CHAPTER NINE

When Grace had not seen Letty for a fortnight, her mind began to weave in and about various stratagems. She knew she would make her way back to their house--she had to--but her life, especially of late, had been so based on substrata of manipulation that it never occurred to her to do this directly. At last she hit on a plan which included Anita Vestry. The latter was not so much associated with her as to draw Harold's instant suspicion; besides, Letty, in Harold's hearing, had asked the girl to come and see her.

One noon she made a special trip downtown to have lunch with Anita, to confide in her and to broach to her the idea of calling up Letty and inviting her to the theater. Grace would get them free tickets and would meet them.

"I really want to see her ever so much," Grace pleaded. "Of course, I call her up, but it's not the same. Harold plays bridge to-morrow so, if he _knows_ she's going with you, it'll be all right."

Anita couldn't understand. "Why don't you just call her up and meet her downtown yourself?"

"No," said Grace, "I want her to have a perfect alibi. If you call up at dinner time Harold will answer the phone and he'll know _you_ are making the arrangements, and he'll be satisfied. They fight so much about everything, I don't want them to fight over me. Besides, I'd like to have you along."

This was not an afterthought. There was an uncommon stability, a fresh sturdiness about Anita, which was new to Grace and which attracted her. All her other relations--at home, with Blake, at the office; even, now, with Letty--seemed so precarious that she was nearly always in a state of inner fear--an apprehensive shivering of her very soul. She longed for solid, utterly smooth ground, and Anita gave promise of this.

By some maneuver Grace had managed to get two pairs of seats, so Letty and Grace sat together, and Anita sat behind them by herself. She enjoyed it that way. She luxuriated in the vacant seat.

"If I am ever rich," she thought, "I will always buy three seats to the theater; one for me and a vacant one on either side."

A fig for talk of selfishness when, for the price of selfishness, one could buy some freedom from too enveloping human contacts! But probably she would never be rich. The play was poor, even Anita, who merely liked to watch the lights and the faces, was forced to recognize. But the featured actress had a voice. What a voice! It made the cheapest commonplaces sound like mottoes on glorious tombs. The audience was aquiver with her voice.

During the first intermission Anita remarked on it to Grace.

"Yes," said Grace with a grave note of opinion, "I think so, too. I think they're--silly not to star her."

"Imagine her as Juliet!" suggested Letty.

"N-no. She's not helpless enough. I don't feel that a Juliet--would have so much poise. But Candida! Blake and I are mad about Shaw and we decided that she'd make the perfect Candida. I told Dexter I wanted to meet her, and if he can arrange it I'd like to tell her that."

Somehow, Anita had never realized that actresses could be met. The idea struck her very suddenly and she looked at Grace, in spite of herself, with wonder that had a tinge of awe in it. Anita would not quite have dared to cry as Letty did, "Oh, will you take me along, Grace?"

"If it's--possible," said Grace with dignity.

During the second intermission Grace and Letty held a long, vigorous consultation on clothes. Anita, listening, could not understand why they had troubled to trick and to arrange this evening for such talk. She could not feel the warm alliance between them from which each drew comfort and composure, no matter what they said. From each other they got that sense of the burden of troubles, emotions, and thoughts being eased, shared; of some other helping to live their lives which men may hope to freely get from women, but which wise women never even attempt to expect from men. To be sure, men can have their easy, unexacting, open friendships, and laugh at the intricate intimacies between women, for it is upon the shoulders of women that they unload the subtler moods and cares. But this lack in their lives women must look to other women to fill, unless they can bear to be, too often, entirely alone.

After the theater the three girls walked up Broadway, past the first rush and chatter of the crowds, the first battle of lights and electric signs, past the kitten made of light naïvely chasing a spool made of light, to a slightly quieter section before another turn of that twisting, glinting street, opening and shutting accordion-like. They went into Bouton's and sat down at a blackly shining, glassy table.

"Three frŏsted chŏcolates," ordered Grace.

"Three frawsted chawc'lets?" inquired the waiter politely.

They began to giggle behind his back.

"It's always that way," said Grace. "I've tried every combination but I never hit on the right one. If I say 'frawsted chŏcolate,' the waiter rebukes me with 'frŏsted chawc'let.' And if I reverse the pronunciation, he reverses it, too, so we never meet."

They were merry, but both Grace and Letty glanced at the clock from time to time. Letty said in a low aside under cover of the general hubbub, "Are you going up with me?"

"No, to Brooklyn," murmured Grace. She gave the faintest nod in Anita's direction. Anita was not meant to catch the nod.

Grace looked up at her swiftly across the table.

"How is your job going now?" asked Anita.

"Oh, so-so. Al has a movie. I've been working all day with a vaudeville act. Midgets. I had an awfully bright idea--if I say so myself. Eight of them--piled into a cab and then refused to pay extra fare, claiming they were so small that eight of them made only four legal persons. So the driver--haled them to court. He was marvelous--we had to let him in on it, of course--fell right into the spirit of the thing and was very--indignant, and postured and declaimed like anything. I love taxi drivers. They always catch the spirit of things. But we had to let the judge in, too, so he would dismiss the case before the afternoon show and that--was difficult. Harry fixed that up. We've got a tremendous spread in the _Evening World_ to-night--it's just their meat--and stuff in all the other papers. Very funny.

"But none of it's--easy," she explained with more emphatic pauses and doubly serious eyes. "It's not like doing publicity for an established theatrical firm. They're--entitled to a certain amount of space in the dramatic columns. They have standing and they advertise. Harry Strauss places advertising for his clients, too, but not everywhere and not _enough_ and not--consistently. Besides, the papers are wary of him into the bargain. So it's a process of grab as grab can. And he certainly expects you to grab. He wants all the news space and all the front pages!"

"I have a singer, too," she added with a snigger. "Baritone. I think I've--acquired him, Letty. Two lunches and one dinner so far, and he wants to teach me how to speak Italian and eat spaghetti. Pretty good--what? We're also going to have a show soon--called _Mamie_--and I think perhaps Mr. Strauss'll let me handle it alone. If I do well perhaps I'll even get--a raise. Do you know, Annabella told me she paid Strauss $200 a week, and I don't know what the night club paid him. It's unbelievable, isn't it? He gets the highest prices in the business."

"I'll bet Blake minds the baritone," put in Letty.

"Minds? I guess he doesn't," said Grace firmly. She seemed altogether less flexible than Anita had ever seen her. Her eyes were merely large eyes, very calm. "I guess--he has no right to mind. I must find some way to spend my evenings."

There was one thing more that Letty wished to know, and as they were leaving, single file, she murmured to Grace, "Then when is she coming back?"

"Not till December," said Grace, low. "She changed her mind and wanted to come home for Thanksgiving but--she was told to _stay_. If Ma should call..."

"I know. Don't worry."

Some time later, when Anita was preparing for bed, the two asides, the conversation she had overheard at the night club, the slight warning nod began to arrange themselves idly in her mind. And, not of her volition, but like the final link of a puzzle slipping into place without effort when all the other parts have been set in order, there came back to her a remark Grace had made at their one dinner together. Blake lived in Brooklyn.

With a certain gallantry, she at once shook off this unexpected meaning, a meaning that seemed too discordant in the atmosphere of the tragic which she had sensed about Grace; a meaning which left a wryness in her mouth and opened before her mind a shocking vista of sad, small, endless, and tasteless adaptations ever at their task of leveling and making endurable. After all, what did she know of tragedy? It suddenly struck her that perhaps the very souls in hell found obscure dingy ways of habituating themselves to hell fire and thereafter survived in the midst of it with an unseemly equanimity.