There was a certain trail that rose from Preshbend, and ended after an hour's walk in a high cliff of easy ascent. Bedient often went there alone when the moon was full—and waited for her rising. At last through a rift in the far mountains, a faint ghost would appear, and waveringly whiten the glacial breast of old God-Mother—the highest peak in the vision of Preshbend. Just a nucleus of light at first, like a shimmering mist, but it steadied and brightened—until that snowy summit was configured in the midst of her lowlier brethren on the borders of Kashmir—and Bedient, turning from his deep reflections, would find the source of the miracle, trailing her glory up from the South.

Often he lost the sense of personality in these meditations. His eyes turned at first upon that dead, dark mountain, which presently caught the reflection of the moon (in itself a miracle of loveliness); then the moon which held the reflection of the hidden sun, which in its turn reflected the power of All; and he, a bit of suppressed animation among the rocks of the cliff, audaciously comprehending that chain of reflections and adding his own! The marvel of it all carried him a dimension beyond the responsiveness of mere brain-tissue, and for hours in which he was not Bedient, but one with some Unity that swept over the pageant of the universe, his body lay hunched and chill in the cold of the heights.... That was his first departure, and he was in his twenty-eighth year.

Another time, as he watched old God-Mother, he suddenly felt himself an instrument upon which played the awful yearning of the younger peoples of Europe and America. Greatly startled, he saw them hungering for this vastness, this beauty and peace; yet enchanted among little things, condemned to chattering and pecking at each other, and through interminable centuries to tread dim hot ways of spite and weariness, cruelty and nervous pain. He, Bedient, had found peace here, but it was not for him to take always. He seemed held by that awful yearning across the world; as if he were an envoy commissioned to find Content—to bring back the secret that would break their enchantment.... No, he was not yet detached from his people; he could only accept tentatively these mighty virtues of wonder and silence, gird his loins with them and finally take back the rich tidings.... Was he dwelling in silence to walk in power over there? This excited and puzzled him at first. Bedient as a bearer of light was new....

Yet hunger was growing within for his own people; a passion to tell them; rather to make them see that all their aims and possessions were not worth one moment, such as he had spent, watching the breast of old God-Mother whiten, with the consciousness of God walking in the mountain-winds, the scent of camphor, lotos, sandal and wild-honey in His garments. A passion, indeed, grew within him to make his people see that real life has no concern with wrestlings in fetid valleys, but up, up the rising roads—poised with faith, and laughing with power—until through a rift in the mountains, they are struck by the light of God's face, and shine back—like the peaks of Kashmir to the moon.

And another night it came to him that he had something to say to the women of his people. This thought emerged clean-cut from the deeps of abstraction, and he trembled before it, for his recent life had kept him far apart from women. And now, the thought occurred that he was better prepared to inspire women—because of this separateness. He had preserved the boyish ideal of their glowing mystery, their lovely cosmic magnetism. India had stimulated it. All the lights of his mind had fallen upon this ideal, all the colors of the spectrum and many from heaven—certain swift flashes of glory, such as are brought, in queer angles of light, from a butterfly's wing. He had been mercifully spared from moving among the infinitudes of small men who hold such a large estimate of the incapacity and commonness of women.... Even among the Sikh mothers (Bedient did not dream how his spirit prospered during these Indian years) his ideal was strengthened. He found among the mothers of the Punjab a finer courage than ever the wars had shown him—the courage that bends and bears—and an answering sweetness for all the good that men brought to their feet....

So one night at last he found himself thanking God in the great silence—that he could see the natural greatness of women; that he was alive to help them; that he could pity those who knew only the toiling, not the mystic, hands of women; pity those—and tell them—who knew her only as a sense creature.... And swiftly he wanted to tell women—how high he held them—that one man in the world had kept his vision of them brighter and brighter in substance and spirit. He had the queer, almost feminine, sense, of their needing to know this, and of impatience to give them their happiness. Perhaps they did not continually hold this in mind; perhaps the men of their world had taught them to forget.... They would be happier for his coming. He would put into each woman's heart—as only a man could do—a quickened sense of her incomparable importance; make her remember that mothering is the loveliest of all the arts; that only in the lower and savage orders of life the male is ascendant; that as the human race evolves in the finer regions of the spirit—when growth becomes centred in the ethereal dimension of the soul—woman, invariably a step nearer the great creative source, must assume supremacy.... Among the dark mountains the essence of all these thoughts came to him during many nights.

He would make women happier by restoring to them—their own. He must show how dreadful for them to forget for an instant—that they are the real inspirers of man; that they ignite his every conception; that it is men who follow and interpret, and the clumsy world is to blame because the praise so often goes to the interpreter, and not to the inspiration. But praise is a puny thing. Women must see that they only are lovely who remain true to their dreams, for of their dreams is made the spiritual loaf, the real vitality of the race; that by remaining true to their dreams, though starved of heart, the sons that come to them will be the lovers they dream of—and bring the happiness they missed, to the daughters of other women. For love is spirit—the stuff of dreams—and love is Giving.... He must bring to women again, lest they forget, this word: that never yet has man sung, painted, prophesied, made a woman happy, nor in any way woven finer the spirit of his time, but that God first covenanted with his mother for the gift—and, more often than not, the gift was startled into its supreme expression by the daughter of another.... All in a sentence, it summed at last, to Bedient alone,—a flaming sentence for all women to hear: Only through the potential greatness of women can come the militant greatness of men.

And so things appeared unto him to do, as he watched the miracle of the moon bringing forth the lineaments of the old God-Mother; and so the cliff became his Sinai. On this last night, for a moment at least, he felt as must an immortal lover who has seen clearly the way of chivalry—the task which was to be, as the Hindus say, the fruit of his birth.... Thus he would go down, face glowing with new and luminous resolves.... And once dawn was breaking as he descended, and the whir of wings aroused him. Looking upward he saw (as did Another of visions), in the red beauty of morning—a flock of swans flying off to the South.

* * * * *

Gobind must not be forgotten—old Gobind, who appeared in Preshbend at certain seasons, and sat down in the shade of a camphor-tree, old and gnarled as he; but a sumptuous refuge, as, in truth was Gobind in the spirit. The natives said that the austerities of Gobind were the envy of the gods; that he could hold still the blood in his veins from dusk to dawn; and make the listener understand many wonderful things about himself and the meaning of life.

The language had come to Bedient marvellously. Literally it flowed into his mind, as in the rains a rising river finds its old bed of an earlier season.

"This is your home, Wanderer," Gobind told him. "Long have you travelled to and fro and long still must you wander, but you will come back again to the cool shadows, and to these—" Gobind lifted his hand to point to the roof of the world. The yellow cloth fell away from his arm, which looked like a dead bough blackened from many rains. "For these are your mountains and you love these long shadows. All Asia and the Islands you have searched for these shadows, and here you are content, for your soul is Brahman.... But you are not ready for Home. You are not yet tired. Long still must you wander. Some sin of a former birth caused you to sink into the womb of a woman of the younger peoples. You have yet to return to them—as one coming down from the mountains, after the long summer, brings a song and a story for the heat-sick people of the plains to hear at evening——"

This was the substance of many talks. It was always the same when Gobind shut his eyes.

"You say I shall come back here, good Gobind?" Bedient asked.

"Yes, you will come back here to abandon the body——"

"Alone?"

"Yes."

Bedient was filled with grave questions. One can always put a mystic meaning to the direct saying of a Hindu holy man, but there seemed no equivocation here. The young man was slow to believe that all his dreaming must come to naught. It seemed as if his whole inner life had been built about the dream of a woman; and of late she had seemed nearer than ever, and different from any woman, he had ever known—the mate of his mind and soul and flesh. For a long time he progressed no farther than this, for falling into his own thoughts, he would find only the aged body of Gobind before him—the rest having stolen away on night-marches of deep moment, while he, Bedient, had tried to realize his life loneliness. At last he could think of nothing else throughout the long day, and he went early in the semi-light and sat before the holy man. The dusk darkened, and a new moon rose, but Gobind did not rise to mere physical consciousness that night, though Bedient sat very still before him for hours. The bony knees of the old ascetic, covered with dust, were moveless as the black roots of the camphor-tree; and a dog of the village sat afar off on his haunches and whined at intervals, waiting for the white man to go, that he might have the untouched supper, which a woman of Preshbend had brought to Gobind's begging-bowl.

And again the next night Bedient came, but Gobind was away playing with the gods of his youth—just the old withered body there—and the dog whining.

But the third night, the eyes of Gobind filled with his young friend——

"You say, good father Gobind," Bedient said quickly, "that I shall come back here alone to die?"

"Yes," the Sannyasin answered simply, but a moment later, he shivered, and seemingly divined all that was in the young man's mind, for he added: "You will learn to look within for the woman.... You would not find favor—in finding her without.... It is not for you—the red desire of love!"

* * * * *

It was during these years in India that Bedient began to put down the thoughts which delighted him during the long rides through the forest; and something of the thrill of his reflections, as he watched old God-Mother from his cliff. He found great delight in this, and his mind was integrated by expression. He recalled many little pictures of the early years—not the actions, but the reflections of action. It was fascinating. He found that his journal would bulk big presently, so he took to polishing as he went along; chose the finest, toughest Indian parchment—and wrote finely as this print—for it was clear to him that he had entered upon what was to prove a life-habit.

The letters from Captain Carreras had become more frequent in late years; in fact, there was almost always a letter en route either from Preshbend or Equatoria.... The Captain wanted him to come; stronger and stronger became the call. So far as money was concerned, he had done extraordinarily well. He always wrote of this half-humorously.... At last when Bedient was beginning his seventh year in the Punjab, there came a letter which held a plaint not to be put aside.

Bedient was in his thirty-second year; and just at this time old Gobind left his body for a last time beneath the camphor-tree. The young man had sat before him the night before, and the holy man had told him in symbolism—that the poor murky river of his life had made its last bend through the forests, and was swiftly flowing into the sea of time and space. Though he sat long after silence had settled down, Bedient did not know (so softly and sweetly did the old saint depart) that the Sannyasin was tranced in death instead of meditation. It was not until the next morning, when he heard the Sikh women of the village weeping—one above all—that he understood. It was not a shock of grief to these women, for such is their depth that the little matters which concern all flesh and which are inevitable, cannot be made much ado of. Still it was feminine and beautiful to him, their weeping; and possibly the one who wept loudest had mothered old Gobind in her heart, and there was emptiness in the thought that she could not fill his begging-bowl again. Bedient, as well as others of the village, knew that to Gobind, death was a long-awaited consummation; that he was gone only from the physical eye of the village. That missed him—as did Bedient, who had loved to sit at the fleshly feet of the holy man.... But he loved all Preshbend, too.

And at length, he set out on foot for Lahore—often looking back.



SIXTH CHAPTER

THAT ISLAND SOMEWHERE

ALL these impressive years, from seventeen to thirty-two, had brought Andrew Bedient nothing in the civilized sense of success. It is quickly granted that he was a failure according to such standards. He had never been in want nor debt, nor so poor that he could not cover another's immediate human need if presented; yet the reserve energy of all these years, in fact, of his whole life, as represented in gold, amounted to less than three hundred dollars. Probably, outside of Asia, there was not a white man who had accumulated three hundred dollars with less thought; certainly in Asia there was none, white or black, who carried this amount with less vital concern. Up the years, he had given no thought to the oft-expressed eagerness of Captain Carreras to help him in a substantial way. He had always felt that he would go to his friend—at times had hungered for him—and now he answered the call.

Fifteen years since he had taken the hand of Captain Carreras and laughingly refused to share the other's fortunes! Bedient remembered how bashfully, but how genuinely, that had been suggested. Then the Captain's manner had become crisp and nervous to hide his heart-break, and the order was given with all the authority of the quarter-deck, that Bedient must never fail in any extremity to make known his need. But there had been no need—save for the friendship....

Strange old true heart that could not forget! Bedient felt it in every letter. Thousands of acquaintances, but not a friend nor relative! He thought about Bedient every day; an old man's heart turned to the boy whose hands had suddenly fallen upon him with such amazing power. Occasionally in the letters, there was an obvious effort to cover this profundity of affection with a surface of humor, but it always broke through before a page was blotted.... Equatoria, and his really remarkable acquisitions there, were invariably matters for light touches. He had picked up big lands for almost nothing; and he found himself presently in strong favor with what was probably the most stable government Equatoria had ever known. The Captain's original purpose of acquiring the mineral rights of certain rich rivers had greatly prospered. Yes, there was gold in the river-beds.... Incidentally, to keep his hands "from mauling the natives," he had caused to be planted at different times, several thousand acres of cacao trees, all of which were now bearing. The Captain explained naively that these had turned out rather handsomely, since the natives harvested the nuts for him at a ludicrously low figure, and Holland sent ships twice a year for the product. "Just suggest anything to this soil, and the answer is perennials. We can't bother with stuff that has to be planted more than once," he observed. Bedient returned many times to the letter that told about the goats. Part of it read:

"There was a rocky strip of land in the fork of two rivers—several thousand acres—that almost shut itself off, so narrow and rocky was the neck.... For a long time this big bottle of land troubled me—couldn't think of any use to put it to—until somebody mentioned goats. In a fit of industry, I shipped over a few goat families from Mexico, turned them loose in the natural corral—and forgot all about them for a couple of years. You see, the natives are fruit-eaters, and it's too hot for skins. My men occasionally brought me word that the goats were doing well. Finally, I sent a party over to pile a few more rocks at the mouth. They came back pale and awed, begging me to come and look. I went. I tell you, boy, there were parades, caravans, pageants of goats in there—all happy in the stone-crop.... I haven't dared to look for a year or more, but with a good marine-glass from the upper window of the hacienda, you can see a portion of the tract. They're hopping about over there—thick as fleas!... That's the way everything multiplies. Come and extricate me from the goat problem!... Dear lad, I do need you—not for goats, nor for fruit, nor mining, nor chocolate interests, not to be my cook—forgive the mention of a delightful memory—but as a lonely old man needs a boy—his boy."

* * * * *

Only a half-day in New York on the way down to Equatoria, or the alternative of waiting over a ship, meaning eight days later with Captain Carreras. Bedient could not bring his mind to the latter delay at this stage of the journey, though the metropolis called to him amazingly. Here he had been born; and here was the setting of many early memories, now seen through a kind of faery dusk. With but an hour or so in lower Manhattan, he swept in impressions like a panorama-film, his mind held to no single thought for more than an instant. The finest outer integument had never been worn from his nerves, so that nothing of the pandemonium distressed; but what his oriental training called the illusion of it all—really dismayed. It seemed as if the millions were locked in some terrible slavery, which they did not fully understand, only that they must hurry, and never cease the devouring toil. In the hideous walled cities of China, the same thought had often come to Bedient—that these myriads had been condemned by the sins of their past lives, blindly to gather together and maim each others' souls.

Still there was some big meaning for him in New York. Bedient realized that sooner or later he would return. Toward the end of the afternoon, as he looked back from the deck of the Dryden steamer Hatteras, he realized that New York had dazed him; that something of the grand gloom, something of the granite, had entered his heart. Perhaps it was well for him to have these glimpses, and to hurry away to adjust himself in the silence—before he took up his place in New York again.

A week later the Hatteras awaited dawn, sixty miles off the northern coast of Equatoria. Treacherous coral reefs extend that far out to sea, and the lights of the passage into port are few. This is an ugly part of the Caribbean in high seas. Moreover, the coral has a way of changing its ramifications; its spires build rapidly in the warm surface water.

All the forenoon the liner crawled in toward the harbor, and at last through the blazing noon, Bedient saw Coral City in a foreground of palm-decked hills. Certain fresh-tinned roofs close to the water-front reflected the sun like a burning-glass. Nearer still, a few white buildings on the seaward slopes shone through the heat haze with the vividness of jewels—whitened walls gleaming among the palms and colorful turrets of pure Spanish line. The strip of beach, white as a road of shells, lost itself on either side of the city in its own dazzling light. Films of heat danced upon the painted roofs. The sky was a blinding azure that tranced the hills and harbor with its brilliance, silence and magic.

Clouds of yellow mud boiled up from the bottom of the oozy harbor as the Hatteras dropped her hook; and the sharks moved about, all the more shuddery in their tameness. Two launches were making for the steamer, and Bedient, sheltering his eyes from the light, discovered the little Captain standing well-forward on the nearest—a puffy, impatient face, pathetically unconscious of its own workings in anxiety. Bedient's uplifted hand caught the other's eye as the launch neared. The old adventurer needed a second or two to take in the tall figure and the changed countenance—then a look of gladness, full, deep and tender with embarrassment, crowned the years and the long journey.

Bedient had to remember hard, after dozens of fluent and delightful letters, that he must encounter the old bashfulness again.... Plainly the Captain showed the years. There was the dark dry look of some inner consuming, and the trembling mouth was lined and assertive where formerly it was unnoticed in the general cheer. There was a break in rotundity. Perhaps this, more than anything else, put a strange hush upon the meeting. Bedient was glad he had not delayed longer; and he saw he must break through the embarrassment, as the boy and the cook of years ago would not have thought of doing. The old perfume sought his nostrils delicately with a score of memories.

The Captain seemed to have an absurd number of natives at his disposal. Bedient's small pieces of baggage were prodigiously handled. A carriage was provided, and the two drove up the main thoroughfare, Calle Real. The little city was appointed and its streets named by the Spanish. Parts of it were very old, and Bedient liked the setting, which was new to him—the native courtesy and the mellowness of architecture which that old race of conquerors has left in so many isles of the Western sea.

At the head of the rising highway shone a gilded dome, a sort of crown for the city. Bedient had seen it shining from the harbor, and supposed it to be the capitol. The building stood upon an eminence like a temple. Calle Real parted to the right and left at its gates. Their carriage passed to the right, and within the walls were groves of palms, gardens of rose, rhododendron, jasmine, flames of poinsettia, and a suggestion of mystic glooms where orchids breathed—fruit, fragrance, fountains.

"The Capitol?" laughed the Captain. "No, my boy, those little rain-rotted, stone buildings near the water-front are the government property. However, you never can tell about Equatoria. There are folks who believe that this stone palace of Senor Rey is fated to become the Capitol. It might happen in two ways. Senor Rey might overturn the government and move headquarters to his own house. You see, he loves fine things too well to reside back yonder. Or, the government overturning Celestino Rey—would ultimately move up here on the hill."

Bedient laughed softly. It was all delightfully young to him. "Then Senor Rey aspires?"

"That's the idea—only we put it 'conspires' down here.... It is really a remarkable institution—this of Senor Rey's," Carreras went on. He forgot himself in a narrative. "Now, if you were in New York and had a hundred thousand dollars of another man's money, and wanted to relax—you would come here to Equatoria, and put up with Celestino Rey. To all appearances, The Pleiad is a hotel, but in reality it's just a club for those who have taken the short cut to fortune—the direct and amiable way of loot. There's so much red tape in Equatoria that a New York warrant for arrest would be about as compelling in our city as a comic valentine.

"So you see, Andrew, those who used to fly to Mexico now come here. This is the most interesting colony of crime-cultured gentlemen in the world—ex-cashiers, penmen, promoters and gamblers, all move in those great halls and gardens. There are big games. Senor Rey is an artist in many ways, not only as a master of gambling chances. His palace is filled with art treasures from all lands. He was a pirate in these waters—yes, within your years. I heard of him in Asia as the most murderous pirate the Caribbean had ever known—and this was the Spanish Main. Of course, stories build about a picturesque figure. The Senor must be seventy years old now, but a man of mystery, fabulously rich.... Just a little while ago, he brought over a fresh bride from South America. They say she's a thriller to look at. The Spaniard calls her his 'Glow-worm'——"

"Truly a honeymoon name," Bedient observed.

"You see," the Captain concluded, "I can speak of The Pleiad only from the outside. That's the Senor's name for his establishment, possibly because there are seven wings to his castle, but others say it was the name of a gold-ship that he took in the early days. Anyway, Rey and I don't neighbor. He's becoming formidable, I'm told, in the politics of the Island. He's at the head of a very powerful colony nevertheless, and no matter what its inter-relations are, it hangs together against the law and the outside world. Rey wants more say back yonder at headquarters, and our Dictator, Jaffier, all things considered, is a very good man, but old and stubborn and impolitic. He won't be driven even by Celestino Rey, who in turn is not a man to be denied. He is probably richer than Equatoria, and then Coral City lives off this institution as Monaco lives off Monte Carlo. He doubtless commands the whole lower element of the town. The word is, Celestino Rey intends to run the Island first-hand—if he can't run it through the powers that are."

All of which Bedient found of interest, inasmuch as he was passing through the heart of these strange affairs. Having any part in them seemed unearthly remote. The carriage was taking the gradual rise behind a pair of fine ponies, and the view behind, over The Pleiad to the sapphire water, was noble. The horizon, beyond the harbor distances, was a blazing intensity of light that stung the eyes to quick contraction. The Captain sat back in the cushions, weary from talking, but his face was happy, and he took in the exterior, and something of the inner proportions, of the young man, with a sense of awe. He did not try to explain yet—even to himself.

The hacienda was slightly over twenty miles interior. Bedient was entranced by the sunset from the heights. Then the slow ride to the Carreras House through the darkened hills: the smell of warm earth from the thick growths by the trail-side; little stars slipping into place like the glisten of fireflies in a garden, or gems in a maiden's hair; a scandalously-naked new moon lying low, like an arc of white-hot wire in the purple twilight, and always behind them, a majestic splash of jewel-edged crimson which showed the West.

And presently, from a high curve in the road, they saw the lights of the hacienda bold upon its eminence—and a dark valley between. Into this night they descended, for the last course of the journey; and as the ponies clattered upward again, white-coated natives came forth to meet them. Bedient was further astonished at their volubility and easy laughter. They spoke a debased Spanish, which the Captain had fallen into,—as difficult of understanding for one whose medium was pure Castilian as for one who spoke English. There was that mystery upon the environs that always comes to one who reaches his destination in the darkness. And to Bedient the sensation was not wholly of joy. These were wild hills, not without grandeur, but there was something of chaos, too, to him who came from the roof of the world. He missed the peace of the greater mountains. His heart hungered to go out to the natives crowding around—white-toothed men and women of incessant laughter—but the tones of their voices checked the current. It was emptiness—but nothing he had to give seemed able to enter.

The Captain was ill with fatigue. His face—the weakness expressed in the smiling mouth—remained before Bedient's mind, as he followed a giggling native boy to the large upper room which was for him. Rows of broad windows faced the South and East, while a corridor ran to the North for the cool wind at night. Electric lights and glistening black floors—the first effect came from these. Then the details: rugs that matched, by art or accident, as perfectly as a valley of various grain-fields pleases the eye from a mountain-side; a great teak bed, caned with bamboo strips and canopied with silk net, yards of which one could crush in his hand, so nearly immaterial was this mosquito fabric; sumptuous steamer-chairs; a leather reading-couch that could be moved to the best breeze or light with a touch of the finger; a broad-side of books and a vast writing-table, openly dimensioned to defy litter—the whole effect was that of coolness and silence and room. Everything a man needed seemed to be there and breathing spaciously.... Turning through a draped door, the astonished wanderer found completeness again—everything that makes a bath fragrant and refreshing—even to Carreras scent and a set of perfect English razors.... It was all new to Bedient. For an hour he tried things—and still there were drawers and cases of undiscovered novelties and luxuries—details of wealth which make delightful and uncommon the mere processes of living. Very much restored in his fresh clothing, and eagerly, he went down to dinner.

The little man was waiting with expectant smile under a dome of sheltered lights in the dining-hall. Something of his dazed, ashen look brought back to Bedient the afternoon of the great wind—the Captain expecting to stick to his ship.... The table was set for two, and on one corner was the fresh handkerchief and the rose-dark meerschaum bowl. Bedient took his old place at the other's chair until the Captain was seated—and both were laughing strangely.... The ships from Holland brought all manner of European delicacies. Fresh meats and Northern vegetables arrived every eight days in the refrigerators of the alternating Dryden steamers, Hatteras and Henlopen, from New York. Most tropical fruits were native to Equatoria—those thick, abbreviated red bananas, and small oranges with thin skin of suede finish, so sharply sweet that one never forgets the first taste. These were served in their own foliage.

Much of the solid and comfortable furnishing of the hacienda had come from the old English house of the Carreras' in Surrey. The Captain's cook, Leadley, and his personal factotum, Falk, were English. A dozen natives kept the great house in order; and their white dress was as fresh and pleasing as the stewards of an Atlantic liner. As a matter of fact, Captain Carreras had softened in this kingly luxury, the infinite resourcefulness of which was startling to Bedient, who had known but simplicities all his years, and who even in the Orient had been his own servant.

The Captain lit his pipe but forgot to keep it going. His eyes turned to Bedient again and again, and each time with deeper regard. Often he cleared his voice—but failed to speak. The young man plunged into the heart of things—and finally with effort, the other interrupted.

"You are not what I expected—forgive me, Andrew——"

"You mean I've disappointed you? Thinking a long time about one—sometimes throws the mind off the main road of reality—"

"Dear God, not disappointed.... The Man has come to you in a different way than I expected, that's all. What has India been doing to you?"

"It made New York very strange to me," said Bedient.

"You are like an Oriental," Carreras added. "Oh, they are all mad up in The States.... It's very good to have you back. I wonder why it was—that I never doubted you'd come?" Here the Captain swallowed some wine without adequately preparing his throat, and fell to coughing. Then he rose with the remark that he had experienced altogether too much joy for one old man, in a single day—and started for bed in confusion. Bedient sat back laughing softly, but noting the feeble movement of the other's limbs, quickly gave his arm. Up they went together.... In the big room alone, Bedient put on night garments; and unsatisfied, crossed after a time to the Captain's quarters. He found the old man sitting in the dark by the window, the meerschaum glowing.... It may have been the darkness altogether; or that Bedient as a man gave the other an affection that the boy could not; in any event that night, they found each other across the externals.

This was the cue for further grand talks—pajamas and darkness. Often, if it were not too late, they would hear the natives singing in their cabins. The haunting elemental melody of the African curiously blended with the tuneful and cavalierish songs of Spain and fitted into the majestic nights. The darkies sang to the heart of flesh. In such moments, Equatoria was at her loveliest for Bedient—but the clear impersonal meditations did not come to him. In a hundred ways he had been given understanding during the first fortnight, of that something he had missed the first night on the Island. These people were infant souls. They were children, rudimentary in every thought. Theirs were sensations, not emotions; superstitions, not faiths. Their consciousness was never deeper than the skin. And fresh from his spacious years in India, where everything is old in spirit, where more often than not the beggar is a sage,—to encounter in this land of beauty, a people who were but babes in the thought of God—gave to Bedient the painful sense that his inner life was dissipating. There was no Gobind to restore him. It was as if the Spirit had favored the East; that Africa and the Western Isles had been cast apart as unfit for the experiment of the soul.

Moments of poignant sorrow were these when Bedient realized he was not of the West; that he irrevocably missed the great inner content of India, and would continue to hunger for it, until he returned, or coarsened his sensibilities to the Western vibration. This last was as far from him as the commoner treason to a friend. There were moments when he feared Captain Carreras almost understood. That dear old seaman through his solitudes, his natural cleanness and kindness, his real love, and more than all, through those vague visions which come late to men of simple hearts—had seemed, from several startling sayings, to touch the very ache in the young man's breast. These approaches were under the cover of darkness:

"There was something about you then, Andrew," (meaning the long-ago days at sea,) "I haven't been able to forget.... Damme—I haven't done well here—"

Bedient bent forward, perceiving that "here" meant his earthly life, as well as Equatoria.

"I should have stayed over yonder and sat down as you did—before you did. Here"—now the Captain meant Equatoria alone—"I have thought of my stomach and my ease. My stomach has gone back on me—and there is no ease. Over there, I might have—oh, I might have thought more—but I didn't know enough, early enough. And you did—at seventeen, you did! That's what made you. They're all mad up in The States, and they're just little children down here.... I might have profited in India—"

That was a frequent saying of the Captain's about the States. Twice a year at least, he was accustomed to make the voyage to New York.... The truth was, the old man felt a yearning for something the years and India had given Bedient. He felt much more than he said, and often regarded the young man, as one rapt in meditation.... His interest in Gobind and the Himalayas was insatiable; much more eagerly did he listen regarding the Punjab than about the ports he had known so well—and the changes that had passed under the eyes of the young man in Manila and Japan.... When Bedient was relating certain events of days and nights, that had become happy memories through the little things of the soul, Captain Carreras would start to convey the indefinite desires he felt; then suddenly, the deep intimacy of his revelations would appear to his timid nature, and even in the mothering dark, the panic would strike home—and he would swing off with pitiful humor about goats or some other Island affair....

Bedient had an odd way of associating men whom he liked with mothers of his own imagining. Happily discovering fine qualities in a man, he would conjure up a mother to fit them.... Often, he saw the little Englishwoman whose boy had taken early to the seas.... She was plump and placid in her cap; inclined to think a great deal for herself, but still she allowed herself to be kept in order mentally and spiritually by her husband, whose orthodoxy was a whip. Perhaps she died thinking her tremulous little departures were sure attractions of hell and heresy. Bedient liked to think of her as vastly bigger than her mate, bigger than she dreamed—but alone and afraid.



SEVENTH CHAPTER

ANDANTE CON MOTO—FIFTH

For the first time in his life, Bedient learned what America liked to read.... All the finer expressions of the human mind and hand gave him deep joy. His love and divination for the good and the true were the same that characterized the rarest minds of our ancestors, who had access only to a few noble books in their formative years. And Bedient's was the expanded and fortified intelligence of one who has grown up with the Bible.

Each ship brought the latest papers, periodicals and certain pickings from the publishers' lists. India had not prepared Bedient for this. With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were forward and solicitous. There was something of sacrilege about it all. The minds and souls of real women—such were not matters for American story; and yet the Americans wrote with dangerous facility. Bedient, who worshipped the abstraction, Womanhood, felt his intelligence seared, calcined.... Only here and there was a bit of real literature—usually by a woman. The men seemed hung up to dry at twenty-five. There was no manhood of mind.

Bedient's sense of loneliness became pervasive. Apparently he was outside the range of consciousness—for better or worse—with the country to which he had always hoped to give his best years. His ideals of the literary art were founded upon large flexible lines of beauty into which every dimension of life fell according to the reader's vision. He felt himself alone; that he was out of alignment with this young race from which he had sprung, to wander so far and so long.

And yet there was a Woman up there for him to know. This was imbedded in his consciousness. Soon he should go to her.... He should find her. And as the Hindu poets falteringly called upon the lotos and the nectars; upon the brilliance of midday athwart the plain, and the glory of moonlight upon mountain and glacier and the standing water of foliaged pools; upon the seas at large, and the stars and the bees and the gods—to express the triune loveliness of woman (which mere man may only venture to appraise, not to know)—so should he, Bedient, envision the reality when the winds of the world brought him home to her heart.

* * * * *

There was much to do at the hacienda. The Captain was past riding a great deal, and the large hill and river property—the coffee, cacao, cotton, cane and tobacco industries profited much better with an overseer. Still Bedient slowly realized that the hundreds of natives in touch with Captain Carreras' plantations worked about as well for him as they knew. Single-handed, Carreras had done great things, and was loved as a good doctor is loved. In spite of his huge accumulation of land, the Captain was the least greedy of men. He had been content to improve slowly. His incalculable riches, as he had early confided to Bedient, were in the river-beds. Only a few of these placer possibilities were operated. There was a big leak in the washings. Still, the natives were not greedy, either. They were home-keepers, and had no way to dispose of bullion.

Carreras had managed all his affairs so as to keep the government on his side, and his revenues were no little part of the support of the Capitol. This was his largest outlay, but in return he was protected.... Deep disorder brooded in the present political silence; all recalcitrants were gathering under Celestino Rey—but this situation was only beginning to be understood.

At certain times of year, Carreras had in his employ the heads of five hundred families, and had shown himself unique in paying money for labor. This was un-Spanish. It gave him the choice of the natives. He represented therefore a stable and prosperous element of the population. His revenues were becoming enormous. The Hollanders paid him a fortune annually for raw chocolate. This, with tree-planting and culture, would double, for the soil seemed to contain the miraculous properties of alkahest. The point of all this is, that Captain Carreras had come to be regarded as the right wing of the government. He arranged all his dealings on a friendly rather than a business basis; his good-will was his best protection.... Bedient had been in Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.

"I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since you came, sir.... I used to think nothing of the ride down town—and now it's a carriage.... Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony—and tell me what it says when I get back."

As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman. The Captain went again—followed the musicians to Boston and Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players—a little fat man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told Bedient in this way:

"The Hatteras was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,—but a souvenir of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their instruments.... It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man. He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill, don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder. The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist—to drive the stops. Between them, they got me where I was all run down from that orchestra crowd. They said a child could learn the stops.... You should have heard my friends on the Hatteras—when the orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon. They never forget that. Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span were goaded up the trail—and there she stands.

"Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred music-rolls.... It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to cable for power.... About those music-rolls—I had called for the best. One does that blind, you know. But the best in music matters, it appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains.... It's a pretty piece of furniture. The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had the electric-plant going.... I take it you have to be caught young to deal with those stops.... You go after it, Andrew. It scares me and the natives when it begins to pipe up. I had a time getting my household back that first time. Maybe, I didn't touch the right button—or I touched too many. You go after it, my boy—it's all there—appassionato—oboe—'consharto'—vox humana and the whole system—"

... It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in his life. Just a few old songs—always unfinished—but they had haunted the depths of him, and made him think powerfully. Certain strains had loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind. And so he came to ask; "Are not all the landmarks of evolution identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds? Is there not an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man's soul, to all that is true in music?"

Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a tigress. His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian's helpless quaking. Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he knew then there was an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key to ghostly doors. A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift passage of consciousness the breast of some savage mother. Night-birds everywhere meant to him restless mystery.... Is sound a key to psychology? Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man, sometime to be interpreted through music—as yet the infant among the arts?

The answer had come—why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for him. So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and there to concrete form—as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is caught by a thorn. So they build around it—as flesh around spirit. But it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient's mind—and knew no set forms. So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or pigments. Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks the feeling of those who follow to see or hear.

These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things of music.... Ben Bolt brought back the memory of some prolonged and desperate sorrow. The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody. Once he had heard Caller Herrin' grandly sung, and for the time, the circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of a bleak land and darker era. In this case the words brought him a clearer picture—gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common fisher folk.... Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson's, Sweet and Low, which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly tono-graphed.... Once across infantry campfires, Juanita came, with a bleeding passion for home—to him who had no home. There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to him—songs and poems which wrung him as if he were an exile; Tom Moore's Sunflower Song incited at first a poignant anguish, as of a sweetheart's dead face; and Lead Kindly Light brought almost the first glimmer of spiritual light across the desolate distances of the world—like a tender smile from a greater being than man. And there were baleful songs that ran red with blood, as the Carmagnole; and roused past the sense of physical pain, like the Marseillaise. What heroic sins have been committed in their spell! By no means was it all uplift which the songs brought. There was one night when he heard Mandalay sung by some British seaman across the dark of a Japanese harbor. They were going out, and he was coming into port....

These were his sole adventures in music, but they had bound his dreams together. He had felt, if the right person were near, he could have made music tell things, not to be uttered in mere words; and under the magic of certain songs, that which was creative within him, even dim and chaotic, stirred and warmed for utterance.... So fresh a surface did Bedient bring to the Carreras music-room.

The time had come when his nature hungered for great music. The orchestrelle added to the Island something he needed soulfully. Experimenting with the rolls, the stops and the power, he found there was nothing he could not do in time. Music answered—trombone, clarionet, horn, bassoon, hautboy, flute, 'cello answered. Volume and tempo were mere lever matters. On the rolls themselves were suggestions. Reaching this point, his exaltation knew no bounds. He looked upon the great array of rolls—symphonies, sonatas, concertos, fantasies, rhapsodies, overtures, prayers, requiems, meditations, minuets—and something of that rising power of gratitude overcame him, as only once before in his life—when he had realized that the Bible was all words, and they were for him. From the first studious marvellings, Bedient's mind lifted to adoring gratefulness in which he could have kissed the hands of the toilers who had made this instrument answer their dreams. Then, he fell deeply into misgiving. It seemed almost a sacrilege for him to take music so cheaply; that he had not earned such joy. But he could praise them in his heart, and he did with every sound.

The orchestrelle unfolded to a spirit like this. Doubtless his early renderings of random choice were weird, but more and more as he went on, the great living things righted themselves in his consciousness, for he had ear and soul and love for them. Some great fissure in his nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves—the Andante in F, the three movements of the Kreutzer Sonata, a prayer from Otello, the Twelfth Rhapsody, the Swan Song and the Evening Star, and finally Isolde's Triumph over Death—these were ascendings, indeed—to the point of wings.

The stops so formidable at first became as stars in the dark.... Little loves, little fears and sins and hopes were all he had known before; and now he entered into the torrential temperaments of the masters—magnificent and terrifying souls who dared to sin against God, or die defying man; whose passions stormed the world; whose dirges were wrung from heaven. Why, these men levelled emperors and aspired to angels, violated themselves, went mad with music, played with hell's own dissonances, and dared to transcribe their baptisms, illuminations, temptations, Gethsemanes, even their revilings and stigmata.

The dirges lifted him to immensity from which the abysses of the world spread themselves below. Two marches of Chopin, and the death-march of Siegfried, the haunting suggestion of a soul's preparation for departure in Schubert's Unfinished; the Death of Aase, the Pilgrim's Chorus, one of Mozart's requiems, and that Napoleonic funebre from the Eroica—these, with others, grouped themselves into an unearthly archipelago—towering cliffs of glorious gloom, white birds silently sweeping the gray solitudes above the breakers....

It was during the four days while Captain Carreras remained in Coral City with Jaffier, that Bedient entered into the mysterious enchantment of the Andante movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He had played it all, forgetting almost to breathe, and then returned to the second movement which opens with the 'celli:



Again and again it unfolded for him, but not its full message. There was a meaning in it for him! He heard it in the night; three voices in it—a man, a woman and a soul.... The lustrous third Presence was an angel—there for the sake of the woman. She was in the depths, but great enough to summon the angel to her tragedy. The man's figure was obscure, disintegrate.... Bedient realized in part at least that this was destined to prove his greatest musical experience....

Captain Carreras found much to do in the city, but he did not tell Bedient that the real reason for his remaining four days was that he couldn't sooner summon courage for the long ride home. He spoke but little regarding the reasons Jaffier had called him.

"He's afraid of Celestino Rey, and likely has good reason," said the Captain wearily. "The old pirate is half-dead below the knees, but his ugly ambition still burns bright. He thinks he ought to be drawing all the Island tributes, instead of the government. Jaffier expects assassination. On this point, it would be well to watch for the death of Rey. These two old hell-weathered Spaniards are worth watching—each tossing spies over the other's fences, and openly conducting affairs with melting courtesy toward each other—but I don't seem to have much appetite for the game. There was a time when I would have stopped work and helped Jaffier whip this fellow. But I hardly think he'll take our harvests and the river-beds just yet—"

They talked late. The Captain alternated from his bed to a chair, seemed unwilling for Bedient to leave and unable to sleep or find ease anywhere. He was over-tired, he explained, and hearing about Bedient's experience with the Andante con moto, insisted upon it being played that night....

"It's very soothing," Carreras said, when Andrew returned to the upper apartment. "I think I can sleep now. Off to bed with you, lad."

So lightly did Bedient sleep, however,—for the music haunted his brain,—that he was aroused by the bare feet of a servant in the hall-way, before the latter touched his door to call him. Captain Carreras had asked for him. The glow of dawn was in the old man's quarters, and he smiled in a queer, complacent way from his bed, as if a long-looked-for solution to some grave problem had come in the night, and he wanted his friend to guess. A hand lifted from the coverlet, and Bedient's sped to it; yet he saw that something more was wanted. The Captain's shoulder nudged a little, and the smile had become wistful. He did not fail to understand the need, but other realizations were pressing into his brain. So the Captain nudged his shoulder again bashfully. Bedient bent and took him in his arms.

It was death. Bedient had known it from the first instant of entering, but he was not prepared. He could not speak—only look into the tender, glowing smile. Captain Carreras finally turned his eyes into the morning:

"You know it was very foolish of me—very—to think I could make you happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly, but very low, as if he had saved strength for what he wished to say.... "You were a long time coming, but I knew you would come—knew it would be just like this—in your arms. Queer, isn't it? And all the waiting years, I kept piling up lands and money, saying: 'This shall be his when he comes.'... It was a little hard at first to know you didn't care—you couldn't care—that one, and ten, were all the same to you. And last night, I saw it all again. Had I brought you word that Celestino Rey had the government and that confiscation of these lands were inevitable, you would never have compared it in importance with finding that part of the symphony. It's all right. I wouldn't have it changed...."

Andrew listened with bowed head, patting the Captain's shoulder gently, as he sustained.

"But I have given you more than money, boy. And this you know—as a man, who knew money better, could never understand. I have given you an old man's love for a son—but more than that, too,—something of the old man's love for the mother of his son.... I thought only women had the delicacy and fineness—you have shown me, sir.... It is all done, and you have made me very glad for these years—since the great wind failed to get us—"

Then he mingled silences with sentences that finally became aimless—seas, ships, cooks, and the boy who had nipped him from the post he meant to hold—and a final genial blending of goats and symphonies, on the borders of the Crossing. Then he nestled, and Bedient felt the hand he had taken, try to sense his own through the gathering cold.... It was very easy and beautiful—and so brief that Bedient's arm was not even tired.

An hour afterward, Falk came in for orders—and withdrew.

Bedient had merely nodded to him from the depths of contemplation.... At last, he heard the weeping of the house-servants. And there was one low wailing tone that startled him with the memory of the Sikh woman who had wept for old Gobind.



EIGHTH CHAPTER

THE MAN FROM THE PLEIAD

Bedient drew from Falk a few days afterward that the Captain had planned almost exactly as it happened. Since the beginnings of unrest in Equatoria, he had transferred his banking to New York; so that in the event of defeat in war, only the lands and hacienda would revert, upon the fall of the present government. Falk could not remember (and his services dated back fifteen years, at which time he left Surrey with the Captain) when the master did not speak of Bedient's coming.

"But for your letters, sir, Leadley and I would have come to think of you as—as just one of the master's ways, Mister Andrew."

Falk was a middle-aged serving-class Englishman, highly trained and without humor. Leadley, the cook, and a power in his department, dated also from Surrey, which was his county. These men had learned to handle the natives to a degree, and the entire responsibility of the establishment had fallen upon them during the absences of the Captain. As chief of house-servants and as cook, these two at their best were faultless, but the life was very easy, and they were given altogether too many hands to help. Moreover, Falk and Leadley belonged to that queer human type which proceeds to burn itself out with alcohol if left alone. The latter years of such servants become a steady battle to keep sober enough for service. Each man naturally believed himself an admirable drinker.

Natives came from the entire Island to smoke and drink and weep for the Captain. Dictator Jaffier sent his "abject bereavement" by pony pack-train, which, having formed in a sort of hollow square, received the thanks of Bedient, and assurances that his policy would continue in the delightful groove worn by the late best of men. The reply of Jaffier was the offer of a public funeral in Coral City, but Bedient declined this, and the body of his friend was turned toward the East upon the shoulder of his highest hill....

Presently Bedient read the Captain's documents. Falk and Leadley were bountifully cared for; scores of natives were remembered; the policy toward Jaffier outlined according to the best experience; and the bulk, name, lands, bonds, capital and all—"to my beloved young friend, Andrew Bedient."... At the request and expense of the latter, the New York bankers sent down an agent to verify the transfer of this great fortune. A month passed—a foretaste of what was to come. Bedient, prepared for greater work than this, was lonely in the sunlight.

He knew that he must soon begin to live his own life. His every faculty was deeply urging. Equatoria had little to do with the realities for which he had gathered more than thirty years' equipment. He felt a serious responsibility toward his fortune, though absolutely without the thrill of personal possession. The just administration of these huge forces formed no little part of his work, and in his entire thinking on this subject, New York stood most directly in the need of service. It was there that the Captain's accumulated vitality must be used for good.

Early in the second month, Bedient came in at noon from a long ride across the lands, and reaching the great porch of the hacienda, he turned to observe a tropic shower across the valley. The torrent approached at express speed. It was a clean-cut pouring, several acres in extent. Bedient watched it fill the spaces between the little hills, sweep from crest to crest, and bring out a subdued glow in the wild verdure as it swept across the main valley. Sharp was the line of dry sunlit air and gray slanting shower. Presently he heard its pounding, and the dustless slopes rolled into the gray.... Now he sniffed the acute fragrance that rushed before it in the wind, and then it climbed the drive, deluged the hacienda, and was gone.... In the moist, sweet, yellow light that filled his eyes, Bedient, fallen into deeps of contemplation, saw the face of a woman.

He went inside and looked up the Dryden sailings. The Hatteras would clear, according to schedule, in ten days. That meant that the Henlopen was now in port. His eyes had looked first for the former, since it had brought him down, and was the Captain's favorite.... Yes, the Henlopen was due to sail to-morrow at daylight.... He told Falk he would go.... In that upper room across from his own, he bowed his head for a space, and the fragrance still there brought back the heaving cabin of the Truxton.... Then he rode down to Coral City in the last hours of daylight.

His devoirs were paid to Dictator Jaffier, who confided that he had purchased a gunboat and search-light on behalf of the government. Its delivery was but ten days off, and with it he expected to keep that old sea-fighter, Celestino Rey, better in order.... Bedient had the evening to himself. In one of the Calle Real cafes, he was attracted by the face and figure of a young white man, of magnificent proportions and remarkably clean-cut profile. The stranger sipped iced claret, watched the natives moving about, and seemed occasionally to forget himself in his thinking.

He looked more than ever a giant in the midst of the little tropical people, and seemed to feel his size in the general diminutive setting. Yet there was balance and fitness about his splendid physical organization, which suggested that he could be quick as a mink in action. He chaffed the native who waited upon him, and his face softened into charming boyishness as he laughed. His mouth was fresh as a child's, but on a scale of grandeur. Bedient found himself smiling with him. Then there was that irresistible folding about the eyes when he laughed, which is Irish as sin, and quite as attractive. Left to himself he fell to brooding, and his brow puzzled over some matter in the frank bored way of one pinned to a textbook. Bedient sat down at the other's table. Acquaintance was as agreeably received as offered.

The stranger's name was Jim Framtree. He had been on the Island for several weeks, and intended to stay for awhile. He liked Equatoria well enough—as well, in fact, as a man could like any place, when he was barred from the real trophy-room in the house of the world, New York.

"I'm sailing for New York in the morning," Bedient said.

Framtree shivered and fell silent.

"You've found work that you like here?" Bedient asked simply.

The other glanced at him humorously, and yet with a bit of intensity, too,—as if searching for the meaning under such an unadorned question.

"I seem to have caught on with Senor Rey at The Pleiad," he replied.

"Ah—"

"I'm afraid you're making a mistake, sir," Framtree added quickly. "I'm not barred from New York on any cashier matter. You know when something you want badly—and can't have—is in a town—that isn't the place for you.... Even if you like that town best on earth.... What I mean is, I'm not using The Pleiad as a hiding proposition."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Bedient said.

"I suppose it would be natural—down here——"

"But I saw you first."

"Um-m."

"I was only thinking," Bedient resumed, "that if the establishment of Senor Rey palled upon you at any time, I'd like to have you come up and see me in the hills.... I'd be glad to have you come, anyway. I may not be very long in New York—"

* * * * *

"That's mighty good of you," Framtree declared, and yet it was obvious that he could not regard the invitation as purely a friendly impulse, even if he wished to. "I remember now. I've heard of your big place up there."

"Perhaps, I'd better explain that I wasn't thinking of Island politics—when I asked you.... Queer how one has to explain things down here. I've noticed that it's hard for folks to go straight at a thing."

Framtree laughed again, and tried hard to understand what was in the other's mind. Bedient's simplicity was too deep for him. They talked for an hour, each singularly attracted, but evading any subject that would call in the matters of political unrest. Each felt that the other wanted to be square, but Bedient saw that it would be useless to impress upon Framtree how little hampered he was by Jaffier.... At daybreak the next morning, the fruity old Henlopen pointed out toward the reefs, and presently was nudging her way through the coral passage, as confidently as if the trick of getting to sea from Coral City was part of the weathered consciousness of her boilers and plates.



II

NEW YORK

Andante con moto



NINTH CHAPTER

THE LONG-AWAITED WOMAN

Bedient went directly to the house-number of David Cairns in West Sixty-seventh Street, without telephoning for an appointment. It happened that the time of his arrival was unfortunate. Something of this he caught, first from the look of the elevator attendant, who took him to the tenth floor of a modern studio-building; and further from the man-servant who answered his ring at the Cairns apartment.

"Mr. Cairns sees no one before two o'clock, sir," said the latter, whose cool eye took in the caller.

Bedient hesitated. It was now twelve-forty-five. He felt that Cairns would be hurt if he went away. "Tell him that Andrew Bedient is here, and that I shall be glad to wait or call again, just as he prefers."

And now the servant hesitated. "It is very seldom we disturb him, sir. Most of his friends understand that he is not available between nine and two."

Bedient was embarrassed. The morning in the city had preyed upon him. Realizing his discomfort, and the petty causes of it, he became unwilling to leave. "I am not of New York and could not know. I think you'd better tell Mr. Cairns and let him judge——"

The servant had reached the same conclusion. Bedient was shown into a small room, furnished with much that was peculiarly metropolitan to read.... He rather expected Cairns to rush from some interior, and waited ten minutes, glancing frequently at the door through which the servant had left.... His heart had bounded at the thought of seeing David, and he smiled at his own hurt.... A door opened behind him. The writer came forward quietly, with warm dignity caught him by both shoulders and smilingly searched his eyes. Bedient was all kindness again. "Doubtless his friends come in from Asia often," he thought.

"Andrew, it's ripping good to see you.... Why didn't you let me know you were coming?"

"I didn't want you to alter your ways at all."

"You see, I have to keep these morning hours——"

"Go back—I'll wait gladly, or call when you like."

"Don't go away, pray, unless there is something you must do for the next hour or so."

* * * * *

In waiting, Bedient did not allow himself to search for anything theatric or unfeeling at the centre of the episode. Cairns had moved in many of the world atmospheres, and had done some work which the world noted with approval. Moreover, he had called from Bedient bestowals of friendship which could not be forgotten.... "I have been alone and in the quiet so much that I can remember," Bedient mused, "while he has been rushing about from action to action. Then New York would rub out anybody's old impressions."

As the clock struck, Cairns appeared ready for the street. He was a trifle drawn about the mouth, and irritated. Having been unable to work in the past hour, the day was amiss, for he hated a broken session and an allotment of space unfilled. Still, Cairns did not permit the other to see his displeasure; and the distress which Bedient felt, he attributed to New York, and not the New Yorker....

The mind of David Cairns had acquired that cultivated sense of authority which comes from constantly being printed. He was a much-praised young man. His mental films were altogether too many, and they had been badly developed for the insatiable momentary markets to which timeliness is all. Very much, he needed quiet years to synthesize and appraise his materials.... Bedient, he regarded as a luxury, and just at this moment, he was not in the mood for one. Cairns drove himself and his work, forgetting that the fuller artist is driven.... Luzon and pack-train memories were dim in his mind. He did not forget that he had won his first name in that field, but he did forget for a time the wonderful night-talks. A multitude of impressions since, had disordered these delicate and formative hours. Only now, in his slow-rousing heart he felt a restlessness, a breath of certain lost delights.

It was a sappy May day. The spring had been late—held long in wet and frosty fingers—and here was the first flood of moist warmth to stir the Northern year into creation. Cairns was better after a brisk walk. Housed for long, unprofitable hours, everything had looked slaty at first.

"Where are you staying, Andrew?"

"Marigold."

"Why do you live 'way down there? That's a part of town for business hours only. The heart of things has been derricked up here."

"I'm very sure of a welcome there," Bedient explained. "My old friend Captain Carreras had Room 50, from time to time for so many years, that I fell into it with his other properties. Besides, all the pirates, island kings and prosperous world-tramps call at the Marigold. And then, they say—the best dinner——"

"That's a tradition of the Forty-niners——"

"I have no particular reason for staying down there, even if I keep the room. I'll do that for the Captain's sake.... I'm not averse to breezing around up-town."

"Ah——" came softly from Cairns.

"I'd like to know some folks," Bedient admitted.

Cairns was smiling at him. "You'll have to have a card at my clubs. There's Teuton's, Swan's and the Smilax down Gramercy way.... Perhaps we'd better stop in at the Swan's for a bite to eat. The idea is, you can try them all, Andrew, and put up at the one you fit into best——"

"Exactly," breathed Bedient.

"You won't like the Smilax overmuch," Cairns ventured, "but you may pass a forenoon there, while I'm at work. Stately old place, with many paintings and virgin silence. The women artists are going there more and more——"

"I like paintings," said Bedient.

They walked across Times Square and toward the Avenue, through Forty-second. Cairns waited for the quiet to ask:

"Andrew, you haven't found Her yet—The Woman?"

"No. Have you?"

"Did—I used to have one, too?"

"Yes."

"Andrew, do you think She's in New York?" Cairns asked.

"It's rather queer about that," Bedient answered. "I was watching a rain-storm from the porch of the hacienda seven or eight days ago, when it came to me that I'd better take the first ship up. I sailed the next morning."

This startled Cairns. He was unaccustomed to such sincerity. "You mean it occurred to you that She was here—the One you used to tell me about in Asia?"

"Yes."

Cairns now felt an untimely eagerness of welcome for the wanderer. A renewal of Bedient's former attractions culminated in his mind, and something more that was fine and fresh and permanent. He twinged for what had happened at the apartment.... Bedient was a man's man, strong as a platoon in a pinch—that had been proved. He was plain as a sailor in ordinary talk, but Cairns knew now that he had only begun to challenge Bedient's finer possessions of mind.... Here in New York, a man over thirty years old, who could speak of the Woman-who-must-be-somewhere. And Bedient spoke in the same ideal, unhurt way of twenty, when they had spread blankets together under strange stars... Cairns knew in a flash that something was gone from his own breast that he had carried then. It was an altogether uncommon moment to him. "So it has not all been growth," he thought. "All that has come since has not been fineness."... He felt a bit denied, as if New York had "gotten" to him, as if he had lost a young prince's vision, that the queen mother had given him on setting out.... He was just one of the million males, feathering nests of impermanence, and stifling the true hunger for the skies and the great cleansing migratory flights....

All this was a miracle to David Cairns. He was solid; almost English in his up-bringing to believe that man's work, and established affairs, thoughts and systems generally were right and unimpeachable. He heard himself scoffing at such a thing, had it happened to another.... He stared into Bedient's face, brown, bright and calm. He had seen only good humor and superb health before, but for an instant now, he perceived a spirit that rode with buoyancy, after a life of loneliness and terror that would have sunk most men's anchorage, fathoms deeper than the reach of the longest cable of faith.

"I think I'm getting to be—just a biped.... I'm glad you came up.... Here we are at Swan's," said Cairns.

* * * * *

Like most writers, David Cairns was intensely interesting to himself. His sudden reversal from bleak self-complacence to a clear-eyed view of his questionable approaches to real worth, was strong with bitterness, but deeply absorbing. He was remarkable in his capacity to follow this opening of his own insignificance. It had been slow coming, but ruthlessly now, he traced his way back from one breach to another, and finally to that night in the plaza at Alphonso, when he had been enabled to see service from a unique and winning angle, through the pack-train cook. That was the key to his catching on; that, and his boy ideals of war had lifted his copy from the commonplace. He remembered Bedient in China, in Japan, and in his own house—how grudgingly he had appeared in his working hours. He felt like an office-boy who has made some pert answer to an employer too big and kind to notice. Now and then up the years, certain warm thoughts had come to him from those island nights, but he had forgotten their importance in gaining his so-called standing.

Andrew Bedient was nothing like the man he had expected to find. He remembered now that he might have looked for these rare elements of character, since the boyhood talks had promised them, and power had emanated from them.... Still, Bedient had grown marvellously, in strange, deep ways. Cairns could not fathom them all, but he realized that nothing better could happen to him than to study this man. Indeed, his mind was fascinated in following the rich leads of his friend's resources. He consoled himself for his shortcomings with the thought that, at least, he was ready to see....

They talked as of old, far into the night. Cairns found himself endeavoring with a swift, nervous eagerness to show his best to Andrew Bedient, and to be judged by that best. He spoke of none of the achievements which the world granted to be his; instead, the little byway humanities were called forth, for the other to hear—buds of thought and action, which other pressures had kept from fertilizing into seed—the very things he would have delighted in relating to a dear, wise woman. Something about Bedient called them forth, and Cairns fell into new depths. "I thought it was pure sex-challenge which made a man bring these things to a woman." (This is the way he developed the idea afterward.) "But that can't be all, since I unfolded so to Bedient.... He has me going in all directions like a steam-shovel."

Cairns was arranging a little party for his friend. In the meantime, his productive quantity sank from torrent to trickle. His secretary, who knew the processes of the writer's mind as the keys of his machine, and had adjusted his own brain to them through many brisk sessions, fell now through empty space. He had no resources in this room, where he had been driven so long by the mental force of another. Having suffered himself to be played upon, like the instrument before him, he died many deaths from ennui.... So Cairns and the secretary stared helplessly at each other across the emptiness; and New York rushed on, with its mad business, singing spitefully in their ears: "You for the poor-farms. You'll lose your front, and your markets. Your income is suffering; the presses are waiting; editors dependent...."

Cairns left the house on the third morning after Bedient's coming, having dictated two or three letters.... Bedient was across the street from the Smilax Club in the little fenced-in park—Gramercy. Cairns told his work-difficulty.

"Don't you think it would be good for you, David," Bedient asked, "to let the subconscious catch up?"

Cairns was interested at once. "What do you mean?"

"I've been thinking more than a little about you and New York. One thing is sure: New York is pretty much wrong, or I'm insane——"

"You're happy about it," Cairns remarked. "Tell me the worst."

"People here use their reflectors and not their generators," Bedient said. "They shine with another's light, when they should be incandescent. The brain in your skull, in any man's skull, is but a reflector, an instrument of his deeper mind. There's your genius, infinitely wiser than your brain. It's your sun; your brain, the moon. All great work comes from the subconscious mind. You and New York use too much moonshine."

Both men were smiling, but to Cairns, nevertheless, it seemed that his own conscience had awakened after a long sleep. This wanderer from the seas had twigged the brain brass which he had long been passing for gold value. He saw many bits of his recent work, as products of intellectual foppery. He recalled a letter recently received from an editor; which read: "That last article of yours has caught on. Do six more like it." He hadn't felt the stab before. He had done the six—multiplied his original idea by mechanical means....

All things considered, it was rather an important affair—the party that night at the Smilax Club. Cairns began with the idea of asking ten people, but the more he studied Bedient's effect upon himself, the more particular he became about the "atmosphere." Just the men he wanted were out of reach, so he asked none at all, but five women. Four of these he would have grouped into a sentence as "the most interesting women in New York," and the fifth was a romantic novelty in a minor key, sort of "in the air" at the Club.

So there were seven to sit down to the round table in the historic Plate Room. The curving walls were fitted with a lining of walnut cabinets. Visible through their leaded-glass doors, were ancient services of gold and silver and pewter. The table streamed with light, but the faces and cabinets were in shadow.... Directly across from Bedient sat Beth Truba, the most brilliant woman his visioning eyes ever developed.

The sight of her was the perfect stimulus, an elixir too volatile to be drunk, rather to be breathed. Bedient felt the door of his inner chambers swing open before fragrant winds. The heart of him became greatly alive, and his brain in grand tune. It is true, she played upon his faculties, as the Hindus play upon the vina, that strange, sensitive, oriental harp with a dozen strings, of which the musician touches but one. The other strings through sympathetic vibration furnish an undertone almost like an aeolian harmony. You must listen in a still place to catch the mystic accompaniment. So it was in Bedient's mind. Beth Truba played upon the single string, and the others glorified her with their shadings. And the plaint from all humanity was in that undertone, as if to keep him sweet.

She was in white. "See the slim iceberg with the top afire!" Cairns had whispered, as she entered. Other lives must explain it, but the Titian hair went straight to his heart. And those wine-dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like a night-sky above a prairie-fire, said to him, "Better come over and see if I'm tamable."

"I can see, it's just the place I wanted to be to-night," she said, taking her chair. "We're going to have such a good time!"

And Kate Wilkes drawled this comment to Cairns: "In other words, Beth says, 'Bring on your lion, for I'm the original wild huntress.'"

Kate Wilkes was a tall tanned woman rather variously weathered, and more draped than dressed. She conducted departments of large feminine interest in several periodicals, and was noted among the "emancipated and impossible" for her papers on Whitman. The romantic novelty was Mrs. Wordling, the actress, and the other two women were Vina Nettleton, who made gods out of clay and worshipped Rodin, and Marguerite Grey, tall and lovely in a tragic, flower-like way, who painted, and played the 'cello.

"Meeting Bedient this time has been an experience to me," Cairns said, toward the end of dinner. "I called together the very finest people I knew, because of that. He had sailed for ten years before I knew him. That was nearly thirteen years ago. Not that there's anything in miles, nor sailing about from port to port.... He has ridden for the English since, through the great Himalayan forests—years so strange that he forgot their passing.... We are all good friends; in a sense, artists, together, so I can say things. One wants to be pretty sure when one lets go from the inside. I didn't realize before how rarely this happens with us.

"The point is, Bedient has kept something through the years, that I haven't. I'm getting away badly, but I trust what I mean will clear up.... Bedient and I rode together with an American pack-train, when there was fighting, there in Luzon. He was the cook of the outfit, and he took me in, a cub-correspondent. I look back now upon some of those talks (with the smell of coffee and forage and cigarettes in the night air) as belonging to the few perfect things. And last night and the night before, we talked again——"

Cairns' eye hurried past Mrs. Wordling, but he seemed to find what he wanted in the glances of the others, before he resumed:

"Without knowing it, Bedient has made me see that I haven't been keeping even decently white, here in New York. I found out, at the same time, that I couldn't meet him half-way, when he brought the talk close. Back yonder in Luzon, I used to. Here, after the years, I couldn't. Something inside is green and untrained. It shied before real man-talk.... Bedient came into a fortune recently, the result of saving a captain during a long-ago typhoon. His property is down in Equatoria, where he has been for some months. So he has had a windfall that would be unmanning to most, yet he comes up here, just as unspoiled as he used to be——"

"David," Bedient pleaded, "you're swinging around in a circle. Be easy with me."

"You've kept your boy's heart, that's what I'm trying to get at," Cairns added briefly.

Kate Wilkes dropped her hand upon Bedient's arm, and said, "Don't bother him. It looks to me as if truth were being born. You'd have to be a city man or woman to understand how rare and relishable such an event is."

"Thanks, Kate," said Cairns. "It's rather difficult to express, but I see I'm beginning to get it across."

"Go on, please."

Cairns mused absently before continuing:

"Probably it doesn't need to come home to anyone else, as it did to me.... I've been serving King Quantity here in New York so long that I'd come to think it the proper thing to do. Bedient has kept to the open—the Bright Open—and kept his ideals. I listened to him last night and the night before, ashamed of myself. His dreams came forth fresh and undefiled as a boy's—only they were man-strong and flexible—and his voice seemed to come from behind the intention of Fate.... I wouldn't talk this way, only I chose the people here. I think without saying more, you've got what I've been encountering since Bedient blew up Caribbean way."

Cairns leaned back in his chair with a glass of moselle in his hand and told about the big lands in Equatoria, about the two Spaniards, Jaffier and Rey, trying to assassinate each other under the cover of courtesy; about the orchestrelle, the mines and the goats. Cleverly, at length, he drew Bedient into telling the typhoon adventure.

It was hard, until Beth Truba leaned forward and ignited the story. After that, the furious experience lived in Bedient's mind, and most of it was related into her eyes. When he described the light before the break of the storm, how it was like the hall-way of his boyhood, where the yellow-green glass had frightened him, Beth became paler if possible, and more than ever intent. Back in her mind, a sentence of Cairns' was repeating, "His voice seemed to come from behind the intention of Fate."... Finally when Bedient told of reaching Equatoria, and of the morning when Captain Carreras nudged bashfully—wanting his arm a last time—Beth Truba exclaimed softly:

"Oh, no, that really can't all be true, it's too good!" and her listening eyes stirred with ecstasy....

She liked, too, his picture of the hacienda on the hill.... The party talked away up into the top of the night and over; and always when Bedient started across (in his heart) to tame the wine-dark eyes—lo, they were gone from him.



TENTH CHAPTER

THE JEWS AND THE ROMANS

Kate Wilkes lived at the Smilax Club, as did Vina Nettleton, and, for the present, Mrs. Wordling. The actress was recently in from the road. Her play had not run its course, merely abated for the hot months. She was an important satellite, if not a stellar attraction. About noon, on the day following the party for Bedient, Mrs. Wordling appeared in the breakfast room, and sat down at the table with Kate Wilkes, who was having her coffee.