Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

by Will Levington Comfort

"No."

"You don't know who did those pictures?"

"No."

"Puvis de Chavannes."

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

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

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

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

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

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