This Proud Heart (36 page)

Hidden in the midst of all this life, she went on working steadily, without haste, without delay, in long absorbed hours. She walked through spring sunshine in the morning and when she laid down her tools, she went out into the bright spring evening. Sometimes a sudden rain blown against the window made her lift her head a moment, and the noises of the street died in the clatter of rain until the sun shone and the children swarmed out to make excited search into gutters and momentary pools.

Steadily day by day she hewed and carved, now driving off great flakes and chips, now cutting as delicately as she might have painted with a brush the curves of lip and lid, the pointing of a breast, the turn of knee and ankle. In the earliest days of summer she finished American Woman, Black.

Delia, pausing to look at it as she finished her cleaning, laughed high laughter.

“Sho’ would worry me if I looked like dat!” she declared. “It was mighty relievin’ when you tole me you was makin’ it out of yo’ own haid!” She paused, grave and enormous. “I wouldn’ like anybody to think I wasn’t a lady, honey!”

“Nobody would think this was you, Delia,” Susan agreed.

“Naw’m,” Delia said, “dey sho’ly wouldn’ and is I relieved!”

She now knew that this great figure was only the first of many to come, how many she did not know. But around her were all these faces, these figures in procession. Every day she saw one which belonged in marble. She chose, from among them, a Swedish woman who, with her husband, ran a restaurant. They had no other help, and together they cooked and washed dishes and served the small tables covered with red and white oilcloth. In an earlier age they would have been plunging across the western deserts behind oxen. She went in one day and behind their spread of home-made smörgasbord, she asked, “Will you and your husband let me sit here and draw you as you work?”

“Sure,” the woman cried heartily, “it don’t do no hurt I guess, hay, Gus?”

“Naw,” he grunted, his arms heaped with dishes.

She went every day for two weeks, watching, drawing, hearing them talk to each other. At the end of that time she tore up her drawings and began to hew out of the marble from Paros her figures which she called, America North. They were clothed figures in early Swedish costume, and with them they were carrying all they could of the chattels of their civilization. Their bodies were tall and lean and their steady faces were set in the bitterness of the north wind.

Smikey, coming in alone one day because it was getting hot in the street, sat down in the chair and stared at the head she was blocking out.

“That’s Gus, ain’t it? It looks sort of like him, only bigger.”

She nodded, and went on driving off the hard white flakes.

Blake was charming to her all the time. They were perhaps not quite so close as they had been, and yet in one way they were closer. When they were away from each other all day, they talked eagerly at night as they had not when they were together all day. Then, living every moment together, there had not been much to talk about. Each knew the other and they communicated with each other by touch and caress rather than by words. But words were a clearer means. There was no loss, or at least, very little. She must perhaps take a little more care not to be late.

She came back one night, her feet sore with standing and her arms aching, but she did not regard weariness. She had her splendid body. She had been too thin, but now she was growing into the strong fullness of her old shape. She ran upstairs, bathed and dressed quickly and put on a soft old rust-colored gown. Then she went to find Blake. Blake was perhaps a little changed to her, but she would not notice it. He did not, as he once had, come instantly to her room to find her. He did not draw her tub and brush her hair and choose her gown. He waited, formally, in the drawing room until she came down to him. Now when she bent to kiss him, he kissed her lightly, quickly. But she would not notice any of this. Besides, he was reading a book on Yugo-Slavian sculpture. She sank down beside him and slipped her hand into his and they sat quietly until Crowne announced dinner. She would not wonder about him, knowing that if she gave herself up to him, she would be consumed by him, by his willfulness and emotion, his incessant demands on her attention. They were growing a little apart, but it was that or she would be lost.

They dined alone, and she sat quietly and listened to him talk of his day and afterwards they went upstairs together and she looked carefully at his work, seeing instantly what he meant and what he had done. He was working very hard. It was not her way of work, but she could see the beauty in the long lean lines, in the slant eyes and sloping brows, in the formalized shapes he loved and made so superlatively.

“It’s the beauty of mathematics expressed in human shape,” she said to him, and he was pleased. “You have caught something essentially great,” she added warmly, not only because she loved Blake but because she believed what she said.

It was that next winter, the same winter he made his plaster of Marcia, that he made the statue of Sonia Pravaloff, the Russian dancer who was sending everyone mad. He was working very fast. In a month he had finished Marcia, tall and slim, her head drooping, her straight boxed hair falling over her narrow face, her thin hands clasped. It was Marcia, all feeling and excitement, her body as thin as a cat’s body.

Marcia was already beginning to want to study nothing but dancing, and after she met Sonia at Christmas she begged Susan every day, “Don’t make me go to school any more. Let me learn to dance, Mother, really dance, like Sonia!”

“Sonia’s ignorant,” said John calmly. “She can’t read much, even—at least I never see her read a book.”

“I don’t like books, either,” Marcia said quickly, biting her finger. “They’re like dead people. Oh, Mother, let me dance, please, please!”

“The child should dance,” Sonia told her. She came often to dinner, for she would not dance more than three times a week. Besides, Blake was doing her portrait in his famous terra cotta that was like none other, and she was excited by the sight of herself emerging from under his hands. She could not stay away from his studio.

When it was finished, for the first time Susan did not like what he had done. She stood before the flying figure and was silent. Blake waited, sure of her praise.

“Am I lovely? I think so!” Sonia cried ardently.

She sat on Blake’s big couch, her knees under her chin, her muscular strong fleshless body folded together under her scant white satin dress.

“Oh, Blake, you are a genius! I so love myself you have made!”

But Susan said anxiously, “There is something wrong with it.”

“What do you mean?” Blake asked.

She forgot that they were husband and wife, that they were in love with each other still. She forgot she was a woman speaking to a man. She saw only the plastic figure that was not Sonia. Blake had stamped his own style on Sonia. He had not come out of himself to see her as she was. For the first time his instinct had failed him in his material. She perceived, in this instant, that Blake would always be limited by himself. Whatever he chose to make must be like him or his gift could not encompass it. It was a narrow gift, though exceedingly fine.

“I don’t think she’s plastic material, Blake,” Susan said. She looked at Sonia. “You see the shape of her head and her body—clay isn’t the medium—nor anything plastic. She’s glyptic. I’ve often thought so. Her dancing is glyptic—I mean, you could do a whole series of her postures in marble or stone—in quite hard stone, like Heptonwood, even. She’s not delicate as you have made her—she’s solid, and the strength of her dancing is its solidity. You have attenuated her, so that the clay will hold her, but still it is not strong enough for her. She has escaped you.”

She saw instantly that he was fiercely angry.

“You are so hipped on carving, you can’t understand anything else,” he said. “Besides, no one escapes me.”

“But I like your work, Blake!” she protested.

“This is the best thing I have done,” he said.

“Marcia is better,” Susan answered.

She could coax and yield and cajole—but not about work. About work there must be nothing but honesty. Sonia was looking at them strangely, her pale slant eyes full of light in her square-cheeked dark face.

“You don’t see that is Sonia?” she asked Susan sharply.

“No,” said Susan. “It doesn’t speak with your voice. I always seem to hear a statue when it has caught life. But this seems only a statue. It is silent.”

“Nevertheless I shall submit it to the Academy,” Blake said.

“Blake, why are you angry with me?” she demanded of him.

“I am not angry,” he replied. He smiled at Sonia. “I am only amused.”

She saw his gaze on Sonia, still warm with anger, and suddenly she, too, was angry.

“Sonia, will you pose for me?” she asked clearly. “I will do you in marble and show Blake what I mean.”

“You, too!” cried Sonia, and she laughed her loud Russian laughter. “Yes, why not? It will be funny.”

“Let’s go out somewhere,” Blake said abruptly. “I’m sick of this house.”

They went to a night club, as Blake often wanted to do, and she watched Blake dancing with Sonia so beautifully that she sat lost, her chin in her hands, admiring and enjoying their beauty. When he came back and lifted his eyebrows at her coolly, she shook her head and smiled. “I’d much rather watch you and Sonia dance again,” she said to him.

“You are not honest!” Sonia cried, opening her eyes.

“Yes, she is,” Blake said. “I’ll say that for Susanne—she’s too simple to lie. You are not in the least clever, you know, Susanne darling.”

He was not angry any more, and she was glad. Besides, it was quite true that she was not clever. She did not think out of her brain cleverly and quickly and facilely as Blake did and as his friends did. She thought mysteriously out of the depths of herself, out of her heart and her bowels. She felt thought stirring in her womb. Only at last did her blood carry what she already knew to her brain and only at final last, if it were necessary, did she speak what she had first felt. She smiled at Blake.

“Dance again,” she begged him, “you are both so beautiful.”

He rose, laughing. “Oh, Susanne,” he cried. “My perfect wife!—Come, Sonia!”

They were dancing and from somewhere a circle of white light shot down upon them, seeking them out from all the others. People were recognizing Sonia, and Blake was delighted to be recognized with her. His face was set in coldness and gravity. He seemed to see no one, to feel nothing, but Susan, knowing him, knew that because he saw everything he made his handsome face blank and his eyelids drooped. The band fell into low swinging music, playing for them. Everybody was looking at them. And Susan was drawing upon the back of a menu, with a pencil she begged from a waiter, the swift strong lines of Sonia to be made in marble. This was the beginning of The Dancing Russian, in her American Procession.

That night when they came home she went first into the long drawing room and at the door she turned, surprised, because they delayed so long behind her. There in the shadow of the hall she saw Blake draw Sonia against him and kiss her swiftly and hard. She looked away and went quickly to the fire, and an instant later they were there, in the room, laughing.

“Ring for something to drink, will you?” Blake was asking her. She did not feel the fire hot at all, though Crowne had piled it blazing high with dry logs…. Blake and Sonia! They were not disturbed no, not by that kiss. If not, then it could not be the first.

“Yes, of course,” she said, dazed, and rang because Blake had commanded it. She sat down on the end of a couch and stretched out her hands to the fire. She was cold and she wanted to be warm. Crowne brought in whiskey and soda and because she never drank he did not pour a third glass.

“Crowne!” she said sharply, “I’ll have one, please.”

“Yes, Madame,” he said, surprised, and she said to them all quickly, “It’s very cold, isn’t it!”

“Not for me!” Sonia laughed. “I am always so hot. Ah, I am sleepy!” Sonia yawned behind a brown hand. “Take me home, Blake—when I have had one more drink. Susan, I come to you tomorrow morning at ten, yes? I have a fancy—a wish—to be made in marble. Marble will last forever, will it not? When I am dust and Blake’s portrait of me is in bits like an old earthen pot, the marble will be there.”

“Yes,” Susan said.

No, they were not disturbed. It was not their first kiss.

In her bed, in her room, she lay waiting for Blake to come back from Sonia’s hotel. He came very soon, without delay, and he was there sitting beside her on the bed. He was so natural, so charming, he was always so charming at three o’clock in the morning, that she could not say to him, “Why do you and Sonia need to kiss each other?”

If she said that, he would shrug his shoulders and laugh and tease her. “You are not jealous, are you? A kiss is nothing, Susanne. I will let you kiss anyone you like.”

And if she said honestly, “I don’t want to kiss anyone but you, Blake,” he would only laugh again and say, “Kiss me, then,” and bend to take her kiss.

No, she would say nothing. She did not want to kiss him.

“Blake is right, you know, Susan,” Sonia said. She was dancing and flinging out fragments of her incessant talk as she moved from one sharp static pose to another. “You are very simple.”

“Am I?” Susan said. “I have had no time to think of it.” She was drawing rapidly one figure after another.

“Blake is like this,” Sonia said. She began to dance in short nervous abbreviated steps. Her body took on the meaning of Blake. She was somehow Blake, without looking in the least like him. Susan stopped drawing and waited. It was impossible to draw now. She did not know how to catch this thing Sonia was doing. Watching her, she had not, she told herself, ever thought of wanting to do Blake’s portrait. She could not imagine Blake in marble. There was an evanescence in him which could not be caught and held. Sonia was dancing quickly in evanescent staccato poses.

“And this is you—” Sonia stopped, shook herself, and stepped into slow, deep, elemental movements, a little stiff. “So simple, so like a child—no vanity, no coquetry—Blake has coquetry, but not Susan. Susan is sad, but she does not know it. She is not sad for herself, but because she knows life is secretly sad, and gayety is only for the moment. Sadness is the long reality—sorrow is the foundation, and to know that is to know peace.”