CHAPTER TEN

During the last two years of school Grace had taken her classes at the Washington Square College. Between classes, which came in the late afternoon and evening, she would cross Washington Square Park and explore the raggedy-taggedy streets of the Italian and artistic colonies. Sometimes she went to the tea-room cafés that brought together art and tourists. When she met Blake Andrews in one of these (very formally, they were introduced) she met an even-featured young man with sandy hair, a solid chin, and thin cheeks. He slouched with determination, did not trouble to be polite, and did not trouble to be neat. The acidity of failure she mistook and he mistook for the irony of sophistication. He talked about books, plays, and the stage. So did she. He was married, which was too bad, but not definitely against him in our times, and his wife remained in St. Louis, which was better. He led a curious life.

This life seemed strange even to Blake, though he acted as if he had been born to it. His people were decent, semi-substantial folks in St. Louis. He had married, as Grace said, the "little girl next door," a pretty girl, whose porch and lawn adjoined, who had gone to the same college, who was gentle and dutiful and knew how to cook. No one had forced him to marry her. No one had forced him to enter a relative's bank. There he had done his work equably and capably and was in line for a vice-presidency, at least. He and Edith, his wife, had an apartment, not a house like their parents', with all sorts of novel appliances. They were a modern young couple. When the war began Blake enlisted at once, and after his discharge he stayed in New York. He said that he wished to write plays.

Blake came not too unnaturally by an interest in the theater. An uncle was on the stage--on the road, rather, but with headquarters in New York; the aunt, too, was of the profession. They lived in a two-room apartment over a restaurant on West Forty-seventh Street. There Blake took up his abode. At one end of the street burlesque chorus girls with fat legs stood about the stage door of the Columbia; opposite, agents and vaudeville actors greeted each other warmly around the Palace. In the center of the block Spaniards leaned against the portals of the Hotel America, contemplating with dumb, warm eyes and chewing toothpicks. The porter constantly moved trunks with vivid placards. Actors and fight managers were shaved by the window of the Hotel Somerset. Highly painted, ardently respectable women, with wedding rings, divorces, fur coats, and diamonds of various grades, walked in and out of the delicatessen shops, lingerie shops, restaurants, lobbies, and the few remaining brownstone houses. Lap dogs were aired before shabby apartment hotels and trucks of scenery unloaded before the climbing iron staircase back of the Palace.

At first Blake hunted for work. As he disliked the only sort of work he knew and was not familiar with any other, he found no work. He looked up various people from St. Louis, made acquaintance with Broadway, and for a time he drifted toward the Village. His struggles had served no purpose, so he made up his mind with a vigor none the less effective for being inert, to struggle no more. He would not go home. He did no work. He even stopped shaving and paid no further attention to his clothes. His parents sent him a little money and not too many remonstrances; he was their only child and they swore by him--perhaps they remembered his firm chin and unwavering gait. His wife stayed with her people and wrote him bewildered, pleading letters. His uncle provided food and shelter. Blake went about, unshaven, thin-cheeked, morose, not confiding in anyone.

He was, as one Village girl defined it, in the "sitting business." Whenever she entered a Village café and saw him there, sitting sourly in a corner, she called, "Ah, there! Still in the sitting business, what?" Blake was outsitting his parents, his job, his duty, his class, and St. Louis, Missouri. He even had a faint hope that he might outsit his wife, a faint hope since Blake came of a social stratum in which it is one of the virtues of wives to stick like a wet hair to the hand. To prove, however, that he had at least outsat this virtue in himself, he made some careless love to girls who painted or wrote and thereby, necessarily to Blake, flaunted their lack of cohesion. For several months he and Grace met thus, very casually, enjoying the novelty of each other's "lines."

One day they were walking up Sixth Avenue when a shabby man approached Blake and asked him for money to buy a meal. Blake had a quarter in his pocket. The sight of pain, trouble of any sort, was hateful to him, for, affected by it though he was, he found himself averse with every fiber of his lethargic, self-contained nature to any effort at alleviation. He thought he had decided that such effort was futile. He could not help other people's troubles; therefore he wished to be unconscious of them. They made him feel too powerless. He put his hand into his pocket, because of Grace, and at once thought better of it. He didn't mean to be confused by gallantry. The man added, "I been in vaudeville for years, mister, and now I can't get work." Blake walked by with an awkward laugh. "Oh, in vaudeville?" he said. "Then you're not worth even a quarter. Apply to the N.V.A." He flushed, as he said this, at his own brutality.

Grace hurried past him, caught up with the man, and searched for some change. She was white-lipped and had difficulty to keep back the tears. She did not think she could even bear Blake by her side.

Blake had a stroke of luck that year. He wrote a playlet with another man who knew an agent who sold it as a vaudeville act. Toward the end of the year Edith managed to get the money to come to New York, their furniture was brought from St. Louis, and Blake found himself in the midst of his lares and penates in Brooklyn, with a vague income, a tender if puzzled wife, and a love affair accelerated by its own speed, going now of its own volition.

At last neither Grace nor Blake could make any further attempts to fly before the fire with which they had been playing. They merely sought, with a muddled stubbornness on Blake's part, to keep the flames away from that parched island where Edith dwelt, bewildered, but not even imagining, utterly unknowing. Their hope, at least Blake's hope, was that some day the island would grow too parched for human endurance and Edith would cease to forgive and to submit and by herself, of her own free will, try to escape. To cast her out from even this poor refuge to which she clung so intently seemed impossible to Blake. He could not be so cruel to her. And Grace, resenting this division between his love and his kindness, this division which was so nicely defined for her, which Blake could not, would not, realize, saw no way but to yield. She wished for both the love and the kindness; she would not rest and could not feel serene till she had both. But for the present, for the sake of peace, she had made her choice. There was a rough justice in it, a painful justice. She would have the love and Edith might, undisturbed for the present, have the kindness.

Blake, walking up Broadway on a January afternoon, was full of a new, a dreaded necessity for kindness which he had had to swallow and which now Grace would have to swallow or reject. He had a reason which caused his memory to stumble back through the passage of the months, past various milestones which he had never considered before but which he found he recollected surprisingly well. He had a good memory which he kept to himself. The urging and the pleading were blurred because they had been so distasteful, but it was not so with a certain promise that he had made to Grace, all the circumstances of which appeared to him with a double distinctness. He understood why he had made the promise and why the promise had been called for. He understood also why he had broken the promise. And how was he to explain it? He could shift the blame and he could not shift the blame at all honorably. He had a defense and yet, before accusing eyes, it crumbled into no defense at all. He could not help remembering the dark glare of those eyes, whose suction was, more often than he cared to admit, a source of wonder to him, focused on him as Grace said, in all tense seriousness, "If that ever happened, I--I would kill you. I would."

And yet, what had he to blame himself for? Who had made the choice if not Grace, while he kept himself consciously aloof, while, unconsciously, how could he help that he had willed to aid the choice? He could not bear to see the tangle, wished with all his heart to turn his head and avoid it, as one avoids the ugly sight of some mangled animal by the wayside, but he found it, with loathing, with embarrassment and dismay, impossible, for he was within the snarl, he was part of the mangled animal.

Even when he did not wish to see Grace, when what he had to say would be much better said by letter, by written word, not face to face, those eyes were steadily drawing him through the traffic, up Broadway, around that special corner, and nearer, ever nearer, to her. He had never before quite guessed how many arid spaces there were in his life and how, from Grace's eyes, like deep, pliant pools, he drew their constant and necessary refreshment.

He found her already sitting at their table. She wore an almost springlike hat of pale silk, for it was one of those winter days which give promises of spring that cannot possibly be kept. This day had succeeded only in losing all its red corpuscles and was wan, languid, dampish.

The hat shaded her eyes. To gain time he commented on it.

"Have you got your raise, then?" he asked, and Grace seemed surprised. It was usually she who made the first allusions to her work. Seeing him so concerned, however, she described a hopeful interview with Harry Strauss and told him news of Mamie.

"Only, I thought he'd let me handle it myself, and now Al is in on it, too, which makes things--very annoying. I feel as if I have to be on my guard," she said disconsolately.

"Mm. He would cut throats all right."

"I don't understand that--sort of throat cutting," said Grace. "If I were in his way--but I'm not at all. I have a feeling he thinks Harry Strauss is grooming me, sort of, to take his place, at less money. But that's silly, if Al really has an interest in the business, as he says."

Blake thought, but had no advice to offer. The subject tired him on the whole. He did not see why Grace could not do her work on the surface, day by day, without peering and boring into underground channels, like a woman. Besides, he was too unhappy and could not bear his unhappiness alone and did not see how he could find the way to make her share it. Why didn't she see, of herself?

Grace watched him under her new hat with dark, unlighted eyes. Something was wrong between them to-day, and to-day she felt too weary herself to make the effort to set it right. She ventured one usual question, but without verve or hope.

"Everything--as usual?"

Now was the way opened. He glanced up with a sense of relief and saw by Grace's posture, her eyes drooping over the table, the answer she wished to-day. He nodded quickly. So that subject was closed. Their tea dragged on.

Then, putting on her gloves, Grace said, "I have to dash to the photographer's before he closes. Will I see you to-morrow?"

He nodded again, resigning himself with resentment to another day's sole confusion and apprehensive thought, and walked on to pay the check.

Grace could not, however, leave him yet. She stood by the door. "I thought you might--walk up with me," she said, and glued her eyes to him to see whether this was a mistake. He did not take her arm but they walked on together.

Suddenly he had such a longing to rid himself of his burden of suspense, even of anguish, that he wanted to halt in the middle of the street and cry, "Look here, don't walk with me. I--my wife and I--we're going to have a child," and have done with it and breathe while he waited to see what would follow. His feet even paused for a second, then he clutched her arm and pulled her on. Grace turned to him her questioning eyes, just beginning to fear, saying nothing.

"Do you remember what you said--that you'd kill me--if----?" he said swiftly. The memory rose at once to the surface of Grace's eyes. "Well, you can do it now," he said, with a sneer at his pain and her pain, and turned his face away.

She understood, but the understanding would not rise and surge within her as easily as the memory had. She nodded her head several times slowly, to make sure she knew, taking some slow breaths, making the first minor inward adjustments quickly, quickly, holding back terror, hugging hope fiercely, as people do who see the overwhelming flood on the horizon. When she spoke her voice was calm though strained, as if she called for news across a slight distance. She asked him how it had happened. This he told her shortly, for this at least he owed her. And when the baby was coming. This he hadn't asked and did not care to know himself. It was a long way off.

They went on.

"It'll be sort of hard on you--I mean financially," she remarked. He hardly dared to listen.

They went on.

"Babies are very expensive," she said in the same level voice.

After a while, something less than a sound, the feeling behind a sound, moved him to look at her again. They walked on a street of endless garages. Between the brim of the new hat and the collar of her coat she was weeping openly, without noise. When she noticed his eyes on her she bent her head completely away, almost back, and fumbled from far off in her purse for a handkerchief.

"Oh, I forgot," she said with bitterness. "I mustn't cry. You don't like that." This bitterness, this first and only bitterness, she would permit herself.

Without thinking how or why any longer, they stopped in the middle of the street and Blake found and clung to her hand. He looked so white, so thin-faced, so stern. He hated to use the words of tenderness and gazed at the pavement, clinging to her hand.

"When you don't cry any more, Grace, I'll know that you don't care any more."

Their fingers clutched at each other's, intertwined tightly. He, hugging his misery, could not think of her own. She, comforting him, let it go till she should be alone. It would keep, never fear, it would keep.