The Restless Sex

"What has this to do with you and me, Steve?"

"A great deal, unhappily. The seeds of tragedy lay in the boy's soul of Oswald Grismer – a tender sensitiveness almost girlish, which he concealed by assertiveness and an apparent callous disregard of opinion; a pride so deep that in the shock of injury it became morbid… But, Jim, deep in that unhappy boy's soul lay also nobler qualities – blind loyalty, the generosity that costs something – the tenderness that renounces… Oh, I know – I know. I was only a girl and I didn't understand. I was fascinated by the golden, graceful youth of him – thrilled by the deeper glimpse of that mystery which attracts all women – the veiled unhappiness of a man's secret soul… That drew me; the man, revealed, held me… I have told you that I never dreamed there was any question about you. I was obsessed, wrapped up in this man so admired, so talented, so utterly misunderstood by all the world excepting me. It almost intoxicated me to know that I alone knew him – that I alone was qualified to understand, sympathize, advise, encourage, rebuke this strange, inexplicable golden figure about whom and whose rising talent the world of art was gossiping and guessing all around me."

After a long silence he said:

"Is that all you have to tell me?"

"Nearly all… His father died… My aunt died. These facts seem unrelated. But they were not… And then – then – Oswald lost his money… Everything… And I – married him… There was more than I have told you… I think I may tell this – I had better tell you, perhaps… Did you ever know that my aunt employed lawyers to investigate the matter concerning the money belonging to Chiltern Grismer's sister, who was my mother's mother?"

"No."

"She did. I have seen Mr. Grismer at the hospital once or twice. He came to see my aunt in regard to the investigation… The last time he came, my aunt was ill, threatened with pneumonia. I saw him passing through the grounds. He looked frightfully haggard and ill. He came out of the infirmary where my aunt was, in about an hour, and walked slowly down the gravel path as though he were in a daze… He died shortly afterward… And then my aunt died… And Oswald lost his money… And I – married him."

"Is that all you can tell me?"

After a silence she looked up, her lip quivering:

"All except this." And she put her arms around his neck and dropped her head on his breast.

CHAPTER XXIX

In reply to a letter of hers, Cleland wrote to Stephanie the middle of June from Runner's Rest in the Berkshires:

STEVE, DEAR:

The place is charming and everything is ready for you and Helen whenever you care to come. I had the caretaker's wife and daughters here for several days' scrubbing and cleaning woodwork, windows and floors. They've put a vacuum cleaner on everything else and the house shines!

As for the new servants, they seem the usual sort, unappreciative, sure to quarrel among themselves, fairly efficient, incapable of gratitude, and likely to leave you in the lurch if the whim seizes them. They've all come to me with complaints of various sorts. The average servant detests clean, fresh quarters in the country and bitterly misses the smelly and oily animation of the metropolitan slums.

But this unpretentious old place is very beautiful, Steve. You haven't been here since you were a girl, and it will be a surprise to you to find how really lovely are this plain old house and simple grounds.

Oswald has made several sketches of the grounds, and is making others for the pool and fountain. He is anything but melancholy; he strolls about quite happily with the eternal cigarette in his mouth and an enormous rose-scented white peony in his button-hole; and in the evening he and I light a fire in the library – for the evenings are a trifle chilly still – and we read or chat or discuss men and affairs most companionably. The occult charm in this man, of which you are so conscious, I myself can perceive. There seems to be, deep within him, an inexplicable quality which appeals – something latent, indefinable – something that you suspect to be wistful, yet which is too sensitive, too self-distrustful to respond to the very sympathy it seems to draw.

Steve, I have asked him to spend July with us. He seemed quite surprised and a little disconcerted by the invitation – just as he seemed to be when I asked him to do the pool and fountain.

He said he would like to come if he could arrange it – whatever that may mean. So it was left that way.

Do you approve?

It will be wonderful to see you here, moving in the garden, standing out yonder on the lawn! – Steve, herself, in her own actual and matchless person! – Steve in the flesh, here under the green old trees of Runner's Rest… Sometimes when I am thinking of you – and I think of practically nothing else! – I seem to see you as you were when last here – a girl in ribbons and white, dancing over the lawn with her chestnut hair flying; or down by the river at the foot of the lawn, wading bare-legged, fussing and poking about among the stones; or lying full-length on the grass under the trees, reading "Quentin Durward" – do you remember? And I used to take you trout-fishing to that mysterious Dunbar Brook up in the forest, where the rush of ice-cold waters and the spray clouding the huge round bowlders always awed you and made you the slightest bit uneasy.

And do you remember the brown pools behind those bowlders, where you cautiously dropped your line; and the sudden scurry of a black shadow in the pool – the swift tug, the jerk and spatter as you flung a speckled trout skyward in mingled joy and consternation?

Runner's Rest has not changed. House and barns need paint; the garden requires your soft white hands to caress it into charming discipline; the house needs you; the lawns are empty without you; the noise of the river rippling on the shoals sounds lonely. The whole place needs you, Steve, to make it logical. And so do I. Because all this has no meaning unless the soul of it shows through.

When I am perplexed, restless, impatient, unhappy, I try to remember that you have given me a bit of your heart; that you realize you have mine entire – every atom of my love, my devotion… There must be some way for us… I don't know what way, because you have thought it necessary to leave me blind. But I shall never give you up – unless you find that you care more for another man.

And now to answer what you have said concerning you and me. I suppose I ought to touch what is, theoretically, another man's. Yet, you do not belong to him. And you have begun to fall a little in love with me, haven't you? And in this incomprehensible pact it was agreed that you retain your liberty until you came to final decision within two years.

I don't understand it; I can't feel that, under the strange circumstances, I am unfair to you or to this strange and unexplained enigma named Oswald Grismer.

As for my attitude toward him, I hope I am free of the lesser jealousy and resentments. I will not allow myself to brood or cherish unworthy malice. I am trying to accept him, with all his evident and unusual qualities, as a man I've got to fight and a man I can't help liking when I let myself judge him honestly.

As for the flimsy, eccentric, meaningless, yet legal tie which links you to him, I care nothing about it. It's got to be broken ultimately – if one can break a shadow without substance.

How to do it without your aid, without knowledge of the facts, without causing you distress for some reason not explained, I don't know. But sooner or later I shall have to know. Because all this, if I brood on it, seems a nightmare – an unreal dream where I struggle, fettered, blindfolded, against the unseen and unknown, striving to win my way through to you.

That is about all I have to say, Steve.

Oswald has just come in with his drawings, to find me writing to you. He seems very cheerful. His design is delightful and quite in keeping with the simplicity of the place – just a big, circular pool made out of native stone, and in the centre a jet around which three stone trout are intertwined under a tumbling spray.

It is charming and will not clash at all with the long, low house with its shutters and dormers and loop-holes, and the little stone forts flanking it.

Telegraph me what day and what train. And tell Helen you and she may bring your maid-of-all-work.

JAMES CLELAND, in love with you.

There was no need of a fire in the library that evening at Runner's Rest. The night was mild; a mist bordered the rushing river and stars glimmered high above it.

Every great tree loomed huge and dark and still, the foliage piled up fantastically against the sky-line. There was an odour of iris in the night; and silence, save for the dull stamping of horses in the stable.

Cleland, deep in an arm-chair on the porch, became aware of Grismer's tall shape materializing from the fog about him.

"It's a wonderful place, Cleland," he said with a graceful, inclusive gesture. "All this sweet, vague mystery – this delicate grey dark appeals to me – satisfies, rests me… As though this were the abode of the Blessed Shades, and I were of them… And the rest were ended."

He seated himself near the other and gazed toward the mist out of which the river's muffled roar came to them in ceaseless, ghostly melody.

"Charon waits at every river, they say," he remarked, lighting a cigarette. "I fancy he must employ a canoe down there."

"The Iroquois once did. The war trail crossed there. When they burned Old Deerfield they came this way."

"The name of your quaint and squatty old house is unusual," said Grismer.

"Runner's Rest? Yes, in the Indian wars before the Revolution, the Forest Runners could find food and shelter here. The stone forts defended it and it was never burned."

"You inherited it?"

"Yes. It belonged to a Captain Cleland in those remote days."

There was a long silence. The delicately fresh odour of grey iris became more apparent – a perfume that, somehow, Cleland associated with Stephanie.

Grismer said in a pleasant, listless voice:

"You are a happy man, Cleland."

"Y-yes."

"Here, under the foliage of your forefathers," mused Grismer aloud, "you should rest contented that the honour of an honourable line lies secure in your keeping."

Cleland laughed:

"I don't know how honourable they were, but I've never heard of any actual criminals among them."

"That's a great deal." He dropped one lean, well-shaped hand on the arm of his chair. The cigarette burned between his pendant fingers, spicing the air with its aromatic scent.

"It's a great deal to have a clean family record," he said again. "It is the greatest thing in the world – the most desirable… The other makes existence superfluous."

"You mean dishonour?"

"Yes. The stain spreads. You can't stop it. It taints the generations that follow. They can't escape."

"That's nonsense," said Cleland. "Because a man had a crook for a forebear he isn't a crook himself."

"No. But the stain is in his heart and brain."

"That's morbid!"

"Maybe… But, Cleland, there are people whose most intense desire is to be respectable. It is a ruling passion, inherent, unreasoning, vital to their happiness and peace of mind. Did you know that?"

"I suppose I can imagine such a person."

"Yes. I suppose such a person is not normal. In them, hurt pride is more serious than a wound of the flesh. And pride, mortally wounded, means to them mental and finally physical death."

"Such a person is abnormal and predestined to unhappiness," said Cleland impatiently.

"Predestined," repeated Grismer in his pleasant, even voice. "Yes, there's something wrong with them. But they are born so. Nobody knows what a mental hell they endure. Things that others would scarcely notice they shrink from. Their souls are raw, quivering things within them that agonize over a careless slight, that wither under disapproval, that become paralyzed under an affront.

"Their fiercest, deepest, most vital desire is to be welcomed, approved, respected. Without kindness they become deformed; and crippled pride does strange, perverse things to their brain and tongue.

"There are such people, Cleland… Predestined … to suffering and to annihilation… Weaklings … all heart and unprotected nerves … passing their brief lives in desperate and grotesque attempts to conceal what they are… Superfluous people, undesirable … foredoomed."

He dropped his cigarette upon the drenched grass, whore it glimmered an instant and went out.

"Cleland," he said in a singularly gentle voice, "I once told you that I wished you well. You did not understand. Let me put it a little plainer… Is there anything I can do for you? Is there anything I can refrain from doing which might add to your contentment?"

"That's an odd thing to ask," returned the other.

"No. It is merely friendship speaking – a very deep friendship, if you can understand it."

"You're very kind, Grismer… I don't know quite how to take it – or how to answer. There is nothing that you can do for me – nothing one man could ask of another – "

"Ask it, all the same."

"I can't."

"Then I'll offer it… I give up – Stephanie – to you."

The silence lasted a long time. Neither man stirred. Finally Cleland said in an altered voice:

"I can't ask it – unless she does, too. I don't know what to say to you, Grismer, except that no man ever spoke more nobly – "

"That is enough. If you really think it, that means everything, Cleland… And this is my chance to tell you that when I – married her – I never dreamed that it could ever be a question of you… I don't believe she did, either… But it has become so. That is the question, now… And so I – step out."

"I – I tell you I can't accept – that way – unless she asks it, too," stammered Cleland… "After all, it's got to be on a basis of her happiness… I am not sure that her happiness lies in my keeping. I do not know how much she cares for you – how deeply you are engaged in her heart… I can't find out… I'm like a blind man involved in a maze!"

"She cares for me," said Grismer in his low, pleasant voice. "We have been intimate in mind – close and responsive, intellectually… Sentimentally, too. On her part a passionless loyalty to whatever in me she believed appealed to her intelligence and imagination; an emotional solicitude for what she discovered in me that aroused her sympathy – "

He turned and looked at Cleland in the darkness:

"Hers is a tender heart, Cleland. Impulse carries it to extremes. Injustice to another provokes quick action from her; and nothing so sways her as her intense sense of gratitude, unless it be her fear of wounding others.

"I shall have to tell you more, some day. If I do, it will be more than I would do for anybody else alive – the ultimate sacrifice of pride."

He rose and stood gazing out across the mist at a far star above it, glimmering with dimmed brilliancy all alone.

"It couldn't have been," he said, half to himself. "I always knew it. Not that the thought of you ever crossed my mind. I knew it would come somehow. It simply couldn't be."

He turned to Cleland with a sudden laugh that sounded light and natural:

"This is to be no tragedy. It will disentangle itself easily and simply. I am very sure that she is in love with you. Tell her what I have said to you… And – good night, old chap."

CHAPTER XXX

Stephanie and Helen arrived, bringing a mountain of baggage and the studio cat – an animal evidently unacquainted with the larger freedom of outdoors, and having no cosmic urge, for when deposited upon the lawn it fled distracted, and remained all day upon a heap of coal in the cellar, glaring immovably upon blandishment.

"Oh!" cried Stephanie, standing on the lawn and quite enchanted by the old place. "It is simply too lovely! It's like a charming doll's house – it's so much smaller than I remember it! Helen, did you ever see such trees! And isn't the garden a dear! Listen to the noise of the river! Did you ever hear anything as refreshing as that endless rippling? Where is Oswald, Jim?"

"He went back to town this morning."

"How mean of him!"

"I tried to keep him," said Cleland, "but he insisted that it was really a matter of business. And, of course, I had nothing more to say."

"Did he have a good time here?" asked Stephanie in a guileless voice. But she looked sideways at him.

"I think so, Steve. He seemed carefree and vastly contented to rove over the place. I planned to go with him after trout, but he preferred to prowl about the lawn or smoke on the porch… I am glad he came. I have learned to like him very much."

"You're a dear!" she murmured under her breath, her grey eyes fixed on him and full of a gay tenderness tinged with humour. "You always do the right thing, Jim; you are right, that's the reason. Do you wonder that I'm quite mad about you? – I, who am all wrong."

"Who says you are all wrong?" he demanded, starting toward her. But she deftly avoided him, putting the sun dial between them. And, leaning on it with both elbows, her face framed in her hands, she let her eyes look gay defiance into his.

"I'm all wrong," she said. "You don't know it, but I am."

"Do you want to be punished?"

She laughed tormentingly, feeling delightfully secure from his demonstrations there on the sunny lawn, with Helen wandering about inspecting the flowers in the garden, and the hired man unloading the luggage at the side-door.

"Come on, Helen!" she called gaily. "We can have a bath; there's plumbing in the house, you know. Where do you suppose that poor cat is hidden?"

Helen came from the garden with a blue pansy between her lips, which she presently drew through Cleland's lapel.

"A bribe, dear friend. I wish to go fishing," she said. "Stephanie has been telling me about her girlhood days here with you, and how you took her on several sacred occasions to a mysterious, dashing stream full of huge bowlders – somewhere deep in the primeval woods – "

"The Dunbar brook, Jim," smiled Stephanie. "Shall we go fishing in the morning? I'm not going to spend all my time fussing with domestic problems."

"The cares of housekeeping sit lightly on her," remarked Helen, as they all strolled toward the porch. "What if the new servants are slack and wasteful? Being a man you wouldn't know; being Steve, she doesn't worry. I see that it's going to devolve on me. Is it possible to run two baths in this house at the same time?"

"Is it?" inquired Stephanie of Cleland. "I forget."

"Yes," he replied, "if you don't draw too much hot water."

"Take yours first, Helen," she said. "I'll sit in this cool library and gossip with Jim for a while."

She unpinned her hat and flung it on a sofa, untied a large box of bonbons, and careless of her charmingly disordered hair, vaulted to a seat on the massive centre table – a favourite perch of hers when a young girl.

Helen lingered to raid the bonbons; Cleland immediately began his pet theme:

"Why do Americans eat candy? Because the nation doesn't know how to cook! The French don't stuff themselves with candy. There isn't, in Paris, a candy-shop to the linear mile! That's because French stomachs, being properly fed with properly and deliciously cooked food, don't crave candy. But in a country noted for its wretched and detestable bread – "

"Oh, you always say that," remarked Stephanie. "Some day I'll go over and find out how much truth there is in your tirades. Meanwhile, I shall consume candy."

"When you go over," he said, "you'll go with me." His voice was low. Helen had strolled into the "best room" and was standing there with a bitter chocolate between her fingers, contemplating the old-time furniture.

"When I go over to Paris," said Stephanie airily, "I shall invite whom I choose."

"Who will it be?"

"Oh, some agreeable young man who isn't too bossy," she returned airily. "Somebody who doesn't try to place me in a day nursery while he goes about and has his fling. But, of course, that doesn't mean you. You've had your fling, haven't you?"

"Not too violently," he said.

"That is your story. But I think I'll investigate it when I go over, and tell you what I've found out when I return."

Helen finished her chocolate and came back. "Where the dickens is that unhappy cat, do you suppose?" she inquired.

"Oh, she'll turn up at dinner-time," Cleland reassured her. "Do you know where your room is, Helen?"

"How should I?" returned that young lady, " – never having been in the house before – "

"Dear, forgive me!" cried Stephanie, jumping from her perch and passing one arm around Helen's shoulders.

They went away together, the former waving a saucy adieu to Cleland behind her back, without turning. She did not return.

So he concluded to get himself into fresh flannels, the late afternoon having grown very warm and promising a close and humid evening.

But when he descended again from his room, he found nobody except the cat, who, sadly disfigured by coal-dust, advanced toward him with amiable intention.

"Very fine, old girl," he said, "but you need a bath, too." So he rang and sent for some butter, dabbed a little on the cat's nose; and in ten seconds she had begun a thorough and minute toilet, greatly to Cleland's edification.

"Keep it up," he said, much interested, watching the pink tongue travelling over the fur, and the velvet paw scrubbing away industriously. "Good old cat! Go to it! Take the whole course – massage, shampoo, manicure, whiskers ironed! By Jove, you're coming out brand new!"

The cat paused to blink at him, sniff for a moment some faint perfume of distant cooking, unnoticed by his less delicate nostrils, then she settled down to the business in hand. And when a cat does that she feels that she is entirely at home.

Not until a maid announced dinner did the two girls appear, both arrayed in that filmy and dainty flyaway apparel suitable only to youth and freshness.

"We had naps," remarked Stephanie shamelessly, and with a slightly malicious humour in her smile, for she knew that Cleland had expected her to return for the ten-minutes' gossip she had suggested.

He shrugged:

"You should see your cat! She's polished within an inch of her life – "

A loud mew by his chair announced the regenerated animal's advent.

Stephanie fed it with odd morsels from time to time, and cautioned the waitress to prepare a banquet for it after dinner.

It was still daylight when they strolled out into the garden. The tree-clad eastern ridge was all ruddy in the rays of a declining sun; the river dull silver save in pools where pearl and pink tints tinged the stiller water. Birds were very noisy, robins gallantly attacking a gay carol which they always found impossible to vary or bring to any convincing musical conclusion; song sparrows sweetly monotonous; an exquisite burst of melody from a rose-grosbeak high on a balsam-tip above the stream; the rushing twitter of chimney swifts sweeping by, mounting, fluttering, sheering through the sunset sky.

Helen, pausing by the sun-dial, read aloud what was chiselled there, black with encrusted lichens.

"Who wrote this?" she asked curiously.

"Some bandit of the back-woods, some wilderness fur trader or ruthless forest runner – with murder on his soul, perhaps. I don't remember now. But my father made a note of the story."

She read the straggling lines again, slowly:

"But for ye Sunne no one would heed Me —A senseless Stone;But for ye Sunne no one could rede MeSave God alone.I and my comrade Sunne, together,Print here ye hoursIn praise of Love and pleasant weatherAnd Youth and flowers."

"How odd and quaint," she mused, " – and what straggling, primitive, illiterate letters these are, chiselled here in this black basalt. Fancy that gaunt, grim, buck-skinned runner emerging from the wilderness into this solitary settlement, finding shelter and refreshment; and, in his brief hour of rest and idleness, labouring to leave his record on this old stone!"

"His was a poet's soul," said Cleland, " – but he probably took an Iroquois scalp when unobserved, and skinned living and dead impartially in his fur transactions."

"Some degenerate son of honest English stock, I suppose," nodded Helen. "Yet, he had the simplicity of the Cavalier verse-makers in his gracious heart… Well, for his sake – "