This Proud Heart (23 page)

“I must go out and find people,” she thought, and there flew into her mind all those worlds of people of whom Michael had told her, whom she had never seen. “I’ve seen very little,” she thought. “I wonder why I’ve been so happy.” Mary had said she was as good as dead in this little town, and she had said, believing it, that life was wherever you were living.

“But I’m not living just now,” she thought. “Nothing is happening to me inside, and if nothing happens inside, my hands have no work to do and then I shall really die.”

She stood up, frightened. She must get out of this wood before night fell. She began to walk quickly and soon she came unexpectedly out of the trees at the street’s end where she and Mark had once lived. There that first house stood. It was closed and neglected and the garden was full of weeds. No one had come into it after they went away. She stared at it, seeing it strangely with different eyes.

“How did I ever live in that small house!” she thought, wondering. But once it had been enough for her.

Then, suddenly, as she stood there all the life she had led until this moment seemed to shrink into this closed house which she had outgrown. The town, the people, the friends she had had, the years she had spent, everything gathered around the memory of Mark and was folded away with him. And all was past. She alone, she and the two children, remained, with nothing except the future. And toward that future she must now move.

She walked quickly down the twilight street. Once she turned her head aside and saw Lucile’s house. The shades were up and they were all sitting about the table at supper. Lucile was standing, cutting slice after slice from a loaf of bread. Susan looked away and went on her own way.

That night she wrote David Barnes, “I want to go away—” She paused and looked out of the window and saw a delicate young moon. “And it may as well be Paris, because you are there,” she added.

When the letter was finished, stamped and sealed, she walked down the lane and put it in the rural delivery box and set the little tin flag flying so that in the morning the postman would stop. Then she walked back through the pale night and slept as she had not slept since Mark died.

In the morning she woke to a light excited heart. She hummed a little as she dressed and when she went downstairs she said to Jane, “We are all going to Paris.”

Jane looked up from the kitchen stove. “I’m sick as a dog on the sea, Mum,” she said, “but I suppose I won’t die of it, though I’ve wished I could. Paris! I can’t talk the langwidge, and however will we get the shoppin’ done?”

“A ship—a ship!” John cried.

“Who’ll live in our house?” asked Marcia solemnly. They were eating their breakfast at the kitchen table.

“No one,” said Susan. “We’ll lock it up.”

“Aren’t we ever coming back?”

“I don’t know—yes, of course we are.”

“I should hope so,” murmured Jane, searching for the pan holder, “the raspberries and all—”

After her own breakfast she went to tell her parents. They were still at the table, and her mother said, “I wish you’d leave the children with me, Susan. Those foreign countries have such queer food.”

She considered a moment. What would it be to go off, free and alone, to work! But she could not leave them. At night she must come home, and they were now her only home.

“I can’t do without them,” she told her mother. “Even if they’re safer with you, they must take their chances with me.”

“Paris!” her father kept saying, “Paris! I always thought I’d get there some day, but I never have.”

The news flew about the little town. Lucile gave her a bridge party and she listened to their exclamations. “How you have the courage, Sue!” “With those children!” “I envy you, I must say!” “Paris is so fascinating, I’ve always thought—” “We’ll be wanting to hear all about it, Susan!”

“What’ll you do over there?” Lucile asked. She was growing stout and she pouted a little as she cut a dark cake and licked a bit of icing from her forefinger. Then she forgot Paris. “There, girls!” she cried. “That’s a good cake, if I do say it as shouldn’t!”

They all forgot Paris, Susan, everything not in their own lives. They screamed and cried, “You always make grand cake, Lucile!” “Oh, Lucile! M-mh!” Lucile, smiling and flushed, forgot what she had asked. “The whole secret of it—” she began. “No, I won’t tell!” she declared. “If I did, you’d all be making it, and then I wouldn’t have anything special to give you when you come to my house!”

“Aw, you meanie!” “Isn’t she mean?” “I’ve a good mind not to eat your old cake, anyway!” they cried.

Smiling, silent, trying to be one of them still, as she had tried to be when she was a child, Susan was as lonely as she had been the other day in Tramp’s Woods. Not one of them was living. If she should put one of them into stone or marble the strong stuff would crush them into nothing, for they were empty in themselves. There was no material in them for her needs. If they had known what she thought, they would have hated her. And she did not hate them at all.

She sat listening, watching, admiring their pretty frocks, their pretty hands fluttering among the cards. She had often paused in her morning’s work to watch a flock of small birds gather and pour out a chit-chat of varied noise, not musical, not strong enough for speech. She watched them, half amused, half tender, understanding their small intensities which were none of her intensity.

“I must remember to put out crumbs for them,” she always thought, and sometimes she remembered….

“Of course, I’ll remember to send everybody picture postcards,” she promised at their gay importunings—“Oh, all the wonderful things you’ll be seeing, Sue!” And she answered, smiling, “You must all write me and tell me how the babies are growing and everything that happens in the town.”

“We will, Sue dear,” they promised. “Good luck, Sue—oh, dear, I must hurry! Larry will be home!” “Heavens, is it six o’clock? Tom will be starving! Goodbye, Sue!” “Goodbye, dear Sue!”

“Goodbye—goodbye!” she said to them all.

They set forth for New York, a little company of four, and she was their captain. They looked to her and she led them, looking back wherever she went, to see Jane’s faithful dilapidated figure, a child’s hand in each of hers, and her eyes dogged and anxious.

“I’m too big to hold your hand, Jane,” John muttered, tugging.

“I’ll not leave hold of the two of you till we get there,” Jane answered fiercely, perspiration cold on her upper lip, and he subsided.

Susan left them in a hotel room while she bought tickets and learned about ship’s docks.

“Lock the door,” said Jane grimly. “John’s that good at arguin’, I don’t want it so we can get out before you’re back, no matter if he argues me head off the way he does.”

So she locked them in and put the key in her handbag and went about her business until everything was done. Then in the few hours before the ship sailed she took them to the entrance of the Halfred Hospital and half shyly she said to them, “There under that great round window is where those people I was making are going to stand.”

“Well, I never,” said Jane vacantly, staring around the great space.

“Look, Mother,” John cried, “there’s a man with balloons!”

“Where?” screamed Marcia. They were darting toward the street.

“There! There!” John cried.

“I’ll get them for you,” said Susan quietly, and turned away to buy the balloons. Of course it could be nothing to them where her people were to stand.

On the ship, leaving the last land she knew, she counted her money carefully. Alone she would not have troubled to know what she had, but these three looked to her for everything. She counted the bills and looked to see if the traveler’s checks were where she had put them. Jane was stalking the decks, her hands still clutching firmly the children’s frantic little fingers.

“I’ll keep ahold as long as I’m up,” she had told Susan, “for once we cast off, I’ll have to lay for good.”

“I’ll go down and get things unpacked, then,” Susan had said.

So she had come down into the cabin and unpacked pajamas and tooth brushes and counted her money. She had her prize money, and she had drawn half of Mark’s insurance money from the bank and it was enough, she reckoned, with Jane’s managing, to live for a year. In that year she must earn for another year. Her work now must be more than art, more than something to satisfy her own desire and need. It must be bread to feed the children and a roof beneath which to live.

The last moment, when she had stood ready to close the familiar door, swept back into her mind. For that moment she had been half afraid. She was leaving shelter, the only shelter she possessed, to go out, for no particular reason, into the world she did not know. Yet she did not want to sleep another night in that house. She wanted to wander, she must wander.

“Am I afraid?” she asked her heart. She was not afraid. “I’m strong enough.” she thought steadily. She was brushing her hair before the mirror with swift long strokes. Her face was brown with country winds and burn, and her body was firm and full of power, and since the day she had determined to go to Paris, the lack of will which had kept her weary since Mark died, had left her. She felt able for anything. A year! She could do anything in a year.

The door opened and Jane stood there, a pallid green upon her face.

“We’ve left,” she said faintly. “I’ve got to lay down.” She thrust the children in. “You won’t forget ’em, Mum, and get to dreamin’?”

“No,” said Susan, “I won’t get dreaming.”

“You have to keep a-hold of ’em,” said Jane, clutching them both, and leaned her head against the door jamb.

“I will,” Susan promised. She looked out of the porthole. The ship had cast her moorings and was sailing slowly toward the sea.

“Well, Susan Gaylord,” said David Barnes, “you’re here at last!”

The train had slid to a stop in the gray of an early Paris morning, and immediately his head had appeared at the door. “Kit and caboodle,” he added. “Well, come on—I’ve got a room at a pension for you and I daresay we can get another. I thought you’d be alone. Never dreamed you’d drag your pups along.”

“I had to come like this or not at all,” she said.

He did not answer. He was roaring at a blowsy porter to take their bags and then he stumped ahead of them through the crowd, digging his way with vicious jerks of his elbows.

“Keep straight behind me,” he ordered.

He led them to a gate and put his fingers in his mouth and blew a sharp whistle and a taxicab rushed out of the mist.

“Here, bundle in,” he said, and when they were all in he squeezed himself by Susan and roared an address at the driver.

“Everything’s ready for you,” he said to Susan. “You’ll go every morning at eight o’clock to the studio—here’s the place—I wrote it down for you, and you will work all morning with this man. He will teach you the million things in which you are still ignorant. And in the afternoon for the present you will come to me and work as an apprentice. I haven’t made you work before. I have treated you pretty much as a woman until now. But from this moment you aren’t a woman. You are a sculptor. You shall complain of nothing I set for you to do. You shall learn everything. Have you ever seen a foundry?”

“No,” said Susan.

“Ha!” said David Barnes. He stared at the children. “Why did you bring them?” he asked.

“They are my home,” she said.

He grunted. “You don’t need a home!”

She did not answer, but she was not going to be afraid of him. At the door of the pension she turned to him and held out her hand.

“You have been so kind,” she said. “Now there is nothing more you can do for us. I will go to the studio tomorrow morning, and in the afternoon I will come to you.”

“Here is my address,” he said. He gave her a bit of paper. “I wrote everything down. These French names have nothing for the mind to hang to…. You’re all right, are you?”

“Quite all right,” said Susan quickly.

“Well!” he grunted, and turned away and stumped into the mist.

“Where’ll we go, Mum?” asked Jane. She interrupted the stout dark Frenchwoman who had come to receive them.

“We’ll go in and have breakfast,” said Susan. “Then you shall keep the children, and I’m going out to find a place for us to live.” They were following the woman up a clean dark little stair, into a large bare clean room.

“One moment!” the woman cried. “A little breakfast, my dears!”

“What’s she sayin’?” asked Jane with suspicion.

“She’s going to bring us breakfast,” said Susan brightly. “Now, Jane, don’t look at her as though she were a murderess.”

But Jane was looking at the small ewer of water set in a basin. “We’ll not keep clean on that,” she said. “The French are a dirty people.”

“We aren’t staying here,” said Susan. “Only today. I’ve got to find something today, because tomorrow my work begins. Jane, I have to work as I never have before.”

“All them raspberries goin’ to waste in the garden at home,” Jane muttered. She was taking off Marcia’s hat and coat tenderly. “Now, lovey, we’ll wash and have a bite of breakfast, and then you shall have a sleep after such a night. Such trains, Mum! John, you’ve not cleaned yourself proper.”

“You shall all rest,” said Susan gently. “I’m going to find a pleasant place for us to live and we’ll go this afternoon.”

She had no idea of what she could do, but she must do it. Today was her one day. She would ask no delays because she was a woman with two children. In her stiff college French, while Jane spread rolls with butter and honey, she asked the large dark woman about a place to live. “Near a park, if possible, for the children, but not dear,” she added.

“But certainly,” the woman said briskly. “I see it exactly. Madame is an artist, but there remain these children. Ah, yes, there are houses, flats, apartments, assuredly, and some not dear, if Madame does not mind poor people—clean, naturally, as all French are clean. With us poverty is not filth—no, no, we are not like the English, thank God. As a matter of truth, there are such places in this very street—how large a park do you require, Madame? At the end of our street there is a bit of ground where they have set a statue of an old provincial general. It was presented by his province, you understand, Madame, and naturally it is not good enough for Paris. But what would you?—it is a gift. We are nothing if not courteous, we Parisians. So the authorities set it here among the poor. There is not a park, but the sparrows come and sit so sweetly upon his poor old shoulders. He is quite gray with their little excrements. And there is a bench and a bit of grass and a tree, and the street is wide.”