This Proud Heart (27 page)

She had been so long alone that she was startled every time he spoke to her. He broke upon her silence and each time she came out of her natural silence, startled at the sound of his voice. She looked at him, answered him, and went back into the silence in which she lived. And every day she worked, carving the Clemenceau to the last inch of the model. There, though longing to finish it, she forbade herself.

“I could do it as well as the
maître
—perhaps better,” she thought and was not ashamed because she felt in herself the power not yet used. She was sure, now, as she was sure of life, that she would do some great thing even though she did not know what it was. She only knew there was all this power in her which nothing had yet consumed, which no one had plumbed. There was so much more power than her life had yet used. Mark had needed only a little and the children needed a little. Sometimes, longing to spend, on a Sunday, on a holiday, she poured herself upon them.

“John, Marcia—see, let’s play together, all of us. I’ll play, too. Let’s play we are traveling around the world on the clouds and winds. No one can see us, but we can see everybody.”

But they went with her only a little way. They grew weary of her too full fancy, her too swift planning even for their pleasure. They wandered away from her.

“I don’t want to play any more, Mother,” John would say.

“I don’t like this game, Mother,” said Marcia.

“I think I’ll whittle,” said John.

“Let’s all whittle,” she said, not wanting to be shut away from them, longing to pour out this power of her love and have it used. But the speed of her skillful fingers discouraged them. She whittled a row of little birds on a branch and John said in discontent, “I’ll never be able to make such nice birds. I wish you wouldn’t make them, Mother.”

No, and she could never love them fully enough to use her love. Sometimes when they passed her she could not keep from putting out her arms and seizing them and holding them in her great embrace.

“Ah, but your mother loves you!” she would cry. But her love was too much for them.

“You hold me too tight, Mother!” Marcia cried, and John struggled away from her. She learned to kiss them quickly and let them go….

Only the marble was large enough for all her power. She spent hours choosing the piece she wanted. When one could only have one piece it was precious. The
maître
had been generous. He was pleased with her, and he said, waving his square hands, “Take what you like. You are not Robert, and you shall have more than his wage. What would he do with marble?”

She wandered among the pieces of rough marble, feeling for her own, touching, pondering each. Each was a prison for some shape. She was full of the strange familiar silent happiness which came when she was ready again to create.

“Shall I help you?” his voice broke into her silence again. She looked up angrily to refuse. “I know a lot about marble,” he went on. “My father is an importer of marbles. This piece, for instance, has a black rotten vein running through it. You would be half finished before you found it.”

“Now how do you know that?” she asked, and forgot to push him away from her.

“Do you see this creamy thread?” His quick nervous thin hand was feeling the marble. She had to bend close to see what he felt. There it was, almost invisible in the roughness of the unfinished stone.

“This—and this—are not good pieces,” he said, rapidly rejecting two more, “and these two are very fine, and this one is best of all.”

He chose a rounded block, and she looked at it, wanting it and wishing he had left her alone to choose it for herself.

“Do you work in marble?” she asked, unwilling to accept it from him. She would not decide until he had gone away.

“Lord, no!” He laughed. “It’s too slow for me. I model—and let other people do the work.”

She did not hear him. She was thinking about the stone, wishing he would go away.

“David Barnes told me a lot about you,” the pleasant voice said.

“Did he?” She started, and looked up at him and away again. His eyes were gray as the sea under clouds.

“He thinks you’re a great genius.”

“I don’t know yet what I am,” said Susan. “I don’t think anyone does.”

Blake Kinnaird laughed. “I don’t think so, either,” he said. “Are you going to let me try?”

She shook her head gravely. “You can’t,” she said. “I shall have to do it alone.” He was intolerably close to her here like this. She had a strange premonitory fear of him. “I must go away,” she said abruptly, and went, leaving him standing staring after her. She went out into the street and at a little shop bought a roll and a cup of hot milk for her lunch…. She really wanted that piece of marble, only she wished he had not … “I shall just forget him,” she decided quickly and firmly, and did.

But he would not allow her to forget him. He was at the studio every day, arguing over his work, laughing when the old sculptor snorted at the figures he modeled so quickly and easily.

“But I am modern, sir!” he said over and over again. “I make my own technique, if you please! I work in planes—
à bas
with realism! I am not realistic, and you are!”

The old sculptor, his hands clenched under his waving coattails, was shouting, “And who has seen a human face like this? A smudge, a platter, a tea tray, but not a human face—
non!”

Blake Kinnaird, all good humor, took him firmly by his thick round shoulders.

“If you stand two inches from any human face it will look either like a teapot or a tea tray. Stand here, sir, where the light falls so—You see, sir, I use light as one of my materials.”

“Susanne!” the old man roared from under the two strong young hands. “Come here—see with your good honest eyes—is this a human face?”

She left the corner where her marble now stood and came to them and studied the clay he had been modeling so rapidly and with such seeming carelessness for several days. Half of his time he had spent twenty feet away in staring at it. Then time and time again he had gone back to move it an inch this way or that.

“It’s a girl in autumn,” he said. “The wind’s blowing her hair.”

Then she saw the girl, a thin shivering creature, shielding her face with her hands. It was true the wind was blowing.

“Do you see her?” the old man demanded.

“Yes, I do,” she said slowly, “but it’s like a dream. You’re not sure—it almost escapes you.”

“Look at this!” He let go the old man’s shoulders and went and moved the pedestal. Instantly there was only a mass of planes and angles.

“Why, she’s gone!” Susan said.

“She was never there,” said the old man cynically.

Blake Kinnaird turned the mass slowly, exactly.

“I see her again!” Susan exclaimed.

“Well, a very little,” the old man admitted. “If I look at it quickly and away again—”

“Look at it again and again,” said Blake Kinnaird, “and each time you will see her more clearly.”

“There is something wonderful about it,” Susan cried with excitement. “I don’t understand it, but I see it.”

“So long as you see it you needn’t understand it,” Blake Kinnaird said.

“You two—” mumbled the old man, stumbling away, dazed. All around him stood the honest classical statues upon which he had spent his life, bodies with sound full arms and legs, rotund trunks and noble heads.

“Thank you, Susan Gaylord,” Blake Kinnaird said.

And she went up again to the girl in clay and studied her, wondering and puzzled and charmed.

“To use light like that!” she said. “I never thought of it—But of course you are right. Light is a material—it can’t be treated as a constant. The planes lay hold of it.”

“You see that!” he exclaimed eagerly.

They were very near to each other. She had forgotten that she did not like him near her. She wanted to talk. She had not really talked with anyone since David Barnes went away.

“Let’s have lunch together!” Blake Kinnaird said.

“Yes, let’s!” she answered eagerly. “I want to talk about this whole business of realism in work. I want to know what you think. I’ve been trained in realism, but I feel it a prison around me, sometimes. I want to leap out of it.”

They left the studio, and he took her to a table on a sidewalk and he pulled out her chair.

“Realism is the end,” he was saying. “No, Susan, you aren’t just going to eat bread and milk—I’m going to order your lunch. Here,
garçon!”
—he ordered quickly under his breath and turned to her again—“the trouble is in making the means realistic. When the means and the method are realistic, literalism and not realism is the result, and literalism is false. The literal truth is only half-truth, and perhaps not even that. There are all the tones and supertones, unexpressed. It’s not what’s said that is important—it’s what is meant.”

She was eating something hot and delicious, but she did not know what it was. She was talking, listening, seeing him in flashes between talk. He was beautiful in a tall angular spare fashion. His hair was black. His hands were long and very delicate, much more delicate than her own. She rose abruptly at last.

“I must go back to work,” she said.

“Where do you work in the afternoon?” he asked.

“In my own studio,” she answered. “That is—in David Barnes’ studio—he’s lending it to me.”

“May I come there sometime?” he asked, smiling, and when she hesitated, he said quickly, “I’d like to see his things. He said I could.”

“I suppose I have no right to say you cannot,” she said slowly. Then she said quickly, “No, no—if you please, don’t come!”

She could not have him near her when she was working on her marble. As surely as he came near her the thing she saw receded.

“Go away—go away, Blake!” she cried at him in an agony in the morning if he came near. She had to be quite alone. She could endure the
maître
stepping softly about her sometimes as she worked, for he said nothing. But Blake had always to speak to her, and at the sound of his voice the image fled into the marble and hid. Worse than his voice was his touch. If he put his hand on her arm—he was always touching everything—she groaned against him.

“Leave me alone, Blake—”

And once when carelessly he ran his hand over the marble, she winced and threw it off.

“Don’t touch me like that,” she cried at him.

“I didn’t touch you!” he shouted at her.

“You did—you did!” she cried. “I can’t bear to be touched!”

“Susan, you’re crazy!” he said, astonished. “I swear I only touched the marble!”

She wiped her face with her smock.

“Blake, please go away when I’m working.”

“Will you let me come to your studio this afternoon if I go away now?”

He was smiling at her, mischievous, willful. But she was looking at her marble.

“Yes—yes—anything, if you will only not spoil my work.”

Then when he was gone there was the blessed, acute loneliness. She missed him when he was not there. But when she was alone the thing she saw came creeping out of the stone again. It was a woman, a shy woman, kneeling, young, eager, waiting, innocent. When Blake came near she went away. But when he was gone she came straining out of the stone. Then Susan cut and carved, quickly, surely, seeing her plain.

In the studio, making her little figures to sell, he was no interruption at all. He was enchanted with her little figures.

“Susan, your loaves and fishes—” he said, “they are charming. I will buy them myself.”

She would not allow it. “No, you must go to the shop like anybody else.”

“But you’d save the commission,” he protested.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t be sure you weren’t helping me,” she said firmly. “I’ve got to know I am doing it myself. Of course, I can’t forbid you the shop.”

“I hate independent women,” he declared.

Susan looked up from the tiny creature in her hands and paused. She had not thought of herself as a woman with him. But when he said this he made her a woman. She saw she was wearing her old stained brown smock, and that her hair was stuffed into a beret to keep it out of stone dust, and her hands were calloused and grimy, and her nails worn away with feeling rough stone. He hated independent women, such as she was.

“I know,” she said humbly, “all men do, don’t they? But I can’t help it—I’m made so.”

“Susan!” he cried. “You’re not serious? You don’t think I meant it?”

He had dropped to his knees in his impulsive habit of quick affection to which she could not become accustomed. Now he clasped her wrists.

“Oh, yes, you do,” she nodded her head vigorously. “I know how you feel—everybody feels that way to me, I think.” She freed her hands and snatched off her beret and smoothed her hair.

“I admire you with all my heart,” he said in a low voice.

“I think people don’t like people they admire so much,” she said, faltering. “In school even, I wasn’t liked so much—when I took prizes, you know.”

“Susan, Susan!”—he was laughing at her, wasn’t he?—“You’re a little child! Where have you been all your life?” He seized her wrists again.

She looked at him with embarrassed dark eyes. What did he mean? She had been married, she had two children, whose bread she earned.

“Look here!”—Only why didn’t he let go her wrists when he talked? His hands were tight as manacles. She struggled to get free.—“No, I’m not going to let you go. You’re always going off alone, even when I’m talking to you, you slip off somewhere by yourself secretly. I’m going to bring you to life.”

She stared down at his thin tense face. Bring her to life! “I am alive,” Mary had said, “and you are dead.” Her house had once been full of that strange hot rushing love between Michael and Mary. She had felt it, an unknown flood, like a swirling river upon whose banks she stood as it swept past her. She had hated it and felt it. What sort of love was it that did not make Mary want to marry Michael? … Blake was talking to her. His breast was against her knees. He was holding her hands now, clenched in his, against his cheeks.

“Susan, did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful, beautiful? Did anyone ever say your hair is the loveliest hair in the world, of a color even I can’t understand because sometimes it is dark and sometimes it is gold? Did anyone ever tell you it is sure magic to have dark eyes with such hair—eyes so shy when you’re a woman and so bold when you’re a child? Did anyone ever tell you anything at all about yourself, Susan?”