This Proud Heart (25 page)

… Tonight she went home late, as she often did, walking through the lonely Paris streets, holding her look steadfastly ahead because of the solitary figures that came out of the darkness and brushed against her. Her garments were too poor to tempt a robber, and her intent unwandering eyes held no lure for the casual. If a man stood in her path, drunken, she pushed him aside with one hand. Her mind was full of what she was learning.

Day after day now she was at the foundries, watching the stirring molten metal in the crucible, the pouring of its hot white stream into the mold. She pressed forward, forgetful of the sparks and the smoke, until the mold overflowed. Someone leaped forward to knock away the surplus, and the white intense moment was over. She longed as she had longed for children, to be able to make entire a figure from the clay to its final bronze. To make the clay models was only to conceive. She wanted to work through the whole creation from original clay, through the plaster mold, to the final smoothed and polished bronze. But no one did such things, not even David Barnes. And the other sculptors whom she came to know through him never thought beyond the plastic clay. To conceive an idea and put it to clay was enough for them. They sent them away and received them again, not knowing how it was they went out in clay and returned in metal. But she was incomplete unless her hands had moved to perform each step….

“Am I craftsman or artist?” she asked herself aloud in the darkness of the street.

The
maître
kept saying to her loudly that women were never artists. Women were too passive, they lacked the cold desire for perfection, women were lazy, they could not give themselves, women were machines and not creators, women had no imagination. She listened, pondering what he said. But she was not like other women. Once she had told Mark most passionately that she would not be different, but now she knew she was different. Other women did not carry about in them this unceasing desire for perfection in the shaping of clay and the carving of stone. Other women did not leave their homes and come across the sea, searching. She knew now that had Mark lived, one day she would still have come, and if he had not come with her she would have left him and come alone. And that would have broken his heart. It was better that he died than that she should break his heart. Then she was shocked that it could ever seem well to her that Mark was dead. She was ashamed and still she said to herself doggedly, “I have to do what I was made to do.”

She reached the square and in the blackness the old general’s figure lifted itself, still more solid in blackness, and she opened the door of the straight steep stair that led to home. Now she left the unanswered question outside in the night. Upstairs Jane sat beside a clean lighted lamp darning John’s sock drawn over her hand.

“How have they been?” Susan asked quickly.

“They’d a wunnerful day,” said Jane. “I took ’em on a bus to some gardens the policeman told me about. There’s a policeman at the end of the street who can talk almost Christian, Mum.”

“You mustn’t get lost,” Susan said. “How would I ever find you?”

“I’ll not lose them,” Jane answered. “I always look which way I’m goin’ and come back the same.”

Susan tiptoed into the big bedroom where on the two cots they lay asleep. She drew up a stool and sat down. Asleep or awake they gave her something which she did not try to understand, but which she must have. Their bodies, their voices, their talk and laughter, their whole being made a foundation of reality to her life. She had not seen them all day. She had scarcely thought of them. But at night she came home because they were here. In the faint light of the night lamp she could see John’s head, his cheek upon his hand, quiet, ordered, as John was. But Marcia lay in a sprawl, her arms flung wide, her hair tossed as sleep happened to catch her. If there had not been these two to make her home, to what would she come, who must come home at night? David Barnes had a cot behind a screen in his studio and he did not care whether it was night or day. He slept when he could work no more. But she had to open a door into a room and see a lighted lamp and a table set for food and know that her children were safe and sleeping. She tiptoed away, content.

Jane rose to fetch her supper and Susan sat down in her place and drew John’s sock over her hand and began to weave the thread in and out. It was good to feel the familiar homely work in her fingers.

“How long his foot is growing!” she said to Jane.

“He takes eight-year-old things reg’lar now,” said Jane. She set down a bowl of soup. “It’s a soup I learned off of Madame downstairs whose name I can’t never say,” she said. “But the soup’s good. I smelled it one day when I ran in. ‘What is it?’ I says, sniffin’ you know to show her, on account of her bein’ slow in the langwidge, and she takes me behind and shows me. Carrots, onion, a bit of cabbage, whatever meat you’ve got handy—”

“It’s good,” said Susan. She forgot food hour after hour, and came home to find herself ravenous at the smell and taste of food.

“Perhaps we ought to send John to school,” she said to Jane who was bringing in a salad.

“It would maybe be good for ’im,” said Jane, standing to wait, “though it’s a pity if he has to learn his books in such a langwidge as they’ve got here.”

“I think I’ll take tomorrow to find out about schools,” said Susan. It was a long time since she had spent a day with the children. A hunger for them stirred in her. She had every now and again to renew herself with them. “They mustn’t forget I am their mother,” she thought jealously.

And for a day she was everything to them.

“I want Mother to button my dress,” Marcia cried. “Go away, naughty old Jane!”

“Mother, I drew some birds,” said John eagerly. “I want to show you my birds.”

After their breakfast she took them with her to see Mr. Withers, the English clergyman who had come to call on her once.

“We want a school for John,” she told him. They were sitting in the proper little English drawing room which looked out on a winding old Paris street, and Mr. Withers’ faded little wife was saying, “Would you like a biscuit, dears?”

“Cookies, she means, Mother,” John explained in a whisper when she had passed the jar.

“Let me see,” said the clergyman.

“French,” said Susan.

“Ah,” said Mr. Withers, “I doubt the wisdom of his learning his letters in a foreign tongue.”

“Ah, no,” cried Mrs. Withers softly. “Don’t let them become foreign. It is such a temptation. One succumbs, scarcely knowing. I feel odd myself, sometimes, when we go back to dear old England. If it weren’t that Mr. Withers’ flock is in Paris—”

But in the end she put John into a small day school nearby where the children of the neighbors went. It was not a school which Mr. Withers had ever heard of nor would he have approved it. But neat little French boys and little girls in cotton aprons went there every morning, and she had stopped on her way home at noon from Mr. Withers.

“But yes,” the fresh-faced school mistress cried, “why not, Madame? We do not object to little English boys if they will learn to speak French! Ah, small one, you are six? A big boy! The English are so big—ah, he is American! They are bigger, even, than the English. Yes, yes, tomorrow—why not?”

In the afternoon she took them to the Louvre. They stood before the Venus de Milo.

“Can you make them just like that?” John asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. All day she had forgotten the question she had asked herself the night before. Now it rushed back to her. How smooth were these surfaces, the planes how flowing! There were no angularities to disturb that harmony of shape.

“Look, John,” she said eagerly, “feel her!” She lifted him to touch the smooth body. “See how the lines flow as though they were made of water! Do you remember the curl of the wave at the prow when the ship cut into the sea?”

They were looking at her with large uncomprehending eyes.

“Come, it’s time to go home,” said Susan. And when they were home she fed them and bathed them and put them to bed.

“I can bathe myself,” John protested. “Jane always lets me.”

“Let me just dry you,” she said when he stepped out of the tin tub Jane filled with water from a can. She dried him, feeling the lean firmness of his body. The roundness was disappearing. He was growing in lines and planes. She saw him for a moment like a statue, the turn of his shoulder and thigh, the poise of his head…. She had been with them all day. They had been happy and she had been content. Again and again through the day she put out her hand to touch them, to caress them, to hold their hands, and now she was assuaged in one part of herself and now she was hungry in another.

When they were in bed she said to Jane abruptly, “I’m going for a walk before I sleep.”

And when she opened the door there was the question she had left there, still waiting for her. She crossed the little square and sat down in the shadow of the old provincial general. Along the outline of his shoulders she could see the ragged headless shapes of sparrows, their feathers ruffled in sleep, their heads under their wings. She sat there a long time, until Madame had closed her little shop and her black-haired boy had put up the boards for the night. At night the square was as still as a field at home, except for a little cafe at the far corner. But even there the tables were being deserted. A man passed by with a woman and he drew her into the general’s shadow and kissed her deeply and long.

“Alors!”
he cried with a loud sigh, and she clung to him a moment and then they stepped out into the street again and went on. They had not seen her because she had shrunk away between the old general’s knees. But she had watched them as eagerly as though she had known them. She had felt the woman in the man’s arms, she had felt on her own mouth the pressure of his lips. She sat dreaming of them, of people like them, of all people everywhere, and of how their indestructible life forced itself into being. What she wanted to do was to catch this life into her hands and make it live forever. Those two figures, man and woman, had stood together as motionless as marble. Life at its every height was still, instinct with pure feeling. Marble alone could contain that noble stillness, toward which all movement flowed. Every end is still.

She rose, feeling a power rush into her. She knew her tools now and she was master of her materials. But tools were not enough and materials were only means. Marble, stone, and bronze, flesh and blood and bone, these were still only her means.

“I want to make people,” she thought. She was suddenly done with numbers and metals, with casting and with foundries. She knew her craft. She had now to find her art.

“I want my own studio,” she said to David Barnes. “It’s been very nice of you to let me stay here, but now I want really to work, and I need to be alone.”

“I don’t know what makes you think you know so much,” he muttered. He was very short-tempered these days because he was more and more convinced that he must go to America for his next Titan, who had to be a living man. Until now they had all been in Europe and England, great men who were dead. But he had caught up to his times.

“I’ve got to go to America,” he groaned. “Edison won’t come here. You can have this place to yourself.”

“No,” she said, “you’d always be here. I’d never rid myself of you.”

“You’re a weak woman,” he said. “If you were strong enough you could work anywhere. Look at me! I work where I happen to have my stuff. I’ve got my hands along with me and clay’s easy. One of the best things I ever did was in an English public house with all the chaps standing about making fun of me.”

“I could do that,” she cried, his scorn lighting her anger like a torch put to tinder. “But you’re so damned domineering. I feel you here even when you’re gone.”

“I never interfere with you,” he shouted.

“Only by being yourself,” she replied.

It became a challenge to battle between them.

“I dare you to take my studio and go on with your own stuff!”

“I could if I knew what my stuff was,” she replied. “But I’m only trying to find out. Your ideas, your words will hang about here like echoes after you’re gone. I don’t want them.”

“I’m going in a week,” he said. “Make up your mind, you woman.”

To be a woman was such a burden that she had become sensitive to the word. She replied instantly, “Very well, I’ll take it. And when you come back, you’ll find it so strange here you won’t want to stay.”

But before the week was out Jane said, “I’ve only money for a month, Mum. You said to tell you.”

She had forgotten. “Well,” she said, and drew a deep breath, “I shall have to get some more, Jane.”

She felt a sudden terror. She would be completely alone. There would be no one to whom she could turn when David went to America, and if she could find no food for her children—She was glad that she had not known before Jane told her. She would not now tell David Barnes. She could manage her own life. She helped him to pack and endured the last day of his frenzy. He packed his tools meticulously into beautifully made cases, each chisel point wrapped in chamois skin, and took an immense supply of a clay he had mixed himself.

“That American stuff,” he growled, “it dries before you’re half done—it’s their cursed facility. Clay ought to stay soft as flesh until you’re through with it. I’ve got a secret I’ll tell you sometime, Susan, but not until I’m dying.”

“Suppose you fall out of a plane or something?” she asked.

“You’re to look inside that Adam over there,” he nodded his head at a small primeval figure in plaster. “It’s sealed inside of him, on a bit of paper. Nobody knows.—There now, I’m ready to go.”

“But where are your clothes?” she asked.

He looked at her.

“Damn!” he said, and pulled an old Gladstone bag from under the cot and opening a chest he pulled out garments. “Once I went without ’em,” he said busily, “and didn’t find it out until I was at sea.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“Wore what I had on,” he replied briskly. “There—goodbye, Susan.” He opened the door, roared into the hall, and a boy came and heaved the box of tools to his shoulder, and he seized the sagging bag. She felt the stiff brush of his gigantic beard against her cheek. “Goodbye,” he said again, and stopped at the door. “There’s some mixed clay there in the closet,” he said. “You might as well use it, I guess.”