The Restless Sex

"Good-bye!" she said. He caught her at the door, and she turned and looked up gravely.

"Don't spoil it," she whispered, disengaging herself.

So he released her, and she stretched out her hand, smiled at him, and stepped out. The music-phone continued to play gaily.

A girl who was coming upstairs saw her as she left Cleland's studio; and, as the pretty visitor sped lightly past her, the girl who was mounting turned and watched her. Then she resumed her ascent, came slowly to Cleland's open door, stood there resting a moment as though out of breath.

Cleland, replacing the rugs, glanced up and caught sight of Stephanie; and the quick blood burnt his face.

She came in as though still a trifle weary from the ascent. Neither spoke. She glanced down at the two empty wine glasses on his desk, saw the decanter, the biscuits and cigarettes. The music-phone was expiring raucously.

"Who is that girl?" she asked in an even, colourless voice.

"A girl I met."

"Do you mind telling me her name?"

"I – don't know it," he said, getting redder.

"Oh. Shall I enlighten you?"

"Thank you."

"She's Mary Cliff, of the Follies. I've seen her dance."

"Really," he said carelessly.

Stephanie leaned against the desk, resting one hand on it. An odd sense of mental fatigue possessed her; things were not clear in her mind; she was not very sure of what she was saying:

"I came up to say – that I'm sorry we quarrelled… I'm sorry now that I came. I'm going in a moment… You've already had tea, I see. So you won't care for any more."

After a flushed silence, he said:

"Did you have a successful lesson, Steve?"

"I've had two – lessons. Yes, they were quite – successful."

"You seem tired."

"No." She turned and walked to the door. He opened it for her in silence.

"Good night," she said.

"Good night."

CHAPTER XXIII

Cleland's unhappy interpretation of the episode was masculine and therefore erroneous – the interpretation of a very young man whose reverence for the restless sex might require revision some day or other unless he died exceedingly young. For he concluded, now, that he had thoroughly disgusted Stephanie Quest; first by his vulgar flirtation with Lady Button-eyes, then by losing his temper and admitting to her his own odious materialism; and, furthermore and flagrantly, by his hideous behaviour with a pretty girl whose name even he had not known when he entertained her at his impromptu thé-dansant.

He saw himself quite ruined in the unemotional grey eyes of a girl who, herself, was so coldly aloof from the ignoble emotions lurking ever and furtively in the masculine animal.

He had had little enough chance with Stephanie, even when his conduct had been exemplary. Now he was dreadfully certain that his chances were less than none at all; that he had done himself in. What had he to hope of her now?

To this unconventional yet proud, pure-hearted girl had been offered the very horrid spectacle of his own bad temper and reprehensible behaviour. And, although there had been no actual harm in it, she could never, never understand or forgive it. Never!

Her virginal ears had been insulted by the cynical avowal of his own masculine materialism. Of the earth, earthy, he had vaunted himself in his momentary exasperation – "of humanity, a shamelessly human example."

With her own incredulous, uncontaminated eyes she had seen him pocket Lady Button-eye's telephone number. Her shrinking ears had heard the mutilated record in his music-phone dying out in a tipsy two-step; her outraged gaze had beheld a perfectly strange young girl's gaily informal exit from his own bachelor apartment, where sherry still stood in both glasses and the rugs lay scattered in disorder against the wall. Elimination was naturally the portion he had to expect. And he gloomily schooled himself to endure annihilation.

According to his philosophy there was nothing else on earth to do about it. Doubtless she'd ultimately forgive him, but her respect he couldn't hope for at present; and as for any deeper sentiment, if ever there had been any hope in his heart that he might one day awaken it, now he knew it was wriggling in its death-throes, making him, by turns, either frightfully unhappy or resentfully reckless.

The hopeless part of it was that, unlike weaker men, he had no desire to drown sorrow in any irregular and unworthy fashion.

Many men of many minds turn to many things seeking the anodyne in one form or another – the nepenthe of forgetfulness, rarer than the philosopher's stone.

Neither wine nor the dreary quest for heart-ease among frailer companions ever appeals to any but weak minds. And the boy, not knowing what to do, turned to his work with a renewed energy resembling desperation.

It is the only hope for ultimate anesthesia.

Also, he took to prowling by night, being too unhappy to remain in his studio so near to Stephanie.

He prowled about Broadway and Long Acre with Badger Spink, whose restless cleverness and self-absorption ended by wearying him; he prowled with Clarence Verne one night, encountering that strange sphinx by accident, and strolling with him at hazard through the purlieus of Chelsea. Both men seemed deeply preoccupied with problems of their own, and though they knew each other only slightly they maintained the reticence of intimacy – an odd assumption, as Cleland thought afterward. Yet, one of them was very sick for love, and the other very sick of it; and, besides, there roved with them a third and unseen companion, through the crooked, lamp-lit streets, whose shrouded arm was linked in Verne's. And perhaps that accounted for the sombre silence which brooded between these men in trouble.

Verne said at parting – and gazing absently at nothing while he spoke:

"The tragedy of civilization – of what the world calls civilization! – that is the most terrible of all, Cleland. That is the real and only hell. Not the ruthless eruptions of barbarism; not the momentary resurgence of atavistic violence – of red-blooded rapine and lust – but the ordered, lawful, stealthy, subtle horrors of civilization: they slay men's souls."

"I don't get you, Verne."

"No, Cleland. But somebody else will – somebody else will get me – very soon, now… Good-bye."

A few days later Cleland prowled with Harry Belter, intent upon supper somewhere in the outer marches of the town.

For an episode had occurred that shook them both with the most sobering and distressing jar that youth experiences in fullest mental and physical vigour.

"I don't see how a man can kill himself," said Cleland. "I don't see why he can't go somewhere else and cure himself of his unhappiness. Travel, change, new faces – "

"Perhaps he wants to be rid of faces," muttered Belter.

"There are wonderful wildernesses."

"Perhaps he's too tired to admire 'em. Perhaps he's half dead for sleep."

"You talk as though you sympathized and understood, Harry."

"I do."

"You! The indefatigable optimist! You, the ever-welcome, the gay consoler, the irrepressible spirit among us!"