This Proud Heart (39 page)

It was easy enough in the morning to say to him, “Blake, will you come and see some things I have made?”

He looked handsome and cool in his light gray suit. The dining room was shaded for their breakfast, and Crowne was bringing in iced fruits and coffee. She had put on a silver-white housecoat which he liked. By her napkin there was a letter from John at camp. She felt cheerful and full of hope, and so she spoke, at once.

He had come in a little earlier than she, and he rose while she sat down, and then seated himself again. He looked up as she spoke.

“Of course I will,” he said, and after a moment he said, “I have wanted very often to ask you about your work, Susanne, but you are such an independent young woman!”

He smiled, but she discerned, or thought she did, annoyance in his voice.

“I didn’t know you thought of it,” she exclaimed. “I was waiting for you to speak.”

“But why? I show you everything I do!”

She looked at him. She had, perhaps, been very wrong about Blake. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I felt that part of me quite separate from you because, perhaps, I knew you wouldn’t like it. Or perhaps because I am a woman,” she mused, “perhaps I felt I had to prove myself—do something before I talked about it. I honestly don’t know, Blake. I don’t think why I do things. I feel I must and I do, that’s all.”

“Ah,” he said quietly, “that is the reason you are so formidable.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. One never quite has you, you know.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said.

“I mean, because you don’t think as other people do, you’re always a little away from everybody. It’s not easy to get close to you, Susanne. Do you know, nearly all of my friends are afraid of you?”

“Are they?” She was astonished. “Why, Blake?”

“They think you feel yourself, rather—criticize them, you know, the way you sit watching them.”

“But I don’t—it’s not that.” She was wanting to cry, very nearly. “It’s just that I can’t keep from watching people. I do it without knowing it.”

They were talking back and forth like strangers and she could not bear it. The tears, held back, suddenly rushed into her eyes.

“Don’t say you can’t understand me,” she whispered.

And he, not looking up, not seeing her tears, went on, bantering, “Don’t women like to be mysterious and difficult to understand?”

She felt very far away from him, far, indeed, from everyone, as he said she was. While she had been working day after day people had been escaping her. She had had no time to make friends, no time to spend with anyone. Even the children had been glimpses and fragments at the beginning, at the end, of her days. And now she had shut the night against Blake, too. He sat at the end of the table, dim to her sight in the sunshine, and distant.

“Blake, say something real to me!” she begged. “Speak to me!”

If he had spoken to her she would have gone to him and knelt beside him and put her arms around him and cried to him, “It doesn’t matter about Sonia—nothing matters if you will only keep me close to you. I must be close to someone.”

But he looked up and said in the same gay voice, “What shall I say, Susanne? That you are beautiful this morning? But you are always beautiful, and I tell you that so often—Come, eat your breakfast, and then we will go and see these wonderful things of yours.”

He dipped his fingers in the bowl of water where a few red rose leaves floated and wiped them on the crisp linen napkin. Crowne came in with kidneys and bacon and he began to eat with his invariable relish. He ate heartily always and still maintained the tall thinness to which his body was born.

“Someone,” he said, “actually broils kidneys with good taste!” His voice was earnest with feeling .

“I am so glad,” she said. For she had spent valuable hours looking for a new cook because the kidneys he liked for breakfast were not done as he liked them, and then yesterday Jane had said in her grim fashion, “I’d as lief go, Mum, in the mornings and do them kidneys of his he’s always rowin’ about, if you’ll make it plain to all of them downstairs that I’m sent special.”

“Jane, thank you—you’re always a help to me,” she had said, and Jane had answered cryptically, “You’ll be really needin’ me again one of these days….”

“Shall we go?” Blake was asking her.

She rose at once, and felt her knees tremble a little. “I’m not afraid of him,” she told herself, and aloud she said, “I’ll just get into my street things, Blake.”

They stepped into the car and Bantie with solemnity drove them the four blocks to the studio and they got out. To this place where she had hidden from him, she was now bringing him.

“Susanne!” Blake exclaimed. “In such noise and filth!”

“It’s really very nice,” she said hurriedly. “There is so much room inside.”

She ran up the steps ahead of him and unlocked the door. But when he had come in, while he was looking, she began to tremble again. She begged him, “Sit down, Blake darling, and I’ll sit here on the arm of the chair.”

So he sat down and she sat beside him, waiting, her heart pounding. When David Barnes looked at them she was so sure of them, but now under Blake’s narrow gaze she did not know. They looked suddenly reserved, block-like, heavy, huge. Beside the exquisite sharp finish of his work they seemed crude.

“I am quite—overcome,” he said at last. “Susanne, they are enormous. How have you done all this?”

“I have been working every day, nearly,” she answered.

“I didn’t expect such large things,” Blake replied. He rose and walked among them. She felt them aware of his step and coming, but they did not shrink.

“There is a certain simplicity about them of course,” he began, and did not finish. Outside a fire engine shrieked and tore by and children’s voices yelled and the old room shook and settled again. Only the massive figures did not tremble.

“I see your idea,” Blake began again, studying the inscriptions. “Sort of elemental America—roots, soil, first things and all that.”

“Something like that,” she said. “It is a feeling more than an idea.”

He stood a long time before the triad of Sonia.

“Ah,” he said in a very quiet voice, “you see her like that—a sort of peasant. I see her as something very different.”

“She really is a peasant,” Susan said. “Her father was a Croatian farmer—they lived among the Tartars.”

And then he said, “Has she seen it?”

And she said, “Not since I finished it. She came here only, to pose.”

And he said, “So she told me.”

Sonia had not been at the house since the night they had talked of her. But of course Susan knew they met, and Blake spoke of her carelessly now, as though with nothing to hide.

“You’ve done everything in marble?” he was asking.

“Yes,” she answered, and then she said, “you don’t like stone, but it’s my material.” He was still looking at Sonia’s strong nude body and then she could not endure it.

“Do you like my black woman?” she asked, and he turned.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s good,” and then he said with a sort of wonder, “It’s really very good, Susanne.”

She wanted to cry out, “Why should you wonder?” but she only said, “Yes, I like it, too.”

Then he grew very kind. He told her how to go about preparing for her exhibition, and he gave her addresses and names, and he said, “Shall I do it for you, Susanne? Shall I prepare the way for you?”

But she shook her head.

“It will be fun for me. I want to do everything. You don’t mind if I only use my own name?”

“Why should I?” he replied.

At the door he kissed her gently and said, “It is all astonishingly good in its own way. They are not modern, though, Susanne.”

“They are only what I see,” she said. “I don’t know what they are.”

“No,” he said, staring at them. “I can see you don’t. You haven’t worked with your head, but with something else—I don’t know what. It’s instinctive work—in a way, it’s incomplete. Do you sketch first?”

“Yes, but I tear it all up and work directly.”

“Ah,” he said, “only a few people can do that.” She was not sure if he meant she was not one of the few. Then he bent and kissed her. “Goodbye, Susanne.”

He was gone—no, at the door he stayed and a look of willfulness came into his face. “I want you to lunch with me today,” he said suddenly.

They had not lunched together in many months. It had come to be taken for granted that they took their separate ways until nightfall. She hesitated, looking at him. She had planned to spend this day with her figures, studying them for their final perfection. If she had been sure that he wanted her for love she would not have hesitated at all. But the glints of his willfulness, which shone in his eyes and sharpened his smile, made her doubtful. She put her doubt away. In caprice she could not match him nor comprehend him.

“Yes, I will,” she said quietly. “Where? At home?”

“No—at the Femme d’Or,” he said, and then he added quickly, “Do you mind if Sonia comes?”

They looked at each other. Now plainly he was mischievous.

“I do—rather,” she said.

“Ah, well, for once,” he coaxed her, and then he said, “You must come. It will be the last time. She goes back to Russia next week, and next winter she will stay in Moscow.” He came back and gave her shoulder a sudden sharp pressure and was gone.

And when he was gone her figures, which had been so quiescent in his quick presence, took on their being, and she put Blake and Sonia away from her and gave herself to them. She had learned how to do this. Long ago when Mark died she had first learned how to do this. But she could not do it then so well as she did today. The power of her will was very nearly perfected. Blake worked in such spasms of moods. He would have days of swift terrible work and then days when he could not summon his mood.

“God, I’ll never work again!” he would groan, despairing. He could not make himself do what he did not feel like doing.

But her will was always there to summon the mood of work. It was like touching a button which swung a lever to release an energy into a vast generating machine. But to put out the hand to touch off the will—that first moment was pure will. It was like the forcing of one’s will to anesthesia. That first moment—then her being, propelled by her will, was swept along into its fulfillment and every other consciousness was laid aside, but for energy, not for sleep…. She polished and smoothed, but not too finely, for the essence of her work was in roughness and not in smoothness. Her figures rose out of masses of rough rock, or they sprang straining out of high columns of rock. She forgot, and when she remembered, it was far too late for lunch.

“I need not see Sonia now,” was her first thought, and she looked gratefully toward her people, who had made her forget everything. She went on working, glad and remorseful together. Would Blake mind? He would not mind. Perhaps he had planned some moment of melodrama between them. She knew there was melodrama in him. He could weep as a child does when he was too tired or when something upon which he worked went askew from what he had planned. She who so seldom wept, had been terrified at first, because she had not often seen a man weep. Then she perceived that Blake did not mind weeping at all—it was as meaningless as a child who cries because he is not given something which for the moment he wants. There was no ruggedness in him. So when he wept she allowed him to weep, without protest, and at last without pity.

“You don’t care, Susanne!” he cried once.

“Weeping eases you,” she replied, and instantly he had stopped weeping to cry at her, “How hard you are!”

And she had answered sturdily, “No, but I will not be torn to pieces.” She was learning how to preserve herself, knowing that Blake’s storms passed over him like a summer rain over a landscape. But she was not like him. Storm tore at her roots and she guarded herself, lest she be destroyed…. She was thinking, “And if he is angry when I come home tonight, I will tell him the simple truth, that I was working and I forgot. If he is angry, I will let his anger pass over my head.”

Then suddenly the door opened. She turned, and Sonia stood there in a white dress of heavy silk. She stood, smiling, her pale eyes a deepening green under her white hat.

“Shall I come in?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Susan. “I was just thinking that I had no apology to offer for not coming to lunch today except the truth—that I forgot Blake had invited me.”

Sonia came toward her slowly. “You forgot! Let me see your eyes! No, you are honest. I see you did forget. Susan, there is not another such woman in this world, who forgets when her husband is lunching with me!”

She looked at Sonia, feeling her. She could not blame Blake, not wholly. One must be completely possessed not to see Sonia’s gay mouth, her wide sweet face, the exact and flowing grace of her compact body. And Blake, too, perhaps was not one to be completely possessed.

“I didn’t want to go away without seeing you, Susan,” Sonia’s deep golden-edged voice was saying. “I know you have been thinking many things of Blake and me. I have wanted to come to you, and I have not come.”

What was in this woman’s lovely eyes? She searched them painfully. But now Sonia had walked to her portrait and stood looking at it. She put out her square mobile hand and caressed her own marble cheek.

“You made me three. It is not enough. There are many more. One said, ‘Go and tell Susan—’ and another said, ‘You and Blake give each other something necessary,’ and to another Blake said, ‘I do not rob Susan, Sonia. Susan understands.’ And so—”

She shrugged, smiled, and put out her hands to the three.

“You and Blake still love each other?” Susan asked.

“What does Blake say?” Sonia asked, not looking at her.

“Not yes or no,” Susan answered.

“I say yes and no,” Sonia said. She looked at Susan fully and quickly and laughed her loud Russian laughter. “But you are not to be disturbed. It is over, what Blake and I have done. I am going home for a year, for two years. When I come back I shall be another creature. I never stay the same. Every year I am another. See, I promise you! I will dye my hair another color, even.”