This Proud Heart (34 page)

“Why not?” he said busily. He knocked the top from his egg with one short quick blow. “Now that the children are going to school I am not enough for you, I know. I felt that last night.”

She looked at him to discover his mood, but he was very amiable in spite of his words. “It is quite all right,” he said gaily. “You shall have a corner in my studio, and I will explain to you the secret of mixing my clay. No one else knows, and I would tell no one but you.”

“Do you have a secret?” she asked, playfully.

“Of course,” he said. He was a little lofty with her. “How do you suppose I get those lean creatures to stay together?” he demanded.

“I suppose everybody has a secret,” she replied peaceably. “I remember David Barnes said his was in that little Adam he had in plaster in his studio. There was a small square cut in the back, which came out.”

“What was the secret?” Blake demanded.

“I never looked,” she replied, surprised. “He said I was to have it only if he died.”

“You worked day after day with that beside you and never looked?” Blake’s fine narrow black brows were raised at her.

“Of course!” she said indignantly, and he laughed.

“Darling Susanne!” he said. “The reason I love you is because you are like no one!”

“Don’t you believe me?” she asked.

“I do,” he declared. “I always believe you and no one else. And you may have the corner by the window for your own.”

He was so amiable and so handsome that she could scarcely go on to what she had already planned. She was beginning to see she had dreaded him when he was not amiable, and that he knew it. That was to be ended. She forced herself to go on.

“A corner will be scarcely enough for me, Blake—I want to work in marble.”

“Marble!” he exclaimed. “No, you can scarcely haul a quarry up to the studio. If I am too curious, forgive me—but what, Susanne, shall you do in marble?”

He was not in the least unkind. His voice was humoring and gay. She loved him very much, but she found, feeling her way from moment to moment, that she did not want to tell him anything.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I thought you didn’t,” he said. “Let me advise you, Susanne, against carving directly in marble. No one can do it—only two or three very great sculptors try to do it.”

Her proud heart reared its head like a lion in her woman’s body. “How do you know I am not great?” it demanded. But though she heard it she would not let it speak. She sat silent, smiling at Blake while he talked, and not listening to him at all. Still she was his beloved and he was hers. But she was sorting out her life from its fragments, even from love….

Outdoors on the street she dismissed Bantie, while he stared at her.

“Thank you, Bantie, I’ll take the small car myself this morning.”

“Traffic’s bad, Ma’am,” he said glumly.

“You might surprise Linlay this morning and clean up the garden,” she said, twisting a smile at him as she took the wheel.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said forlornly. Nothing pleased him more than driving endlessly about the city in the thickest traffic, and he hated the garden.

But she wanted to go alone and discover a place where she could work. There must be a place somewhere to which she could go and where she could forget Blake, a garage she could rent, or a floor of an old house.

The reputable real estate offices had nothing for her, she found. “We could rent you a studio apartment,” one plump neat young man after another told her, their voices full of bright professional interest.

“No—no, thank you,” she said. “I won’t want to live in my studio. I have a house.”

She drove home after hours, slowly, by devious ways. Quite near Blake’s house were tenements, full of the alien and the poor. A few rich men like Blake had seized upon the river front and, disregarding the poor, had built their homes on a few streets, evading tenements. Bantie always drove in and out by those wide clean ways.

Now alone she found herself in the tangle of tenements. She had to drive carefully because of children, shrilly intent upon play and seeing cars no more than flies in their path. Women leaned out of windows and screeched at them and shook out grimy bedclothes, and men lounged on stained doorsteps. Blake would never come here. She paused at an entrance. A sign was at the window—“Apartment to Let.”

“May I come in and see that apartment?” she called to a pleasant-looking man with a dirty face, who stood leaning against the door.

“I don’t care,” he remarked.

A swarm of boys leaped at her like grasshoppers.

“Watch your car, lady?”

“I’ll watch it, lady!”

“Why does it have to be watched?” she asked.

“’Cos,” said a dark boy with shining secret black eyes, “if we don’t, somethin’ happens to it.”

“Shall I give a nickel each to ten boys or fifty cents to one?” she inquired.

It was something serious. They went into conference and emerged.

“Give it to Smikey,” they clamored, “we can make him divide.”

Smikey came forward, a pale child with anxious blue eyes and his front teeth gone.

“Will you watch it, Smikey?” she asked.

He nodded, prodded from behind, but speechless.

So she went in, guided by the dirty-faced man, and looked at the empty apartment. There were three rooms, partitioned lightly from each other out of what had once been a room of noble size. The ceilings were high and corniced and there was a carved wooden mantel now defiled and filthy. Blake would never find her here.

“Would it matter if I took the partitions out?” she asked.

“I’ll do it fur yez, Miss,” the man said eagerly. “I’m odd job man and janitor here.”

“I’d want the walls and the floor painted,” she said.

“I cud do it,” he answered.

“And the windows washed?”

“Me ould woman,” he said.

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

“I’ll report it to the office,” he said proudly.

“When can I come in?” she asked.

“This day week,” he said with certainty.

She went down the dirty steps. Around the car a crowd of silent intense children watched for her. She took fifty cents from her purse.

“Thank you, Smikey,” she said.

“She done it!” they muttered. “Fifty cents—Jeez!”

They disappeared down the street, sweeping Smikey along in their midst, a bird in the wind.

She drove three blocks and turned a corner into the quiet quadrangle where she and Blake lived among a few rich people.

“You couldn’t work here, my dear?” old Mr. Kinnaird was asking. She had gone to Fane Hill to choose the marble he wanted to give her.

“Oh no, I couldn’t indeed,” she said. “It’s beautiful—but I couldn’t.” She could not possibly work in this remote place under those pale kind eyes of Blake’s father.

“It’s very quiet,” he murmured.

“Yes, it is,” she said gently, “it’s lovely.”

It was very still. Winter was silently passing. The beautiful old house where Blake was born was settled back in its great trees, asleep and dying, even while their new leaves prepared to bud again. She could not work there. She would only sit idle, day after day, dying with all that was dying.

“I wish you’d take all you want,” he said, unlocking the door of the storehouse. “I’ll have them sent—where shall I send them?”

She gave him the number and the street.

“I don’t know it,” he murmured. “Is there a studio there?”

“I’ve made one,” she said.

Then she walked among the marbles. Without any knowledge of what she would make, she chose four pieces—a Siena, two Serravezzas, a piece of Belgian black.

“It’s treacherous stuff,” old Mr. Kinnaird said, his hand white as ash upon the Belgian black, “as treacherous as beauty. Watch it as you go.” And then he gave her three blocks of Paros marble.

“These are years of my life,” she thought, “caught here and held.” The marble stood before her, solid and heavy with promise. The years were stopped.

“You must let me see what you bring from them,” he said.

He stood against the light of the open door, slender and fine and pale, as graceful and pure a statue of age as she had ever seen, and somehow never to be loved. She put out her hand, impulsive and warm.

“I do thank you with all my heart.”

He touched it quickly with his fingers and drew away. His hand was cold, and dust to touch….

“Blake,” she asked him that night at dinner, “do you remember your mother?”

“No,” he said, “she died when I was two.”

“Did your father never speak of her?” she asked.

“No, except to say they were happy.”

“He or they?”

“I believe,” Blake said, looking at her hard, “that he always put it like this, ‘I was very happy with your mother.’” He cocked a fine eyebrow at her. “Isn’t it the same thing?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Yes, it is,” he insisted. “Wouldn’t I know it if you weren’t happy?”

“Suppose I didn’t tell you?” she said.

“I’d know,” he said, carelessly.

She looked at him thoughtfully, searching him. No, he did not know, she thought, anything about her happiness.

She said to herself that Blake should not notice the slightest difference in her. No one should feel or see her different. The only difference would be in herself. She had her love disciplined now. It should not longer consume her with hours of idleness. When Blake went to work, she would work. She had told him she had rented a studio not far away and he had said nothing at all. But he began to dally in the mornings. When he knew that she would come to his studio and lie on the couch watching him, he sprang out of bed, full of zest to begin. A half hour was long enough for breakfast.

But now he came into her room early in the morning and delayed her with his love. She bit back her impatience. She loved him, but this was perversity, this was childishness. The day must begin, because night came so soon. Then he cried out at her, “Susanne, what’s the matter with you? You’re changed to me!”

“No, I am not, Blake,” she said flatly.

“Then why do you want to get up?”

At first she put him off. Then she saw she was afraid of him and so she said plainly, “I have my own work to do.”

“I’m sorry!” he said, and leaped from her bed.

He stood looking down at her, wrapping his robe about him. His lips were thin and his eyes gray as slate and his voice was so cold she caught his hand.

“You know you are my beloved,” she said gently. “Kiss me, Blake!”

He kissed her harshly.

“Don’t ever say that to me again!” he said.

“You must love me, Blake,” she begged him.

“I do,” he said. “But—stay what I love.”

He went away and he did not come back as he usually did to see if she were dressed, and she knew he was angry. They met at the breakfast table and though she coaxed him with her eyes and voice, he was willfully cold to her. Once she put out her hand, but Crowne came in and she drew it back again.

He went upstairs immediately after he had finished, and she stood looking after him. He could be so hot and so cold. She wanted to run after him. Instead she put on her coat and hat and went into the street. Bantie, at the curb, touched his cap.

“I’ll walk this morning, Bantie,” she said.

She wanted to walk alone this morning to her own studio, not to ride in Blake’s car. She turned the corner and went down the street. There were the thousands of people in this city whom she did not know. But she could never tire of looking at them, at dark Italian faces, at brown Greeks and pale Swedes, thick-bodied Czechs and low-browed Slavs. They stared at her as she passed. Some day she would know them. They were friendly, for everyone knew that she had rented lower three hundred and twelve. They had stood open-mouthed when the Fane Hill truck had delivered the great lumps of marble.

“Rocks!” the children had murmured in astonishment.

“I’m a sculptor,” she had explained to the ones near the door. “I make things from rocks.”

They had nothing to say to this. “Chee!” a single small boy’s voice said at last. Then they had disappeared like a flock of birds. Nothing held them long, these city children leaping from one excitement to another. The siren of a fire wagon or an ambulance, a roar and a curse and a policeman’s whistle, and they were gone.

Inside the great room was empty except for the marbles and her tools and one chair. She sat down, ready to work. There was nothing here to keep her from her deepest desire. No one knew where she was. She looked about her gratefully. The walls were clean with paint, the bare windows were shining. She rose and moved from one piece of marble to the other, touching them. Yesterday she had gone out and bought herself more of the beautiful tools, the finest, the most delicate, the strongest. The man in the shop had said over and over, “Now this, Miss, is a new thing—it’s a short cut, you might say—”

But she had put aside all except the strongest and simplest.

“No gadgets, please,” she had said.

She sat down again. She must begin, she must think what she would make. And then, here where Blake had never been, away from him and where he could not find her, she found herself thinking only of him. She was not leaving him—no, she wanted to keep everything as it was. But he must see that this could only be when she was most fully herself. They must be two equal creatures, each complete in himself, each loving the other the more for such completeness. She would show him day by day what she meant.

“I can do it,” she said to herself firmly, “I can do anything.”

Her mind ran back over the years. Nothing had been impossible for her. To think of a thing, to know she wanted to do it, was to have it done. She saw herself as she had once been, that young girl overflowing into a hundred activities which she did well, not knowing which she must discard. In those days she had cried out to Mark that she had wanted everything. Now all that various demand of her too abundant life had clarified itself into this great sole necessity which was her work. She had been away on a holiday with Blake, a holiday of love, and now she was back. Marriage—what was it for her? She did not know.

“Perhaps women like me can’t
be
married,” she thought. It was not Mark, it was not Blake, it was she who could not make a marriage. Some part of her was complete alone, needing no mating. If this was true, and it was, then how impossible a task for any man she had given to him! And so thinking she fell into the intensest loneliness she had known.