This Proud Heart (13 page)

But she seemed almost all the time, even to herself, like any other woman. By Christmas she knew she would have another child, and she was glad. She told Mark, and he took her hand gently and held it.

“It comes over me like a dream sometimes that you bear my children,” he said. “I have such a feeling that you could be anything you liked. I’m not good enough for you.”

“Don’t say that,” she answered sharply. “I can’t tell you how I hate to hear you say that.”

“Even if I feel it?”

“Even if you feel it don’t say it,” she begged.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

But she did know. It was because she must feel him equal to her. She must have the sense of complete comradeship. For when Mark’s bodily presence was not there, or John’s, immediately she was alone. She wondered if other women were as she was, so that she must put out her hand and touch solid flesh, meet eyes, hear a voice and words spoken, or else feel the world dropped away and herself alone. But she could not ask anyone.

“It would do no good if I did,” she thought, pondering. “I am as I have been born, and what others are can’t change me.”

But looking ahead with that prescience which came over her at times she saw herself walking through the unreached spaces of her life, and she was always alone. Mark was not there, nor any child, nor friend. She hung back from that lonely march, occupying herself with this bright present. That vision meant, perhaps, nothing at all. In any life, perhaps, the years ahead looked different, more formidable, than the known present.

She must be, she was, like any other woman. She cooked and sewed, she read and played the piano and listened to Mark. She took care of John and began to tell him his first stories, to which he listened with eager half-understanding. She let Jane talk to her with sad pleasure of her life as a girl in London, a kitchen maid in a big household, whose master came during the war to Canada, because he was too old to fight, and having married late he had no sons to give to England, and he decided to emigrate with all his daughters and servants.

“Twelve servants in all,” Jane said with mournful satisfaction, “and he nigh burst a blood vessel, Mum, over the war because he was too old to go. So we left England, and he brought the carriage and horses as well, because he thought the motion of motor cars was bad for babies. He had his ideas, Mum. And then he lost his money and suffered somethin’ terrible, Mum. I do feel that sorry for the rich. The poor, Mum, we’re used to nothin’. But it’s cruel hard for the rich to be poor. It’s best to be used to nothin’. Then you’re thankful for the little you get.”

She looked at Jane’s meager honest face and felt guilty because she had so much.

In January the postman brought her a thin blue envelope stamped in Paris.

“A furrin letter, Mrs. Keening,” he said.

It was from David Barnes, a curt question scrawled across the page.

“What are you wasting all this time for?” he demanded, his writing square and black across the blue paper.

She smiled and crushed the letter in her hand and threw it away. Her child would be born in June. John was growing. Her home was tended and her garden in the spring would be filled with flowers so that to those who walked up the street the brightness of the flowers shining against the wood would be as gay as flags flying. Now that she was at home all day her old friends came in, dropping onto the couch by the grate fire, or in the spring, which came so soon, upon a garden bench Mark had made, talking and gossiping, sighing over work to be done. She listened to them, smiling, saying little. Though they were women, they seemed still to be the children she remembered them, eager to be done with duties, eager for simple play at games, at the pictures. She loved them with compassion,, talking with them of their problems, half ashamed that she had none to offer in exchange. The winter slipped away and it was early spring. And still she was resolute in her happiness.

Lucile said gratefully, “It’s nice to have you at home once in a while, Sue. Last summer every time I ran in you were away.”

“I was taking some lessons,” Susan answered. She was digging around a pansy bed and Lucile was sitting in the new grass, idle beside her.

“Was that what you were doing!” Lucile’s small gray eyes grew shrewd.

“What else?” asked Susan simply. “I went to David Barnes every day all summer.

“I knew that,” said Lucile. “I must say we all wondered. He has the worst reputation.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Susan.

“Oh, my dear!” cried Lucile. “Don’t you know about Vannie Blaine? Why, everybody says she was his mistress! That’s why she left her husband. They say she thought of course he’d marry her. But he didn’t, though there was a child. That sort don’t marry anybody. Artists don’t behave like other people, I guess.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Susan.

David Barnes was a pair of hands, sensitive, blunt, moving, strong. He was a brain looking out of sullen dark blue eyes. He was an angry voice crying to her out of his own wilderness.

Jane was coming in the gate. “Well, you’re lucky to have help in the house,” said Lucile. “I’ve got to go. The baby’ll be awake. I wish I could get a girl. Mark must be doing awful well.”

“I pay for Jane,” said Susan, and wished she had not. What did it matter who paid for Jane? But Mark would not like anyone to think he did not pay for everything.

“You can’t keep that up,” said Lucile with decision. “You’ll find that out when you have two. Besides, Sue, you want to be careful not to spoil Mark. Goodness, things have come to a pass if we have to earn the money and have the children, too!”

“I want six,” said Susan, smiling. Under her fingers a crown of yellow pansies stood up in a gay circle.

“You’re crazy,” said Lucile. “I have three, and I never have a moment to myself. Well, goodbye, Sue.”

“Goodbye, dear,” said Susan, peaceably.

Alone again she pondered over Lucile. The town was full of Luciles. A little fatter, a little thinner, old or young, she was everywhere. How did women grow so alike? Or if they were different, they were like Mark’s mother, silent and alone, and seemingly friendless, or they were like Mary, sullen and young. Her own mother was only a sort of Lucile. And all these Luciles lived childish, haphazard years, disconnected from life as it really was, clamoring for a romance which bewildered, harassed men did not know how to give them.

Last night Mark had sighed against her shoulder. “You’re so restful. I sink into you somehow and you’re still and deep and warm. You never demand anything, Sue. Sure you’re happy?”

“Sure!” she had said….

For every moment of life was her own. “Not a moment your own,” Lucile had said. But all her moments belonged to her life. This moment, for instance, her hands warm in the soft moist earth, was part of her life. In an hour she would be cooking luncheon and that hour also was her own life.

Jane was bringing John out of the house, and she hesitated.

“I want to ask you something, Mum,” she said.

“Yes?” said Susan.

“When the little one comes, shan’t you be wantin’ me reg’lar?”

“I don’t think so, Jane,” said Susan gently. “We haven’t much money and it isn’t as if I didn’t love to do my own work.”

“I thought maybe you’d be sculpturing again, Mum.”

Susan paused. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t say now.”

“Ah, well,” said Jane, “I’ll just wait. It’ll come to you.”

She stooped and took John’s hand and together they went out of the gate, her long black skirts flapping against her thin legs in the spring wind. But Susan, lifting her head, saw the old flash of long empty corridors, ahead. The street, the house, the budding trees, were suddenly as unreal as the painted backdrop in a theater. Then she struck her trowel resolutely into the earth and it all grew real and so she held the moment still her own.

On the tenth day of June she gave birth to a daughter, whose name, she had decided, was to be Marcia. And Mark, tiptoeing into the hospital cell in creaking shoes, found her smiling.

“You look like a million dollars,” he whispered. “If anybody had told me you were a woman who’d just had a baby, I’d laugh!”

She pulled back a blanket and showed Mark the small girl, dark and black-haired. “I have the technique now,” she boasted, laughing. “I know exactly how to do it. There are going to be four more, Mark!”

“I’ll have to hustle for them,” he said.

He sat a long time staring at the tiny face, deep in contented sleep. She did not ask him of what he thought, not caring quite enough to trouble to know. Besides, she knew him so well. Mark would not be thinking anything very strange. She was drenched in easy content, steeped in it. Some double instinct in her was nearly satisfied, more satisfied than she had been in many months. She had felt the solidity of Marcia’s shape with more than a mother’s content. It was a beautiful and perfect body, every line right, and she had made it. She sighed, smiling, and fell asleep.

Waiting quietly to be allowed to go home, she thought, hours upon end, of everything and of nothing. She lay receiving into herself anything that stopped, like a wandering bird flying past, to lodge itself in her brain. It was the pause that comes after creation. There would be something else. One day she would get up out of this narrow white bed and go back to all that had been, and the more that she knew waited for her. But until then she could be as she was, receptive, waiting. Her mother and father came each day, never together. Her mother said little. She sat and held Marcia with a simple pleasure, broken only to ruminate aloud after long pondering, “She doesn’t look so much like you as she does like Mary did when she was born.”

And her father, glancing at Marcia, said briskly, “I suppose she’s like any other child. Still, here’s a poem—To Marcia on Her Birth.” He cleared his throat and read it aloud. When he had finished he said, “Question is, would you rather have the twenty dollars they might pay me for it, or would you rather have the poem?”

“Oh, the poem!” said Sue, laughing.

“Might as well have both,” he replied. “Take all you can get, I say—there’s precious little, all in all…. Sue, when I retire I’m going to the South Seas, whether your mother will go or not.”

She laughed again and reached for the poem. As long as she could remember he had talked of going to the South Seas. As a tiny girl it had troubled her because her mother believed him and had cried every time, “Oh, Danny, what would I do there?” And in her mother’s alarm she had trembled with insecurity. But as years went on her mother ceased to hear him.

“I’ll put this among my precious things,” she said.

He was pleased, but he only growled, “I have another copy, anyway.”

And Mary came in the last day, home from her first year in college, and bent over Marcia, a new composed Mary, very mature and detached, in a dark blue suit with a white blouse and a small dark hat.

“She looks healthy,” she said carelessly, and sitting down she lit a cigarette with ostentation.

“Dad said anything about me?” she inquired, her eyebrows lifted.

Susan shook her head.

“He will,” said Mary. “He’s furious with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to finish college. I want to get a job. College is so bourgeois now.”

She blew a ring o£ smoke, and another, and another.

“What does Mother say?” Susan asked cautiously.

“Oh, Mother,” said Mary. “She hasn’t an idea in her head.” She flicked the ash with her little finger. “It isn’t as though I’d be content just to settle down and marry,” she went on. “I want to get out into life.”

Susan looked down at Marcia, now curled in her arms.

“This is life, too,” she said.

“Oh, well,” said Mary, “but not my sort.” She got up restlessly, a straight dark girl with a cold clear exact profile and the small tight red mouth. The shape, the look, of her mouth never changed. In childhood she had had the same shaped mouth. It was not larger now, not fuller, nor more passionate. “Susan, I’m not asking favors, but if Dad says anything, just say I know my own business, will you?”

“If you’re sure you do,” said Susan doubtfully.

“If I don’t, nobody else does,” Mary said. “Well, goodbye, Sue! It’s a swell baby!”

She lay a little exhausted after Mary was gone. Mary used up the very air about her.

A day or two later her father said moodily, staring at Marcia, “I’m not sure I don’t wish you hadn’t another boy. Women are damned hard these days. Your sister’s got radical notions—wants to live her own life and go to New York and get a job. You can tell a boy to go to hell, but you can’t tell a girl that, and I don’t know what else to do with Mary.”

She said nothing, not knowing what she ought to say. In a flash of memory she heard Mary striking the wrong note again and again on the piano, with determination, not knowing she was wrong.

So their lives drifted in upon her and out again, and she was bound to all of them partly and to none of them altogether. She got up at last, and with Mark beside her, carrying Marcia, went back to her own home. John and Jane were at the door for welcome. The house stood sturdy and accustomed and dear to the sight and she entered it gladly.

But the instant she was there, in the midst of all the familiar and the warm possessions, her heart fluttered in her breast and something moved in her, as Marcia had moved before she was born, a creature confined in her and yet apart. She was not restless at all, she was happy, for she had a nature made for happiness, being easily absorbed in every passing object. An unexpected yellow rose open on the vine over the porch was as absorbing to her as the news in the paper last week of the award to David Barnes of five thousand dollars for his new Titan, Christopher Columbus, which the city of New York wanted to buy. She was as enchanted by these things as she was by the news of the discovery of the North Pole, or as she would be by Marcia’s first tooth. But she knew, not so much by knowledge as by instinct, that she could comprehend infinitely more happiness than she now had in everything, and that she was capable of a profounder peace than the peace of this life with which she was nevertheless quite content.