The Restless Sex

The day, drawing to its close without his seeing her, had seemed colourless and commonplace; but the sound of her gay voice over the wire had changed that – had made the day complete.

"I believe I am in love," he said aloud. He rose and paced the room in the dusk, questioning, considering his own uncertainty.

For the "novelty" – as Stephanie called it – of last night's fever had not been a novelty to her alone. Never before had he been so deeply moved, so swept off his feet, so regardless of a self-control habitual to him.

Perhaps anger and jealousy had started it. But these ignoble emotions could not seem to account for the happiness that hearing her voice had just given him.

Even the voice of a beloved sister doesn't stir a young man to such earnest and profound reflection as that in which he was now immersed, indifferent even to the dinner hour, which had long been over.

"I believe," he said aloud to himself, "that I'm falling very seriously in love with Steve… And if I am, it's a rather desperate outlook… She seemsto be in love with Grismer – damn him! … I don't know how to face such a thing… She's married him and she doesn't live with him… She admits frankly that he fascinates her… There are women who never love… I seem to want her, anyway… I think I do… It's a mess! … Why in God's name did she do such a thing if she wasn't in love with him – or if she didn't expect to be? Is she in love with him? She isn't with me… I'm certainly drifting into love with Steve… Can I stop myself? … I ought to be able to… Hadn't I better?"

He stood still, thinking, the street lamps' rays outside illuminating his room with a dull radiance.

Presently he switched on the light, seated himself at the desk, and wrote:

STEVE, DEAR:

I am falling in love with you very seriously and very deeply. I don't know what to do about it.

    JIM.

He was about to undress and retire late that night when a letter was slipped under his door:

You sentimental and adorable boy! What is there to do? The happiest girl in New York, very sleepy and quite ready for bed, bids you good night, enchanted by your note.

    STEVIE.

CHAPTER XXI

To have returned after three years abroad and to have slipped back into the conventional life of the circles to which he had been accustomed in the city of his birth might not have been very easy for Cleland. To readjust himself among what was unfamiliar proved easier, perhaps. For his family circle existed no longer; the old servants were gone; the house had been closed for a long time now.

At his college club unfamiliar faces were already in the majority, men of his own time having moved on to the University, Union, Racquet and Knickerbocker, leaving the usual residue of undesirables and a fresh influx from his college. And he was too young in letters to be identified yet with any club which meant anything except the conveniences of a hotel.

Among friend and acquaintances of his age there had been many changes, too; much shifting and readjustment of groups and circles incident to marriages and deaths and the scattering migration ever in progress from New York.

It was an effort for him to pick up the threads again; and he did not make the effort. It was much simpler to settle down here in these quiet, old-time streets within stone's throw of the artists' quarter of the city where Stephanie lived – where a few boyhood friends of artistic proclivities had taken up quarters, where acquaintances were easily made, easily avoided; and where the informalities of existence made life more easy, more direct, and, alas, much more irresponsible. Chelsea, with a conscious effort and a lurking smirk, mirrored the Latin Quarter to the best of its ability.

It did pretty well. There were more exaggerations, more eccentricities, less spontaneity and less work in Chelsea than in the Latin Quarter. Too many of its nomadic denizens were playing a self-conscious part; too few of them possessed the intelligence and training necessary for self-expression in any creative profession. Otherwise, they were as emotional, as casual, as unkempt, as vain, and as improvident as any rapin of the original Latin Quarter.

Cleland met many of the elect even before he had settled down in his new studio-apartment on the top floor of the same building where Stephanie and Helen lived.

The quarter was peppered with tea-rooms and cafés and restaurants sufficiently cheap to attract artistic youth. Also, there reigned in that section of the city a general and resolute determination to be bohemian; a number of damsels errant and transplanted, shock-headed youths cooked in their own quarters, strolled about the streets in bed-room slippers, or visited one another bare-headed and adorned with paint-smeared smocks.

And there was, of course, much deviltry with cigarettes and cheap claret in restaurant and café – frequent outbursts of horse-play and song, especially if Philistine visitors were detected in the vicinity. And New York French was frequently though briefly employed as the limited medium for exchanging views on matters important only to the inmates of Chelsea and its purlieus.

"But Washington Square bohemians are a harmless, friendly people," remarked Helen to Cleland one morning late in May, when he stopped on his way out to breakfast to watch her modelling a horse in clay. "They're like actor-folk; they live in a world entirely self-created which marvels at and admires and watches them; they pose for its benefit, playing as faithfully as they know how their chosen rôles – painter, writer, critic, sculptor, composer. Nobody in the outside real and busy world notices them; but they think they're under incessant and envious observation and they strut happily through the little painted comedy of life, living an unreal existence, dying undeceived. The real tragedy of it all they mercifully never suspect – the utter lack of interest in them taken by real people."

She went on modelling, apparently amused by her own analysis.

"Where is Stephanie?" he inquired, after a slight pause.

"Out somewhere with Oswald, I believe."

"It's rather early."

"They sometimes get up early and breakfast together at Claremont," remarked Helen, working serenely away. The freckled livery-stable lad who held the horse for her and occasionally backed him into the pose again continued to chew gum and watch the pretty sculptor with absorbed interest.

"I've got such an interesting commission," she said, wetting down her clay with a huge and dripping sponge. "It's for the new Academy of Arts and Letters to be built uptown, and my equestrian figure is to be cast in silver bronze for the great marble court."

"What is the subject?" he asked, preoccupied by what she had told him about Stephanie, yet watching this busy and efficient young girl who, with the sleeves of her blue blouse rolled up, displaying her superb young arms, stood vigorously kneading a double handful of clay and studying the restless horse with clear and very beautiful brown eyes.

"The subject? 'Aspiration.' I made some sketches – a winged horse taking flight upward. A nude female figure, breathless, with dishevelled hair, has just flung itself upon the rearing, wide-winged Pegasus and is sticking there like a cat to the back fence – hanging on tooth and nail with one leg just over and the other close against the beast's ribs, and her desperate fingers in the horse's mane… I don't know. It sounds interesting but it may be too violent. But I've had that idea – hope, aspiration, fear and determination clinging to a furious winged animal that is just starting upward like a roaring sky-rocket – "

She turned her head, laughing:

"Is it a rotten idea?"

"I don't know," he said absently. "It's worth trying out, anyway."

She nodded; and he went on about the business of breakfast. But had now no appetite.

There was one thing, Cleland soon found out, against which he was helpless. Stephanie frequented Grismer at any hour of the day and evening that her fancy prompted.

This perplexed him and made him sullen; but when he incautiously started to remonstrate with her one evening her surprise and anger flashed like a clear little flame, and she explained very clearly what was the essence of personal liberty, and that the one thing she would not tolerate from him or anybody else was any invasion of her freedom of thought and action.

Silenced, enraged, and humiliated at the rebuke he had retired to his studio to sulk like Achilles – a sullen mourner at the bier of love. For he fully and firmly determined to eradicate this girl from his life and devote it to scourging the exasperating sex of which she was a beautiful but baffling member.

The trouble with Stephanie, however, was that she could not seem to see the tragedy in his life or understand that a young man desired to suffer nobly and haughtily and at his own leisure and convenience.

For there came a knock at his door after his second day of absenting himself, and when he incautiously opened it, she marched in and took him gaily into her unembarrassed arms and bestowed upon his astonished countenance a hearty, wholesome and vigorous smack. Moreover, she laughed and jeered and tormented and poked merciless fun at him until she had badgered and worried and hectored and beaten the sulkiness out of him. Then she admonished him:

"Don't ever do it again!" she said. "We are free, you and I. What we are to each other alone concerns us, not what we may choose to do or be to others."

"You don't care what I do, Steve," he said.

"I care what you do to me!"

"How I behave otherwise doesn't concern you?"

"No. It would be an impertinence for me to meddle. For," she added in smiling paraphrase:

"If you are not nice to me
What care I how nice you be —

to other girls?"

"Do you really mean that it wouldn't make any difference to you what I do? Suppose I take you at your word and become enamoured of some girl and devote myself to her?"

"You mean a nice girl, don't you?" she inquired.