And then with the cool dark and the mountain winds, after the long, pitiless day of fierce, devouring sunlight, the moon glided over the fainting world with peace and healing—like an angel over a battle-field. … The two are mystic in every Indian ideal of beauty, and alike cosmic—woman and the moon.
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