Fate Knocks at the Door Part 20

"I had great dreams when I came to New York three years ago," she said somewhat scornfully. "For a time in Paris, I did things with little thought, and they took very well. I must have been happy. Then when I came here, all that period was gone. I was to be an artist--sheer, concentrated, the nothing-else sort of an artist. And things went so well for a time. That's queer when you think of it. The papers took me up. They gave me an exhibition at the _Smilax Club_, and not a few things were disposed of. In fact, when I learned that this studio was to be let, I was so prosperous as to consider it none too adequate for Margie Grey herself----

"Since then these things and others have been done, and they haven't struck the vogue at all. First, I thought it was just one of those changing periods which come to every artist, in which one does badly during the transition. I have continued to do badly. It was not a change of skin. I have become sour and ineffectual, and know it----"

"You won't mind if I say you are wrong?" Bedient asked quietly.

"No," she laughed. "Only please don't tell me that I'm only a little ahead of my time; that presently these things will dart into the public mood, and people will squabble among themselves to possess them----"

"I might have told you just that--if you hadn't warned me.... I like your woods; they're the sort of woods that fairies come to; and I like your fields and afternoons--I can hear the bees and forget myself in them. I _know_ they're good."

The Grey One whipped out a match and cigarette from the pocket of her blouse, lit it and stared at her covered easel. "You have your way, don't you?" she asked, and her lips were tightened to keep from trembling.

"It isn't a way," he said. "It's a matter of feeling. I never judge a book or picture, but when I _feel_ them, they are good to me. I would have stopped before some of these in any gallery, because I feel them.

They make me steal away----"

"I'm hard-hearted and a scoffer," she said, holding fast. "It isn't that I want to be--oh, you are different. I don't believe you were ever _tired_!... I see what David Cairns meant about your coming up here out of the seas with a fresh eye--and all your ideals.... Don't you see--we're all tired out! New York has made us put our ideals away--commercial, romantic--every sort of ideal.... Oh, it's harder for a woman to talk like this than for a man; she's slower to learn it.

When a woman does learn it, you may know she carries scars----"

The Grey One arose. She looked tall and gaunt, and her eyes had that burning look which dries tears before they can be shed. He did not hasten to speak.

"It's crude to talk so to you, but you came _to-day_," she went on. "I had about given up. The race--oh, it's a race to sanctuary right enough--but so long!... In the forenoons one can run, but strength doesn't last."

With a quick movement, the Grey One tossed up the covering from the easel. He saw a girl in red, natty figure, piquant face. It was not finished. She was to stand at the head of a saddle-horse, as yet embryonic. She stepped hastily to a little desk and poked at a formidable pile of business-looking correspondence.

"Do these look like an artist's communications?" she asked in the dry pent way that goes with burning eyes.... "They are not, but letters to one who paints for lithographers' stones! See here----"

And now she lifted a couch-cover, and drew from beneath a big portfolio which she opened on the floor before him. It was filled with flaring magazine covers, calendars, and other painted products having to do with that expensive sort of advertising which packing-houses and steel-shops afford. _Girls_--girls mounted side and astride, girls in racing-sh.e.l.ls and skiting motor-boats, in limousines and runabouts, in dirigibles and 'planes;--seaside, mountain and prairie girls; house-boat, hunting and skating girls; even a vivid parlor variety--all conventional, colorful and unsigned.

"Eight years in Europe for these," she said in a dragging, morbid tone.

"And the letters on the table say I may do more, as the managers of s.h.i.+rt-waist factories might say to poor sewing-women when business is good. And they pay piece-work prices just the same; and they want girls, not real girls, but things of bright paint like these! Oh, they know what they want--and they must be common in order to suit--girls of just paint----"

"And women of just flesh," said Bedient. "New York has shown me that about so many men!"

This startled her--made her forget the sailor part. It was particularly in the range of her mood that moment, and seemed finished.

"You're going to feel a lot better, and soon," he went on. "It's going to be much better than you think----"

She drew suddenly back, hatred altering her features as a gust of wind on the face of a pool.

"You mean my marriage?" she asked, clearing her voice.

"I did not know that you were to be married," he said quickly. "I'm sorry not to have been clearer. I meant the days to come through your work--and nothing more."

"A few have heard that I'm to be married," she said. "I thought you had heard. As a matter of fact, it is not settled. Oh, I have croaked to you terribly--please forgive me!"

"That first night, I felt that we were old friends at once," he added, rising and standing before her. "The next day, you said it was just like a dream--the night before--and it was the same to me. We went up to Miss Nettleton's on the minute, just as if we were old playmates, and you had said, 'Let's----'... So to-day, you have only told an old friend things--trying things--exactly as you should. And I--I think you're brave to have done so well--for so long. I like New York better.

I'm coming again. I like your pictures. They are not just paint....

Hasn't anyone told you--don't you know--that it wouldn't hurt you at all to do the others--if your real pictures were just paint? And since you are driven to do them, and don't do them out of greed, nor through commonness, nor by habit, they can't hurt your real work? I really believe, too, that it is what you have done that will help you, and bring the better times, and not what anyone else will do.... I seem to be talking a great deal--as I could not at all, except for the sense of an old friend's authority, and to one I have found rare and admirable.

Believe me, I have very good eyes,--New York has not printed its metal soul upon you."

The Grey One had listened with bowed head. A tall woman is at her loveliest, standing so. She regarded his face searchingly for an instant, smiled, and turned away.

Bedient asked no one. He did not know that the race Marguerite Grey was running was with American dollars, and that the sanctuary she meant was only a debtless spinsterhood. He did not know that she dared not give up the Handel studio while she held a single hope of her vogue returning. Only the great, who are permitted eccentricities, dare return to their garrets. Nor did Bedient know that her marriage meant she had failed utterly, and that another must square her debts; that only out of the hate of defeat could she give herself for this price.... Still, Bedient knew quite enough.

It was a little later, after he had been truly admitted into the circle he loved so well, that Beth told him the story of the Grey One's first collision with the man world. It was a rainy afternoon; they were together in the studio he always entered with reverence.

"She is different from Vina," Beth said, speaking of Marguerite Grey.

"She has been working fearfully and she's not made for such furious sessions as Vina Nettleton can endure. Vina seems replenished by her own atmosphere. She told me once that when her work is coming well, her whole body sings, all the functions in rhythm. Aren't people strange?

That little soft thing with baby hands! Why, her physical labor alone some days would weary a strong man--and that is the thoughtless part.

"But I was telling you about the Grey One. Sometimes I think she is more n.o.ble than we understand--one of those strange, solitary women who love only once. At least, she seems to ask only success in her work, and what that will bring her." Beth thought a moment of the horrible alternative which she did not care to explain to Bedient. "A few years ago in Europe--just a young thing, she was, when she met her hero. He was a good man, and loved her. I knew them both over there. In the beginning, it was one of those really golden romances, and in Italy.

One day, a woman came to the Grey One, and in the lightest, bra.s.siest way, asked to be congratulated on her engagement, mentioning the man whose attentions Marguerite had accepted as a heavenly dispensation.

This was in Florence. The woman hurried away that day for London. The Grey One, just a gullible girl, was left half dead. When her lover came, she refused to see him. He wrote a letter which she foolishly sent back, unopened. And she returned to Paris--all this in the first shock.... She did not hear from him again for two years. Word came that he was married--no, not to that destroyer, but to a girl who made him happy, let us hope. The Grey One penetrated then to the truth. He had only a laughing acquaintance with the other woman to whom he was one of several chances. Leaving Florence, she had crippled the Grey One. This is just the bare fact--but it is enough to show how the lie of a worthless woman--kept Marguerite from happiness. And she has remained apart.... It is said that the Grey One encountered the destroyer here in New York a few months ago, the first time since that day in Florence. So natural was evil to this woman, that she did not remember, but came forward gus.h.i.+ngly--and would have kissed her victim...."

TWENTIETH CHAPTER

A CHEMISTRY OF SCANDAL

Beth had seen Andrew Bedient almost daily for three weeks. Many wonderful moments had been pa.s.sed together; indeed, there were moments when he reached in her mind that height he had gained at once in the ideals of Vina Nettleton. But he was sustained in Vina's mind, while Beth encountered reactions.... "I believe he is beyond s.e.x--or fast going beyond--though he may not know it," Vina had said in effect....

On the contrary, the Shadowy Sister had sensed a lover in the room.

Beth had perceived what Vina meant--the mystic who wors.h.i.+pped woman as an abstraction--but it had also come to her, that he could love _one_.

Beth would not trust the Shadowy Sister, but was determined to judge Bedient according to world standards. Plainly she attracted him, but could not be sure that her attraction was unique, though she always remembered that he had told of his mother only to her. He had a different mood, a different voice almost, for each of the other women of their acquaintance. His liking for the Grey One mystified Beth; Vina Nettleton had charmed him, brought forth in a single afternoon many intimate things from his depths. He spoke pleasantly of Mrs. Wordling.

The Shadowy Sister was bewitched. To her a great lover had come--a lover who had added to a boy's delicacy and beauty of ideal, a man's certainty and power. This was the trusting, visionary part of Beth, that had not entered at all into the other romance. Beth refused now to be ruled by it. The world had hurt her. The fault was not hers, but the world's. The only profit she could see to be drawn from her miseries of the past was to use her head to prevent repet.i.tion. Hearts were condemned.

And yet, the contrasting conduct of the Shadowy Sister in this and that other romance, was one of the most astonis.h.i.+ng things in Beth's experience. (Sailor-man had but to enter and speak, for Shadowy Sister to appear in kneeling adoration.)

Often Bedient was allowed to stay while she worked at other things. His own portrait prospered slowly, a fact in which the world might have found humor. And often they talked together long after the slanting light had made work impossible; their faces altered in the dim place; their voices low.... There were moments when the woman's heart stirred to break its silence; when the man before her seemed bravely a man, and the confines of his nature to hold magnificent distances. If she could creep within those confines, would it not mean truly to live?... But the years would sweep through her mind--grim, gray, implacable chariots--and in their dusty train, the specific memories of fleshly limitation and untruth. To survive, she had been forced to lock her heart; to hold every hope in the cold white fingers of fear; cruelly to curb the sweep of feminine outpouring, lest its object soften into chaos; and roused womanhood, returning empty--overwhelm. This is the sorriest instinct of self-preservation.

She would have said at this time that Andrew Bedient had not aroused the woman in her as the Other had done. Indeed, she paled at the thought that the Other had exhausted a trifle, her great force of heart-giving. There had been beauty in such a bestowal--pain and pa.s.sion--but beauty, too.... Another strange circ.u.mstance: Bedient had made her think of the Other so differently. She had half put away her pride; she might have been too insistent for her rights. The Other really had improved miraculously from the poor boy who had come to their house. And to the artist's eye, he was commandingly masculine, a veritable ideal.... Bedient was different every day.

The visit to the gallery, too, had given Beth much to think over. What he had said about the pictures, especially before the one he had called _The Race Mother_, had revealed his processes of mind, and made her feel very small for a while. She saw that all her own talk had not lifted from herself, from her own troubles, and certain hateful aspects of the world; while his thoughts had concerned the sufferings of all women, and the fruitage that was to come from them. She had talked for herself; he for the race. But he had merely _observed_ the life of women, while she had lived that life.

Why did Andrew Bedient continue to show her seemingly inexhaustible sources of fineness, ways so delicate and wise that the Shadowy Sister was conquered daily, and was difficult to live with? It is true that Bedient asked nothing. But if the hour of asking struck, what should she say to him? (Here Shadowy Sister was firmly commanded to begone.) Beth had not been able to answer alone.... Could Vina Nettleton be right? Was her studio honored by a man who was beyond the completing of any woman? If so, why did Shadowy Sister so delight in him? Or was this proof that he was not designed to be the human mate of woman? These were mighty quandaries. Beth determined to talk about prophets when he came again.... Her friends told her she hadn't looked so well in years.

Beth drew forth at length a picture of the Other Man, that she had painted recently from a number of kodak prints. The work of a miniature had been put upon it. A laughing face, a reckless face, but huge and handsome. Before her, was the contrasting work of the new portrait. The two pictures interested her together.... Bedient was at the door. It was his hour. Beth placed the smaller picture upon the mantle, instead of in its hidden niche--and admitted the Shadowy Sister's Knight....

"I saw Vina yesterday," she observed, after work was begun. "She was still talking about prophets and those other things you said----"

"What a real interest she has," Bedient answered. "She has asked me for a _Credo_--in two or three hundred words--to embody the main outline of the talk that day. Perhaps it can be done. I'm trying."

"How interesting!"

"If one could put all his thinking into a few pages, that would be big work."...