This Proud Heart (37 page)

But Susan was not listening. She was drawing as fast as her charcoal pencil could move, in the bold thick black strokes that were her peculiar way of picturing. She never sketched. She drew, tridimensional and solid, the figure she saw always in marble even while she was drawing upon paper.

“There,” she said, “it is enough. I have what I want.”

Sonia stopped, and came to her and took up the score and more of sheets.

“How differently you see me!” she cried. “And which is Sonia? Shall I believe Susan or Blake? What am I, then?”

Susan did not answer or hear. She was moving among her marbles toward a certain circular piece. She had not once remembered all morning that Blake had kissed this Sonia the night before. Or at least the dim ache in some far part of her being could scarcely today be called a memory.

But Mary discovered it again, ruthlessly, one May morning. Susan was finishing the first of the three figures of Sonia, carved in a solid circular group. Each was Sonia in part, and the three would make her entire, Sonia flung into a stiff beautiful pose of daring grace, Sonia static, her arms folded, her feet stamping, Sonia drooping like a willow tree. It was the most difficult thing she had done, for space was part of the whole. The bodies did not touch, but out of the pillar-like matrix one’s motion flowed into the next and the next, so that by continuing motion all were related. She had shaped the lines into a block-like simplicity, making of Sonia not a woman but a dance.

Mary came in one noon.

“I’m on my way to lunch,” she said. “Besides, I’m sailing for Paris next week. Parsdale and Poore are sending me over for designs. Miss Blume always goes and she has appendicitis—luck for me!”

She was thinner than ever, and very smart. She drew out her handkerchief, dusted the chair and sat down.

“Are you going to lunch with Michael? I haven’t seen either of you for so long,” Susan said. She was working on the arch of Sonia’s lifted foot and she did not pause.

“Oh, Michael!” Mary said. “He’s angry with me.”

“You mean you’ve parted?” Susan looked up from Sonia’s foot.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mary said. She was looking at her narrow brown hands, and at her wine-red fingernails. “How parted, when we’ve never been together?”

Susan hesitated. “I don’t know how,” she said, “because I’ve never known anything about you two. You don’t marry each other, and you don’t marry anyone else.”

“Marriage—marriage!” Mary exclaimed. Her old secret restraint was gone these days, at least upon her surface. She talked a great deal in a sharp jagged nervous fashion. “You’ve always been obsessed with marriage, Susan. You think women can’t live without it.”

“It’s one of the things,” Susan said gently.

“If I marry,” Mary went on abruptly, “it will be a business. I may marry. I’ll have decided by the time I am back. It depends.”

“Michael’s been very patient.” Susan traced a muscle in the marble so lightly she seemed not to have made a line, except that one saw a strain appear in the stone as though it were flesh.

“Michael has nothing to do with this.” Mary’s voice was clear and depthless, brittle with clarity. “I shall never marry him. If I marry, it will be Bennyfield Rhodes.”

Susan paused and looked at her sister. “I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

“He’s somebody in spite of that,” Mary replied. Her sharp pretty nails were tapping like little woodpeckers at the arms of the chair. “He’s the chief stockholder in the company.”

Susan put down her tools. She was kneeling on the floor and now she looked at Mary sternly.

“Is that why you are marrying him?” she asked. She saw for the first time that though Mary’s dark handsome eyes met her gaze with such seeming directness, there was no penetrating through them. They were so dark that the pupils were lost in the darkness.

“Why I marry, if I do, is my own affair,” Mary said.

“How did you meet him?”

“He comes into the store a good deal.”

“How old is he?”

“Not sixty—looks younger.”

“Michael must be very angry,” she said. She felt a little sick. There was no honor left any more in what people did. Some old health and sweetness was gone out of people’s hearts. For a flitting second she missed Mark.

“I’ve been perfectly frank with Michael.” Mary’s voice was bright and hard. “I’ve never pretended anything. I’ve given him all I could. He knows I never could marry him.”

“But why, Mary?”

Mary lifted off her hat, smoothed back her short closely cut hair, and put her hat on again, a little more to the left. She opened her bag and took out her vanity case and she powdered her straight nose. Then she put everything back in the bag and shut it hard. “Susan, anybody who marries Michael has got to give up everything. He’d never give up. I’d have to become part of him. Well, I won’t. I won’t be part of anybody.”

“Not though you love him?”

“No, not however much I might love him. I couldn’t stand it. You don’t think, Susan. You just feel. You go along your life, feeling your way from one day to the next. Your eyes aren’t open and never will be. But I plan and I use my head. Feelings are just nothing when it comes to practical everyday living. If I married Michael I’d never know where I was or how much money we had. If his mother ever dies I suppose he’ll have something, but she looks headed for a hundred. He’ll never make anything at painting the sort of things he does.”

“You could keep on working, couldn’t you?” Susan asked. She was thinking of the boy Michael who had come into her attic so long ago and drawn the picture of himself, riding headlong into the dark wood.

“I could but I won’t,” Mary said. “When I marry I want to stop work. If I can’t, I’ll stay as I am.”

Susan picked up her chisel and mallet. She wanted to work, to work hard. She was suddenly very angry.

“Women like you,” she said slowly, “—women like you set us all back for centuries. There’s no hope for us except as we learn to take everything in life.” She was pounding the marble furiously. She had left the delicately arched foot and was hewing at the mass of the base. The studio echoed to her blows. But underneath all the anger she knew what she was doing. Her hands were flying, alive with instinct…. “I hate women who think of nothing except how they can get the most out of some man. Look at Lucile and poor Hal! She thinks she’s a respectable woman. She doesn’t see she’s sucked Hal dry until he’s nothing. He’s done nothing all his life except support Lucile. He works all day to feed and clothe her and comes home at night and helps her wash the dishes and put the children to bed because she’s tired. That’s his life. Nobody knows what Hal is, really. He’s never had time to find out himself. No, Mary, don’t marry Michael! It’s kind of you not to marry him. Perhaps if he’s sure you won’t, he’ll forget you and be what he is, a great painter. It would be a pity to spoil him so that you could stop work and do nothing at all!”

She was pouring this out, between the blows of her mallet.

And Mary said, her voice like a cold quiet stream, “Your theories don’t work, Susan. Nobody has everything, not even you.” She paused, and then she said calmly, “You haven’t Blake—Sonia has him.”

She stood up. “There—I hadn’t meant to tell you. It’s none of my business. I’ve known it all winter. Everybody knows it except you. I’m only telling you to show you you’re wrong. You’ve lost him. You can’t have everything, though you’ve always thought you could.”

There was nothing to say. Mary had cut away the earth on which she stood. She had not strength to lift her mallet, to strike the chisel, to break the stone. She put her tools down and suddenly, in the silenced room, she felt her mouth dry.

“You have always hated me—why?” she asked. Her tongue clacked in her dry mouth.

“No, I don’t, Susan,” Mary said. There was a shred of pity in her brittle voice. “I feel sorry for you. Everybody knows Blake Kinnaird better than you do. That’s why I was so surprised—at that, you’ve done awfully well—you’ve been married nearly three years, haven’t you? Sonia’s the first I have heard of—”

“Three years in June—” Susan’s voice was a whisper. On a bright June day she and Blake had gone into that little office in Paris and been married. She had felt she must marry him and she had gone straight away and done it.

“Michael said just the other day he hadn’t expected it to last so long. It isn’t as if you were Blake’s type—you’re really very simple, Susan. You’re not like all these people.”

She was still on her knees, looking up at Mary. Perhaps Mary was right. She was simple, too simple for Blake—for everyone. Sonia had called her simple. Only Mark had not found her too simple. But then he was a child, who had died young. And she was not able to comprehend this cleverness or to cope with it. She was too deep in reality—or perhaps in dreams.

“Well, goodbye.” Mary bent and laid her cool dark cheek an instant against Susan’s. “Don’t worry, whatever you do. That’s a wonderful Negro thing, over there—I must say you’re improving, Susan.”

She could feel Mary trying to be a little kind, but it was too late. She rose to her feet.

“Goodbye, Mary,” she said. “I’m sorry I said what I did—you know best, of course, for yourself.”

Mary went out, smiling and sure, her small red lips compressed. “Yes, I do,” she said.

When Mary was gone, she sat down in the chair and painfully drew back into her mind the moment of Blake’s kiss to Sonia. What had that kiss meant, and how had it been given, and why? She did not know. Why indeed should Blake want to kiss Sonia if he did not love her? She did not know. So he must love her.

“I shall have to ask him,” she thought, simply.

She could think of nothing else to do. Even if she knew how, she could not spy upon him. If she could, she had not time to follow him where he went in the day. She had her work to do.

She looked at her watch. She wanted to go home at once and find Blake. But at this hour, one o’clock, he would be away. He seldom lunched at home if he were not working, and just now he was arranging for another exhibition. He was hoping, she knew, and expecting that after the exhibit some at least of the figures would be sold for the museum. She sighed and took out of the pocket of her coat a package of sandwiches which every morning Crowne brought as she left the house and handed to her with dignity.

“Oh, thank you, Crowne,” she always said and stuffed them in her pocket. Once he said, “Wouldn’t you like your luncheon brought to you, Madame?” And she, frightened at the thought of servants and trays intruding upon her work, had answered quickly, “Oh no, I like sandwiches very much.”

She ate them, and going to the faucet, bent and drank as at a fountain. Then she stood a moment wondering what to do, and because she still did not know, she went back to her work. Once she stopped to think, “This is Sonia’s body I am making—how can I?” She waited a moment, and then went on. Deeper than Sonia was the desire to go on, to finish the thing she had begun. It was not Sonia. It was her work.

In the dining room at dinner Blake was telling her the vexation of trying to persuade old Joseph Hart that what he was doing was not “mere playing about in mud.” When he paused, Susan asked, “Is that all, Blake?”

“It’s quite enough for one day, I think, Susanne,” he answered amiably, now that it was all told. He was not in the least different from himself as he had been. She had sat watching him as he talked and pondering whether indeed he were changed within. For surely new love must leave some small mark. But he looked at her with his clear cool gray eyes, and his hand, flecking the ash from his cigarette, never trembled, nor indeed did she notice any lesser quality in the kiss he gave her when she came in. She had had an impulse before dinner in her own room to put on the red and gold dress he had made for her. It hung in her closet, glimmering and glowing. But she was ashamed to do anything that might be coquetry, though at least she need not wear blue which he disliked. She put on at last a plain white chiffon and brushed back her long hair and knotted it as she always did. He had not noticed, eager to pour out his vexation.

“Because I have a question to ask you,” she said. They were alone for a moment. The salad had just been served. It would be a few minutes before Crowne came back.

“Yes?” Blake lifted his delicate black eyebrows at her. But his voice held no alarm.

“Mary came in today,” she said. “And she told me you and Sonia are in love. Is it true, Blake?”

But now she had taken him by surprise. He put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

“Why should Mary say that?” he demanded.

And in the same quiet voice she said, “It came out because of other things I had said. She was not tale-bearing. She had not meant to tell me, I am sure. But she was annoyed with me.”

She thought she would be angry with him, but she was not angry. She felt only still as death while Blake looked at her.

“Are you going to be angry with me?” he demanded.

“No,” she said, “no, not angry—only I must know. Just tell me simply, Blake.”

But he could not tell her simply. He was crumbling his bread on the plate. “Sonia—of course Sonia has loved a great many people—it is part of her nature—I suppose part of her art.”

“If you would just tell me simply, Blake,” she said again.

“It is not quite simple, Susanne,” he answered. “Sonia has no relation to the way I feel toward you, for instance. That she appeals to a part of my—thought—I do not deny. Why should I? I might complain that I found you working in David Barnes’ studio, but I do not. People like us—we do what we do because we must. Our nature demands much.”

She stared at him. “Did you think David Barnes and I—” she began.

He shook his head and put out his hand. “No, no, Susanne! I tell you I did not think! I took you as you were—I keep you as you are—whatever you do, you are Susanne.”

There was such calmness in his voice and look that she was bewildered. She clutched at a phrase he had spoken. There must be truth somewhere, an absolute truth.

“You mean you must—love Sonia?”

“Susanne, you simple darling—forget about Sonia. What I think about Sonia has nothing to do with us.”