This Proud Heart (30 page)

“Is it, Blake?” She hated herself for her humility before him. She ought to say quietly, “I don’t agree with you, Blake.” But she could not say it now. Perhaps after a while she would be able to say she did not agree with him.

“When we get home, get another hat,” he said, “a larger one. You should avoid small hats.” Then he said with the secret warmth which could so excite her that instantly she forgot what he had not liked, “You’re beautiful—everything you wear must build into your beauty.” She had never thought of her face, her body, her eyes, her hands and the garments she must wear for beauty. He created her and he made her feel herself precious. That was why, perhaps, she humbled herself before him and listened to him. “Am I growing vain?” she asked herself, astonished. Blake was making out of her a woman she had never been. How strange to be vain!

But Blake was saying something. The ship had docked. “This is my beautiful Susanne, Father,” he was saying. “Susanne, he never leaves the country, so this is for love of you.”

A delicate-faced tall old man, very thin and narrow in a pale gray suit, took her hands in both of his. She felt the dryness of his palms, his lips were dry on her cheek, the look of his old pale eyes was dry and light upon her. His voice when he spoke was high.

“I have hoped my son would marry, my dear, for a long time. I had a very happy marriage myself. Now I am glad he waited.”

She smiled, liking this tall, slightly trembling old man.

“These are my children,” she said, her hands on their shoulders.

“Yes, yes,” he murmured, looking away from them. “They must come to Fane Hill and spend the day.” But he did not take the hands John and Marcia put out, tentatively. Behind them Jane stood, in her decent black. She was very pale, and Susan thought in a parenthesis of her mind, “I ought to be ashamed. I never even thought of her being seasick.” But before she could speak Blake packed them into a huge car and they were driving through city streets bright with evening, until at last they reached a quiet quadrangle of houses by the river. The car stopped, a door on the street opened, and a man in livery came out.

“Are you coming in, Father?” Blake asked.

“No,” said old Mr. Kinnaird, “no, I’ll go back to Fane Hill. You’ll be fatigued. Besides, the city fatigues me. And the peaches are very fine. Linlay will bring you some in the morning. One of the terriers is ill. I must be getting back at once.”

They came out of the car and it drove noiselessly away. The children stood bewildered. She was suddenly strange herself, upon a strange street in a city she did not know. The moment lagged. She felt dazed, not knowing what next must come. Then she felt herself lifted quickly off her feet and set inside the threshold,

“You are in my house now, Susanne,” said Blake. She stood looking down a wide hall, very bare and beautiful. At the end was one of Blake’s paintings, an Indian woman standing alone in hard white sunlight in a square of bright desert. The sunlight seemed to stream from the canvas. Outside she could hear Marcia’s voice clamoring, “Lift me, too, Blake! Lift me into the door!”

But Blake shook his head, laughing. His arm was about Susanne’s shoulders, and he was hurrying her into the rooms. She looked back and saw the children hesitating in the hall.

“Come, darlings,” she cried.

But Blake commanded her. “Susanne! Here are your rooms.”

They were going upstairs. Behind her the children walked soberly, tiptoeing up the white marble stairs.

And Blake was saying to John, “You and Marcia and Jane are on the next floor.”

“Come with me, then,” Jane said, pushing them along before her.

Blake opened a wide door and Susan stood looking into the rooms he had made for her, enormous rooms, beautifully bare, graciously empty, the furniture pale and straightly built, the corners windowed, the light tempered.

“Nothing small or fiddly for my big Susanne,” Blake said. “I designed everything.”

“When?” she asked, staring into this hugeness.

“Oh, almost at once—I think I began the day after we met,” Blake said, smiling at her, watching her.

She could not think of anything to say. She stood gazing about her.

“Do you like it?” Blake asked.

“Yes,” she whispered, “it’s strange to me—but it’s beautiful.” She waited a moment, and then she said simply, “I do thank you, Blake, for loving me.”

E
VERYTHING IN THE HOUSE
, she thought, looking down the long narrow drawing room, was now in order. She had lived in Blake’s house weeks enough now to know when everything was ready for the day. At the end of the drawing room was a small formal garden and beyond the garden was the East River. Linlay, the Scotch gardener, came up from the country once or twice a week and saw to the plants around the pool. The chauffeur was to water between his visits. She had just been listening to Linlay’s complaints.

“Bantie don’t water half that he should, Ma’am. With your leave, I’ll speak to the maister.”

“Oh, no, Linlay,” she said quickly, “please don’t trouble my husband. I will speak to Bantie.” Next time—this afternoon when she was driving to the Metropolitan, she would remember to lean forward and say to young Bantie—She went alone almost every day to the Metropolitan. It was cool and empty and she could sit as long as she liked, pondering what she saw.

The house itself was very still in midsummer. The children had gone away to camp. Blake, in the first week, had said to her restlessly, “Don’t children go away to camps in the summer?” Certainly they should not be kept in town. Blake had been wonderfully generous about doing over the west end of the house for them, but it was hot. Besides, there was the morning she had found Blake in the drawing room holding his head in his hands, because John was leaping down the stairs.

“John!” she had called sharply, and had gone into the hall to meet him, flying at the last step. And then because of the innocence of his inquiring eyes she had not scolded him.

“Would you like to go to a camp?” she asked instead.

“Jane said she might take Marcia and me home,” he said, his voice tentative.

“This is home,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” he answered gently. “But I mean—you know—our real home.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I’d much rather you both went to camp and learned swimming and things.”

She worked with Jane for a week, getting them ready. Blake had been very good. He gave John an expensive fishing rod and explained about flies. There was almost nothing Blake did not know. But last week John had written to her privately: “Will you please send me an ordinary fishing rod and don’t tell Blake as the fellows say the ordinary kind like everybody has here are better, and we use worms.” So without telling Blake, and she would not for anything have told him, she had gone alone to a sports shop and sent a very ordinary-looking rod. Marcia was too young to write for herself. Every other week a prim official letter came announcing certain facts about Marcia, that she was quite well, that she was going to be a naturally good swimmer and rider, but that her appetite was capricious and she was a little willful. Susan asked, “Does Marcia seem at all homesick?” “No,” the prim letter replied, “Marcia speaks occasionally of her new father, but actually we should say she misses no one.”

And Jane, when they were both gone, said very firmly, “With all the help in this house, Mum, you don’t need me until the children come back. I’ll just go home and clean up good and put up the brambleberries to jelly.”

So she and Blake were alone in the house.

“Do you want to go away, Susanne?” Blake asked her.

“Do you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I love it here. I love this house—I love this city. Besides, I’ve some ideas I want to work out in terra cotta. New York is a wonderful place in the summer. Everybody is gone.”

But the city was full of people. She watched them often from her windows above the river. She was idle, idle. She was given up to loving Blake.

Blake was, in his moods, tireless in work. The top floor of the house was his studio and he had said on the first day when he led her there, springing ahead of her, “You’re to use it, too, Susanne—if you want to go on working, that is.”

“Of course I shall go on working,” she had answered, amazed. But she had not….

Then he had not seemed to hear her. He was showing her everything. He was proud of his house, and most proud of his studio which he had designed. There were the great windows whose curtains were so cunningly controlled by silken ropes and pulleys, the endless cupboards where his materials were kept, the drawing boards and tools—she had never in the bare barn or in the old
maître’s
haphazard useful studio dreamed of such luxury. She went upstairs often to watch him, but still she did nothing herself. With everything about her she could think of nothing she wanted to make.

Indeed, why need she hurry? It was sweet to live in Blake’s house, to feel herself Blake’s wife. It was nearly enough. When she had been married to Mark she was continually thinking of things beyond which she wanted to do. Now, even if Blake had been poor and she compelled to cook and scrub, she would not have wanted to do anything but be what she was, Blake’s beloved. But she could not imagine Blake poor.

“I still don’t feel I’m your wife,” she said again and again.

“It’s negligible,” said Blake in his gay voice, “a mere accident, allowed for convenience simply. The only reality is that you are my love.”

He piled the cushions on the great studio couch, and there she lay watching him work. He worked at such speed, whistling incessantly scraps of songs, stopping to mix a drink, to throw himself beside her for a passionate moment into which he could go, out of which he could come with such suddenness that she was left helpless and bewildered. His passion fled ahead of hers.

She wondered at times, watching him, that she was content. She seemed to have no more desire to create, or if she had, perhaps he satisfied it with what he did so swiftly, so blithely. Beside him her work would seem thick and slow. He was then making what he called his gallery of moderns. Once or twice a week, when she opened the studio door he had a model there, young men or young women with thin dramatic bodies. He drew them off rapidly in a series of irregular concave surfaces, at once absurd and real.

“I don’t in the least understand how you do it,” she told him. “But I feel it is art.”

“It is the only art today,” said Blake carelessly.

She looked at him. She ought to contradict him, if he were wrong. And he was wrong. There was no one art in any day.

“The only live art, that is,” he added, and whistled a shred of melody out of a rhumba they had danced on a roof the night before. He took her somewhere every night, among people they did not know, and together they looked down from among the stars upon miles and miles of little threaded lights on the earth beneath them.

She asked Blake, “I ought to go and see my parents. Why don’t I want to go? I thought I loved them—I do love them.”

He said, “I’m making you an honest woman. You never have really wanted to see them, but you’ve thought you ought to want to. Children naturally hate their parents.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said, surprised. She thought about it, puzzling. He could hit a truth sometimes, carelessly and accurately too.

“Then why don’t you go to see them? Why do I live perfectly contentedly without my father? Why won’t he even spend the night with us? Why are John and Marcia quite happy away from you?”

She did not answer. His face, when he was working as he was now, was very hard, as hard as the sharp-lined creatures he was making.

“You’re hard, Blake,” she said. “Why?”

“You don’t get anywhere unless you’re hard,” he answered, stepping back to stare at the mass he was striking into shape. “That’s the best thing we’ve got, we moderns—we’re hard.”

“No, but why?” she insisted.

“Ruthless love of beauty!” he said. “Pure beauty is hard.”

No, there was no softness in him. Even at his most passionate he was ruthless. Even his tenderness was hard…. What had his life been? She did not want to know. He never asked her of her life before he came, nor did she ever speak of it. They lived as though this were all. Perhaps it was.

She went to her own room and shut the door and wrote a long letter to her parents. “I am perfectly happy, darlings,” she wrote at the end, “and I’m coming home for a long visit one of these days.” Then she added, “Of course Blake is anxious to know you,” and then in a final postscript she added an old childish sentence, “Don’t forget I love you. Sue.” It was such a letter as she would not for anything have let Blake see.

Blake liked Mary at once.

Susan had written to Mary as soon as she came to New York and had no answer. Then suddenly at the end of weeks Mary came in casually, like any visitor. She sent in her name and sat waiting in the long drawing room. Blake, coming in, found her there and went to find Susan in her room, reading.

“Girl downstairs by the name of Mary says she’s your sister,” he said. “Good-looking girl—not a bit like you.”

She went out and there was Mary, all black and white, her pale hands crossed on her knees.

“Hello, Susan,” she said. “How ridiculous for you to be married to Blake Kinnaird!”

“Do you know Blake?” Susan kissed the cool smooth pale cheek Mary turned to her. Mary never kissed anyone. She merely turned her cheek to be kissed and looked away.

“No, but Michael does,” Mary said.

“Where is Michael?” Susan asked.

“We’re just back from Norway,” Mary said coolly. “He’s been painting rocks and water and things like that. He admires Blake immensely, but he laughed when he heard he’d married you. It must be rather different for you now, Susan. Michael said he couldn’t imagine Blake really marrying anyone. Well, at least you’ll be independent—he won’t want children and all that.”

Blake had come in, lighting a cigarette, and looking sidewise at Mary out of his long gray eyes. “What’s that about me?” he asked.

“I said Susan could keep her independence, married to you,” Mary said, as easily as though she had always known him. There was no shyness left in her now. She would perhaps be silent with women, but not with men.