This Proud Heart (31 page)

“None of you understands Susanne,” Blake said. “She’s not in the least independent. Are you, Susanne?”

Mary smiled. “No more theories, Susan?”

“None at all,” said Blake for her, boldly. “She’s the most female of her species.”

“I always suspected it,” said Mary, her small mouth twisting. “Don’t trust her! She’ll sneak up on you yet and have a baby. She was always wanting babies.”

“It’ll be grounds for divorce if she does,” Blake declared. “I married one woman named Susan Gaylord—not Susan Gaylord et al.”

They were sparring back and forth, laughing, sharp, absurd. Mary was the sort of woman Blake knew at once, and though she had never seen him before she was completely familiar with him. Susan sat watching them, smiling, aware of bewilderment, as though they were laughing at her. She felt clumsy and slow-witted and dark. When Mary was gone she asked Blake humbly, “Why did you marry me, Blake?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said, his eyes teasing.

“Do you think Mary is pretty?” she asked. The room was twilight and she could not see his face.

He reached for a cigarette and the light of the match flared on his narrow handsome face, set into sudden cautiousness.

“Is she?” he mused. “I don’t know. She’d be easy for me to draw. She has lines. But she’s not a bit like you.”

She wanted to cry out, “She was an ugly child, you know, Blake.” She wanted to say, “Mary was really a horrid girl when she was young.” Then the discovery of such ungenerosity in herself frightened her. Loving Blake made her strange to herself. She had never had such thoughts before about Mary. It was terrifying to see what she really was. She did not speak. Instead she sat thinking quickly, “I can give Mary something pretty now—something really expensive and pretty. Blake is so generous to me with money.”

“Let’s have the lights.” Blake leaped to his feet. “I hate dark rooms.”

The room burst into light. He leaned over her chair.

“What are you thinking about?” he demanded.

“I was thinking I would like to give Mary a nice present,” she said simply.

He laughed down at her, but his gray eyes were sharp and bright.

“You’ve been thinking bad thoughts about her,” he said. “You are ashamed of yourself!”

“How did you know?” she asked, opening her eyes very wide.

“Simple Susan!” he said, and laughed again.

“Am I simple?” she asked humbly. “Too simple for you, Blake?” She wished he would stop laughing. Why did he laugh at her so often?

“Good people are always simple,” he declared. He was still leaning over her, looking into her eyes.

“Mary—” she began.

“Mary,” he said, “is like any other woman. You are not. And that’s all.”

“Marbles—” old Mr. Kinnaird was saying. She and Blake were at Fane Hill for a week in August during a sudden swelter of heat. Blake had turned one morning in disgust from the clay.

“Everything sticks to my hands,” he said. “Get ready, Susanne. Fane Hill’s better than this. The house is big enough so the old boy won’t trouble us much.”

“I’d like to know him better,” Susan said. She leaped to her feet. The thought of trees made her pant.

“Oh, you can’t know him,” said Blake. He was washing his hands meticulously and he put a little scent on his palms because clay left an odor he disliked.

They were gone from the house in an hour, and she was sitting under a great elm tree, a cool glass in her hand, listening to old Mr. Kinnaird. Blake was lying on the grass, his eyes shut, his arms and legs flung in graceful exhaustion.

“Marbles,” old Mr. Kinnaird said, stirring his tall glass carefully with a long-handled silver spoon, “cannot be understood in a lifetime. I suppose I know as much about marbles as any man living. I do not simply sell—I keep the finest back, to study them, to understand them, to give them at last into hands that know.”

He might have been made of his own marble, she thought. He sat there under the trees, in the shadows moved by the gentle wind, very thin and upright in his creamy flannels. Across one long narrow white shoe lay a small smooth black terrier, cocking an ear in fitful sleep.

“By the way,” the dry silvery old voice was saying, “if you wish to work in marble, my dear, I should be only too glad—I have some Italian marble I have saved for years, thinking Blake might turn to marble one day. But he doesn’t.”

“My stuff won’t,” Blake murmured, and did not open his eyes.

She felt a faint movement of interest in some vague part of her being.

“I’d like to see it,” she said, and added, “that is, some time.”

Blake yawned nicely, without looking at all unprepossessing. “I hate the country,” he murmured. “It makes me into a dullard. I’m going to sleep.”

He threw his arm across his eyes and dropped into light instant slumber.

“Why not now?” Mr. Kinnaird said. There was an eagerness in him that he had not showed before, and she rose.

They left Blake asleep on the grass and they wandered along a shadowy lane.

“I keep all my fine pieces together here,” he was saying. “I look at every shipment and choose what I will not sell. These pieces I present—”

He took a key from his pocket and opened the door of a great unpainted wooden shed at the end of the lane. Inside were blocks of rough marble of all sizes.

“All waiting,” he said gently. “Would you like to choose one
,
my dear? I brought David Barnes here once and he took three—a large one for a Titan and two small ones. He is making his Edison from one of my marbles.”

She walked among the pieces restlessly. Within her something stirred again.

“You must not choose at once,” he said. “Whenever you are ready, here they are. Marble cannot be chosen quickly.”

“I know that,” she said. She ought to say more and could not. She was glad when he locked the door, and still she felt the restlessness stirring in her, like prophecy of pain.

“You know Blake is wrong about marble,” Mr. Kinnaird was saying. “It’s the only stuff for the real sculptor—not clay. It’s only the great who can use hard stone. Blake’s afraid of it.” She looked at him. His face was tranquil and cold as he spoke of his son. “Blake’s stuff,” he went on, “wouldn’t hold up in marble. You’ve got to have an inward solidity or the marble won’t take it. No, marble is only for the plain—that is, the eternal.”

She listened, wondering that he knew this. But she did not answer. Deep in her being something was stirring. She was quickening as for child.

On the first cool day of early autumn she went alone one day to the Halfred Memorial Hospital to see the thing she had made. She thought once or twice of telling Blake of it, and then she did not. She was afraid for Blake to see it. She had made it so long ago that she could not trust her memory of whether it was good or bad now. She wanted to see it first alone.

On a cool afternoon in late September she went there and people were coming in and out, and she went in at one of the doors and stood in the hall quietly, looking…. They were there, the people she had made, set forever in immutable bronze. Painting could be destroyed by time, books moldered and died and passed away, and music was silenced, but what she made, good or not, had to endure. She looked at them with solemnity, because they were more eternal than herself.

Then, as she looked at them, they seemed clumsy and large. Were they so, or had she grown used to Blake’s attenuated slant-sided figures? She had made these people before she ever saw Blake. They were huge, the man’s shoulders broad, the woman’s breasts full. She could hear Blake say banteringly, “Hopelessly realistic, my Susanne!” Why did they seem so alive, then? The dark bronze shone with their life, the light fell upon them, moving, heaving with life. Two girls came in and stood beside her, staring, chewing gum.

“The woman looks awful sad, don’t she!” she heard one whisper to the other.

“Yeah,” the other said. “It kinda makes you want to cry.”

If Blake had been there he would have laughed to hear them.

She turned away and went home. She did not even ask if Blake were in. She went into her own room and shut the door. She took off her street clothes and bathed and wrapped herself in a satin robe and lay down on a couch. Blake had put mirrors at angles opposite to her, and she saw herself reflected again and again, smaller and smaller, until the room seemed full of pretty idle women, wrapped in ivory satin, lying outstretched upon creamy satin couches. She lifted her hand languidly. It had grown soft and white as her hands had never been. Her hands—her hands! And glancing at the mirror she saw lifted innumerable pretty hands, languid and white. She turned away from the women and buried her face in her arms.

When Blake came in she had not moved. She heard him come in. He stood beside her and still she did not move. Then she felt his grasp on her shoulders turning her over to him. His hands were quick and hard and they always hurt her a little when they touched her, as though they were sharp.

“Why, you’re not asleep!” he cried. “I thought you were asleep.”

She shook her head, and he sat down. In the mirrors tall handsome slender men sat down and leaned over pretty women.

“What is it?” he asked.

But he did not wait for her answer. His gray eyes flickered as he looked at her. “You’re beautiful,” he said abruptly.

In the mirrors the men bent and seized the women into their arms. Over his shoulder she looked at them. All the men were Blake, but none of the women was she—no, she did not know the women.

Her life, which had always seemed simple and whole, was now a conglomerate of fragments, all shining, all momentary. There was nothing to link these pieces together. They were not bound together into a life. She walked from one room to another and all the many rooms made no house in which her soul could live. She had everything. There was really nothing to be imagined which she did not have. Blake loved her passionately. She was his beloved. John and Marcia came home and she was their mother and she listened while they talked.

“I caught fifty-six fish and we ate them,” John said. “I wish you had come to see me, Mother.”

“I swimmed and swimmed.” Marcia, brown as bronze, swam around the room.

Jane, returning, brought jars of jelly and fruit. “I left the balance of it in the cellar at home,” she said.

“But why, Jane?” Susan asked. “Nobody’s going there.”

“I dunno,” Jane answered. “I felt to do it. I cleaned everything good. It’s like heaven there—so quiet.”

These walls of Blake’s house were suddenly strange around her.

“How is the new well?” she asked.

“Wunnerful, Mum,” said Jane. “The water’s sweet and cold.”

She did not speak. If Mark had drunk that sweet cold water he need not have died. But then there would not have been all this life with Blake. She could not think of herself now without Blake.

She was Blake’s beloved and he was hers.

“Put on your dark gold dress tonight, Susanne,” Blake said. They were going out to dance. “You ought always to wear dark gold, my sweet. And let me do your hair. Everybody’s coming back to town and everybody wants to know whom Blake Kinnaird has married. You know I always said I wouldn’t marry anybody, Susanne—damn your lovely eyes!” And she had gone as Blake’s beloved, holding herself proudly, and proud to see these gay and beautiful people surrounding Blake. Blake’s arm was about her lightly.

“Susanne, Susanne!” he presented her to them all. Women’s eyes looked at her curiously, coldly, but men’s eyes were hot. She looked at them all alike and scarcely spoke.

She would never be able to speak to them, she thought, watching them, listening to them. She could not understand what they said. Blake understood. Blake tossed their brittle talk back to them. Women came up to him abruptly, throwing their scraps of glittering talk at him, their eyes ardent. The eyes of all the women were ardent upon Blake. Their eyes made a pool of warmth about him. And he was like a shining silvery thing, darting through their warmth, toward them, away from them, evading, eluding, smiling. None could touch him. They put out their hands while they talked, but he moved away, as though he did not know a hand was about to touch his arm, his hand.

“Blake can take care of himself,” she thought. Then she thought, wondering, “But he loves it—he loves every one of these women a little.” Sitting there quiet in the midst of their incessant fluttering and darting and preening, she wondered again, without humility, with nothing but pure wonder, why he had ever married her.

“Did you have a good time?” Blake asked her at four o’clock in the morning when they were going to bed. He was a little drunk and he turned back her head and kissed her throat over and over. She lay passive and considered.

“I think I did,” she said seriously. “Only the strange thing is I can’t remember any of their faces.”

“You’re a little drunk,” he said, laughing.

But she had drunk nothing all evening. She had only watched them, listening, wondering.

“Susanne, come here!” Blake was commanding her. She went to him docilely. She was Blake’s beloved and he was hers, though she did not know why. But this, too, was only a fragment….

Once Michael came to see her. He came alone and she was alone, too. He was entirely a man, she saw immediately. All of the beautiful boy was gone. The Christ look was gone as though it had never been. The blond hair was darker and smoother. He wore a small mustache and his body had thickened. He did not mention Mary at all or that she had been with him in Norway.

“I’m having an exhibition—my fjords,” he said. “I’ve done nothing else all summer but rocks and water and nudes—mostly rocks and water. There is something about a woman’s soft body on a wet black rock and the surf pounding toward her—You’d swear she was about to be crushed. You want her to be mangled and crushed.” He paused. “I keep painting that sort of thing just now,” he said carelessly. “One does what one must—” He got up and walked to the window of the long drawing room and looked out upon the river.

“Don’t you paint horses any more?” she asked. “You used to paint running horses so beautifully. I could feel the streaming wind.”