The Restless Sex

"Don't you want anything to eat, Steve?" she inquired. "This shrimp salad isn't bad."

"I'm not hungry."

"You seem to be thirsty," remarked Helen, looking at the girl's flushed face and her half-filled wine glass. "Where is Jim?"

"Dancing."

"With whom?"

"Some girl of sorts whom he picked up," said Stephanie; and the pink flush in her face deepened angrily.

"Was she worth it?" inquired Helen, frankly amused.

Stephanie's cheeks cooled; she replied carelessly:

"She had button eyes and a snub nose and her attire was transparent – if that interests you." She rested her elbow on the edge of the box, supporting her chin on her cupped palm.

They were dancing again. Grayson came and took out Helen; a number of men arrived clamouring for Stephanie. She finally went out with Verne, but not liking the way he held her left him planted and returned to the box where a number of hilarious young men had gathered.

Harry Belter said:

"What's the trouble, Steve? I never saw you glum before in all my life!"

"I'm not glum," she said with a forced little laugh, "I'm thirsty, Senior Bacchus! Isn't that enough to sadden any girl?"

Later Helen, returning from the floor, paused beside Stephanie to bend over her and whisper:

"Harry Belter is behaving like a fool. Don't take anything more, Steve."

The girl lifted her flushed face and laughed:

"I feel like flinging discretion into the 'fire of spring,'" she said. "That's where most of these people's clothing has disappeared, I fancy." Excitement burned in her pink cheeks and wide grey eyes, and she stood up in the box looking about her, poised lightly as some slim winged thine on the verge of taking flight.

Grismer rose too and whispered to her, but she made a slight, impatient movement with her shoulders.

"Won't you dance this with me?" he repeated, touching her arm.

"No," she said under her breath. "You annoy me, Oswald."

"What!"

"Please don't be quite so devoted… I'm restless."

She turned and started to leave the box. The others were leaving too, for dancing had begun again. But at the steps she parted with the jolly little company, they descending to the floor, she turning to mount the steps alone.

"Where on earth are you going, Steve?" called back Helen, halting on the steps below.

"I want to see the floor from the top gallery!" replied Stephanie, without turning her head; and she ran lightly upward, her bells and bangles jingling.

Half way up she turned her head. She had not been followed, but she saw Grismer below looking up, watching her flight. And she made no sign of recognition, no gay gesture of amity and adieu; she turned her back and sped upward through the clamour and hazy brilliancy, turned into the first corridor, and vanished like a firefly in a misty thicket.

CHAPTER XIX

At three in the morning the Ball of the Gods was in full and terrific blast and still gathering momentum. A vast musical uproar filled the Garden; the myriad lights glittered like jewels through a fog; the dancing floor was a bewildering, turbulent whirlpool of colour.

Few if any of the dancers had reached the point of satiation; a number, however, had attained the state of saturation.

As far as Cleland could see the only difference between this and a more miscellaneous assemblage seemed to be that the majority of people here knew how to ignore unpleasant lapses in others and how to efface themselves if surprised into accidental indiscretion.

With Lady Button-eyes on his arm he had threaded his way into the supper-room, where the gods, demi-gods and heroes were banqueting most riotously.

It was becoming very rapidly a dubiously mixed affair; Bacchus, with his noisy crew, invaded the supper-room and pronounced Cleland's snub-nosed, button-eyed goddess "tray chick," and there arose immediately a terrific tumult around her – gods and satyrs doing battle for her; but she persisted in her capricious fancy for Cleland. He, however, remained in two minds; one was to abandon Button-eyes, retire and find Stephanie again, in spite of the ever-smoldering resentment he felt for Grismer; the other was to teach himself without loss of time to keep away from her; school himself to do without her; preoccupy himself casually and recklessly with anything that might aid in obliterating his desire for her companionship – with this snub-nosed one, for example.

The desire to see Stephanie remained, nevertheless, sometimes fiercely importunate, sometimes sullenly persistent – seemingly out of all proportion to any sentiment he had ever admittedly entertained for her – out of proportion, also, to his sulky resentment at the folly she had committed with Oswald Grismer.

For, after all, if she ultimately married Grismer in the orthodox way her eccentric pre-nuptial behaviour was nothing more serious than eccentric. And if she didn't, then it meant annulment or divorce; and he realised that nobody outside of the provinces paid any attention to such episodes nowadays. And nobody cared what clod-hoppers thought about anything.

His button-eyed goddess had a pretty good soprano voice and she was using it now, persuaded into a duet by Belter. Cleland looked at her sideways without enthusiasm, undecided, irritated and gloomy. She was Broadway vulgarity personified.

Badger Spink dropped onto a chair on the other side of him:

"Who's your transparent lady friend?" he inquired lazily. "She looks like a gutter-angel. Who is the depraved little beast?"

"I don't know – some actress, I believe – Sonia something-or-other. Do you want her?"

"Thanks. What does she represent? A Kewpie behind a pane of glass?"

"She's a goddess of sorts, I believe. This is getting rather raw, isn't it, Spink?"

Spink yawned and gazed leisurely about him, the satyr's horn emerging from his thick, wavy pompadour hair, accentuating his clever, saturnine features. His expression was slightly Satanic always.

"Yes," he said, "it's turning out rather rough. What do you think of this sort of thing in New York, Cleland? We're drifting toward Babylon. That's the trend since the dance craze swept this moral nation off its moral feet into a million tango joints."

"There's something the matter with us, that's sure," said Cleland. "This sort of thing doesn't belong in the new world."

"It's up to our over-rated American women," sneered Spink. "Only a few years ago we were slobbering over them, worshipping them, painting pictures of 'em – pictures influenced by the French naturalistic school – a lot of cow-faced American females suckling their young. Everybody was yelling for the simple life, summoning the nation back to nature, demanding that babies be produced in every family by the dozen, extolling procreation and lauding the American woman. That's the sort of female we celebrated and pretended to want. Now, look what we've got! – a nation of dancing dolls! A herd of restless, brainless, aggressive, impudent women proclaiming defiance and snapping their fingers at us!

"I tell you there burns here in the Garden to-night something more than the irresponsible gaiety of a lot of artists and Philistine pleasure-seekers. The world is on the verge of something terrifying; the restlessness of a universal fever is in its veins. Our entire human social structure is throbbing with it; every symptom is ominous of social collapse and a complete disintegration of the old order of civilization!"

"What's your other name, Spink? – Jeremiah?" asked Cleland, laughing.

"No. I'm merely on my favourite topic. Listen to me, my young friend; all England faces strikes and political anarchy in Ireland and India; the restless sex is demanding its rights in London and menacing the Empire. France, betrayed by one of the restless ones, strangling in the clutch of scandal, is standing bewildered by the roar of the proletariat; Russia seethes internally, watching the restless Empress and her accursed priest out of millions of snaky, Asiatic eyes; Portugal has just fallen crashing into fragments around a terrified Queen; China splits open from end to end and vomits forth its dynasty on the tomb of the dead Dowager; Austria watches for the death of an old, old widower – an Imperial mummy long since dead in mind and spirit. Germany, who uses the lesser sex for breeding only, stares stolidly out of pig-like eyes at the Imperial litter of degenerates and defectives dropped with stolid regularity to keep the sty-supply of Hohenzollerns unimpaired. Only radicals like myself feel the cataclysmic waves deep under the earth, symptomatic, ominous of profound and vital readjustments already under way.

"And here in our once great Republic of the West, the fever of universal unrest is becoming apparent in this nation-wide movement for suffrage. State after state becomes a battle-ground and surrenders; accepted standards are shattered, the old social order and balance between the sexes – all the established formalism and belief of a man-constructed status – totters as door and gate and avenue and byway are insanely flung open to the mindless invasion of the restless sex! Don't stop me, Cleland; I am magnificent to-night. Listen! I tell you that political equality, equal opportunity, absolute personal liberty are practically in sight for women! What more is left? Conscious of the itching urge of its constitutional inclination to fuss and fidget, the restless sex, fundamentally gallinaceous, continues to wander on into bournes beyond its ken, hen-like, errant, pensively picking at the transcendentally unattainable, but always in motion – motion as mechanical and meaningless as the negative essence of cosmic inertia! … Now, I'm through with you, Cleland. Thanks for listening. I don't think I want your goddess, after all. She looks too much like a tip-up snipe!"

And he took himself off, yawning.

The rushing din of the orchestra far below came up softened to Stephanie's ears, where she stood at the rail of the topmost gallery and looked down into the glimmering depths of the Ball of all the Gods.