her mind was held by the great vital experience of a soul, a soul faring forth on its supreme adventure. He did not say what had happened in words, but she saw his descent in the flesh and his upward flight of spirit the low ebb and the flashing heights.... How well she knew the cool brightness of his eyes, as he wrote! The god she had liberated that sunlit day was dead not dead to her alone, but to any woman of Shore or Mountain or Isle.... With a gasp, she recalled Vina Nettleton’s first conception, that Bedient was past, or rapidly passing beyond the attraction of a single woman.

Beth saw that she had helped to bring him to this greater dimension. There was a thrill in the thought. There would have been a positive and enduring joy, had he not gone from her to another. Truly, that was an inauspicious beginning for Illumination but miracles happened. This thought fascinated her now: Had she seen clearly and made the great sacrifice of withholding herself that he might rise to prophecy there would have been gladness in that! She felt she could have done that the iron Beth given him to the world and not retained him for her own heart. He said that other women had done so. What an instrument!

But strength did come from his letter; there was a certain magic in his praise and blessing. It gave her something like the natural virtues of mountain coolness and ocean air. Austerely pure, it was. Plainly, pleasure had not made him tarry long.

Beth and Miss Mallory had talked an hour before the name of Jim Framtree was innocently mentioned by the newspaperwoman. It was not Beth’s way to betray her fresh start of interest, even though she gained her first clue to the meaning of the fine light she had seen in Bedient’s eyes at parting.... The blood seemed to harden in her heart. The familiar sounds of the summer street came up through the open windows with a sudden horror, as if she were a captive on cannibal shores.

“No one knows why he wanted this talk with Mr. Framtree,” Miss Mallory was saying. “He wanted it vitally and you see what came of it a revolution averted the fortunes of the whole Island altered for the better and yet, those were only incidents. He was so ill that another man would have fallen and yet he went to The Pleiad and aboard the Spaniard’s yacht, as you read.... I knew his courage before from the Hedda Gabler night but it was true, he didn’t know me! The only result I know was that Mr. Framtree came to New York

It seemed to Beth that her humanity was lashed and flung and desecrated.... “But he did not know,” she thought. “He did not know. He could not have hurt me this way. He thought I could not change, that I should always worship the beauty of exteriors. I told him the parable and he went away to send me what he thought I wanted!...”

Miss Mallory had come with a tribute of praise to a great artist. She found a woman who was suffering, as she had suffered, in part. A great mystery, too, she found. It was almost too sacred for her to try to penetrate, because it had to do with him.... She wondered at Miss Truba’s inability to speak, or to help herself in any way with the things that pressed her heart to aching fullness.... She had found it wonderfully restoring to talk of him with a woman who knew him and who granted his greatness from every point.

The long afternoon waned, but still the women were together. All that had taken place was very clear to Beth even this woman’s ministerings.

“And he is better beyond words, better!” Miss Mallory added. “I received a note from him this morning. The Hatteras arrived yesterday. I came up on the Henlopen eight days ago. So it was my first word. Something great has happened. He is changed and lifted.”

“Has Mr. Framtree finished his mission?” Beth asked.

“Yes. He intends to go back to-morrow afternoon. He finished sooner than he thought. He is going to help Mr. Bedient in the administration of the vast property.... It seems that no one ever touches Mr. Bedient, but that some great good comes to him. I am going back, too

“To live?”

“Yes.” Miss Mallory explained what Dictator Jaffier had done for her, adding:

“It was all Mr. Bedient’s doing.... You see what I mean, about the wonderful things that happen to others where he is.... Yet I would rather have that picture of him you painted than all Equatoria but even that should not belong to one

“You love him then?” Beth asked softly.

“I dared that at first, but I didn’t understand. He is too big to belong that way.... I would rather be a servant in his house than the wife of any other man I ever knew. I am that in thought and I shall be near him!”

After a moment, Beth heard the silence and drew her thoughts back to the hour. She seemed to have gone to the utmost pavilions of tragedy far beyond the sources of tears where only the world’s strongest women may venture. The Shadowy Sister was there.... Beth had come back with humility, which she could not reveal.

The dusk was closing about them.

“You have been good to come good to tell me these things,” Beth said. “Some time I shall paint a little copy of the portrait for you. I’m sure he would be glad.”