The Restless Sex

"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.