This Proud Heart (21 page)

The one night she now still feared was Christmas Eve. She could not forget how she and Mark had kept it every year. Now without him she and Mary put into the small stockings the toys she had gone out alone to buy. They did not talk of what they did, beyond a few words.

“That knife is for John,” Susan said. “He wants to whittle things as his grandfather does. He’ll cut himself, I suppose.”

“He’ll cut himself anyway, sooner or later,” said Mary. “Of course the doll is for Marcia.”

“Marcia doesn’t like dolls any more either,” she answered.

“I never liked dolls,” Mary said, yawning. “But you always did.”

Susan nodded. “I suppose that’s why I keep giving them to Marcia,” she answered. In a few minutes it was all finished. Mary yawned again.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “I can’t get enough sleep since I came home. I’ve been sitting up late in New York. There’s everything to do there. It’s so quiet here.”

“Do you like your life?” Susan asked.

“I love it,” Mary answered passionately. “I hope I can stay there forever. I can, I suppose. They practically promise us jobs when we finish. I’m going into designing—gowns and hats—” Halfway up the stairs she looked down, a tall, angular, smart young figure. She said carelessly, “I might be able to help you, Sue—if you want to make fountains or figurines or something like that. I might be able to place them for you.”

For the first time since Mark died Susan felt another sting.

“I shan’t be doing any small things,” she said proudly. “I never told any of you that Jonathan Halfred chose my model for the memorial to his father. I’m working on it.”

“Halfred of Halfred-Mead?” Mary asked in her cool voice.

“Yes,” said Susan.

“That’s very nice,” said Mary. “How long have you known?”

“Since the day Mark went to the hospital,” Susan answered.

“It’s not like you to keep a thing like that to yourself.” Mary’s voice dropped the words, one by one, like bits of ice.

“With Mark gone it didn’t seem to matter,” Susan said.

They looked at each other. Something hung trembling between them, some old instinctive difference with which they were born. Susan waited, defensive, for Mary to put it into clear cold words. It might be well if it were put into words so that each could know what it was and the mists between them be cleared away. They might be nearer afterwards, in that clarity, than they were now, each not knowing what the words were.

But Mary turned her head away. “Good night, Sue,” she said in her neutral way. “See you in the morning.”

She went upstairs, her heels tapping sharply.

Susan crossed the dark lawn that night, angry, and in anger she began to work with energy and at once.

“Mary hates me,” she thought. “I don’t know why, but she hates me because of what I am. Nothing I can do will make her like me.”

She stopped a moment, thinking. Once in the night Mark had said that something she was came between them and made her remote. And she had put herself aside and given herself up to him.

“I am so glad I did that,” she thought, wistfully. Then abruptly she began to work again.

There was no wistfulness in this knowledge of Mary’s dislike. There was nothing but anger, and anger was healing because it made her forget. She worked twice as fast and as well as she had done before, and when at four o’clock she went to bed she fell asleep immediately and slept without dreaming and without pain.

On Christmas morning Mary watched John with cool dark eyes while he struggled with his new knife, and she sat without a smile while Marcia undressed her doll, dropped it, and began to open every package. Mary seemed not to see them. All through the Christmas Day at her father’s house she was apart from them, as though she were a stranger, tolerating the Christmas tree and her father’s old jokes over the turkey and the blazing plum pudding. Susan, acute with anger, saw and felt her, and her anger made the day pass without the despair she had so dreaded.

But still she said nothing to Mary. She remembered Mary’s pale dark stubborn childhood, and when her father growled to her aside, “Is Mary suffering secretly from cancer or unrequited love or something?” she laughed and answered, “She’s only trying to be grown up.” Mary’s grave face was childish still, her profile so young, when she turned her head unexpectedly over her stiffly held shoulder.

The day after Christmas Susan, at the piano, heard the doorbell pulled without mercy. Jane flew to see who it was. Susan could hear her say stiffly, “Please to take off your things here, sir.” In a moment Jane tiptoed in to whisper indignantly, “It’s only that young feller that used to come ridin’ to the other house—what call he’s got to pull off the handle to the doorbell, I don’t know, Mum, but he’s done it.” She held the old-fashioned brass knob in her hand.

Now Michael’s voice was shouting from the hall, “Susan, where are you? I’m sorry!”

She went out and there he stood in a brown fur coat, looking enormous and changed. But when he flung the coat off, he was still slender, though inches taller.

“We’re here in the country for Christmas,” he explained, his face beautiful and amiable. He bent and kissed her lightly on both cheeks. “Now let me come in by your fire and tell me how you do—don’t tell me anything sad, for I know all that, but tell me what you are working at.”

He was pulling up the blue chair by the fire, and talking in his faintly foreign way. He had been away so long that it was hard now to know where he belonged in the world. But he made the room warm and bright and gay. She leaned forward to put a fresh log on the fire, and before she could do it he had it and was mending the coals, the tongs skillful in his firm quick hands.

He was real, he was fresh and young, and he made everything about him leap with reality, this room, this house, the children’s voices floating down the stairs, the flying flames, the lamplight, the drawn curtains. And whatever he talked about became real.

“I saw Dave the other day in Paris,” he said, and Paris shone before her eyes, a city of living people. “He’s expecting you one of these days.”

She smiled and did not answer. It had not come to her that she could leave this house where she and Mark had lived together. But Michael brought the world into this room with his easy voice and his talk of everything. And Michael had never seen Mark.

“I went over to Constantinople,” he was saying, “just for a holiday, and last winter I was in India to paint the Himalayas. I wanted to do mountains—not Alps, because people are crawling all over them these days, but snows where feet have never trod and all that, you know. There are mountains in the Himalayas which simply won’t let people reach them, Susan. You can see them lifting their heads higher and higher when you start climbing them.”

She was leaning forward, listening. No one had really talked to her for so long. He was throwing the world before her to see. She had forgotten there was a world. “Then I shipped my canvases home and went to China and painted again—people, this time—not the old gorgeous mandarin stuff, Sue, but women like arrows, like odalisques—like—like thin ivory statues—modern women. There’s nothing so wonderful to paint in the world—wait till these old fellows in the Academy see them! The world hasn’t discovered them yet.”

He stopped short to stare over Susan’s head. She turned, and Mary was standing in the doorway in a close, smooth, dark coat of red, buttoned high about her throat, and on her head a small red hat.

“Come in, Mary,” Susan said. “This is Michael Barry.”

He was on his feet, waiting for her. “Michael, this is my sister,” she said.

Mary put out her narrow dark hand. “How do you do,” she said calmly. “Sue, I’m going for a walk before dark.”

“When will you be back?” Susan asked.

“I don’t know,” Mary said. If she knew Michael was staring at her she made no sign she knew. She stood pulling the small red velvet hat on her head, and he stood staring at her. She turned, indifferently, without haste, and went out, and after a moment he sat down.

“You were talking about China,” Susan said.

“Yes,” said Michael and lit a cigarette and smoked it quickly. “She looks rather Chinese, your sister. You didn’t tell me about her, Susan.”

“I never told you about myself at all,” Susan said quietly. “I have two children as well, and a father and a mother.”

But he was not listening. He crushed out his cigarette and stood up again. “I’ll be going along,” he said abruptly. She followed him into the hall. “Awfully good to see you,” he said hastily. He plunged into the great fur coat and slammed the door.

Jane, setting the table for the children’s early supper, peered out of the window. “A nasty conceited young man,” she muttered, “not at all the sort a woman’d want about.”

Here in her house she saw with wonder the swift onrush of instant love between Michael and Mary. Their love was weaning her away from herself, pulling her out of the stupor in which she had let the days pass since Mark died. It was not like any love she had ever seen, and she knew it was not like the long, slow-growing love between herself and Mark. She had known Mark from her babyhood. There was no time in her life when she had not some memory of him. He was always the same, pleasant kind little boy, shy pleasant lad, and he was strange only for a night, when he became her lover. But there had been no madness in him even then, nothing but the endless reaches of his loving kindness. Love was a wide gentle sea which she had seen scarcely disturbed.

But this new love was a sharp, narrow, angry river, hemmed in between rocks. There was no gentle approach to it. Michael came every day in the morning.

“Where’s Mary?” he demanded. “I’ve got to see her.”

“Mary?” Susan called upstairs.

Sometimes Mary answered and sometimes she did not. If she did not Michael waited, fidgeting and talking. The first morning Susan had opened Mary’s door.

“I only want to tell you Michael’s here,” she said.

Mary was lying asleep in yellow pajamas, her head on her arms, her body straight. She opened her eyes and looked at Susan.

“Why should he wake me?” she said and turned and closed her eyes again.

Susan shut the door and went downstairs to Michael.

“She doesn’t want to wake up,” she told him.

“She’s got to wake up,” Michael said. “We have only a few days.”

“I won’t wake her,” said Susan gently.

“I can see she has a damned bad temper,” said Michael gloomily. “But I don’t care.”

He shouted up the stairs. “Mary! Get up! I’ll come up if you don’t! I won’t wait for you.”

But he waited. Mary came downstairs coolly at last, yawning a little.

“You put your coat on and come with me,” Michael ordered. “I’ve got my car.”

“I shan’t go anywhere until I’ve had my breakfast,” Mary said, and she sat idling over coffee and toast and a cigarette, and would not hurry though he stood glowering over her.

Love grew between them like a sharp wind in spring, and they made no secret of it.

“I’m silly about her,” Michael told Susan one day. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. It’s not as if I didn’t know about women. It’s Mary—I’m hit to the heart.”

“I ought to be glad but I’m not,” Susan said slowly. “I can’t see you happy with her. She has to have her own way.”

“So do I,” he said quickly. “I’m going to marry her. I shall ask her today, because she’s going tomorrow.” He was standing by the fire, waiting for Mary, at ten o’clock in the morning. “Then she won’t be going back to that business college. It makes me crazy to think of her in offices with a lot of men. I want to paint her—I want to paint her all the time I’m making love to her, but there isn’t time to do both. When we’re married, I’ll do nothing but paint her all day long.”

“Does she love you?” Susan asked. It was impossible to know whether Mary was in love.

“Of course she does,” said Michael impatiently.

She watched them in the car, flying down the gravelly drive, down the hard frozen road, across the wintry country. They scarcely spoke when they were together, and if she had not known they were in love she would have thought they hated each other.

They were gone all day. It was twilight when the door opened and Mary came in alone. She went upstairs and Susan went to the piano and played quietly, waiting. She felt strange and sad, as though she were old and her life was over, though she was not yet thirty. But life was not according to one’s years—it was according to what one had. Tonight what she had was not enough, and she felt old.

She heard Mary’s footsteps come down the stair and into the room behind her. Mary’s hand was on her shoulder, cool and light.

“Well, Sue,” she said in her clear voice.

“Well?” asked Susan. She went on playing, softening the music to a whisper.

“I’m all packed,” said Mary. Susan turned and looked at her. Mary took her hand away and sat down in the blue chair and crossed her long slender legs.

“You’re not—you didn’t—” she said.

“I’m not going to marry Michael Barry,” said Mary, looking back at her straightly. “I suppose that’s what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you love him?” Susan asked, astonished.

“Yes, I love him,” said Mary, “but I simply will not be married. I’ve made up my mind to it. I know what I want.”

“You’re wrong,” said Susan quickly. “You’ll be sorry.”

“Why?” Mary’s voice was clear and hard.

“It’s life,” said Susan slowly. “You can’t refuse life and be alive.”

Mary looked around the silent room. Outside was the darkness, falling upon the stillness of the winter’s night.

“There’s not much life in this house,” she said. “You don’t know what life is, Sue, shut off like this.”

“I had Mark,” said Susan. “I have the children.”

Upstairs John and Marcia were asleep. They had played outdoors in the cold sunlight until their cheeks were scarlet.

“I don’t know why women think one man and a couple of children is all of life,” said Mary.

“It’s the earth out of which life grows,” said Susan. “If you refuse marriage, Mary, you’ll never have your roots deep.”

She could not say what she meant. But she knew, though Mark was dead, that death could never take away what he had given her.