This Proud Heart (4 page)

And now, alone, there was still an inner wall of shyness between them to be pulled away—or perhaps it would fall.

For they would be alone for a week on the edge of this lake, in the little cabin they had borrowed from her father. He had built it for them all when she was a child, but they had not come to it often then. Her mother had hated the stillness, the loneliness, the gnats, the owls in the night, the old rusty stove. So they had given it up, and her father had come alone for a day sometimes. But he never stayed long.

“Guess I’m not big enough to stay alone,” he would say, joking.

“You’re grown up, aren’t you?” Susan had asked once, when she was a little girl.

“I’m not sure,” he had replied gravely.

But he had kept the cabin.

“Might want to go there sometime,” he said.

She and Mark had driven here two days ago to bring food and books, and to sweep and dust. She had thought, packing her books in her own room to bring them away, “Shall I take clay, or a paint box? What if I want to make something at the cabin?” No, she would not take these things on her honeymoon.

She did not know how much she would ever want to use them again. Perhaps she would not need them any more. She had packed them not for the honeymoon, but to be taken to the house where she and Mark had chosen to live. The alcove in her old room looked empty and forlorn when she had put everything away into a big box, to be taken to the small new house. The Cupid was finished and kneeling now among the budding irises in Mrs. Fontane’s garden. Mark’s head she had carried herself down the street and set up in the new attic. The head was not finished. Something was wrong with it. She had the mouth perfectly, but the eyes were wrong under the brows. Do what she would, they continued to look like empty sockets.

“It’s not right—it doesn’t speak,” she had said to him one day. They were in the little new house, getting it ready for this day that was now over.

“Speak?” he had asked.

“When I have them right I seem to hear them speaking,” she said.

“Gosh, it looks enough like me to make me feel queer,” he said, staring at it.

They had stood looking at the clay face and then Mark said suddenly, “I’ll look like that when I’m dead.”

She did not answer, she could not bear to answer, because he was right. It was exactly Mark’s face, dead. She wrapped it quickly in the damp cloth.

“It’s not finished, that’s all,” she replied. “I’ll bring it to life.” It would be the first thing she would do when they came back, when they began their real life.

But now in the cabin without reason that silent perfect mask haunted her like the face of some dead memory. She kept thinking of it when she looked at him, while they talked, while they unpacked. They stood before each other, they kissed, and she saw not his face, but the mask she had made.

“Aren’t we silly!” she laughed. “We’ve been longing for this moment. Here it is—and we feel odd with each other!”

He looked down at her without a smile. “I still feel as if it were not us,” he said. In his eyes was emptiness. She—she must make the reality. His face must not be to her the clay mask she had not finished, the mask which, pathetically, humbly, was waiting until she finished it and brought it to life.

“Come,” she said practically, “let’s unpack our bags and get our supper—then a swim by moonlight, Mark?”

“Yes, let’s!” he assented eagerly.

To do something together would make it all real again. They would feel they were the two who had planned these very hours, now come after so long. That was what was the matter. They had dreamed this moment so long that they could not draw it out of dreams. Though it was here, though they were in it, it seemed still to come. He followed her while she hung up their garments on nails behind a cretonne curtain, while she set the pine table for the two of them, while she broiled the beefsteak and made coffee. He could not find much to do. She was so swift in every movement, so exact. She seemed to be doing everything at the same time. He stood helpless before her certain speed.

“You’re wonderful!” he said. “I—you make me feel useless.”

She was putting into a clear glass of water the red roses she had worn at her belt when they left her father’s house. She was setting them on the table. But when he said, “You’re wonderful!” she flew to him and buried her face against him.

“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, strangled against his breast. “Don’t call me that!”

He was astounded. “Why, I meant it!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you like to be called wonderful?”

“No—no—no—” she cried, stifled.

“Well!” he gasped. “Well! I don’t understand—Most people—”

She lifted her head suddenly and sniffed.

“The steak’s burning!” she cried. “That’s not very wonderful of me!” She ran to push it hissing upon the plate. He could not tell whether she was laughing or crying.

“I’m hungrier than I have ever been in my life,” she cried gaily. They were busy over the food, almost at ease with each other now, in the candlelight.

“So am I, you darling,” he said.

They were almost real again, but not quite. She thought, pondering upon his eyes, “It’s just this flickering candlelight that makes them so shadowy that they seem empty. They aren’t really empty. I love him so. He’s my husband.” Outside of her loving him, beyond this being of a woman, married to Mark, that was she, her busy brain went on talking to itself. “That head looks exactly like him now. Perhaps I’ve done the best I can with it—perhaps it won’t come to life. Perhaps I can’t make life. I wonder if I can be a real sculptor?”

Ah, yes, but she would make life, she said resolutely. They rose and sat together on the little porch overlooking the lake while he smoked his pipe. They sat very closely in silence, realizing at last each other’s presence.

“This is the beginning,” she whispered.

“The beginning of our life,” he answered.

In the moonlight and the silence they grew clearer to each other, closer. The individual color faded out of their faces, their eyes, their flesh, and some closer outline appeared. She felt his being, breathing, warm, expectant and shy.

“Now for the lake,” he said suddenly. They undressed in the moonlight and there were their two bodies, white as marble. He was like a statue of marble. He would be cold as marble to touch. But she also was like marble, she thought, looking down at her own body, and she was not cold. He stood motionless, gazing at her, and she felt him, cold with shyness.

“Come!” she cried. “Let’s run to the lake.”

For she wanted life and movement in their two white carved bodies. They ran, hand in hand, and leaped and swam out into the lake together. They swam out and then in again to the beach. He was shivering.

“It’s too cold,” he said. “Let’s build the fire.”

They ran back to the cabin and barred the door against the night and the darkness of the woods, and he piled up the logs in the fireplace, and she knelt and lit the dry kindling, and the fire blazed. They knelt before it a moment, and then she felt herself drawn to her feet against him, her head pressed back to meet his kiss. And yet in that one instant before his kiss came down to still it, her brain drew aside from her and said to itself quickly, “There—that’s the look I need for the mask. He’s come to life.”

The unfinished head stood in the attic which she planned sometime perhaps to make into a workroom for herself. But as yet she had no feeling of need for a room for herself alone. This was her home, this small house at the end of the street where she had played as a child. Looking out of its front windows she saw what had been familiar to her all her life, the rows of small white houses, the green of the campus at the far end, and out of the tops of trees the cupola of the main hall of the university where her father taught and where she and Mark had gone for four years. She had at once loved and despised it, knowing it to be small and provincial, and limited by its trustees who were two successful farmers, a lawyer and the president of the town bank, and yet loving the fierce raw-boned quarrelsome poverty-stricken faculty, each of whom she knew not only as the dogmatic passionate person who taught her, but as the person, too, of whom her father growled, as he did of Professor Sanford, after faculty meetings, “That fellow Sanford’s a crank. I don’t care how good he is in astronomy. He can’t see anything but stars.”

Poor Professor Sanford! It was quite true he lived among the stars. But they all lived somewhere else than in those small houses, where their pale wives struggled to be cultivated while they bore babies and did housework and had no maids. She knew them so well, and she never looked from her front windows now without comprehension sweeping over her again. She loved them and ached a little when she thought of them. They were all trying so hard to live as they felt it beautiful to live, and their houses were so small—too small and too close, so that they had constantly to hush the crying of their children and their own laughter or anger or weeping as well. They had only silence to keep them private from each other. And they needed privacy, since they were not ignorant people and since decency was a necessity to them. They could make a joke of poverty and did. But one day little Mrs. Sanford had clutched her hands together—one day at the faculty reception to the seniors. She wore the drooping black lace dress she wore every year. And she had looked up at Susan, a little timidly, to ask, “What do you plan to do, Susan dear?”

“Everything,” Susan had said gaily, and then Mrs. Sanford had clutched her two water-sodden little hands together again, her hands with clean, broken fingernails. It was Monday and in the cellar that early morning she had done the family wash and slipped out to hang it up quickly, not looking at other yards where other wives were doing the same thing.

“Oh, Susan!” she had said. “You frighten me, dear! It’s so dreadful to know all that one wants from life and not be able to have it. Sometimes I think it’s better not to know—not to be able to read, than to be able and have no books, for instance, or wanting terribly to sing and not being able to afford the training.”

She had not known what to say, and then Mrs. Sanford had smiled and patted her arm. “But you’re so talented, dear. I know you’ll be successful.”

Someone cried out, “Now I just know Mrs. Sanford will sing for us,” and Mrs. Sanford called back, “Oh dear, nobody wants to hear me sing!”

“Yes,” Susan said, “yes, please, Mrs. Sanford. I love to hear you.”

“Do you, dear? Then I will.”

They had stood listening while she sang in a small wistful breathy voice,
Kennst du das Land.
Susan had heard her sing it many times, so why now should she want to sob when she remembered it? … Every time she looked out of the front windows she remembered how Mrs. Sanford had looked that day while she sang.

But the west windows looked out into Tramp’s Woods. She and Mark had become engaged there. He had said that day, “Where shall we go, Sue?” And she had said, “I’ve always wanted to go into Tramp’s Woods! Let’s go!”

They had not played there as children, because of a childish superstition, told from one generation of playfellows to the next, that the ghost of a tramp was there, who had hung himself long ago, over his own solitary campfire in plain sight and sound of a street full of homes and families and children. The lights from their windows must have twinkled on him as he ate his supper—there had been a can of beans, half empty, so he could not have died hungry. And there was a little stack of wood if he had wanted to keep his fire burning. There was even enough money in his pocket to bury him, provided it was without fuss. It was in an envelope, and he had put on the outside in a pencil scrawl, “To bury me—no funeral.” There was no reason why he should have hung himself there in plain sight of people. It was so queer of him that mothers were really relieved he had done it, since it was not as though they could have helped it. They said above their children’s heads, “It’s just as well a person like that is out of the way. One never knows what he might do.” And the children, catching the tone of their voices, made a ghost out of the tramp and never went near the woods where he had died.

But she and Mark had gone there that afternoon to be alone together. They were sure of being alone in Tramp’s Woods.

“Are you afraid?” she had asked him, laughing.

“Not with you,” he had answered, and laughed back at her.

Now that her own little home turned partly to these woods she found it a place beautiful and untroubled, and sometimes in an afternoon, waiting for Mark to come home, she wandered among the outer trees, half remembering the old story, but not afraid of it any more because she and Mark had made it their own. It was a strange wood, so silent, the wild flowers untouched. She never saw anyone else there.

But even she did not go there often. For there was always something to do to her house. It was never really done, though the day after they came home, when all their friends came to see them, they had said warmly, “I don’t see how you’ve done it, Sue.” “Why, it looks as though you had lived here years!” And she and Mark, laughing, hand in hand, were drenched in their own profound simple happiness, and they received this admiration as part of it. They had done nothing extraordinary, because everybody got married, and their home they knew was small, and yet they felt successful beyond all their fellows.

When everybody was gone that first night they made a tour of the whole house together, to make sure, to see it all again—living room, dining room, kitchen, hall, the stairs, two bedrooms and Mark’s little study and the small yellow-tiled bathroom. Mark was going up the attic stairs, but she stopped him.

“Don’t let’s go up,” she cried. “There’s nothing there. I haven’t even thought what I’m going to do up there yet.”

It was true she had not even been there since she had carried up the unfinished head and her working tools. So they turned and went downstairs again, and to see if the chimney in the living room really drew, Mark lit a fire. It was not necessary, for the night was so mild they left the door open, and down the street they could see the lights popping out into the darkness, the lights of the homes of their friends. It was lovely, lovely. She felt a gayety that rose from the walls of her life, lights and friends and home and Mark, her husband. Down the street, around the corner, were her parents and Mary and all her happy childhood, her so nearly quite happy childhood. She was very lucky. Why had her father said goodbye to her? She had not had to leave anything behind when she came away with Mark. It was all there. If she wanted to, she could run down that street, turn that corner, open the door and be back in her childhood.