This Proud Heart (24 page)

“I’ll go and see,” said Susan.

But when she turned at the door to say a last goodbye, she saw Jane was terrified.

“If anything should happen, Mum,” said Jane, “I can’t speak a word.”

Susan laughed. “Nothing could happen to me, but here is David Barnes’ address.” She gave Jane the bit of paper and went out alone. And going down the strange street and from one strange house to another, seeing nothing but strange faces, to her too his name and address scrawled upon the leaf from his notebook was comfort.

She went into every house on the long winding street that announced itself to have a vacancy. She listened to long effervescent explanations of how sunlight fell through such a window, so, even in winter, and how here one did not hear the noise of the carts at dawn or of vendors shouting, and of this room, which though seeming dark, was miraculously cool in summer and warm in winter. She could not see any of them as home. There must be something in rooms to receive life, and these did not receive her.

She walked at last to the end of the street. It was better to see the bit of grass for herself, and to know if it were enough for a park. She came upon it suddenly. The tall narrow houses, so closely pressed together, their roofs jagged as cliffs, here stopped short and encircled a tiny square of green. There, truly enough, sat an old general in gray stone under a single large chestnut tree. She crossed the street and stood in front of him. Someone had carved him out of natural granite, someone who did not know very well how to use his tools, but who had loved the man. The uniform was stiff and ugly, but the face was tender and kind in its lines and every medal was on the proud old breast. It was quite true the sparrows had made him their own. They sat in droves upon his head and shoulders and in the crook of his arm a pigeon had built a nest. Here in this bright busy neglectful city the old man sat an exile, and only the birds gave him heed.

“I’d rather like living near him,” she thought. The children could play here, and the bench was empty and Jane could sit and sew. Across the streets on four sides were little shops where she could buy their food. She crossed again and searched among them carefully. Above a little patisserie she saw a sign of rooms to rent and she went in. A small clean white-haired woman nodded brightly above long shelves of breads and pastries, and led her up a straight narrow stair beside the shop door and opened a door. Four small clean rooms, joined one to the other, lay before her. She walked to the window and looking out saw before her the proudly bent head of the old general and his gray covered shoulders, and the chestnut tree made a spray of green across the panes.

“We can live here,” she thought. “May we come at once?” she asked the old lady.

“But yes, Madame,” she answered simply. “It is for rent, is it not? The sooner the better for you and for me.”

There were two bedrooms, and Jane could take the big one with the children, she would put up a screen for John—and she would keep the small one alone. The place would do very well. She opened her purse and paid her first week’s rent into the old woman’s pink, wrinkled palm.

From the turmoil of this small crowded house, from the merriment of the chatter over the tiny breakfast table drawn to the window, from sparrows on the windowsill, gobbling the crumbs the children put there, from Jane, in perpetual gloomy pleasure over the evil ways of foreigners, from the noise and shrillness and energy of the square, stirring into its morning life, she took each morning a bus to the huge silent studio on the edge of the city where the famous sculptor worked. On the first morning she had presented herself, a woman in a peasant’s dress and cap had taken her card, and had said in a rich deep voice, “Enter, if you please, into the foyer and wait.”

She had come into a small stone-floored hall and waited, standing, until the woman came back, her face composed, to say again, “Enter, if you please, into the studio and wait.”

She entered into a long room full of swathed and marble figures. The moments stretched endlessly as she waited. She walked back and forth, waiting, but no one came. The windows were high and she could not see more than green treetops, and the walls were so thick that there was no sound from outside. The woman did not come back, and it was as though she had been put there and forgotten.

She sat down and then got up restlessly, and walked to and fro among the figures again, and then as she waited, she grew half angry and half determined to walk out of the door and away from this house. But at the end of the room was a great scaffolding. She had not seen it at first because the room turned sharply at a right angle and ran along another side of the house. She went up to the scaffolding eagerly and saw within a huge block of marble, partly carved, with an enormous, bold head. Head and shoulders of some giant were blocked in rough sure lines. She looked up at it, awed by its immensity, not seeing what it was to be, and then, because she was not able to deny herself, she began to climb the ladder up to the top of the scaffolding. There on the topmost board she found, laid in exact order, a set of tools. Her heart leaped at them, and she took them up carefully, one by one. These were real tools, fine, tempered beyond any sculptor’s dream. They were a master’s tools, beautifully strong and light, sharp and tended. She took a chisel and a mallet. They fit the palms of her hands as though the maker had measured her for them. She leaned over the immense head, compelled to feel the edge upon the marble, and then she chipped delicately, once and twice. It was like painting with a brush, the edge cut so true and fine. Where, where could she buy such tools?

“Come down,” she heard a voice say. It was so gentle and quiet a voice that she was scarcely surprised. It stayed her hands but did not startle them. She looked down through the scaffolding and saw an upturned face, huge and bearded.

“Come down,” he repeated. She laid the tools down carefully and came down and found herself face to face with an enormous old man in a brown smock. He was brown as a seal, brown skin, brown eyes, but his spreading beard was white. His voice burst out of him, suddenly enormous, so that she jumped.

“So, Mademoiselle,” he bellowed, “you finish the head for me, hein? A young lady I do not know, whom I receive only because of my friend Barnes, comes in and condescends to finish my head for me. I thank you, Mademoiselle!”

His hands were in his beard, pulling and twisting.

“Where can I get such tools?” Susan asked. “I must have such tools.”

“Ah, now you would take my tools!” he cried. He turned and addressed the figures. “My friends, the tools—where are they? She demands them of you, the tools that made you—give them to her!”

“Please,” said Susan.

He breathed fiercely and coughed and said, suddenly rational, “Well, my dear, why have you come?”

“To learn—nothing else,” Susan said stoutly. “I shall learn everything you can teach me.”

“In that case,” he said gravely, “the task is endless.” He paused, twisting his beard, his eyes sparkling. “Climb up again,” he commanded her. “Bring down the tools. Let us begin with tools.”

She climbed up and brought them down, one by one. “Now observe—” he began, and for two hours he told her about tools.

“You’re late,” David Barnes growled at her in the afternoon. “What did you learn?”

“I learned where to buy tools,” she said, and then she said, “I shall have to earn quickly, Dave. I spent half my money today on tools, half my children’s bread!”

He was standing by a sloping desk, drawing a short bold squat figure. He looked up.

“I told you you weren’t any sort of a mother,” he said in his harsh barking voice. But his eyes were shining at her.

She was doing nothing but drawing, nothing but learning how to make armatures, how to mix clay, how to make plaster. She forgot that she had not a man’s body, and she learned how to bend iron and twist heavy wire, how to calculate the strains and stress of a huge figure of clay. All she had known now became nothing—she had so much more to learn.

“Compute!” the
maître
would command her. “If the Laocoon were to be made in clay, of what size and shape would the armature be to support it?”

She sat for hours like a schoolgirl, computing, wetting her pencil in her mouth, muttering multiplications to herself, and when at last she brought her drawing to him he roared with enormous laughter.

“The serpents!” he cried. “The serpents—everything would collapse into earth again.”

And she stood, staring at the swift lines of his black pencil on the paper.

“So!” he said. “And so—and so—” She felt the strong black lines eating into her brain.

… She had given the rest of her money to Jane and Jane was hoarding it, spending it as hardly as blood for rent and food.

“Tell me when there is only enough for a month,” Susan said to her. But Jane had not told her yet….

“First a craftsman,” he said, “and only then the artist—perhaps never the artist,” he added, “for it depends on what you are within, Mademoiselle, as to whether you are an artist. One does not become the artist—one is or is not.”

She would not ask him the words in her mouth, “And I, am I?” It was not for anyone to answer except herself. When she knew her craft she would ask herself the question and answer it.

“The soul,” he said, sharpening delicately a narrow chisel, “it all is in the measure of the soul. A little talent and a great soul are better than great talent and a small soul. When talent and soul are equally in great measure, ah, then—once or twice I have seen it so.”

He looked up at her sharply, his eyes bright behind his bushy brown brows. “You ask me no question?”

“No,” said Susan steadily, “I ask no question, yet.”

He went on sharpening his chisel. Then he stopped and brushed up the ends of his mustache. Between his mustache and his beard his lips still shone full and red.

“You are not a woman, you know, Mam’selle,” he declared. “A woman does not pursue art as you do. With women art is an escape only. It is a thing to do when life does not give what they want most. But I can nearly believe it is what you want most. Ah, your heart is cold and clear! I feel it is so.”

She smiled and did not answer. He talked a great deal to her. She knew quite well that if once she let her eyelids flutter or her hand tremble, he would pounce upon her with those hot red lips. She had heard fragments of stories among the pupils in the studio before he came. This model was his mistress and that. But she had not listened, for she cared to hear nothing. Now she could feel the essence of what he was, a hot, molten creature, still fluid with warmth, forever burning to ready passion anywhere. But still she cared no more than she had cared to use time to hear the stories about him. She looked at him with wide and candid eyes and her hand never faltered.

“You are a little stupid, I think, sometimes, Mam’selle Gaylord! Your eyes are as stupid as a child’s!” he said.

“I am not at all intellectual, Monsieur,” she agreed peaceably.

“So, you do not work out of your brain, eh?” he demanded.

“No,” she said, “not out of my brain.”

“And you have no heart,” he said abruptly, staring at her.

“None,” she said, pleasantly.

“So!” he shouted. “You work out of your stomach, perhaps!”

She thought about this. “Perhaps I do,” she agreed again.

“Ha!” he snorted. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about yourself.”

One afternoon in his studio she said to David Barnes, “How shall I know what I am?” She was working on a flat surface of bronze, rubbing in acids, studying the patina.

He replied, “If you can be satisfied with tools and materials, be satisfied. You are not then an artist. Learn your craft, and if it is enough, let it be enough.”

He stopped and began to whistle.

“What then?” she asked.

“You will be a good marble-pointer for sculptors like me.”

“That would never satisfy me,” she said quickly.

“Very well then, Miss!” he retorted. “Discover what it is that satisfies your soul. If you are satisfied with less you will be surfeited with more.”

He was sitting at his great drawing table. All about him were big sheets of paper upon which he was drawing.

“I shall have to go to America next year,” he muttered. “I shall have to do that Edison next.” He looked up at Susan. “To discover who these Titans are, that is the difficulty. It is easy to make them once they are found. But where are they? It was easy to choose among those who have already made our history. Death has sorted them out. But life is not so clever. Among the living who can say this one is greater than that?”

Susan did not hear him. For weeks she had been working with her hands rather than her brain. Tools and materials, the making of plaster casts, the preparation of marbles, the textures of bronze and the methods of casting—these had been all her interest. David Barnes had hired a carriage and driven her down a cobbled road to a spreading old foundry to watch a white-bearded French foundry man and his two sons cast his Napoleon from the plaster. She had stood by David Barnes when this plaster model was being finished. Now while they waited, she saw a pulse was beating in his jaws and that his eyes were grim. He caught her look and said, “I never can pass unscathed through this moment, when my clay model is destroyed. It is the work of my hands. When it is taken from me by these men, even though I know it must be so, I give unwillingly to other hands—it’s the core of my being for the moment—the thing I’ve made. What if they make a mistake? I shall never be able to do it again exactly right.”

“Have you ever had to do it over?” she asked.

“No—but I suffer always the same,” he replied. “And yet when the bronze comes to me from the furnaces, it is rebirth—my own is come back to me, completed and permanent.”

He would never, as other sculptors did, allow the craftsmen to finish his bronzes. He held the gas torch himself, or he made her do it, and he brushed the acids into the hot metal. He could not eat until he could discover if what he had done were successful. Together they rubbed the smooth surfaces inch by inch until they glowed and shone, and only when all was finished he roared that he was starving. Then putting his hat on askew he would rush out and bring back a great round of beefsteak which he cooked over charcoals and made her eat with him.