The Restless Sex

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.