This Proud Heart (7 page)

For now she wanted to be only body. She took joy in the quick leap of her body to creation. Immediately her body seized upon the seed of life which had been given it and at once she was with child. She was proud of this and she boasted to Mark one morning, “I’ve begun, Mark!”

“What!” he cried, “already! Why, I thought—I’ll have to begin counting my cash.”

They went over their money carefully that night. Mark had had a five-dollar-a-week raise—take that off, say, to pay the doctor. She sat by him, her chin on her hand, while he counted pennies.

“We can just do it,” he said at last, lifting his head from the sheets of paper covered with small figures. “I’m glad of that. It would have worried me if we couldn’t have paid the kid’s bills by the time he was born. But are you sure fifty dollars will cover the clothes and things?”

She nodded. “Perfectly sure.” She would see that it was enough. She would make everything herself, and spend no more.

“It would be easy enough for me to earn a little, somehow,” she said.

“No,” said Mark. “No, sir! I’m going to provide for my own child.”

“Mine, too,” she murmured.

“You know what I mean,” Mark replied with sternness, and he gave her the paper.

“Those are your running rules,” he said. “Within those limits you have complete freedom, my girl.”

And the next morning, after she had the house looking back at her with its clean docile morning look, she sat down by the window and studied the figures closely. Fifty dollars—within those limits she had complete freedom. It would be rather fun to see what could be done, what fine stuffs bought, what materials made into delicate small shapes—it might be fun. But she had already wandered into special departments in stores and she knew that fifty dollars—“Our children will have to take what we have to give them,” Mark had said last night, shutting his lips hard.

She sat alone this morning, looking into the deep green wood. And what had she not to give? There was really no reason why she should not give all she had, too. Why should it be only Mark who gave to the uttermost? A woman gave more of her body, more of her time, than a man could. And why should she withhold what she could give in other ways? She could make the small sunny back bedroom a nursery, the furniture miniature and suited to his needs. There need be no makeshifts. It would not be fair to him, if she could make money and did not. She rose abruptly. Mark was limiting her and limiting the baby. He would have to see that—she would make him see it…. And after she had gazed for a long time into the wood, she went upstairs and changed into her green tweed suit, pulled a small brown hat over her head, and walked firmly and quickly to Mrs. Fontane’s house and rang the bell.

“Mrs. Fontane, please,” she said resolutely to the white-capped maid.

“Mrs. Fontane is in the garden, with guests.” The maid was hesitating, but Mrs. Fontane had swept in through open French doors, her arms full of roses.

“Oh, why, here you are!” she exclaimed. “We were just talking about you. My dear, everybody is mad about my little Cupid! I’m going to show it to David Barnes the minute he gets here. Come out into the garden. Dora, put these into water!”

She felt Mrs. Fontane’s arm thrust through her own, and she was swept along on Mrs. Fontane’s warm voice, in which there was no doubt now of her Cupid, now that everybody was mad about it. “They all want Cupids, my dear!” Mrs. Fontane waved her other arm energetically at the women sitting indolently about the pool, their dresses splashes of blue and yellow and red against the hedge of dark evergreen behind them.

“She’s here—the Cupid girl!” Mrs. Fontane called. And when she drew near they lifted kind, well-bred faces to her, and she shook slender soft ringed hands, and their voices said warmly, “I love that little boy looking at himself in the pool!” “You’ve made more than a Cupid!” “What will you make for me?”

“What do you want?” Susan asked abruptly. She would not tell Mark she had come here.

“She calls herself Mrs. Mark Keening,” Mrs. Fontane was booming in her big voice, “but really she’s Susan.”

They took her at once, gaily, carelessly. “Oh, Susan, come and see my garden and make me something—a fountain, perhaps.”

“Susan, do you do heads? I’ve an adorable child with a head like a young Christ!”

She promised them, drawn by their lovely warmth. “Yes, of course, I’ll come and see your garden. I’d love to see your boy.”

It became like a page from a story book, this garden, this soft September air, these pretty rich women. Why were the rich so warm, so kind? She thought of poor eager anxious little Mrs. Sanford. But Mrs. Fontane was saying, “She has an extraordinary gift—someday she’s going to do something to surprise us.”

She looked up, half frightened, to see Mrs. Fontane’s assured kind smile.

“Oh, I don’t—” she began.

“Yes, you will,” Mrs. Fontane said positively, fanning herself with her hat. “Some day I’ll point to that Cupid and tell everybody, ‘Yes, that’s an original early Susan Gaylord. She used to live here, you know. Her childhood home—’ Oh, I have a rose thorn in my thumb!” She winced and put her thumb to her mouth.

“Let me,” said Susan, and taking Mrs. Fontane’s hand, she put her own thumb and finger delicately together and pulled out the thorn.

“Look at those hands of yours!” Mrs. Fontane said suddenly, seizing her hands and turning them over and over. “Ever see hands like those?”

They bent over her hands in breathless interest. Not even Mark had looked at her hands like this. “See those fingertips?” Mrs. Fontane demanded. “Broad and strong and still delicate as antennae! You can bend them any way.” She bent Susan’s forefinger backward like a spring. Susan sat looking at her own hands as though they did not belong to her. Was there indeed something in her hands? Mrs. Fontane laid them on Susan’s lap gently, with a pat.

“When you brought me that Cupid I knew what you were,” she said firmly. “I don’t mind saying I was afraid at first you would do me something impossible—talented daughter of a local citizen, you know. But when you brought the Cupid I knew it didn’t matter in the least where you were born or who your parents were or whom you married or anything. Some day—”

“I wouldn’t think of leaving this town,” Susan said quickly. “It’s my home—my friends, my family—I couldn’t think of living anywhere else.”

Mrs. Fontane smiled and yawned. “You’re a child, Susan Gaylord,” she remarked. “Oh, dear, I’m sleepy. I wish you’d all go home! Susan, take them away and see what they want.”

They were all laughing at once. Two of the women were quarreling good-naturedly over her. “Come to my garden first, Susan.”

“No, now, Diana, you know Michael’s got to begin school in a fortnight.”

“I’m sure I can do them both,” said Susan. “I work very fast once I see my shape.”

“Well, then, Michael first, and then my garden.”

She was put into a car and driven away, Mrs. Fontane murmuring, “You’ve begun, Susan. God knows where you’ll end.” And they drove miles into the country to stop before a huge white house, the kernel of which had once belonged to a mortgage-ridden farmer, and she stood in an ivory paneled hall and went into a long chintz-curtained room where a big curly-headed blond boy of fourteen or fifteen was slouched in a chair over a book.

“Michael!” his mother cried, and he thrust out his head.

“What?” he said. His voice was surly but his head was an angel’s.

“There!” his mother cried. “Do you blame me for wanting it in stone or bronze or something?”

“No,” said Susan. The old frightening beautiful desire was rushing up in her like water from a sealed fountain, opening. “No, it’s beautiful.”

“Shut up, you,” the boy muttered over his book.

“Shut up yourself,” said Susan. “Let me see your head. Your mother wants me to make it and I will.”

“I won’t have it,” said the boy. “I get so sick—
She
talks like that at school even—before the fellows. I won’t have my head made.”

“You can’t help it,” said Susan, laughing. “I’m going to do it. And I’ll show you exactly how I do it. It’s fun. You can mix some clay, too, if you like. I shall do it in clay and then in bronze. It ought to be bronze,” she said to his mother.

The two women stood by. She felt their quick admiration and was made strong by it.

“Come to my house this afternoon,” she said to Michael. “At two o’clock. We’ll work in my attic, you and I together.”

He looked at her doubtfully. “I’ll ride over on my horse,” he said.

“All right,” she said, and turned away from him. “Now where’s the garden?”

“You do know how to manage him,” his mother whispered. “You’ve no idea how difficult Michael is! I’m always glad when he goes back to school. Goodbye, Susan. When am I to see the head?”

“A week,” said Susan, “—in clay, that is.”

“And, oh, dear, I almost forgot. How much will it be?”

Susan breathed deeply and leaped off. “Two hundred dollars,” she said firmly.

Michael’s mother looked at her a second, and then said quickly, “Two hundred—very well, Miss Gaylord.”

It was impossible to tell whether she thought it much or little. It did not matter, Susan decided, in the garden.

“You see,” Mrs. Vanderwelt’s light hard voice was saying, “the shrubbery makes a natural arch there, so that a fountain would be quite nice.”

“Yes,” said Susan, and stared at the arch. A fountain—she’d always had ideas about water and stone. The things people bought and called fountains were so ugly. Water should be used as part of the whole, not as a thing in itself. “Will you let me think about it?” she said. “I want to make a picture of stone and water, not just a fountain.”

“Will you?” said Mrs. Vanderwelt. “That sounds fascinating. And how much do you think—”

“I haven’t any idea until I have my picture,” said Susan. “If you care to set a limit—”

“Well—shall we say five hundred dollars?”

“All right,” said Susan. “I’ll remember that.”

She was driven back alone, and when they reached the steps of her little house, the colored chauffeur opened the door and she got out and walked up her own steps into her own house.

In the living room where she had sat a few hours before she now sat down again, her hat still on her head. On the table was the sheet of Mark’s figures. Fifty dollars he had written, and in brackets he had put “(Susan’s limit).” She had gone out this morning and made seven hundred dollars. At least she could soon make seven hundred dollars. But it was not that which now frightened her. It was something else, more large, more limitless, than money could ever be. The frail walls of this house, Mark’s house, which he worked so hard to keep around her—she had pushed them away from her this morning. She had gone beyond them. This room looked small as a closet after the big room where Michael had sat. Ah, but she loved this room! She and Mark had made it to live in together. She got up resolutely. There was no reason why she shouldn’t say to Mark quite plainly, “Darling, since there is something I can do, why shouldn’t I do it?” And then she’d tell him about the money.

In the kitchen she pondered over bread and milk and an apple for lunch. It was not the money—yes, it was the money—that made it hard to tell Mark. Well, then, if it was only money, it was nothing. No, but it was more than money—much more. And then, alone in the quiet house, everything went away from her except a boy’s head, except an arch in dark shrubbery. She forgot even that she wanted money for her child. Water and stone—what could they do together against the stern green of old yews, druidical even in a rich woman’s garden? She took the kitchen pad and pencil and began to sketch. The doorbell rang sharply across her dreaming, and she hastened to the door. Michael stood there, slender and tall, against a background of a brown horse, held by a groom.

“I didn’t come except to see your clay and stuff,” he said belligerently. “Where’s the attic?”

“At the top of the house, of course,” she replied, and led him upstairs.

Was he going to be a difficult boy? She opened the door of the attic to him doubtfully. He stood looking about.

“There’s nothing here,” he said.

“You and I and the clay,” she returned. “What more do you want?”

She rolled up her sleeves and put on her smock and turned her back and began to mix the clay.

“That’s a queer baby,” she heard him say.

“It’s only just born,” she replied.

He did not speak. When she turned, he had lifted the cloth from Mark’s unfinished head.

“Why did you make a dead man?” he asked, his voice full of horror.

“He’s not dead,” she said quickly, “only not finished.”

“Don’t you ever finish anything?” he asked, still staring.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m going to finish you. Come—here’s the clay.”

He covered the head and came over to her and looked at the mass she had mixed upon the table.

“I don’t like getting my hands mucky,” he said.

“Then you’ll have to do something else,” she said, “this is mucky work.”

“I could draw,” he suggested. “I draw a great deal.”

“What?”

“Well, horses mostly.”

She wiped her hands and rummaged among her things and found drawing paper and pastels and tacks. She put the paper up on the wall by the window and handed him the crayons.

“You can stand there and draw your own horse,” she said.

He took the crayons and began without a word to draw. And she, seeing how the light fell upon his young head, began quickly to mold and shape her stuff into its likeness.

It was a difficult likeness to catch, full of fleeting tender angles and unexpected childish turns. The cheeks were childishly round, but the mouth was willful and hard, the mouth of a young man, for all its soft full lips. He did not once look at her, and she worked in silence for nearly an hour. Then he threw down the crayons.

“I’ve done enough,” he said. “I’ll finish tomorrow.”

She stopped and came to him.

“Why, you have only drawn the woods,” she exclaimed. “I thought you were drawing your horse.”

“I shall be galloping into the woods on my horse,” he explained, “so I drew the woods first, under that bright cloud, because tomorrow the brightness will be gone. And besides I shall be very small, in front.”