This Proud Heart (11 page)

“Goodbye, Mother.” Susan’s mouth was full of safety pins and she held the child firmly while she pinned clean diapers about him.

And then she went downstairs with him in her arms and gave him orange juice and a cracker and put him in his play pen among his toys, and she began Mark’s dinner. The child looked at her doubtfully every now and again and went on quietly playing with his toys. After a while Mark came in and kissed her and picked the child up and tossed him about in play, and then he gave him the bread and milk she had mixed in a bowl. They went upstairs together, and together she and Mark bathed the child and she curled his hair on top of his head in a long tunnel on her finger, and they laid him in bed, rosy and clean, and put out the light.

She and Mark went downstairs again and she brought in the meal she had prepared and he sat down in solid obvious comfort to eat. He began talking at once of what had happened to him during the day, of time he had spent with people who could not make up their minds about homes they saw, and of a mistake in an account which he could not trace for an hour or two and of how his boss had said that the business had trebled in two years and if “things kept going so good—”

Everything was exactly as it had been every night, and she sat listening and tending to his needs quietly. But suddenly he looked at her.

“Say,” he exclaimed, “you haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying. And you aren’t eating! I feel as if you hadn’t been here at all!”

“Yes,” she said quickly, “yes, I’m here, Mark…. Mark, do you mind if I take some lessons in modeling?”

“Why should I mind?” said Mark, cheerfully. “Go ahead, sure! It’ll amuse you, won’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You don’t get out enough,” he went on kindly. “It isn’t as though you ran around to other women’s houses. When have you and Lucile had a visit?”

“No, I don’t seem to care to,” she agreed.

“So,” he concluded, generously, “go right ahead.”

“I’ll pay for them,” she said.

“Oh, well,” said Mark carelessly.

Ever since John was born they had not talked of money. He did not ask her anything, merely turning over to her each week all his salary except five dollars which he kept for himself. He did not want to know what she did with his money, so that he need not know whether or not it was enough, so that he need not know what she added to it. And he talked a great deal more than he used to do, and she sat listening and listening. “So, as I was saying, Susan, the boss—”

His voice was going on and on, and she fixed her eyes on his face. He grew a little thinner, perhaps, and he was going to be bald before he was old….

Tomorrow she would see if she could get somebody to come and sit with John for an hour or so, twice a week, someone whom no one on the street knew, a stranger who would say nothing because she would not care. She would go to the agency.

And Mark, having finished his dinner, helped her with the dishes, and then he said abruptly, “You haven’t really kissed me since I came home tonight. We both got so busy with the kid—”

He took her in his arms and she stood in silence while he pressed himself to her. She had an impulse to pull away, to sigh and say, “Oh, I’m tired, Mark.” But he had buried his face in her neck, and she saw the curve of his head to his shoulder, as helpless as the droop of a child’s head, and she held him hard. Indeed, indeed, she loved him very much.

“Oh, Sue,” he said breathlessly, “you’re all that makes the day worth while!”

And standing thus, holding him, she knew what he said was true. She must never forget how much she was to Mark, how much he loved her, or that she loved him.

She found a white-faced, half-frightened English woman and engaged her to come twice a week to stay with John. She had looked about the roomful of desultory women and girls at the agency, passed hastily all who were chewing gum and gaudily dressed, to meet a pair of pale blue timid eyes set in a thin white face.

“I’d like to speak to that one,” she said to the thick-bodied woman at the desk.

“Jane Watson, come here,” the woman said, and Jane Watson came forward. She was dressed in a black cotton dress and on her hands were black cotton gloves and she carried an umbrella.

“Lady wants somebody twice a week to nurse,” said the woman.

“Oh yes,” Jane Watson said eagerly, “I’m that fond of a child!”

“Her husband’s just died,” said the woman to Susan. “She hasn’t had a job before. You’ll have to bear it in mind.”

So Jane came, slipping into the house like a shadow twice a week, hanging her things in the kitchen closet, tying a white apron over her black dress. She was as silent as though she were dumb, but she did not once fail. And she was a presence in the house, a guardian to whom Susan could entrust the part of her life which the house held while she fled down the street to that other part.

“Where do you keep yourself?” Lucile called to her. “Come in a while, Susan! I haven’t seen you all summer!”

She only waved and smiled. “I’ll be coming in soon,” she promised. One day she would stop to see Lucile again. But now she hastened, her heart flying ahead of her. And on the porch Lucile stood looking after her, her pretty face a little shrewish.

Sometimes David Barnes was in the big studio which had once been a ballroom, and sometimes he was not. It made no difference, because she had begun to work on an idea for the fountain. He had sniffed at it a little.

“Fountain!” he snorted. “Garden truck!”

“I’ve always wanted to see what I could do with water and stone,” she said abashed. “But if you think—”

“Go on if you want to,” he said. “What’s my thinking got to do with it?” So without further talk she had begun on a fountain, which was to be a thirsty adolescent boy, holding his cupped hands to catch the water gushing strongly from a rock. But the boy’s figure troubled her. She needed a model and she had none. She knew only the lines of Mark’s body, and remembering them, she began to hew out the marble of the block she had chosen from those in the studio.

She had never before worked in anything except clay. But there had come to her now like an unquenchable thirst, the desire to carve instead of to mold. She spent hours watching David Barnes hewing at his Titan. Then she said, “I have to work in stone. I’ve been wrong to touch anything else.”

“Hm,” he grunted. “Mud’s lots easier, especially for a woman.”

“I haven’t any money to buy stone,” she went on. “But I could sell my fountain for enough, maybe, when it’s done.”

“Pick your piece,” he ordered. “You can pay me. It’s the best marble—I get it from Kinnaird. Know Kinnaird?”

“No,” she said.

“Marble man,” he said.

He had taken her from one piece to the other.

“Choose your own,” he said again. “Not too quickly—feel them all over, get the texture and the colors—every block is different from every other—some are warm, some are cold—and some have a vein of rottenness right in the heart. You have to take your chance of that.”

So for hours she had brooded over stone, pondering upon each piece. Finally she chose a small warm white block and touching it she asked him, “Have you chosen this one?”

He shook his head and went on with his own work, sending a fury of small chips about his head. These were the years he was doing his Titans, and this was the tenth—the figure of Galileo. It would be one day a gallery of history in stone. And half hesitating, having watched him, she began her own figure.

At first it was simple enough. She saw quite clearly through the intervention of the marble, the figure she wanted. She had made a sketch, then a dozen, and finally under his scorn, she had finished a complete and careful painting of what she wanted.

“Sketch—sketch—sketch—” he had muttered through his beard. “A sketch is nothing but laziness. Put down what you really mean.”

She had put it down in careful lines. And he said, “The body’s too stiff. It’s the body of a bank clerk or an insurance agent or a salesman. It’s a real estate man or a critic or a sergeant in the army.” He was twinkling at her over his beard, and she laughed. “You can’t make fountains of such lumps,” he said harshly.

But she did not know how to change it, and so she began, driving off the outer layers of her stone. And then she grew bitterly dissatisfied with her picture. She put down her hammer and chisel and stared at the painted figure a long time. It was exactly Mark’s body and it was not Mark who stooped to catch in his hands the water from a spring. Where could she find a boy’s body, a boy not quite a man, a boy lovely and light? Not here—the townspeople would think her insane.

“What’s wrong?” he asked gruffly, and the endless swift tapping of his hammer paused.

“I don’t have the right body,” she said. “I dare not go closer to the figure in the marble until I see it. I don’t like this one.” She tore her picture in two.

“So, why don’t you get what you want?” he asked.

She would not say she did not know how to do it. She would do it somehow. What did it matter what people thought? She would hire a student in the wretched little university—they were all poor. But she could not imagine any of them with a beautiful body, since they were children of the poor. And besides, there were the townspeople. And at that moment she heard a clatter of horse’s hoofs and outside the French window, open upon an old dilapidated terrace, Michael was leaping from his horse and dashing up the steps. They looked at each other.

“Why not?” said David Barnes carelessly. “Michael—Michael!” he roared, and the door opened and Michael thrust in his head.

“Hello,” he said politely. “Say, Susan, Mother wants to see you. She’s got someone who wants you to do her kid.”

“I shan’t do anything just now,” said Susan.

“Come in here and take off your clothes,” Barnes ordered. “She needs your figure.”

And Michael came in, cheerfully obedient, and tugged at his belt and his open shirt collar and kicked off the shoes from his already bare feet.

“Can’t stay long,” he said amiably.

“You’ll stay half an hour at least,” Barnes ordered him. “Now then, Susan Gaylord.”

But she was already drawing as fast as her pencil would fly.

“You’re bending to drink from your hands at a gush of water from the side of a rock,” she said, and Michael stooped carelessly, gracefully, and cupped his hands.

“Gosh, I am thirsty,” he said, his lips parted. “It’s getting hot out. Barney, I want to finish my picture of you. You’ve got to come and sit for me this evening.”

“An old ape sitting in fading candlelight, that’s what you’ve made me in your damned picture,” he growled. “Every time I look at it, I’m afraid my beard’ll catch on fire.”

“I’ll expect you,” said Michael, laughing.

She did not hear them. She was catching every line of his hard young body, of his beautiful turned head—no, but she knew the head—no, but it was larger, different, changing. And his hands—she must get them right—thank God his knees were smooth and straight as a girl’s and his flanks were narrow. She looked at him, seeing his body marble, his head marble, the curve of his waist and bent thighs marble. This was the body inside her block of stone. She turned away from his flesh and blood and began to work certainly at the stone, shaping as she searched. When she looked up again and stopped the noise of the mallet, the room was silent. They had both gone away and she was alone. How long she had been alone she did not know, but the yellow evening sun was lying across the silent terrace and she must hurry home.

But the marble was no longer a block of stone. Out of it was coming a warm white human figure outlined before a rock. She took up the chisel and she put it down again, dazed…. She must go home to put John to bed and to make Mark’s dinner. That was the work she must do.

When Mark came home his dinner was ready and John, bathed and in his night clothes, was finishing his supper. And when he had played with his son a while she and Mark put him to bed, and ate their own dinner and he told what had happened to him all day. When he had told all he could remember he said pleasantly, “Did you have a good time at your lesson?”

“Yes, I did,” she answered.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I hammered stone all afternoon like a convict on the road,” she said.

He laughed and she laughed with him, and he did not notice in their laughter that she said nothing more than that.

The summer passed and she did not know it. Jane came stealthily earlier and stayed later and when Susan came home in the evening, always hurrying because she was too late, she found vegetables washed and meat ready, and the table set, and John bathed and eating his supper.

“I haven’t anything to take my time, Mum,” said Jane. “It’s somethin’ to do—you needn’t pay me more than reg’lar.”

And Susan, knowing the house and the child safe, stayed into the summer dusk, while the light lasted, timing herself only against Mark’s homecoming. Michael sat for her several times more until she had his body by heart, and then she departed from it, making the figure more slender, more young even than his own, so that it was not he, but a dream. All the time David Barnes was beside her, paying her no apparent heed.

But he saw her, sidewise from his own work, and he was silent, or he shouted at her suddenly, furious at a line gone wrong or at a slip of her chisel. But for nothing was he so angered as when she failed in power.

“You’re not making a damned candlestick!” he roared, “you aren’t a gift-shoppy artist. Pound it in—pound it in! Straight and hard and clear!”

He would not touch the figure himself, not even to show her what he meant. But he was merciless upon her, sparing her nothing because she was not a man.

“Forget forever that you’re a woman, will you? God forgot it. Pound that line deeper, harder—That’s it—that’s it—that’s it!”

She swung her arm down, pounding.

“Don’t let me hear any tinkling,” he said, savagely. “When you’re finishing you feel the chisel point like the end of your finger—now it’s muscle you want.”

At night her shoulders ached until she could not sleep. But she wanted no mercy because she was a woman.

When the fountain was finished he glanced at it carelessly.