This Proud Heart (22 page)

“I don’t want deep roots,” said Mary. “I don’t want to grow anywhere, in a house, tied to it. It’s no good your talking, Susan. We’ll never see things the same. You’ve always been rather obvious, with all your ability. You take this little town seriously—you keep on with the girls you always knew—that awful Lucile!—just as when you were in college you loved being president of your class. You waste yourself. Mark was all right but he wasn’t half good enough for you.”

“Don’t talk about him,” Susan muttered. She clenched her hands on the edge of the piano bench.

“I don’t want to talk about him,” said Mary. “It’s simply that you’re an example to me.” She paused, looking at her narrow pointed nails. “You’ve thrown away your gift,” she said. “You shut yourself up here—why, you ought to get out and travel and see people, make connections! You’ll never get anywhere like this. Nobody knows you. If I had half your gift, I’d be miles ahead of where you are—of where you’d be if you hadn’t stopped to marry Mark and have the children and fuss over the house like any ordinary woman.”

“I have to have everything,” said Susan. “I can’t narrow myself the way you do. I had to have babies. I had to feel life pouring in on me—not just overhead, like rain, but deep, like a well bubbling up. You won’t understand. Poor Michael!”

“Oh, Michael and I will keep on,” said Mary. Her clear voice was passionless. “Nobody refuses a man nowadays—absolutely, that is, unless of course he’s sickening. And Michael’s really sweet. I want him, in a way.”

“Mary!” Susan protested.

“What?” asked Mary, opening her eyes.

“I shall warn Michael,” Susan said firmly.

Mary smiled and got up. “I’m going to say good night before we quarrel,” she said. “Poor Susan!” She bent and kissed Susan’s hair quickly. “I used to be so jealous of you, Sue. You were always much prettier than I, and you could always do everything a hundred times better. But I’m not jealous any more. I’d rather be myself, at last. I know what I want.” She was going upstairs as she talked, as positive as a sword, young and hard and inexorable. “I’m alive,” she said, “and you are dead.”

She was gone, but the words remained, and Susan heard them echoing over and over again. She dead, who had been suffering as it was not in Mary to suffer! Dead people could not suffer. She was alive at this moment as Mary did not know how to be alive. She felt everything, the falling coals of the dying fire, the music she had been playing, the white stars in the black sky. She lived in every instant of her being, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, as Mary had no power for living. All this life she had chosen and lived was only the beginning for something, the foundation for something to come. For what was to come! She put on her coat and went out of the house, across the frozen snowy ground to the barn. She lit the lamp, and put a match to the wood in the big sheet-iron stove she had bought and set up. It made quickly a circle of warmth and in this she stood. She worked until midnight without a moment’s rest, feeling the power flowing from within her, down her arms, from her hands. She had made these creatures with knowledge, this man, this woman, these children. She knew their bodies intimately, and she created them as though their surface covered flesh and their flesh bones and organs of life.

At midnight she stepped back, and pulling forward a log she sat down and looked at them. They were now to be clearly seen, for she had made their shapes. There remained no more to be done except the finishing of what was already plain. And as she looked, she saw that out of her own life she had made them. The man, not aware of what she had done, she had made to look like Mark, and she knew the turn of the woman’s head for her own. She got up quickly and went and stood under the man’s figure and looked up. Yes, it was Mark’s face. How strange a thing it was that when he was alive she had not been able to make him seem alive, so that the head on which she had worked then was a death mask now! But here, though he was dead, was Mark alive. The look she knew so well was in his face, a look half shy, a little hesitant, not bold but kind and good and with the strength of goodness in it. But the woman was looking away still.

If Mark were here beside her, she thought, he would be bitterly hurt again.

“You’ve made them us,” he would say slowly, and then he would ask, “Why do you look away from me, Sue?”

But he was not here. He would never be here again. When the stab of bright pain died into the dark she remembered to think, “He will never be hurt again, either.” And she thought again, “I would have hurt him again and again, because I have to make all I do out of my own life. It’s my only material.”

Yes, this was what Mary could never understand. Travel, the casual come and go of strange faces, people for whom she cared nothing and who did not care for her, these were not her life. She had to live not in that passing world but in her own deeps.

She put out the lamp and smothered the coals in the stove with ash and covered her work with the old sheet and went out. The sky was black but the snow shone faintly in the darkness. There was no wind. She stood a moment, aware of intensest loneliness.

“Am I born to be alone?” she asked herself. She felt the air cold and dry as she trudged across the snow. The house was as silent as the night, and alone she crept up the stairs and into her solitary room. She lay awake a long time. Mark, it had come to her, was safe from any hurt now that she could give him. She need not have to think again, “I must be careful—I must not say what I did yesterday. I saw his eyes cloud—I must wait.” She could go on unthinking, along her own road, because love was laid in its tomb and could not any more be hurt by what she was. If she were sometimes desolate still, sometimes, also, she was only free. And in this freedom she finished her people. And so she accepted loneliness.

H
ER FIGURES WERE FINISHED
and she was ready to send them away. She was glad that her work was craft as well as art, because there ran in her veins more than the blood of the musician who had been her grandfather. Her mother’s father had been a carpenter and a builder of houses, and his sturdy knowledge of tools and their use gave her the perception of wood and stone and a value of fine tools. She had not many tools, but she had never bought a cheap or worthless one. And the more she worked the more she knew what tools she lacked and which she would buy first, when she could. She was satisfied that her power was to take rough and common material and hew it and shape it with her hands as well as her brain. She had to know not only how to build the human body in its fleshly shape, but she had to know what skeleton of wood, what armature, was of size and strength enough to hold upon its frame the huge mass of final clay. She had to know how to saw and hammer and nail and how to twist wires together and of what proportion a base must be. She had to calculate with numbers as well as with dreams.

She was wrapping her figures in swaths of coarse sacking upon soft old rags, ready to ship. She was standing on a step-ladder, reaching the heads of the man and woman. She had called in a carpenter to make the crate, which stood in two halves ready. When she had every part protected, she would put the crate on like a shell and nail the halves together with strong strips of wood. She was singing under her breath, “Oh, that will be—glory for me—” and paused, to think, startled, “It’s the first time I have sung that, and I didn’t know I was singing.” Then she heard the clatter of the barn door, and when she looked down there stood Michael looking up at her, his head thrown back over the collar of his fur coat.

“You didn’t tell me you’d made such a huge thing,” he cried reproachfully.

“You didn’t ask me,” she flung down on him.

“I wish you’d unwrap it so I can see it,” he called.

“I won’t,” she replied cheerfully. “It’s done and it’s going.”

And indeed she could not bear to delay it a day. It was late. She had written Jonathan Halfred at last, and he had answered quickly that she was to take what time she needed. The space was waiting for her. She had telegraphed him this morning in triumph, “My people are coming,” and he had telegraphed back, “They shall be met with honors.” She tied the last bond and came down the steps.

“It has to be cast yet, but if you go to the Halfred Memorial Hall, a few months from now, you’ll see it.”

“I’m going to live in New York, as a matter of fact,” he said casually. “Here, let me help you lift that.”

He lifted one end of the crate with her and then the other.

“Just hold them together a moment, until I get the first strip across,” said Susan. The sound of her hammer rang out, quick and clear, hitting each nail true. Mark had said once, “You’re the only woman I ever saw who can hit a nail square every time.”

“Saw Mary in New York the other day,” Michael said, raising his voice.

“Did you?” Susan answered.

“We had dinner together and went to Central Park and rode round and round in a hansom cab in the moonlight.”

Susan held her hammer in mid air.

“Did you mind that Mary wouldn’t marry you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Michael slowly. “Perhaps I don’t, if she will let me hang about as much as I like.”

“Will she?” Susan asked curiously.

“Yes,” said Michael in a low voice.

She began to hammer again quickly. Michael was changed. He was not any more the bright-haired boy whose head she had shaped, so that his mother could remember forever how beautiful he had once been.

“Are you staying here in the country?”

“No,” he said. “I came down to get all my stuff. I don’t know when I’m coming back.”

He helped her finish the crating, and then he took a brush and a pot of black paint and drew in bold swirls the address she gave him.

“Andrew Kenley, The Kenley Foundry, Mount High, New York.”

He helped her fit casters under the crate and roll it to the door of the barn. Tomorrow morning a farmer whom she knew would stop and take it in his truck. As far as she could she had finished it. They walked through the twilight to the house.

“Will you come in?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I want to get back to town early tomorrow.”

He was full of impatience. She could feel it an edge in his voice, in his look, in everything he did. She saw his head and profile clear and black against the sky behind the open door where she stood.

“Then goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye,” he answered.

If she did his head now, no one would know it was the same. She was not sure she knew enough about him now to do it. She stood, letting him go. He was not her life—no, not now. She missed something, some clear pure quality he had been able once to pour out like a radiance. He was full of Mary and the radiance was gone. She stood watching him leap into his car and whirl away, and then she went slowly into her house.

When she saw the crate set into the truck and go swinging down the dusty country road it was as though everyone had gone away and left her behind. In the morning sunshine of an early spring day she stood in the pause of a new loneliness. John and Marcia had run out to see the truck and they stopped beside her. Then she heard John say to Marcia, “Let’s go back to the boat.”

“What boat?” Susan asked.

“We’re making it,” said John.

“Where?” she asked.

“In the orchard,” he said impatiently. “You don’t ask such a lot of things every day, Mother!”

He did not wait for her answer. He was hop-skip-jumping across the grass, according to some secret pattern of his own.

“I go wiv John,” said Marcia, and trotted away.

She stood looking at them, proud of them, half sad, cut off from them somehow. She would not be able to take Mark’s place with them, however she tried. She had not Mark’s power to enter into their small busy world. And they could not enter hers. Perhaps there was no real companionship in children. She had wanted them desperately. She did not forget that she had begged Mark for them. If he had lived she would have again and again wanted a child, because when she was carrying a child in her body there was the satisfaction of creation going on in her being. But children were born and they grew and went away. Whatever she made was completed by the very law of its being, and went away from her and ceased to be a part of her. And each time she was left alone again.

She went into the barn and slowly and with pains she polished her tools, oiled them and put them away. Then she cleared away the refuse of her work, dusted and swept and ordered. She took stock of her materials and made notes of what she must order freshly. When she left the barn at noon, everything was ready for the next work she would do, and she did not lock the barn door.

She was already looking restlessly into herself for what she must do next, for mere work was now a necessity to her. She took a long walk in the afternoon, and all she saw she looked at through a light of question—a farmer ploughing a field, a hawk tearing a dead rabbit, a pheasant startled from the nest. The nest was there at her feet, a shapeless hollowed heap of grass, holding two tawny eggs. But it was all useless to her. There was no meaning in photography of these outward shapes. Meaning came from within herself. She might do the children for mere beauty, or she might as she had often thought of doing, carve the portrait in stone of her father’s irritable, beautiful head. But even these would not be integral in themselves if they did not come out of the inner necessity of her being.

She had wandered toward the far edge of Tramp’s Woods before she knew it, and now she plunged into its thicknesses. Above her head the young leaves already were dark enough for shadows, and fresh mosses were green under her feet. She stooped to pick a fern, its tendril curling and soft as a baby’s hair, and then she walked on toward the ravine. She came upon it soon, not where she and Mark had stood, but at another point where she had never been before. She looked down, still afraid, but she did not draw back as once she had. There was no one now to whom she could turn, whatever her fear. She sat down on a rock and gazed steadily down into the narrow green river that ran among the black rocks. But still she saw no meaning. These were not her materials, these trees and clouds, these fragile ferns at her feet. She must work in sturdier stuffs. Her material was people, not their bodies but their essence, of which the body was only the shape.