This Proud Heart (32 page)

“I painted some wild horses around a pool in the desert,” he said. “Old Joseph Hart took it.”

“Tell me,” she begged him.

“Nothing,” he said impatiently. “I was out west and I’d never seen wild horses. People talked about them, but I never saw them. Then one night when I was sleepless I went out of my cabin and climbed a little sandy hill and there they were, nine of them, drinking from a pool at the bottom of the hill. One of them was black but the rest were all white. They felt me somehow. The black one felt me. He was the leader. He lifted his head and whinnied, and they were all off, galloping together behind the black one, in the moonlight.”

“I see it,” she said. “Oh, Michael!”

But he was lighting a cigarette.

“It will be interesting to see what you and Kinnaird do to each other,” he said. “One or the other of you will be changed. I can’t imagine his being anything else, though.”

“You aren’t married?” she asked.

“Lord, no,” he exclaimed. “It would be ruinous for me.”

“Why?” she asked, remembering how desperately once he had wanted to marry Mary.

“I don’t want to let anyone in that far,” he said. “I’m not strong enough for it. I see that, now. My entity would be disturbed. I wouldn’t feel what to paint.” He paused and added, “It’s different for you.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Oh, well—a woman—” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes? A woman?” she repeated.

“A woman is different,” he said. “They’re basically physiological.”

She was about to protest and then she did not. Last night in the darkness when Blake had gone to sleep she had lain quietly, spent and satisfied. Yes, she was still satisfied. She sat looking at Michael steadily, too honest to deny what she was.

She was Blake’s beloved.

One day David Barnes came stumping in. She and Blake were alone for lunch, and he made a third.

“You two,” he said, looking around the mirrored dining room. Here Blake had set into panels the diagonal mirrors he loved, so that the room was full of the three of them infinitely repeated. “Blake, I thought you’d be doing other things in Paris than getting married.”

“Ah, but Susanne,” said Blake lightly. “She’s the confounded sort of woman to whom you can’t propose anything but marriage—nothing else suits her type.” He picked the fragile bones of a small bird quickly, cleanly, as he talked. His thin hard hands were always deft. “God knows I didn’t want to be married,” he went on. “I tried everything else, didn’t I, Susanne? But it was marriage or nothing.”

“Blake!” cried Susan. “You asked me to marry you from the very first.”

“Ah,” said Blake, looking at Barnes, “she understood nothing until then. She is a stupid creature, as you know, Barnes!”

They laughed, and when she blushed they laughed again because they had made her doubtful of herself. Had she not understood Blake?

“I know you’re only teasing me,” she exclaimed. But she was not sure.

And she was not at all sure when after lunch Blake went away and she and David Barnes were alone.

“So you would be married, eh, Susan?” he said abruptly. He lit his pipe and stretched out his legs and cracked the joints of his big grimy hands. “I thought you were through with that and ready for work. Aren’t you ever going to begin to work? It’s because you’re a woman. Women don’t want to do real work.”

“Something in me wanted Blake,” she said honestly.

“Blake won’t be like that what’s-his-name. He won’t be kind and die young,” said David Barnes, and his eyes grew grim. “Blake’s going to live and live. He’ll let anybody die before he lets himself die.”

“If Blake died I would die, too,” she said.

“Ah,” said David Barnes, “you think so.”

She did not answer. In a moment she looked up to find him staring at her curiously as though he did not know her.

“What is it?” she asked. “What is wrong?”

“Don’t you feel any sense of guilt?” he asked.

“Guilt?” she repeated.

“Yes, guilt,” he said. “Guilt! Your life is passing and you are doing nothing.”

She shook her head. “I’m content to live,” she answered.

“Live!” he whispered. “You call it living! Then there’s no use talking to you yet.”

And very soon he went away.

She did not mind. She even pitied him a little.

“David Barnes lives in a box,” she said to Blake that night. “He has let his art kill his life. Life must come first, mustn’t it, Blake? Out of everything lived it comes at last, a flower and a seed.”

“Do you still think about art?” asked Blake. His gray eyes were laughing at her. “I thought you were through with all that—” Before she could do more than open her eyes at him, he said quickly, his eyes lighting, “Susanne, I thought of a gown today that I want to make for you—thin gold tissue on red—you know, the gold standing out stiff like this—and underneath the tight red.” He began to draw on one of the little paper pads he kept everywhere about the house. She leaned over him to look. She was beginning to love the clothes he designed for her. At first she had been shy when he dressed her, but now her body was his clay. To such use she gladly put herself. For she was Blake’s beloved and he was hers. She went on living her life, one bright fragment after another. It was only long after this that she remembered David Barnes had not once that day spoken to her of his Titans, or indeed of anything he was doing.

Blake said, “Christmas is nothing to me, my dear. Of course, take your children and go and visit your parents. You’ll be miserable unless you’re doing your duty—whereas I am miserable if I am doing it. So I shall not go and dine with my father. I shall let him dine alone at Fane Hill as he always does.”

“What will you do on Christmas, then, Blake?” she asked, troubled. It seemed wrong somehow to leave Blake on their first Christmas. But he disliked anniversaries. “Why do I want to be told about time?” he always demanded.

“There are hundreds of things I can do,” he said, “and I shan’t tell you any of them. All I say is that if you stay I beg you will not litter the house with trees and tinsels nor allow your children to heap me with gifts I don’t want.”

“Very well,” she replied quietly. She never quite knew whether or not Blake was serious in anything he said. She watched him continually that she might discover by sense or sight all that he meant, since merely to hear what he said was not enough to tell her.

It had come to her for the first time that she wanted to go away from him a little while. She could not bear to be away from him for a single night, yet she was beginning to feel exhausted. He kept her at some pitch that was not her own. She had grown thin, although she lived in this complete idleness. She wanted to go away from him and sit by a fire in a quiet old-fashioned house and hear nothing but homely sounds. Everything in Blake’s house was quick and keyed to his necessities. The servants were nervous and too deferential. She still did not know any of them. Even Jane was not herself. She had a little room of her own near the children and she had nothing to do with the other servants.

“Jane, we’re going to spend Christmas with my father and mother,” Susan said.

“John has been prayin’ for it,” said Jane.

“I want to rest,” said Susan slowly, “—though I don’t know from what.”

Jane opened her mouth, shut it again and went away to pack.

Once she had decided, the holidays were almost instantly there and then she clung to Blake again. “I don’t want to leave you,” she said. Out in the hall John was hopping up and down on one leg, and Marcia had on her new hat and coat. Of course she must go. The children would never bear the disappointment. But had she been alone she would not have gone. Blake was in her blood like a mad drink, like a sweet disease. She had closed her life to everything but him.

“Yes, you do want to leave me,” Blake said, his eyes glinting. “You want to go away from me.”

“Do I?” she exclaimed. “How do you know, Blake?”

“You are a little different, Susanne,” he said, “a very little. I feel it when I hold you. You do not quite yield up yourself. Go away and see how you miss me!”

“Shall you miss me, Blake?”

“Yes, of course I’ll miss you,” he said. “But I won’t mope for you—or anybody. I have a hundred things to do.”

He kissed her in his hard quick fierce fashion. “Now, go along,” he said. But his eyes fastened on her, sure of possession.

He loved her, but he had no tenderness for her.

She had been so long without tenderness, so long strung to the thin height of passion, that this house of her childhood was a world of comfort. She sank into the shabbiness of its old easy chairs and couches and wide old beds and faded curtains. When she saw her father at the door she suddenly wanted to cry. John went straight to the kitchen.

“It’s been a long time since I was in a kitchen,” he had said in the car, and Marcia had cried, “I never have been in a kitchen!”

“Yes, you have,” he said gravely, “but you don’t remember. I just barely can, myself.” Marcia ran after him.

She heard her mother’s excited laughter, “Well, I never—”

“I have a new coat and hat!” Marcia’s high voice cried.

Susan stood clinging to her old father, her lips trembling. “Why, Sue, my girl,” he said, patting her back.

“Father, I’ve had a hard time,” she wanted to say. But she had not, she thought, amazed at her untruthfulness. It was not true. It was only that she needed tenderness, that foolishly and vaguely she craved some sort of sympathy, though for what she did not know.

“I don’t know why I cry,” she said, half laughing, trying to find her handkerchief. “It’s so good to see you again, Dad. But you’re thinner.” He looked frail and old.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Well, your mother’s expecting you. Your room’s all ready. Marcia’s in Mary’s room. Mary won’t be home for Christmas—got other plans. I don’t understand that girl, Susan. Maybe you do. She doesn’t belong to us.”

“There are a lot of people like her,” she said. She did not want to talk about Mary. She kissed her father’s brown cheek and went into the kitchen to find her mother. She was at the table by the window, cutting slices of bread for the children, and she turned a softly withering cheek to Susan’s kiss. Jane was already peeling potatoes.

“You look just the same, Mother,” Susan said. Her mother’s stout compact body had not aged at all, nor was there any white in her faded blond hair. Only her face was a pattern of wrinkles, a loose withering of her once fair skin which gave her a look now of childish age, withering but unripe and unmellowing.

“I have my health,” her mother said. Then she looked at her. “You’re thin, Sue—I don’t know as I ever saw you so thin before. Well, you’ll pick up…. John looks more like Mark, don’t he? It’s his build more than his face.”

“I hadn’t noticed it,” Susan said. She glanced at John. Mark was too long dead, and she saw only John.

“I don’t suppose they even remember him,” her mother said mournfully. “His parents never got over it. They’ve just shut themselves up and don’t go anywhere. I don’t see them year in and year out, now they’ve stopped coming to church. They haven’t been to church since the Sunday Mark died. You remember he died on Sunday? People say they just gave up their faith when Mark died.”

“I didn’t know what day it was,” she said. She might, she supposed, go and see Mark’s parents. But why? When Mark died they had passed from her life. And what faith could she restore to them? She lived in this moment, only in moments of her own life.

The kitchen was hot and fragrant with the odor of spices. There were geraniums red in the window and the sun shone fulsomely upon them. Her mother was spreading brown sugar on the buttered slices.

“I believe I’d like some,” Susan said. When she was a little girl she had hurried home from school for bread and butter and brown sugar. She took the slice and bit into it.

“I didn’t know you liked bread and sugar, Mother!” cried Marcia.

“Of course I do,” Susan answered.

It was good and hearty and she ate it slowly to the last crumb as she went upstairs to her old room. The room was exactly the same, the blue checked gingham curtains and the blue counterpane and the rag rug on the floor. She sat down in the wicker armchair. All through her body she could feel the let-down of nerves and muscles, like the slipping strings of a violin strung too high and shrill. She was coming back to her own pitch. She wanted to sleep and sleep, not to have to speak or to listen to anyone. The children were safe and she need not think of them. Everything was safe in this house. She got up and took off the sable cloak Blake had given her and hung it in the closet. There was her old blue dressing robe, washed and clean. She took off her dress and slipped it on and lay upon the bed. It was deep and soft beneath her, and remembered. She fell instantly and dreamlessly asleep.

When she woke her mother was standing over her. The light was on, and outside it was dark.

“We got worrying about you,” her mother exclaimed. “You aren’t sick, are you, Sue?”

She struggled to sit up. The stillness was amazing. She had grown so used to noise. “No,” she said, “only tired. It’s so good to get home.”

“Supper’s ready, then,” her mother said. “I’ve made a good oyster stew. I let the children start—they seemed just starving. My, but she’s a handy soul, your Mrs. What’s-her-name!”

“Jane?” said Susan, yawning.

“I can’t call a body by their Christian name like that,” her mother protested. “Say, Susan, shouldn’t she sit down with us?”

“No,” said Susan. “She would be miserable.”

“Well,” her mother said doubtingly. “I suppose you know her. Here, don’t get all dressed up, child—just keep on your slippers. We’re only home folks.”

Around the lighted table they sat down and her father bent his head to say grace, while John and Marcia paused, astonished, spoons halfway to their mouths. She never had taught them about grace. The fragrance of the rich soup was in her nostrils. She began to eat with a whole pleasure.

Nothing happened in this quiet old house. Her parents had little to say to each other or to her. They did not ask her about her life and she did not speak of it. “Blake was sorry not to come,” she said, perfunctorily, the first night, and her mother, her eyes roving the table, answered half hearing, “Yes, it’s too bad. Maybe he can come some other time.”