CHAPTER TWELVE

At two o'clock next morning Anita was riding home alone from Two Hundred and Twentieth Street. Dark houses, like regimented soldiers, stood up straight, then fell before the onslaught of the train. Around her all the drowsy couples were sagging toward each other; heads nodded lower and lower; heads jerked up to a moment of consciousness at each stoppage of the train. She should be angry to be taking this weary subway ride alone at night, yet watching them--watching the even houses, the drowsy couples, the nodding heads--she was flooded with the vast relief of her solitary aliveness; she only felt relief rising like a flag of triumph within her.

She held herself stiller in her seat, so that no movement of hers should flaunt to these people her secret victory. In that subway train she felt her eyes and her eyes only to be alert with a strange alertness, darting from her moveless self, drawing these people into her consciousness, while she herself was alone and apart, content to be so, unreachable by them, unreachable by all, unreachable (and heaven be praised therefore) unreachable even by Dennis. Oh, this was the essence of all victories, the smart of all defeats--there within the grasp of all, to be discovered by all, and ignored by all the drowsy eyes, the nodding heads, the somber houses. She tightened her lips; she would have bit them, feeling as if at any moment a smile would give the concrete signal of the elation soaring in her veins.

All was dark in the city. Broadway lay wan and disordered. The Palace was dark, and the burlesque house was dark. Loungers in the stuffy side streets west of Sixth, about the pallid hotels and down-at-heels houses, made little lights with sudden cigarettes.

Running up the stairs, she was surprised to hear the taps of the typewriter.

"My Gawd!" said Grace, confronting her. "I was about to send the police for you!"

She pointed to the typewritten sheets. "Blake had to work, so I thought I might as well begin that story."

She looked at Anita sharply, "What's got you so excited? Where _have_ you been anyhow?"

Anita sank into a chair. It had been one of those evenings which seem to traverse many separate periods of time; in moments of awakening, during the transitions, one finds them, much to one's surprise, to be still continuing. This sort of evening is better relished in retrospect, when the memory with its own inarticulate art is found to have selected and retained only the most diverting incidents. Anita was overcome with accumulated laughter.

They had been at one time in a Chinese restaurant, and there was a sign, guardian of the place's respectability, and it said, "Ladies are requested to dance solely with their own escorts." They had sat at another time in a clandestine German beer garden through whose musty lattices oozed a gentle backyard breeze, and Dennis spoke of the beer picnics of his childhood, how cool had been the first breath of the green branches for which the children waited in the sweating cars, and Mac--this was Dennis's friend--spoke of God and the Devil, and Anita announced, a little drunken with Mac's scared admiration, her lack of concern with either, and Frances--this was Mac's girl--said that she didn't know--there must be something when one considered Nature and she said that she loved flowers.

"So then we went back to Two Hundred and Twentieth Street, where there was a tableful of liquor," said Anita. "And there was a girl and a man on the couch. But Frances took me aside and told me it was all right because the girl was a virgin and the man was a respectable married man and he had eight children. So, at length, the virgin and the married man departed and Dennis took a cold bath and went to sleep and snored and Mac took off his shoes and the radio played, 'My Wild Irish Rose, the sweetest flower that grows,' and Mac and Frances had a long argument about a friend of hers who was trying to get her father into an old folks' home, and Mac said, 'So that's the kind of a girl you are! You and your girl friend, you'd take an old man away from his kiddies and stow him in some damned old folks' home. If I was a daddy,' he said, 'I'd want to stay right with my kiddies!'

"So then I decided to go home. But Mac wouldn't hear of it because he explained Dennis was out and he was out and I couldn't ride home alone in the subway--'with all those damned mashers around, moving up close to the girls in the trains late at night.' He knew, he said, he'd seen 'em! He said I was to stay, and Frances said I could stay. She said it wasn't every girl she asked to stay; she said once she had had two girls there who, when asked to stay, objected and said, 'Oh, but we're not like Frances!' So she turned them out. But I could stay because she said she could see I wasn't 'that kind of a girl.' By that time I was a little mixed on the subject myself.

"Anyhow, I decided to go. So Dennis woke up and looked at me a long time and shook his head and said, 'You're too idealistic.' So I wanted to know why. So then he said, 'A-aah, yah punkie!' in his nice street-urchin way. 'You're too damn analytical!' Then he told me I had no abandon and I was the dumbest jane he'd ever run across--in fact, I was his dumbest woman. Upon which home truths I sallied forth."

"In Two Hundred and Twentieth Street!" exclaimed Grace. "It's improbable. Look--couldn't we all go up there some night--Blake too--and get a look at them?"

"Well, I'm not exactly running excursions up there," Anita pointed out.

Grace sniggered. "They sound too good to miss. Blake would love them. We must arrange it."

She paused. During a period of silence an expression adjusted itself on her face which warned Anita. She was prepared for the slow fixing of Grace's eyes that slowly turned to her face, for the halting phrases. She might have known Grace had stayed up for a purpose.

"I've had--an exciting time myself," said Grace.

Anita folded her hands. She listened.

"Blake nearly had a fight over me," Grace continued, and stopped to see the effect. If she was disappointed it did not show in the subtle enjoyment about her mouth, nor did it halt the penetrating spaced flow of her confidences. Blake had had to see someone at a theater owned by Trout, a producer whose current musical comedy he had "doctored." "And never thinking," went on Grace, "I was about to--look in back stage. I've been there so many times with Blake. The doorkeeper knows me and was going to--pass me. Then Fred walked up. You know--he's connected with Trout now. I have always told Blake that Fred made a point of being particularly nasty to me but he laid it to my imagination. Well--to-night--he saw for himself. Fred said, 'Don't pass this girl; we can't have everybody's sweeties hanging around.'"

She paused and swallowed nervously. Anita noticed how her face had become strained, her cheeks lengthened, under the narrative. These concrete signs of emotion never failed to exact sympathy from her, no matter how she might try to evade, to look everywhere, to prevent the focusing of her attention.

"I simply stood," went on Grace. Anita could imagine how she had stood, the tragic hugeness of her eyes. "You know--it's dark there--at the stage door. Neither of us saw Blake. He hissed! He actually did. He drew his face close up to Fred and he said, 'As long as I have any connection with this show, Grace can go in and out here as she damn well pleases, any time. D'ye hear that?' He was so _white_. I could see he was ready--to smash his fist into Fred's face. But Fred drew back. As he naturally would. 'Oh, I didn't know Grace was with _you_,' he said. Very honeyed. Scared, too. I dare say he and Blake will not do so much--business together in future."

Anita frowned, wondering what comment she could adequately make. But Grace spared her the necessity. "I really didn't mind so much," she concluded, "after it was over. It sort of opened things up--gave us a chance to talk. Things have been sliding along so..." She looked to Anita expectantly.

"The divorce?"

"Well--that appears to be still in the distant future," said Grace with reserve.

She paused. But as Anita asked no further questions she at length amended: "It's been--intimated, and I understand it was hinted in reply very coolly that--there might not be so much difficulty about _that_ as he thought. But this was quite a while ago. Blake says she's stopped writing."

Anita spoke suddenly what had been on her mind for a long time: "Don't you think, if Blake told her about you, she'd give the divorce and make an end of it? After all, she seems to be quite decent."

To her surprise, Grace replied with feeling, "Yes. And it's hard on her, too. But Blake seems to be--determined to keep me out of it. He says because of his family--in case--in the future... And then--he thinks it would hurt her and there might be a mess. I told him to tell her. If it's for my sake--I don't care about a mess. And if I were she, no matter what it was, I'd rather _know_. Wouldn't you, instead of fighting with shadows? But--he--has his own ideas."

She rose. "Anyhow," she said, shrugging, "nothing can be arranged for the present. She's sick; something wrong with her heart."

Grace began to loosen her hair. Looking at Anita, who sat still where she had been left, she made a slow addition, as if, now that she had taken advantage of a moment so conducive to confidences, she might as well take the fullest advantage and divest herself of the rest of the truth. "I have no--assurance that he'll marry me, you know," she said softly. "He's never actually said so."

She continued with long, calm strokes to brush her hair that vibrated in little electric spasms of light down its fine spread to her shoulders, so that her face, white, hardened, with the chin raised, seemed to be the face of a stone lady surrounded by the strange, quivering life of the hair. She made a tiny movement of her head and shoulders. "That doesn't bother me," she said hardily. "I'm just as likely to--change _my_ mind, too." She almost smiled at her reflection in the glass, or rather pressed her lips together to form an expression that was firm, a little secretive, and a little malicious. "I'm just as much of a person as Blake--just as free to do as I please."

She brushed for a few moments, absorbed in thought. Then, with a sigh, she relaxed into a full shrug. "After all, one can't blame him," she said, indulgent, condoning. "He doesn't want to get involved again--in all that--domesticity." She scanned Anita's face. "I suppose it's that way with Dennis, too," she remarked.

But Anita swiftly stood up. "Don't include me!" she cried. With her hands, she made motions of shoving away, palms toward Grace, head turned sideways.