The Restless Sex

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?"