This Proud Heart (40 page)

“You can’t change your eyes,” Susan said.

There was some quality in this creature which was like Blake, something not childish, but wild and elfin in its essence. It was a temperament. But it was not hers. She could not create in these flashes and angers and gayeties and perversities. Her people she made out of her deep steady rock-like foundations. Everything in her life had gone into that foundation of her being, out of which came, an eternal spring, the energy to create. She did not want wine to stimulate that energy, nor love to feed it, as Blake perpetually did, Blake and Sonia and all their kind. She did not want anything any more except the plainest needs of every day, food and sleep, the simplest intercourse with human beings and time in which to ponder and to work. She perceived all this and now it was no longer necessary to know anything about Blake and Sonia. She had forgotten, and forgetting had been the symbol.

“Ah, don’t mind!” Sonia coaxed her. “Go your own way, Susan!”

“Yes, I will—I do,” Susan said.

Sonia’s eyes grew bright with laughter. “Ah, Susan!” she cried. “Goodbye, dear Susan! Remember, this Sonia will never come back.” She kissed Susan on both cheeks, her red lips warm and soft. “There is nobody like you, just,” she said. “You will always be a little alone because there is nobody like you—but you are not lonely.” She waved her hand at the door.

“I haven’t hurt you,” she said. “I am not sorry for you!”

She was gone. And Susan stood listening to the old words that had followed her all her life—“Nobody like you—” the walls echoed. She did not fight against them now. They could frighten her no more. They were true. She sat down a little while and rested and then she put on her hat and went out into the street.

“H’lo, Miss Gaylord!” the children shouted. It was the first very hot day, and the street hydrant was turned on and in the gush of water a dozen thin small bodies pranced. Big Bill, the policeman, stood near and touched his cap.

“They’ll be clean for wanct,” he said and grinned.

“I’d like to be one of them,” she said, and smiled. They were all her friends. She had many friends, but no being was entwined with hers. There were certain trees whose roots fed far and wide in the fields where they stood, trees whose arms were spread for shelter but who stood alone under the sky.

She went home and in the hall she called, “Blake?” But there was no answer.

There was no need at night to tell him she had forgotten, for he did not speak of it. He was silent all evening, reading a little, and then idle. And seeing him restless, she said gently, “Shall you miss Sonia too much, Blake?”

He looked at her sidewise. “I? I wasn’t thinking of her.”

“Then why are you so sad?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “only I have felt melancholy as the deuce all day. I feel as if I’d never work again.”

“But you will,” she said. “You have felt so before, but you begin again.”

“I’ve never felt like this,” he insisted, “so—empty.”

He threw himself back on the couch and closed his eyes. His face was sharp with sadness, tense with sadness. She studied it, struck by its beauty, but no longer moved. Marble could not be carved into its likeness—ivory, perhaps. He opened his eyes.

“Come over here,” he commanded her. She went to him and he laid his head on her knees and held her with his arms. She put her arms about him, and then she felt him begin to weep soundlessly against her.

“There, my dear, my darling, there,” she said without distress. What his need was she did not know, nor perhaps did he, or he would not have held it back from her. He wept, carried upon some deep stream of sourceless melancholy, and she held him close, waiting in patience for him to return to himself and even perhaps to her. She did not need him any more but he was dear to her. If he could return to her, another love than that of need might grow between them.

Surely he would return to her. She went on steadily all summer, planning her exhibition, preparing for its opening at the beginning of the autumn, waiting for him.

“November is the best month for a beginner,” Joseph Hart said to her. She had gone to see him one day in his old brownstone house because David Barnes told her to go.

“I’ve told the old chap about you,” he said. “He wants to see you. You’d better go—it’s not often he wants to see anybody.”

But when she went into Joseph Hart’s drawing room he pretended he had forgotten about her.

“Never heard of you,” he said shortly when she came in. His rooms were a museum of painting and statuary.

At first she could see nothing clearly. Rich dark Flemish faces looked out of old gilt frames beside pale American landscapes, arid and new. Then suddenly at the end of the room she saw Michael’s wild horses. It was a long horizontal canvas, and the light fell well upon it. Nine silver white horses fled through the moonlight across the night-dark desert, and there was one, the fleetest of them all, a small black horse, who was their leader.

“Don’t know your stuff,” Joseph Hart was saying.

“I know you don’t,” she answered, “but you will.”

“I won’t if it’s these hop-skip-jump modern things you do. I don’t look at them,” he retorted. Everywhere dealers and managers of galleries had said to her, “If you can get old Joseph Hart—”

“You’re looking at those horses,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

“A Michael Barry,” he said. “Most uneven young painter in the world, he is. Sometimes he does a thing like that—pure color, pure form, pure beauty. Then he’ll go off and do a whole string of fanciful stuff—naked women stretched out on rocks—vicious stuff.”

She did not answer. She kept looking at the horses, galloping wild and free across the desert.

“What’s your medium?” he inquired. “Not mud, I hope.”

“Marble,” she said, and added, “I did one bronze.”

“Where?” he demanded.

“The Halfred Memorial Hospital.”

“You do that?”

“Yes. It was my first real work.”

He took up a glass of wine he had set down when she came in and sipped it in silence.

“Pity you’re a woman,” he said at last.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter any more.”

“You’ll find it does,” he insisted. “You won’t get first places unless you’re really better than anybody.”

“I don’t work for that,” she said.

He did not answer. But after he had poured another glass of wine from a slender red bottle, he fumbled in his pocket for a card and wrote something on it.

“You take that to a man named Gelwicks at that address,” he ordered her, “and tell him I sent you.”

“Thank you,” she said, but he had already turned his back on her.

She stood a long moment alone, looking at Michael’s picture, and then she went away.

“I must tell Michael I saw it,” she thought. “I must tell him how perfect it is.”

She had forgotten Joseph Hart.

It was a small, very plain gallery. She had all her things moved, and at the last moment The Kneeling Woman had come in from Paris.

She and Blake had unpacked her. “The Rejected!” Blake had cried, stripping the shreds of stuff from her. Susan looked at her with critical eyes.

“Of course they didn’t want her,” she said. “I can see why. She isn’t nearly good enough. I don’t think I did anything good in Paris. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.”

“Shall we throw her out?” Blake asked.

“No, let her stay,” Susan said. “After all, I made her.”

She and Blake were regaining a sort of comradeship. But he had not once demanded more of her. Sometimes it was very hard to talk to him, and then she drove her tongue to chatter, because silence was not to be borne between them, though she longed for silence, full and tranquil. But if they did not talk, an edgy silence surged up between them, not full, not tranquil.

“I think I’ll have an old statue of Jane I once did sent up from the country,” she said suddenly. “I think it was good.”

“That old hag!” Blake said amiably. He was studying the black woman. “Shift her an inch to the right,” he commanded the sweating draymen, and they heaved.

“No, Blake,” she said, “that’s too dramatic for her. The light must fall plain and straight, not slantwise, on my things.”

“Marbles to you, my dear,” he said gaily.

When it was all ready she and Blake walked slowly about.

“You mustn’t mind if the critics pan you, Susanne,” he said complacently.

“I won’t,” she said, surprised. It had not occurred to her to think of what the critics would say. What she had done was finished, beyond praise or blame.

The statue of Jane came the last day and that day she was alone and she unpacked it. It was crude and young in its touch, but still it was Jane, looking up startled from her work, wiping her hands on her apron. She had it set behind the door, a little away from the others, in a quiet corner, where Jane would be.

Then when she had paid off the last man she looked at everything quite alone, from Jane to the last thing she had done, which was a figure of a Welsh miner from West Virginia. She had found him quite by chance. He had come to New York, a delegate to a labor meeting, and she had drifted in at the meeting, as she did so many places, not knowing what she came to see, except people, and he had been making a speech. After the meeting she went up and asked him to pose for her, and he had come to the studio and sat talking, his shoulders hunched and his enormous hands outspread on his bent knees.

“I can’t straighten now, Miss,” he said. “I’ve walked bent underground too long for that.”

In a way his was the best figure she had done. She had felt him creeping along under the earth. His eyes looked blind and robbed of the sun and she had made them so. His hands were great claws like a mole’s claws, powerful out of all proportion to his hunched body, and she had made them so. Yes, every figure was better than the last. She had gone straight ahead. And these were only the beginning.

The day before the opening she brought John and Marcia to see her things. They were home for an autumn holiday. She said nothing, feeling shy before them of seeming to have done anything. But she walked between them, sensitive to every sign and word, longing for their approval, feeling for it as she explained.

“This one I call American Woman, Black. And this one is America North—it is Sweden’s part. And this is an Italian girl whom I call American Venus. And this—”

She could feel John’s passionate attention. He was nearly as tall as she was now, and he was wearing his first suit with long trousers. He said nothing, but he stood absorbed before each figure, listening, gazing, his hands in his pockets. If he had ever looked like Mark, she thought, he had outgrown it.

“I see exactly what you mean,” he said, and he drew in his breath. “They’re swell, Mother,” he said, and her heart leaped up in her breast.

Marcia said impatiently, “But why are they all so big and ugly, Mother? Why, you’ve even made Sonia ugly!”

“Oh, shut up, Marcia!” John cried out for Susan. “You don’t know anything.”

“I do,” Marcia pouted. “I don’t like such thick heavy people.” She pirouetted on one toe as she spoke and whirled into a little dance, her arms uplifted, her fingers drooping. Among the solid, pillar-like figures she looked like a little moth, fluttering and unstable, a thing to touch and crush.

“All Marcia’s brains are in her legs,” John muttered.

“I know they are,” Marcia’s voice sang freely. “I think, I feel, with my legs! When I’m dancing I’m happy!”

She was quite happy now that they were not looking at Susan’s statues, but at her.

“Why do you want that ugly old Jane?” she sang impudently, dancing to the door. “She looks awful. Jane’s so ugly!”

“She’s swell, and you know it,” John cried. And on the way home in the car he told Susan shyly, “I’m doing a thing of Jane myself—in wood. I don’t know why I like to work in wood. I guess because Granddad and I have always whittled together. Jane’s been sitting for me every day since I came back home from school.”

“May I see it?” Susan asked.

“I’ve seen it—it’s ugly, too, because Jane’s ugly,” Marcia cried.

John cast her aside with a look. “You know how Jane’s face is, Mother. I don’t think it’s ugly.”

“Only Sonia is pretty,” Marcia cried willfully. “Sonia and Mary are pretty, and Blake is beautiful. Oh, I hope—I hope I’ll be pretty, Mother, when I’m big?” She turned dark begging eyes toward Susan. “I’ll die if I am not pretty!”

“I think you will be,” Susan said.

“I don’t,” said John ruthlessly. “Your face makes me sick. You’re always thinking about yourself, Marcia.”

“John!” Susan said. She turned to comfort Marcia.

But Marcia was sitting very straight and cool, and needed no comfort from anyone. “I don’t care what John thinks,” she said brightly. “Blake likes me.” They were home, the doors opened. “I don’t want to see old wooden Jane,” she said, and she skipped away.

In John’s room Susan said, “I wish, John, you wouldn’t speak so to Marcia.”

She was surprised by the age and gravity of his answering look at her. “Mother, I must,” he said. “You can’t hurt her. You’ve got to knock her or she gets you crazy. And when she knows she’s got you crazy, she’s happy.”

Now he was lifting something out of his closet and unwrapping it. It was a piece of wood about a foot high. “It’s a root,” he said. “I found it at camp, and it looked like Jane. See, I’ve only had to suggest her face. The curves are there. Of course it’s not finished.”

She forgot Marcia completely. It was like Jane indeed. He had carved away bark and surface wood, and out of the twisted root Jane’s bent figure was emerging.

“It’s wonderfully good,” she said simply.

She was proud, proud of her son. She had made him, she had given him some of her own being. His young hands, caressing the smooth wood, were appealing in their thinness, in their size, a man’s hands in shape but so childish in their bony youthfulness. Her flesh stirred at the sight and she wanted to lean forward and kiss them. But she did not.

She said, “Ought you to have lessons, I wonder?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t want them, Mother.” He paused. “I shan’t carve for a living. I just carve things. I’ll probably go into some sort of science.”