The Restless Sex

"Besides – I do care for Oswald – very deeply," she said. "Don't say painful things to me… Don't be sulky, Jim, dear. This is disconcerting me dreadfully. We mustn't make anything tragic out of it – anything unhappy. I'm so contented to have you back that I can't think of anything else… Don't let's bother about love or anything else! What you and I feel for each other is more wonderful than love. Isn't it? Oh, Jim, I

do

 adore you. We'll be with each other now a lot, won't we? You'll take a studio in this district, and I'll fly in at all hours to see you, and you'll come in to see me and we'll do things together – everything – theatres, dances, pictures, everything! And you will like Oswald, won't you? He's really so nice, poor boy!"

"All right," he muttered.

They rose; he took both her hands into his and looked intently into her grey eyes:

"I won't spoil life for you," he said. "I'll be near you, now. The old intimacy must be strengthened. I've failed wretchedly in my responsibilities; I'll try to make up for my selfishness – "

"Oh, Jim! I don't think that way – "

"You are too generous. You are too loyal. You are quite the most charming woman I ever knew, Steve – the sweetest, the most adorable. I've been a fool – blind and stupid."

"You mustn't say such ridiculous things! But it is dear of you to find me attractive! It really thrills me, Jim. I'm about the happiest girl in New York, I think! Tell me, do you like Helen?"

"Yes, she's nice. Where are you dining, Steve? Could you – "

"Oh, dear! Helen and I are dining out! It's a party. We all go to the ball. But, Jim – do get a costume of some sort and come to the Caricaturists' Ball! Will you? Helen and I are going. It's the Ball of the Gods – the last costume ball of the season, and it is sure to be amusing. Will you come?"

He didn't seem to think he could, but she insisted so eagerly and promised to have an invitation at his hotel for him by nine o'clock, that he laughed and said he'd go.

"Everybody artistic will be there," she explained, delighted. "You'll meet a lot of men you know. And the pageant will be wonderful. I shall be in it. So will Helen. Then, after the pageant, we'll find each other – you and I! – " She sighed: "I am too happy, Jim. I don't want to arouse the anger of the gods."

She linked her arm in his and entered the studio.

"Helen!" she called. "Jim is coming to the dance! Isn't it delightful?"

"It is, indeed," said Helen, opening her door a little and looking through the crack. "You'd better tell him what you're wearing, because he will never know you."

"Oh, yes, indeed! Helen and I are going as a pair of Burmese idols – just gold all over – you know – ?"

She took the stiff attitude of the wonderful Burmese idol, and threw back her slender hands – "This sort of thing, Jim? Tiny gold bells on our ankles and that wonderful golden filigree head dress."

She was in wonderful spirits; she caught his arm and hand and persuaded him into a two-step, humming the air. "You dance nicely, Jim. You can have me whenever you like – "

Helen called through the door:

"You're quite mad, Steve! You've scarcely time to dress."

"Oh, I must run!" she cried, turned to Cleland, audaciously, offered her lips, almost defiantly.

"We're quite safe, Jim, if we can do

this

 so innocently." She laughed. "You adorable boy! Oh, Jim, you're mine now, and I'll never let you go away again!"

As he went out, he met Grismer, face to face. The blood leaped hotly in his cheeks; Grismer's golden eyes opened in astonishment:

"Cleland! By all the gods!" he said, offering his hand.

Cleland took it, looked into Grismer's handsome face:

"How are you, Grismer?" he said pleasantly. And passed on out of the front door.

CHAPTER XVIII

Cleland dined by himself in the lively, crowded café of the Hotel Rochambeau – a sombre, taciturn young man, still upset by his encounter with Grismer, still brooding impotent resentment against what Stephanie had done. Yet, in spite of this the thrill of seeing her again persisted, filling him with subdued excitement.

He realized that the pretty, engaging college girl he had left three years ago had developed into an amazingly lovely being with a delicately vigorous and decisive beauty of her own, quite unexpected by him. But there was absolutely no shyness, no awkwardness, no self-consciousness in her undisguised affection for him; the years had neither altered nor subdued her innocent acceptance of their relationship, nor made her less frank, less confident, or less certain of it and of the happy security it meant for both.

In spite of her twenty-one years, her education, her hospital experience, Stephanie, in this regard, was a little girl still. For her the glamour of the school-boy had never departed from Cleland with the advent of his manhood. He was still, to her, the wonderful and desirable playmate, the miraculous new brother, the exalted youth of her girlhood; the beloved and ideal of their long separation – all she had on earth that represented a substitute for kin and family ties and home. That her loyal heart was still the tender, impulsive, youthful heart of a girl was plain enough to him. The frankness of her ardour, her instant happy surrender, her clinging to him in a passion of gratitude and delight, all told him her story. But it made what she had done with Grismer the more maddening and inexplicable; and at every thought of it a gust of jealousy swept him.

He ate his dinner scarcely conscious of the jolly tumult around him, and presently went upstairs to his rooms to rummage in one of his trunks for a costume; – souvenir of some ancient Latin Quarter revelry – Closerie des Lilas or Quat'z Arts, perhaps.

Under his door had been thrust an envelope containing a card bearing his invitation, and Stephanie had written on it: "It will all be spoiled if you are not there. Don't forget that you'll have to dress as a god of sorts. All other costumes are barred."

What he had would do excellently. His costume of a blessed companion of Mahomet in white, green and silver, with its jeweled scimitar, its close-fitted body dress, gorget, and light silver head-piece, represented acceptably the ideal garb of the Lion of God militant.

Toward eleven o'clock, regarding himself rather gloomily in the mirror, the reflected image of an exceedingly good-looking Fourth Caliph, with the faint line of a mustache darkening his short upper lip and the green gems of a true believer glittering on casque and girdle and hilt, cheered the young man considerably.

"If I'm not a god," he thought, "I'm henchman to one." And he twisted the pale green turban around his helmet and sent for a taxicab.

The streets around the Garden were jammed. Mounted and foot-police laboured to keep back the curious crowds and to direct the crush of arriving vehicles laden with fantastic figures in silks and jewels. Arcades, portico, and the broad lobby leading to the amphitheatre were thronged with animated merrymakers in brilliant costumes; and Cleland received his cab-call number from the uniformed starter and joined the glittering stream which carried him resistlessly with it through the gates and presently landed him somewhere in a seat, set amid a solidly packed tier of gaily-costumed people.

An immense sound of chatter and laughter filled the vast place, scarcely subdued by the magic of a huge massed orchestra.

The Garden had been set to represent Mount Olympus; white pigeons were flying everywhere amid flowers and foliage; the backdrop was painted like a blue horizon full of rosy clouds, and the two entrances were divided by a marble-edged pool in which white swans sailed unconcerned and big scarlet gold-fish swam in the limpid water among floating blossoms.

But he had little time to gaze about through the lilac-haze of tobacco smoke hanging like an Ægean mist across the dancing floor, for already boy trumpeters, in white tunics and crowned with roses, were sounding the flourish and were dragging back the iris-hued hangings at either entrance.

The opening pageant had begun.

From the right entrance came the Greek gods and heroes – Zeus aloft in a chariot, shaking his brazen thunder bolts; Athene in helmet and tunic, clutching a stuffed owl; Astarte very obvious, long-legged and pretty; Mars with drawn sword and fiery copper armour; Hermes wearing wings on temples and ankles and skilfully juggling the caduceus, Aphrodite most casually garbed in gauze, perfectly fashioned by her Maker and rather too visible in lovely detail.

Eros, very feminine too, lacked sartorial protection except for a pair of wings and a merciful sash from which hung quiver and bow. In fact, it was becoming startlingly apparent that the artists responsible for the Ball of All the Gods scorned to conceal or mitigate the classical and accepted legends concerning them and their costumes – or lack of costumes.

Fauns, dryads, nymphs, satyrs, naiads, bacchantes poured out from the right entrance, eddying in snowy whirlpools around the chariots of the Grecian gods; and the influence of the Russian ballet was visible in every lithely leaping figure.

Contemporaneously, from the left entrance, emerged the old Norse gods: Odin, shaggy and fully armed; Loki, all a-glitter with dancing flames; Baldin the Beautiful, smirking; Fenris the Wolf; Frija, blond and fiercely beautiful – the entire Norse galaxy surrounded by skin-clad warriors and their blond, half-naked mates.

The two processions, moving in parallel lines along the north and south tiers of boxes, were overlapping and passing each other now, led in a winding march by trumpeters; and all the while, from either entrance new bevies of gods and immortals were emerging – the deities of Ancient Egypt moving stiffly in their splendid panoply; the gods of the ancient Western World led by the Holder of Heaven and Hiawatha, and followed by the Eight Thunders plumed in white escorting the Lake Serpent – a young girl, lithe and sinuous as a snake and glittering from head to foot, with the serpent spot on her forehead.

Ancient China, in bewildering silks, entered like a moving garden of flowers; then India came in gemmed magnificence led by the divine son of Suddhodana.

He bore the bow of black steel with gold tendrils – the Bow of Sinhahânu. He was dressed as the Prince Siddhartha, in the garb of a warrior of Oudh. Bow and sabre betrayed the period – the epoch of his trial against all comers to win the Sâkya girl Yasôdhara.

As he passed, Cleland, leaning forward, scanned the splendid and militant figure intently; and recognized Oswald Grismer under the glimmering dress of the young Buddha militant.

To left and right of the youthful god advanced two girls, all in relieved stiff gold from the soles of their up-turned sandals to the fantastic pagoda peak of their head-dresses.

They wore golden Burmese masks; their bodies to the girdles were covered with open-work golden filigree; from the fantastic pagoda-like shoulder-pieces gold gauze swept away like the folded golden wings of dragon-flies; golden bangles and bells tinkled on wrist and ankle.

With slim hands uplifted like the gilded idols they represented, the open eye painted in the middle of each palm became visible. Around them swirled a dazzling throng of Nautch girls.

Suddenly they flung up their arms: the stiff gold masks and body-encasements cracked like gilded mummy cases and fell down clashing around their naked feet, and from the cold, glittering chrysalids stepped out two warm, living, enchantingly youthful figures, lithe and supple, saluting the Prince Siddhartha with bare arms crossed above their breasts.

To one, representing his mother, Maya, he turned, laying the emblems of temporal power at her feet. And, in her, Cleland recognized Helen Davis.

But his eyes were for the other – the Sâkya girl Yasôdhara in gold sari and chuddah, her body clasped with a belt of emeralds and a girdle of the same gems tied below her breasts.

The young Lord Buddha laid the living Rose of the World in her hands. She bent her head and drew it through her breast-girdle. Then, silk-soft, exquisite, the Sâkya maid lifted her satin-lidded eyes, sweeping the massed audience above as though seeking some one. And Cleland saw that her eyes were lilac-grey; and that the girl was Stephanie.

Suddenly the massed orchestras burst into an anachronistic two-step. The illusion was shattered; the ball was on! Assistants ran up and gathered together the glittering débris and pushed chariot, papier maché elephant and camel and palanquin through the two entrances; god seized goddess, heroes nabbed nymphs; all Olympus and the outlying suburban heavens began to foot it madly to the magic summons of George Cohan.

Under the blaze of lights the throng on the dancing floor swirled into glittering whirlpools and ripples, brilliant as sunset on a restless sea. The gaily costumed audience, too, was rising everywhere and leaving seats and stalls and boxes to join the dancing multitudes below.

Before he descended, Cleland saw Grismer and Stephanie dancing together, the girl looking up over her shoulder as though still searching the tiers of seats above for somebody expected.

Before he reached the floor he began to meet old friends and acquaintances, more or less recognizable under strange head-dresses and in stranger raiment.

He ran into Badger Spink, as a fawn in the spotted skin of a pard, his thick hair on end and two little horns projecting.

"Hello," he said briefly; "you back? Glad to see you – excuse me, but I'm chasing a little devil of a dryad – "

He caught sight of her as he spoke; the girl shrieked and fled and after her galloped the fawn, intent on capture.

Clarence Verne, colourless of skin in his sombrely magnificent Egyptian dress, extended an Egyptian hand to him – the hand he remembered so well, with its deep, pictographic cleft between forefinger and thumb.

"When did

you

 come back, Cleland?" he inquired in that listless, drugged voice of his. "To-day? Hope we'll see something of you now… Do you know that Nautch girl – the one in orange and silver? She's Claudia Gwynn, the actress. She hasn't got much on, has she? Can the Ball des Quat'z beat this for an unconcerned revelation of form divine?"

"I don't think it can," said Cleland, looking at a bacchante whose raiment seemed to be voluminous enough. The only trouble was that it was also transparent.

"Nobody cares any more," remarked Verne in his drowsy voice. "The restless sex has had its way. It always has been mad to shed its clothes in public. First it danced barefooted, then it capered barelegged. Loie, Isadora and Ruth St. Denis between 'em started the fashion; Bakst went 'em one better; then society tore off its shoulder-straps and shortened its petticoats; and the Australian swimming Venus stripped for the screen. It's all right; I don't care. Only it's a bore to have one's imagination become atrophied from disuse… If I can find a girl thoroughly covered I'd be interested."

He sauntered away to search, and Cleland edged around the shore of the dancing floor, where the flotsam from the glittering maelstrom in the centre had been cast up.

Threading his way amid god and goddess, nymph and hero, he met and recognized Philip Grayson, one of his youthful masters at school – a tall, handsome figure in Greek armour.

"This is nice, Cleland," he said cordially. "Didn't know you were back. Quite a number of your old school fellows here!"

"Who?"

"Oswald Grismer – "

"I saw him."

"Did you run across Harry Belter?"

"No," exclaimed Cleland, "is he here?"

"Very much so. Harry is always in the thick of things artistic. How goes literature with you?"

"I came back to start things," said Cleland. "How does it pan out with you?"

"Well," said Grayson, "I write things that are taken by what people call the 'better class' magazines. It doesn't seem to advance me much."

"Cheer up. Try a human magazine and become a best seller," said Cleland, laughing.

And he continued his search for Stephanie.

There was a crush on the floor – too many dancing in the beginning – and all he could do was to prowl along the side lines. In a lower-tier box he noticed a fat youth, easily recognizable as Bacchus. His wreath of wax grapes he wore rakishly over one eye; he sat at a table with several thirsty dryads and bestowed impartial caresses and champagne. Occasionally he burst into throaty song in praise of the grape.

"Harry Belter!" cried Cleland.

"Hey! Who?" demanded Bacchus, leaning over the edge of the box, his glass suspended. "No! It isn't Jim Cleland! I won't believe it! It's only a yearned-for vision come to plague and torment me in my old age – !" He got up, leaned over and seized Cleland by his silken sabre-belt:

"Jim! It

is

 you! To my arms, old scout – !" embracing him vociferously. "Welcome, dear argonaut! Ladies! Prepare to blush and tremble with pleasurable emotion!" he cried, turning to his attendant dryads. "This is my alter ego, James Cleland – my beloved comrade in villainy – my incomparable breaker of feminine hearts! You all shall adore him. You shall dote upon him. Ready! Attention! Dote!"

"I'm doting like mad," said a bright-eyed dryad, looking down invitingly at the handsome young fellow. "Only if he's a Turk I simply won't stand for a harem!"

"In the Prophet's Paradise," said Cleland, laughing, "there's no marriage or giving in marriage. Will you take a chance, pretty dryad? All the girls are on an equal footing in the Paradise of Mahomet, and we Caliphs just saunter from houri to houri and tell each that she's the only one!"

"Saunter this way, please," cried another youthful dryad, adjusting the wreath of water-lilies so that she could more effectively use her big dark eyes on him.

Belter whispered:

"They're from the new show – 'Can You Beat It!' – just opened to record business. Better pick one while the picking's good. Come on up!"

But Cleland merely lingered to pay his compliments a few moments longer, then, declining to enter the box and join Belter in vocal praise of the grape, and eluding that gentleman's fond clutch, he dodged and slipped away to continue his quest of the silken, slender Sâkya girl somewhere engulfed amid all this glitter, surging, beating noisily around him.

Frequently, as he made his devious way forward, men and women of the more fashionable and philistine world recognized and greeted him; he was constantly stopping to speak to acquaintances of what used to be the saner sets, renew half-forgotten friendships, exchange lively compliments and gay civilities.

But he failed to detect any vast and radical difference between the world and the three-quarter world. The area in square inches of bare skin displayed by a young matron of his own sort matched the satin nakedness of some animated ornament from the Follies.

As he stood surveying the gorgeous throng he seemed to be subtlely aware of a tension, an occult strain keying to the breaking point each eager, laughing woman he looked at. The scented atmosphere was heavy with it; the rushing outpour of the violins was charged with it; it was something more than temporary excitement, more than the reckless gaiety of the moment; it was something that had become part of these women – a vast, deep-bitten restlessness possessing them soul and body.

The aspiring quest for the hitherto unattainable, the headlong hunt for happiness, these were human and definite and to be comprehended: but this immense, aimless, objectless restlessness, mental or spiritual, whichever it might be, seemed totally different.

It was like a blind, crab-like, purposeless, sidling migration in mass of the prehistoric female race – before it had created the male for its convenience – wandering out into and over-running the primeval wastes of the world, swarming, crawling at random – not conscious of what it desired, not knowing what it might be seeking, aware only of the imperative urge within it which set it in universal motion. Only to weary, after a few million years of subdivision and self-fertilization, and casually extemporize the sterner sex. And settle again into primeval lethargy and the somnolent inertia of automatic reproduction.

Watching the golden human butterflies whirling around him swept into eddies by thunderous gusts of music, he thought, involuntarily of those filmy winged creatures that dance madly in millions and millions over northern rivers and are swept in sparkling clouds amid the rainbow spray of cataracts out into the evening splendour of annihilation.

He met a pretty woman he knew – had thought that he had known once – and reddened slightly at the audacity of her Grecian raiment. Her husband – a Harvard man he had known – was with her, in eye-glasses and a Grecian helmet – Ajax the Greater, he explained.

They lingered to exchange a word; she beat time to the music with sandalled foot, a feverish brilliancy in eyes and cheeks.

"The whole world," said Cleland, "seems strung too tightly. I noticed it abroad, too. There's a tension that's bound to break; the skies of the whole earth are full of lightning. Something is going to blow up."

"Hope it won't be the stock market," said the man. "I don't get you, Cleland – you always were literary."

"He means war," said his wife, restlessly fanning her flushed cheeks. "Or suffrage. Which

do

 you mean, Mr. Cleland?"

"You've got all you want – practically – haven't you?" he asked.

"Practically. It's a matter of a year or so – the vote."

"What will you do next?" he inquired, smiling.

"Heaven knows, but we've simply got to keep doing something," she said. "What a ghastly bore to attain everything! If you men really love us, for goodness' sake keep on tyrannizing over us and giving us something to fight for!"

She laughed and blew him a kiss as her husband encircled her Grecian waist and steered her out into the fox-trotting throng, her flimsy draperies fluttering like the wind-blown tunic of a Tanagra dancing figure.

The stamp and jingling din of Nautch girls rang in his ears as he turned away and looked out over the shifting crowd.

Everywhere he recognized people he had met or heard about, men eminent or notorious in their vocations, actors, painters, writers, architects, musicians – men of science, lawyers, promoters, officers of industry commissioned and non-commissioned, the gayer element of the stage were radiantly in evidence, usually in the dancing embrace of Broad and Wall Streets; artistic masculine worth and youth pranced proudly with femininity of social attainment; the beautiful unplaced were there in daring deshabille, captivating solid domestic character which had come there wifeless and receptive.

Suddenly he saw Stephanie. She was leaning back against the side of the arena, besieged by a ring of men. Gales of laughter swept her brilliant entourage of gods and demons, fauns and heroes, all crowding about to pay their eager court. And Stephanie, laughing back at them from the centre of the three-fold circle, her arms crossed behind her, stood leaning against the side of the amphitheatre under a steady rain of rose petals dropped on her by some young fellows in the box above her.

Through this rosy rain, through the three-fold ring of glittering gods, she caught sight of Cleland – met his gaze with a soft, quick cry of delight.

Out through the circle of chagrined Olympians she sprang on sandalled feet, not noticing these protesting suitors; and with both lovely, rounded arms outstretched, her jewelled hands fell into Cleland's, clasping them tightly in an ecstacy of possession.

"I couldn't find you," she explained breathlessly. "I was so dreadfully afraid you hadn't come! Isn't it all magnificent! Isn't it wonderful! Did you see the pageant? Did you ever see anything as splendid? Slip your arm around me; we can walk better together in this crush – " passing her own bare arm confidently over his shoulder and falling into step with him.

"I saw you in the pageant," he said, encircling with his arm the silken body-vestment of her slender waist.

"Did you? Did you see Helen and me come out of our golden chrysalids? Was it pretty?"

"Charming and unexpected. You are quite the most beautiful thing on the floor to-night."

"Really, Jim, do you think so? You darling boy, to say it! I'm having a wonderful time. How handsome you are in your dress of a young oriental warrior!"

"I'm the fourth Caliph, Ali," he explained. "I had this costume made in Paris."

"It's bewitching, Jim. You

are

 good looking! – you adorable brother of mine. Do you like my paste emeralds? You don't think I'm too scantily clad, do you?"

"That seems to be the general fashion – "

"Oh, Jim! There are lots of others

much

 more undressed. Besides, one simply has to be historical and accurate or one is taken for an ignoramus. If I'm to to impersonate the Sâkya girl, Yassôdhara, before she became Lord Buddha's wife, I must wear what she probably wore. Don't you see?"

"Perfectly," he said, laughing. "But you of the artistic and unconventional guilds ought to leave the audacious costumes to your models. But, of course, that's too much to ask of you."

"Indeed it is!" she said gaily. "If some of us think we're rather nicely made why shouldn't we dare a little artistically – in the name of beauty and of art? … Oh, Jim! – it's the tango they're beginning.

Will

 you! – with

me

?"

They danced the exquisitely graceful measure together, her little golden-sandalled feet flashing noiselessly through the intricate steps, lingering, swaying, gliding faultlessly in unison with his as though part of his own body.

The fascinating rhythm of the Argentine music throbbed through the perfumed air; a bright, whispering wilderness of silk and jewels swayed rustling all around them; bare arms and shoulders, brilliant lips and eyes floated through their line of dreary vision; figures like phantoms passed in an endless rosy chain through the lustrous haze of motion.

They danced together whatever came; Stephanie, like a child fearful of being abandoned, kept one slim jewelled hand fast hold of his sleeve or girdle when they were not dancing. To one and all who came to argue or present fancied prior claims she turned a deaf ear and laughing lips, listening to no pleading, no claims.

She threatened Harry Belter with the flat of her palm, warning him indignantly when he attempted a two-step, by violence; she closed her ears to Badger Spink, who danced with rage in his goat-skins; she waved away Verne in all his Egyptian splendour; she let her grey eyes rest in an insolent stare at two of Belter's dryads who encircled Cleland's waist with avowed intent to make him their prisoner and dedicate him to vocal praise of the vine.

Then there was a faint clash and flash of iridescence, and the Prince Siddhartha confronted her, golden-eyed, golden-skinned, golden-haired, magnificent in his golden vestments.

"Oswald!" she cried. "Oh, I am glad. Jim! You and Oswald will be friends, won't you? You're such dears – you simply must like each other!"

They shook hands, looking with curious intentness at each other.

"I've always liked you, Clelan