Fate Knocks at the Door by Will Levington Comfort

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Beth was a year or two older. The boy had grown splendid in appearance,
when she discovered she was giving him much that he must hold sacredly,
or inflict havoc upon the giver.... In moments when she was happiest,
there would come a thought that something would happen.... The young
man did not fully understand what caused the break. This may be the key
to the very limitation which made him impossible--this lack of delicacy
of perception. Certainly he did not know the greatness of Beth's
giving, nor the fineness she had come to expect from him.... She did
not exactly love him less, but rather as a mother than a maid, since
she had to forgive.

A woman may love a man whom she is too wise to marry. There are
man-comets, splendid, flashing, unsubstantial, who sweep into the zones
of attraction of all the planet sisterhood; but better, if one cannot
have a sun all to oneself, is a little cold moon for the companion
intimate.... Something that the young man had said or done was pure
disturbance to Beth, compatible with no system of development. She had
sent him from her, as one who had stood before her rooted among the
second-rate.

Only Beth knew the depth of the hurt. All the feminine of her had
turned to aching iron. The Shadowy Sister seemed riveted to a hideous
clanking thing, and all the dream-children crushed.

Her friends said: "Who would have thought that after making such a
_man_ of her protege, Beth would refuse to marry him? Ah, Beth loves
her pictures better than she could love any mere man. She was destined
to be true to her work. Only the great women are called upon to make
this choice. Nature keeps them virgin to reveal at the last unshadowed
beauty. This refusal is the signet of her greatness."

Beth heard a murmur of this talk and laughed bitterly.

"No," she said to her studio-walls. "It's only because Beth is a bit
choosey. She isn't a very great artist, and if she were, she wouldn't
hesitate to become Mrs. Right Man, though it made her falter forever,
eye and hand."

In her own heart, she would rather have had her visions of happiness in
children, than to paint the most exquisite flowers and faces in the
comprehension of Art.... For days, for weeks, she had remained in her
studio seeing no one. Some big work was rumored, and she was left alone
with understanding among real people, just as was Vina Nettleton....
But she was too maimed within to work. She wanted to rush off to Asia
somewhere, and bury herself alive, but pride kept her at home. As soon
as she was able to move and think coherently, she sought her few
friends again. Even her dearest, Vina Nettleton, had realized but a
tithe of the tragedy.

* * * * *

Beth Truba reached her studio again Monday noon. Among the letters in
her post-box, was one she felt instinctively to be from Andrew Bedient,
though it was post-marked Albany. She hesitated to open the letter at
first, for fear that he had attempted to explain his presence in Mrs.
Wordling's room. This would affix him eternally to commonness in her
mind. He had a right to go to Mrs. Wordling's room, but she had thought
him other than the sort which pursues such obvious attractions.
Especially after what Cairns had said, she was hurt to meet him
there.... Beth found herself thinking at a furious rate, on the mere
hazard that the letter was from Bedient....

Were there really such men in the world as the Bedient whom Cairns
pictured, and believed in? Personally, she didn't care to experiment,
but there was a strange reliance in the thought that there _were_ such
men.... The fine nature she wanted to believe in--wouldn't have
written!... This one letter alone remained unopened--when the telephone
rang.

It was Cairns, who inquired if she had heard aught of his friend.... "I
reached town Saturday morning," Cairns went on, "and found a note that
he would be away for the day and possibly Sunday; didn't say where nor
why. He left no word at the Club. In fact, Mrs. Wordling called me just
now to inquire, volunteering that Bedient had been in her world Friday.
Excuse me for bothering you. I've an idea this is his way when a gale
is blowing in his brain. He pushes out for solitude and sea-room."

Beth had not offered to assist. The Albany letter might not be his. It
stared at her now from the library-table, full-formed black writing.
There were no two ways about a single letter. It was the writing of a
man who had not covered continents of white paper. "Miss Beth Truba"
had been put there to stay, with a full pen, and as if pleasing to his
sight. She was thinking--it would be well if Mrs. Wordling were always
inquiring; and that the day would be spoiled if he had undertaken to
explain things in this letter....

Beth crossed to the table, placed the paper-cutter under the flap and
slit it across. Just at this moment, the door of the elevator-shaft
opened on her floor--and her knocker fell. She tossed the letter under
the leather cover of the table, and admitted Vina Nettleton.

FOURTEENTH CHAPTER

THIS CLAY AND PAINT AGE

A new light had come into the studio of Vina Nettleton; and only when
at last the light became too strong, and the struggle too close, had
she left it to seek her friend Beth Truba. She had not been sleeping,
nor remembering to eat; but she had been thinking enough for seven
artists, in the long hours, when the light was bad for work. And now
the packing was worn from her nerve-ends, so that she wept easily, like
a nervous child, or a man undone from drink.

The new force of Andrew Bedient had found in her a larger sensitiveness
than even in David Cairns. That long afternoon which he had spent in
her place of working and living was to her a visitation, high above the
years. She had been amazed at the Grey One, for preserving a semblance
of calm. The gratefulness that she had faltered was but a sign of what
she felt.

The figures of Jesus in her room, she had been unable to touch. Bedient
had made her see the _Godhood_ of the Christ. John the Baptist, who had
attained the apex of manhood and prophecy, had called himself unworthy
to loose the latchet of His shoes, and this before Jesus had put on the
glory of the Father.

All the others were amazingly nearer to her. She saw the bleak Iscariot
as never before, and his darkened mother emerged a step out of the
gloom of ages. The Romans moved, as upon a stage, before her, unlit
battling faces, clashing voices and armor; and the bearded Jews heavily
collecting and confuting. She saw the Eleven, and nearest the light,
the frail John, the brother of James,--sad young face and ascetic
pallor.... And in the night, she heard that great Voice crying in the
wilderness, that mighty Forerunner, the returned Elias; next to Christ
Himself, this Baptist, who leaped in the womb of the aged Elizabeth,
when the Mother of the Saviour entered her house in the hill country!
This cataclysmic figure, not of the "Stations," was dominant in the
background of them all. She saw him second to the Christ (for was he
not a prophet in the elder Scripture?) in being called to the Father's
Godhood; and Saint Paul, of that nameless thorn in the flesh, following
gloriously on the Rising Road!

There was a new and loving friendliness in the Marys. She could pray to
_them_, and wait for greater purity to image the Saviour, as they saw
Him.... And one night from her fire-frame, staring down into the lurid
precipices of the city, the awful question preyed upon her lips, "Are
you Jews and Romans that you must have again the blood of the Christ,
to show you the way to God?"... She was weeping, and would have
swooned, but something in her consciousness bade her look above. There
were the infinite worlds, immensities of time and space and evolving
souls; and urging, weaving, glorifying all, was the Holy Spirit, Mystic
Motherhood.... And back in the dark of her studio, she turned among
creations and visions and longings. Next morning she sat upon the floor
and wept, because she could not have her child of soul, only children
of clay.... Hours afterward she was fashioning a cross with her
fingers, and was suddenly crushed with anguish because she had not been
there to carry the cross for Him, to confront the soldiery and take the
cruel burden, and hear His Voice, Whom she knew now to be the Son of
God.

* * * * *

The women embraced in that rare way which is neither formal nor an
affectation. They had long liked and admired each other.

"Why, Vina,--it has been weeks--how did you manage to leave?"

"I haven't done much--for days," Vina said, ducking from under her huge
hat, and tossing it with both hands upon the piano-top. "Not since he
came up with the Grey One and spoiled my little old ideas. Let's have
some tea?"

Beth laughed at the other, until Vina moved into the circle of light,
and her face showed paler and more transparent than ever. She sat down
upon Beth's working-stool, elbows on knees, and stared trance-like at
her friend.

"Why, you dear little dreamer, what's the matter?" Beth asked quickly.
"Who is the destructive _he_?"

"The sailor-man David Cairns called us together to see. He's been in
the shadows among the panels ever since. What he said I keep hearing
again and again----"

Beth laughed at the remarkable way Bedient was besieging her own
studio, without appearing in person. "But Vina, you've been living like
a Hindu holy man, and no one can do that in New York, not even Hindus.
I order you to eat thrice daily and tire yourself physically----"

"I eat," Vina said, looking bored and helpless at the thought. "I eat
and I do enough physical work to tire a stone-mason----"

"But I can see through you to the bone! I think you only imagine you
take nourishment. Oh, Vina, I know your life--handling huge hard things
and making them lovely with pure spirit. I must take better care of
you. Tell me all about it, if it will help."

"Beth, please don't talk about pure spirit, meaning me. I used to be
able to stand it, but not any more. The Grey One does that. I seem to
suggest it to flesh and blood people.... I'm sure he didn't see me so.
He looked at me, as if to say, oh, I don't know what!... I wish I
_were_ fish-cold! I'm all overturned.... I just met Mary McCullom on
the way over."

Beth had forgotten the name for the moment. She thought Vina was about
to tell her of Bedient.

"Don't you remember Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile,
painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly
bereft and unfortunate children?"

"Oh, yes," said Beth. "I heard she had married----"

"That's just it.... Do you remember how she used to look--pinched,
evaporated, as one looks in a factory blue-light? I remember calling
upon her, as she was giving up her last studio. We sat on a
packing-case, while they took out her pictures, one child after
another, foundlings which had come to her, and which no one would take
nor buy----"

"Vina, you're cruel to her!"

"Listen, and you'll see whom I'm cruel to.... I remember telling her
that day what a fearsome, ineffectual thing art is anyway.... How
spooky thin she looked, and her face was yellow in patches! My heart
was wrung with her, the image of a little woman with no place, no heart
to go to, all her dreams of girlhood turned to ghosts, fit only to run
from. Then she admitted that she might marry, that a man wanted her,
but her wail was that she was mean and helpless, a failure; as such it
was cowardly to let the man have her, hardly a square thing for a girl
to do. Well, I perked her up on that.... She took him; I don't even
know him by sight, but he's a man, Beth Truba! Mind you, here was a
woman who said she was so dismayed and distressed and generally bowled
over by living twenty-seven years, that she hadn't the heart left to
love anybody. But he took her, and he's a man----"

"That seems to charm you," Beth ventured. "'He took her, and he's a
man.'"

"It does, for I just left her, and she's a wicked flaunt of womanly
happiness. I tell you, she has been playing with angels, all daintily
plumped out, eyes shining, hands soft and white, her neck all round and
new, lips red, and her voice low and ecstatic with the miracle of it
all. And 'Oh, Vina,' she whispered, 'I almost die to think I might have
refused him! You helped me not to. He loves me, and oh, he's so
wonderful!'... I kissed her in an awed way--and asked about him....
'Oh, he's just a nurseryman--trees, you know, but he lo--we're so
happy!'... Oh, Beth," Vina finished in a lowered voice, "something
eternal, something immortal happens, when a man brings love to a
thirsting woman!"

"Not tea, but strong tea," Beth observed. "Perhaps you think that's a
pretty story--and perhaps it is," she added indefinitely.

Vina seemed hardly to hear. Many matters were revolving in her tired
mind, and as soon as she caught a loose end, she allowed words to come,
for there was some relief in thinking aloud.

"Hasn't the world done for us perfectly, Beth?" she demanded finally.
"Everything is arranged for men, to suit men--it's a man's world--and
we're foreigners. We're forced to stand around and _mind_, before we
understand. If we speak our own language, we're suspected of sedition.
And then we don't stand together. We're continually looking for some
kind male native, and only now and then one of us is lucky.... Hideous
and false old shames are inflicted upon us. We are hungry for many
things, but appear shameless, if we say so... Beth, has it ever
occurred to you that we come--I mean fair and normal women--we come
from a country where there are lots of little children--?"

"The kingdom of heaven, you mean, Vina?"

"Possibly that's it. And when we get here we miss them--want them
terribly. It's all _through_ us--like an abstraction. We know the way
better than the natives here, but they have laws which make us
dependent upon them for the way.... It has not lifted to an abstraction
with our teachers, Beth. A crude concrete thing to them, a matter of
rules broken or not. We must submit, or remain lonely, reviled
foreigners.... Sometimes we discover a native who _could_ bring us back
our own, but he's probably teaching the nearest...."

"We've got to stand together, we foreigners," Beth said laughingly.
"All our different castes must stand together first--and keep the
natives waiting--until in their very eagerness, they suddenly perceive
that we know best----"

"It's not for us--that happy time," Vina added hopelessly. "We are the
sit-tight, hold-fast pilgrims. We belong to the clay-and-paint age----"

"It's something to see that----"

"Oh, how truly _he_ sees it!"

"Your Sailor-man, does he see that, too?"

"Has he been _seeing_ other things--in your studio?" Vina asked
hastily.

"Oh, no, he hasn't been here, but he has been telling David Cairns
things about writing.... David has really been born again."

"Do you know, Beth," Vina declared with intensity, "he has been such an
inspiration to me, that I'm afraid my 'Stations' will look like a
repaired wall, half new and half old plaster."

"My work will stand an inspiration, too."

"Beth----"

"Yes."

"You know what I think of your work, but I believe the Sailor-man could
give you that inspiration----"

"Perhaps I can get it through you and David Cairns," remarked Beth, who
was beginning to see, and with no little amazement, that to Vina the
inspiration was spiritual, impersonal. This made Bedient's influence
all the more exciting.

"Oh, he'll come to you, right enough. I supposed he had.... You know I
was making my James and Matthews, my Peters and Jews and Romans quite
contentedly in that bleak way it has been done a thousand times. But he
made me see them! And the slopes of Calvary, and Gethsemane hunched in
the darkness, and the Christ kneeling in a faint starry light; he made
me see Him kneeling there, His Spirit, like a great mother's loving
heart, standing between an angry Father and the world, a wilful
child----"

"Yes," came softly from Beth.

"And it's almost too much for me now--the Passion, the Agony, the Crime
and the Night--too much for me and clay. It would be, if it were not
for the glowing Marys. They're for _us_, Beth----"

"That's sweet of you, Vina.... It won't be too much. You're in the
reaction now. After that passes you will do the 'Stations' as they have
never been done. And God's poor people will pass before your work for
years and years to come; and something, as much as they can bear of the
thrilling anguish of this new light of yours, will come to them, as
they pray before the Eternal Tragedy."

"But that isn't all, Beth!... There's another; a terrible side. I sort
of had myself in hand until he came, sort of felt myself two thousand
years old, back among them. But he has made me a pitiful modern again,
a woman who has tried and refuses to try longer, to be happy with clay
dolls. And Mary McCullom----"

"Is submerged in tea--past resuscitation.... That modern madness will
pass, too, dear. 'Member how those Italian giants used to have periods
of madness while they decorated the everlasting cathedrals? No modern
man could come into your studio and break your work for long, Vina. You
know we promised each other that none could." Beth shivered at her
memory. Vina had made her forget for a moment.

"But we said in our haste then, that all men were just natives----"

"Many wise women say so at their leisure----"

"But Mary McCullom----"

"Taboo----"

"Well, then, _he_ made me see there were real men in the world," Vina
declared with slow defiance.

"Oh."

"You're sure to misunderstand. Please listen carefully. He is as far
_to me_--from being that kind of a real man--as a mere native. Do you
understand?... I could worship through him, as through a pure
priest----"

"Vina, you're a passionate idealist!"

"You don't know him. I think he is beyond sex--or going beyond. Perhaps
he doesn't know it.... Oh, we've been hurt a little, by boys who failed
to grow into men, and so we took to our breasts painted and molded
images, saying there _are_ no real men. And here in our midst comes
more than we ask or dream--a Prophet in the making. That's very clear
to me, and you'll see it!... The result--a clearer vision into clay and
its possibilities, and an expanded conception of my subjects--that's
one point and a wonderful one. I'm grateful, but there's another....
Oh, Beth, I'm sick unto nausea with repression. Why, should I deny it;
I want a real lover among men, and I want live dolls!"

A trenchant moment to Beth Truba. No one, so well as she, could
perceive the tragedy of this gifted woman, whom the right man had
missed in the crush of the world's women. A real artist, but a greater
woman.... More than this was revealed to Beth. Her own Shadowy Sister
was speaking to her with Vina Nettleton's tongue, as Beth Truba could
never speak of another...

The Grey One, too, had her tragedy; and Kate Wilkes had hers long ago,
a strong woman, whose cup of bitterness had overflowed in her veins;
who had come so to despise men, as to profess disliking children.
Indeed, that moment, Beth Truba seemed to hear the whispered
affirmations of tragedy from evolved women everywhere....And whither
was tending the race, if only the Wordlings of the world were to be
satisfied--if Wordlings were all that men cared for? What was to become
of the race, if the few women who loved art, and through art learned
really to love their kind, were forever to be denied? And here was Vina
Nettleton with the spiritual power to concentrate her dream into an
avatar (if into the midst of her solitary labors, a great man's love
should suddenly come)!... Did the Destiny Master fall asleep for a
century at a time, that such a genius for motherhood should be denied,
while the earth was being replenished with children of chance, branded
with commonness and forever afraid?

Beth Truba shook herself from this crippling rush of thoughts, and
started to her feet.

"Vina, you've been drinking deep of power. You're a giantess reeking
with mad contagions. Also, you're a heretic. Allow me to remind you
that we are spinsters; born and enforced, and decently-to-be-buried
_spinsters_. It isn't the Sailor-man, but the spring of the year, that
makes us a bit feverish. We should go to the catacombs for this season,
when this devil's rousing is in the air.... If you have anything
further to say, purely in regard to artistic inspirations, you may go
on----"

Vina sat rigidly before her, wan and white-lipped as if her emotions
were burned out. Presently she began to talk again in her trailing
pensive way:

"I had been working deep and doggedly for days, hardly noticing who
came in or out. When the Grey One entered with him, I felt myself
bobbing, whirling up into light surface water. I hardly spoke the first
half hour. I remembered the night before, when he told that fine story
straight into your eyes. I thought him wonderful then, and it occurred
to me that you were in for it. But it was different when he came into
my shop--something intimate and important. His eyes roved from one
'Station' to another, while the Grey One exploited me in her absurd,
selfless fashion. She's a third in our trouble Beth.

"Presently he asked me how I knew the Christ had such wonderful hands;
then he talked of the Forerunner and Saint Paul, who could have done so
much, had they been there during the Passion, and of the women who
_were_ there. It was strange to have him come into the studio--to
me--with all these pictures developed through silent years. It seems to
me something tremendous must come of it... Someone knocked, and
frenziedly I ordered the intruder away, without opening the door."

And now Vina repeated the belief of Bedient that impressed her so
deeply: that the Holy Spirit is the source of the divine principle in
woman; that the Marys of this world are the symbols of that Mystic
Motherhood--the third of the Trinity--which will bring the races of the
world to God, as a woman brings children to her husband.

"Everything he said glowed with this message," she went on. "His every
thought brought out that women are the holders of the spiritual loaf;
that prophets are the sons of strength of great spiritual mothers; that
artists and poets are prophets in the making, and that unto the purest
and greatest of the prophets must come at last Godhood--the Three in
One; and of this Jesus is the Exemplar; His life and death and rising,
His whole Mission, should make us see with _human_ eyes, the Way of
Truth."

"I see, dear girl," Beth said softly, "_why_ you could not open the
door to anyone... Then the, Mission of Jesus was vicarious? I had about
given up hope of comprehending that."

"Yes. He lived and moved and bled and died and rose before the eyes of
common men!" Vina exclaimed. "One has to _bleed_ for such eyes! Without
the living sacrifice, only the rare souls here and there, with the
highest prophetic vision, could have risen clearly to understand these
things.... Thus the growth of spirituality was quickened among the
lowly multitudes. The coming of the Christ is the loveliest
manifestation of the divine feminine principle within Him--the Holy
Spirit. Did he not become a Spiritual Mother of the world? Was not
Godhood the next step for such a finished Spirit? His awful agony was
that these tremendous mysteries of His illumination were enacted in the
hideous low pressures of human understanding. That he could endure this
for the world's eye, is his greatness, his Godhood!"

"And Mr. Bedient comes out of India with this Christian conception?"

"Beth," Vina said solemnly, "I believe there is meaning in that, too.
The beauty and simplicity of that Sacrifice has been husked in dogmas
for centuries, and we here have not torn them all away. He had just the
Book and the Silence, and his own rare mind!"

* * * * *

"But, Vina, how could these things of pure religious fervor and beauty
bring about that other rebellion of yours--the Mary McCullom one?"

"Oh, in a hundred ways; I'm all tired out now, but they'll come back.
In a hundred ways, Beth, he spoke of women--with that same fervor and
beauty. Just as he cleared and made exalted the Mystic Motherhood of
the Christ, he pointed out how it works among _us_. Why, he says that
there is nothing worth reading nor regarding nor listening to in the
world of art, that has not that visioning feminine quality. The artist
must be evolving through spirit, before his book or painting or
symphony begins to live. All the rest of art is a mere squabbling over
the letter of past prophecies, as the Jews did with the living Christ
in their streets!... What a mother he must have had! I seemed to see
her--to sense her--beside him. It was as if _she_ looked into my heart
and the Grey One's heart, and with her hand on her big boy's head, said
to us, smiling and happily: 'This is _my_ art--and he lives! You have
but to look into your own hearts, you listening women, to know that he
lives!'... Oh, Beth, her work does live to bless her! Can't you see how
dead-cold the clay felt to my fingers after that?"

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