The Restless Sex

At the end of the two years he had no desire to return to New York.

A series of voluminous letters passed between him and Stephanie and between him and Miss Quest.

He had plenty of excuses for remaining another year; his education was not completed; he needed a certain atmosphere and a certain environment which could be enjoyed only in Europe.

Of course, if he were needed in New York, etc., etc. No, he wasn't needed. Matters could be attended to. The house in 80th Street ought to be closed as it was a useless expense to keep the servants there.

Poor old Meacham had died; Janet, too, was dead; Lizzie had gone back to Ireland. The house in town should, therefore, be closed and wired; and the house in the country, "Runner's Rest," should remain closed and in charge of the farmer who had always looked out for it.

This could be attended to; no need of his coming back.

So he wrote his directions to Stephanie and settled down again with a sigh of relief to the golden days which promised.

His work, now deeply coloured by Gallic influence and environment, had developed to that stage of embryonic promise marred by mannerisms and affectations. His style, temporarily spoiled by a sort of Franco-American jargon, became involved in the swamps of psychological subtleties, emerging jerkily at times, or relapsing into Debussy-like redundancy.

Nobody wanted his short stories, his poems, his impressions. Publishers in London and in America returned "Day Dreams" and "Out of the Depths" with polite regrets. He sounded every depth of despondency and self-distrust; he soared on wings of hope again, striving to keep his gaze on the blinding source of light, only to become confused and dazzled in the upper oceans and waver and flutter and come tumbling down, frantically beating the too rarified atmosphere with unaccustomed wings.

Nobody could tell him. He had to find out the way. He had within him what was worth saying; had not yet learned how to say it. The massed testimony of the masters lay heavily undigested within him; he was too richly fed, stuffed; the intricacies and complexities of technique worried and disheartened him; he felt too keenly, too deeply to keep a clear mind and a cool one.

Every sense he possessed was necessary to him in his creative work; emotion, intense personal sympathy with his characters, his theme, clogged, checked and halted inspiration, smothering simplicity and clarity. This was a phase. He had the usual experience. He struggled through it and onward.

Stephanie wrote that she had graduated, but that as her aunt was ill she would remain for the present at the hospital.

He felt that he ought to go back. And did not. He was in a dreadfully involved dilemma with his new novel, "Renunciation" – all about a woman – one of the sort he never had met – and no wonder he was in a mess! Besides that, and in spite of the gaily coloured line of rags fluttering on the clothes-line of experience, he knew very little about women. One day, when he came to realize that he knew nothing at all about them, he might begin to write about them, convincingly and acceptably. But he was not yet as far along as that in his education.

He had a desperate affair with an engaging woman of the real world – a countess. She took excellent care of herself, had a delightful time with Cleland, and, in gratitude, opened his eyes to the literary morass in which he had been wading.

Clear-minded, witty, charming, very lovely to look upon, she read and criticised what he wrote, discussed, consulted, advised, and, with exquisite tact, divining the boy's real talent, led him deftly to solid land again. And left him there, enchanted, miserable, inspired, heart-broken, with a laughing admonition to be faithful to her memory while she enjoyed her husband's new post at the Embassy in Sofia.

He wrote, after her departure, a poem simple enough for a child to understand. And tucked it away with a ribbon and a dried flower in his portfolio. It was the first good thing he had ever written. But he remained unconscious of the fact for a long time.

Besides, other matters were bothering him, in particular a letter from Miss Quest:

I am not well. I shall not be better. Still, there is no particular hurry about your returning.

Stephanie remains with me very loyally. She has graduated; she is equipped with a profession. She has turned into a very lovely woman to look upon.

But that sex restlessness which now overwhelmingly obsesses the world, possesses her. Freedom from all restraint, liberty to work out and accomplish her own destiny, contempt of convention, utter disregard of established formality, and hostility to custom, enroll her among the vast army of revolutionists now demanding a revision of all laws and customs made by one sex alone to govern the conduct of both.

You and I once conversed on this subject, if you remember. I told you what I feared. And it has happened: Stephanie has developed along radical lines. With everything revolutionary in the world-wide feminist movement she is in sympathy. Standards that have been standards are no longer so to her. To the world's conservatism she is fiercely and youthfully hostile; equality, tolerance, liberty are the only guide-posts she pretends to recognize.

I shall not live to see the outcome of this world-wide propaganda and revolt. I don't want to. But, in my opinion, it takes a strong character, already accustomed to liberty, to keep its balance in this dazzling flood let in by opening prison doors…

I have left Stephanie what property I have outside of that invested and endowed to maintain my Home for Defective Children. Securities have shrunk; it is not much. It may add four thousand dollars to her present income.

Mr. Cleland, you and Stephanie have gradually and very naturally grown apart since your absence. I don't know what you have developed into. But you were a nice boy.

Stephanie is a beautiful, willful, intelligent, and I fear slightly erratic woman, alive with physical and mental vigour, restless and sensitive under pressure of control, yet to be controlled through her affections first, and only afterward through her reason.

These are unconventional times; a new freedom is dawning, and to me the dawn seems threatening. I am too old, too near my end not to feel that the old régime, with all its drawbacks, was safer for women, productive of better results, less hazardous, less threatening.

But I don't know: I am old-fashioned except in theory. I have professed the creed of the new feminism; I have in my time – and very properly – denounced the tyranny and selfishness and injustice of man-made laws which fetter and cripple my sex.

But – at heart – and with not very many days left to me – at heart I am returning rather wearily along the way I came toward what, now to me, seems safer. It may be only the notions of an old woman, very tired, very sad, conscious of failure, and ready to rest and leave the responsibility where it originated and where it belongs. I don't know. But I wish Stephanie were not alone in the world.

Miss Quest died before the letter reached him. Stephanie's next letter informed him of all the details. She continued:

No use your coming back until you are quite ready, Jim. There's nothing for you to do.

I've taken a studio and apartment with Helen Davis, the animal sculptor. I don't yet know just what I shall do. I'm likely to try several things before I know what I ought to stick to.

Don't feel any absurd sense of responsibility for me. That would be too silly. Feel free to remain abroad as long as it suits you. I also feel absolutely free to go and come as I please. That's the best basis for our friendship, Jim, and, in fact, the necessary and vital basis. My affection is unaltered, but, somehow, it has been such a long time that you seem almost unreal to me.

He did not sail at once. After all, in the face of such an unmistakable declaration of independence, it did not seem worth while for him to arouse himself from the golden lethargy of enchantment and break the spell of Europe which held him content, amid the mellow ripeness of her capitals and the tinted splendour of her traditions.

He wrote frequently for a few months. Then his letters lagged.

Once his pretty Countess had warned him that, for an American, Europe was merely the school-room but his own country was the proper and only place for creative labour.

He remembered this at intervals, a little uneasy, a trifle conscious-stricken because he shrank from making an end to preparation – because he still loitered, disinclined to break the golden web and return to the clear, shadowless skies and the pitiless sun of the real world where he belonged, and where alone, he knew, was the workshop for which he had been so leisurely preparing.

Then the shock came – the bolt out of the blue.

The cablegram said:

I married Oswald Grismer this morning.

STEPHANIE.

CHAPTER XVI

He sailed in April. When he sailed, he knew he would not come back for many years, if ever. His business here was done, the dream of Europe ended. The cycle of Cathay awaited him in all its acrid crudity.

Yes, the golden web was rent, torn across, destroyed. The shock to his American mind left nothing of the lotus eater in him. He was returning where he belonged.

Married! Steve married! To Oswald Grismer, who, save as a schoolboy and later in college, was a doubtful and unknown quantity to him.

He had never known Grismer well. Since their schoolboy differences, they had been good enough friends when thrown together, which had been infrequently. He had no particular liking for Grismer, no dislike. Grismer had been a clever, adroit, amusing man in college, generally popular, yet with no intimacies, no close friends.

As for Steve, he never dreamed that Stephanie would do such a thing. It was so damnably silly, so utterly unthinkable a thing to do.

And in his angry perplexity and growing resentment, Cleland's conscience hurt as steadily as a toothache. He ought to have been home long ago. He should have gone back at the end of his two years. His father had trusted him to look out for Steve, and, in spite of her rather bumptious letters proclaiming her independence, he should have gone back and kept an eye on her, whether or not she liked it.

In his astonishment and unhappiness, he did not know what to write her when the cablegram came hurtling into his calm and delightfully ordered life and blew up the whole fabric.

Sometimes, to himself, he called her a "little fool"; sometimes "poor little Steve." But always he unfeignedly cursed Grismer and bitterly blamed himself.

The affair made him sick at heart and miserable, and ruined any pleasure remaining in his life and work.

He did not cable her; he wrote many letters and tore all of them to bits. It was beyond him to accept the fait accompli, beyond him to write even politely, let alone with any pretense of cordiality.

His resentment grew steadily, increased by self-reproach. What kind of man had Oswald Grismer grown into? What kind of insolence was this – his marrying Steve —

"Damn his yellow soul, I'll wring his neck!" muttered Cleland, pacing the deck of the Cunarder in the chilly April sunshine.

But the immense astonishment of it still possessed him. He couldn't imagine Steve married. Why had she married? What earthly reason was there? It was incredible, absurd.

Still in his mind lingered the image of the girl Stephanie whom he remembered as he last had seen her.

Once or twice, too, thinking of that time, and conjuring up all he could picture of her, he remembered the delicate ardour of her parting embrace, the fragrant warmth of her mouth, and her arms around his neck.

It angered him oddly to remember it – to think of her as the wife of Oswald Grismer. The idea seemed unendurable; it threw him into a rage against this man who had so suddenly taken Stephanie Quest out of his life.

"Damn him! Damn him!" he muttered, staring out over the wind-whipped sea. "I'd like to twist his neck! There's something queer about this. I'll take her away from him if I can. I'll do everything I can to take her away from him. I want her back. I'll get her back if it's possible. How can she care for Grismer?"

He had nobody, now, to return to; no home, for the house was closed; no welcome to expect.

He had not written her that he was coming; he had no desire to see her at the steamer with Grismer. With a youthful heart full of indefinable bitterness and self-contempt that his own indifference and selfishness had brought Steve and himself to such a pass, he paced the decks day after day, making no acquaintances, keeping to himself.

And one night the great light on Montauk Point stared at him across leagues of unseen water. He was in touch again with his own half of the earth, nearing the edges of the great, raw, sprawling Continent where no delicate haze of tradition softened sordid facts; where there reigned no calm and ordered philosophy of life; where everything was in extremes; where everything was etched sharply against aggressive backgrounds; where there were no misty middle distances, no tranquil spaces; only the roaring silences of deserts to mitigate the yelling dissonance of life.

He saw the sun on the gilded tips of snowy towers piled up like Alpine cliffs; the vast webs of bridges stretching athwart a leaden flood; forests of masts and huge painted funnels; acres of piers and docks; myriads of craft crossing and recrossing the silvery flood flowing between great cities.

On the red castle to the southwest a flag flew, sun-dyed, vivid, lovely as a flower.

His eyes filled; he choked.

"Thank God," he thought, "I'm where I belong at last!"

And so Cleland came home.

CHAPTER XVII

It was late afternoon before Cleland got his luggage unpacked and himself settled in the Hotel Rochambeau, where he had been driven from the steamer and had taken rooms.

The French cuisine, the French proprietor and personnel, the French café in front, all helped to make his home-coming a little less lonely and strange. Sunlight fell on the quaint yellow brick façade and old-fashioned wrought iron railings, and made his musty rooms and tarnished furniture and hangings almost cheerful.

He had not telephoned to Stephanie. He had nothing to say to her over the wire. From the moment he crossed the gang-plank the growing resentment had turned to a curious, impotent sort of anger which excited him and stifled any other emotion.

She had not known that he was coming back. He had made no response to her cablegram. She could not dream that he had landed; that he was within a stone's throw of her lodgings.

The whole thing, too, seemed unreal to him – to find himself here in New York again amid its clamour, its dinginess, its sham architecture and crass ugliness! – back again in New York – and everything in his life so utterly changed! – no home – the 80th Street house still closed and wired and the old servants gone or dead; and the city empty of interest and lonely as a wilderness to him since his father's death – and now Steve gone! nothing, now, to hold him here – for the ties of friends and clubs had loosened during his years abroad, and his mind and spirit had become formed in other moulds.

Yet here he knew he must do his work if ever he was to do any. Here was the place for the native-born – here his workshop where he must use and fashion all that he had witnessed and learned of life during the golden hours through which he sauntered under the lovely skies of an older civilization.

Here was the place and now was the time for self-expression, for creative work, for the artistic interpretation of the life and manners of his own people.

If he was to do anything, be anybody, attain distinction, count among writers of his era, he knew that his effort lay here – here where he was born and lived his youth to manhood – here where the tension of feverish living never relaxed, where a young, high-mettled, high-strung nation was clamouring and fretting and quarrelling and forging ahead, now floundering aside after some will-o'-the-wisp, now scaling stupendous moral heights, noisy, half-educated, half-civilized, suspicious, flippant, bragging, sentimental, yet iron-hearted, generous and brave.

Here, on the nation's eastern edge, where the shattering dissonance of the iron city never ceased by day; where its vast, metallic vibration left the night eternally unquiet and the very sky quivering with the blows of sound under the stars' incessant sparkle – here, after all, was where he belonged. Here he must have his say. Here lay his destiny. And, for the sake of all this which was his, and for no other reason, was attainment and distinction worth his effort.

All this good and evil, all this abominable turmoil and futile discord, all this relentless, untiring struggle deep in the dusty, twilight cañons and steel towers with their thin skins of stone – all the passions of these people, and their motives and their headlong strivings and their creeds and sentiments, false or true or misguided – these things were his to interpret, to understand, to employ.

For these people, and for their cities, for their ambitions, desires, aspirations – for the vast nation of which they formed their local fragment – only a native-born could be their interpreter, their eulogist, their defender, their apologist, and their prophet. And for their credit alone was there any reason for his life's endeavour.

No cultured, suave product of generations of Europe's cultivation could handle these people and these themes convincingly and with the subtle comprehension of authority. Rod and laurel, scalpel and palm should be touched only by the hand of the native-born.

His pretty Countess had said to him once:

"Only what you have seen, what you have lived and seen others live; only what you detect from the clear-minded, cool, emotionless analysis of your own people, is worth the telling. Only this carries conviction. And, when told with all the cunning simplicity and skill of an artist, it carries with it that authority which leaves an impression indelible! Go back to your own people – if you really have anything to write worth reading."

Thinking of these things, he locked his door on rooms now more or less in order, and went out into the street.

It was too warm for an overcoat. A primrose sunset light filled the street; the almost forgotten specific odour of New York invaded his memory again – an odour entirely different from that of any other city. For every city in the world has its own odour – not always a perfume.

Now, again, his heart was beating hard and fast at thought of seeing Stephanie, and the same indefinable anger possessed him – not directed entirely against anyone, but inclusive of himself, and her, and Grismer, and his own helplessness and isolation.

The street she lived in was quiet. There seemed to be a number of studios along the block. In a few minutes he saw the number he was looking for.

Four brick dwelling houses had been made over into one with studios on every floor – a rather pretty Colonial effect with green shutters, white doorway, and iron fence painted white.

In the quaint vestibule with its classic fanlight and delicate side-lights, he found her name on a letter box and pushed the electric button. The street door swung open noiselessly.

On the ground floor, facing him on the right, he saw a door on which was a copper plate bearing the names, "Miss Davis; Miss Quest." The door opened as he touched the knocker; a young girl in stained sculptor's smock stood there regarding him inquiringly, a cigarette between her pretty, clay-stained fingers.

"Miss – " he checked himself, reddening – "Mrs. Grismer, I mean?" he asked.

The girl laughed. She was brown-eyed, pink-cheeked, compactly and beautifully moulded, and her poise and movement betrayed the elasticity of superb health.

"She's out just now. Will you come in and wait?"

He went in, aware of clay studies on revolving stands, academic studies in unframed canvases, charcoal drawings from the nude, thumb-tacked to the wall – the usual mess of dusty draperies, decrepit and nondescript furniture, soiled rugs and cherished objects of art. A cloying smell of plasticine pervaded the place. A large yellow cat, dozing on a sofa, opened one golden eye a little way, then closed it indifferently.

The girl who had admitted him indicated a chair and stepped before a revolving table on which was the roughly-modelled sketch of a horse and rider.

She picked up a lump of waxy material, and, kneading it in one hand, glanced absently at the sketch, then looked over her shoulder at Cleland with a friendly, enquiring air:

"Miss Quest went out to see about her costume. I suppose she'll be back shortly."

"What costume?" he asked.

"Oh, didn't you know? It's for the Caricaturists' Ball in aid of the Artists' Fund. It's the Ball of the Gods – the great event of the season and the last. Evidently you don't live in New York."

"I haven't, recently."

"I see. Will you have a cigarette?" She pointed at a box on a tea tray; he thanked her and lighted one. As he continued to remain standing, she asked him again to be seated, and he complied.

She continued to pinch off little lumps of waxy, pliable composition and stick them on the horse. Still fussing with the sketch, he saw a smile curve her cheek in profile; and presently she said without turning:

"Why did you speak of Stephanie Quest as Mrs. Grismer? We don't, you know."

"Why not? Isn't she?"

The girl looked at him over her shoulder; she was startlingly pretty, fresh and smooth-skinned as a child.

"Who are you?" she asked, with that same little hint of friendly curiosity in her brown eyes; – "I'm Helen Davis, Stephanie's chum. You seem to know a good deal about her."

"I'm James Cleland," he said quietly, " – her brother."

At that the girl's brown eyes flew wide open:

"Good Heavens!" she said; "did Steve expect you? She never said a word to me! I thought you were a fixture in Europe!"

He sat biting the end of his cigarette, not looking at her:

"She didn't expect me," he said, flinging the half-burned cigarette into the silver slop-dish of the tea service. "I didn't notify her that I was coming."

Helen Davis dropped one elbow on the modelling table, rested her rounded chin in her palm, and bent her eyes on Cleland. Smoke from the cigarette between her fingers mounted in a straight, thin band to the ceiling.

"So you are Steve's Jim," she mused aloud. "I recognize you now, from your photographs, only you're older and thinner – and you wear a moustache… You've been away a long while, haven't you?"

"Too long," he said, casting a sombre look at her.

"Oh, do you feel that way? How odd it will seem to you to see Steve again. She's such a darling! Quite wonderful, Mr. Cleland. The artists' colony in New York raves over her."

"Does it?" he said drily.

"Everybody does. She's so amusing, so clever, so full of talent and animation – like a beautiful and mischievous thoroughbred on tip-toes with vitality and the sheer joy of living. She never is in low spirits or depressed. That's what fascinates everybody – her gaiety and energy and high spirits. I knew her in college and she wasn't quite that way then. Perhaps because she hated college. But she could be a perfect little devil if she wanted to. She can be that still."

Cleland nodded almost absently; his preoccupied gaze travelled over the disordered studio and concentrated scowlingly on the yellow cat. He kept twisting the head of his walking stick between his hands and staring at the animal in silence while Helen Davis watched him. Presently, and without any excuse, she walked slowly away and vanished into some inner room. When she returned, she had discarded her working smock, and her smooth hands were slightly rosy from a recent toilet.

"I'm going to give you some tea," she said, striking a match and lighting the lamp under the kettle at his elbow.

"Thanks, no," he said with an effort.

"Yes, you shall have some," she insisted, smiling in her gay little friendly way. "Come, Mr. Cleland, you are man of the world enough to waive formality. I'm going to sit here and make tea and talk to you. Look at me! Wouldn't you like to be friends with me? Most men would."