This Proud Heart (44 page)

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“What?” asked Marcia, coming back.

“I was just asking John if he wanted to see Grandfather,” Susan said, her voice usual.

Marcia stopped halfway across the room.

“I do,” she said eagerly, “I haven’t ever seen a dead person.”

“The child has no idea—” Mrs. Gaylord moaned and closed her eyes.

“Very well,” said Susan.

“Let’s go now,” cried Marcia, wriggling her thin little hand into Susan’s. Susan rose and they went out. She saw John watch them, doubtful, wavering, but he did not follow.

She led Marcia into the guest room without a word, and with her stood beside the bed. She looked at Marcia’s face, watchful for fear..

But Marcia was not in the least afraid.

“He looks awfully still,” she said, after a moment.

“Yes,” Susan said, “I suppose that is what death is—complete stillness.”

Marcia was silent an instant.

“Grandmother can’t say I haven’t any idea now,” she said. Susan did not answer. They stood a little longer. “I want to go away now,” said Marcia.

So they went away. Outside the door was John.

“I don’t want to see him,” he whispered. His lips were white, and he was trembling.

“Then he wouldn’t want you to,” Susan said.

“The last time he—I saw him—he was making my boat—my three-master—he was laughing, and when he said goodbye, he said he’d send it to me in three or four days—and he did. You don’t think he’ll mind if I don’t go in?”

“It’s the best way to remember him, as you do,” Susan said. “He’d much rather.”

She put her hand in his arm and led him away.

In the end her own comfort came to her out of herself. In the cold clear sunshine of the November day, it came to her. He was dead, but out of his death a life would come, a life which she would create. She would make and dedicate to him the finest work she had yet done, a work which should spring out of her memory of him. Out of her knowledge of loss came darting upward a clear flame, that strong familiar ecstasy of desire. It upheld her as she stood beside the open grave that afternoon, her mother clinging to her arm, her own hand in John’s young arm. She gazed into a sky lit with early sunset, seeing no one of the crowd that was gathered, hearing no music and no speech. She stood apart in a silence of her own, fashioning out of the clay of her father’s dead body his enduring image. Her ears caught the dull sounds of clods upon the wood.

“Dust unto dust—” The words were an echo from afar off. She did not see or hear.

“I shall make him in veinless marble,” she was thinking in solemn exaltation. And seeing with her inner eye his image, she saw it finished and she heard it speak, and forgetful of the heaping earth she smiled and lifted up her head.

Blake had said, “Take the next train,” but she could not. Back in the empty house the children looked at each other, not knowing what to do next. And out of this pause she said, feeling her wish as it shaped out of the emptiness, “What would you say if we all went to the farm for a few days?”

Jane said briskly, “It’s a terrible good thought, Mum, if you ask me. It can’t be so bad. I cleaned up good in the summer like I always do.”

“Yes,” said John. “Yes, Mother.”

“I can’t remember how it is any more,” Marcia said.

“I don’t care where I am for a while,” Mrs. Gaylord sighed.

So they had piled bedding into the car and food and had gone at once.

At the last moment Lucile had telephoned, “We’ll be over tonight—the first night’s so hard. I know how it was when Mother went. You feel it the first night the body’s gone.”

“We’re all going away to the farm,” Susan told her, and she put up the receiver without waiting, and then she locked the door quickly and ran out to the car where they were waiting for her. It would be well to be busy making beds and cleaning and cooking—there was healing in such common necessity. Tomorrow she would persuade her mother to be busy and the children would be running everywhere. She’d let them miss school for a while. She needed them with her. She drove the car through the night to the end of the town, down the road she had last walked to find Mark ill, and up the lawn. The branches twined above them, bare against the dark night sky. There was no moon and the stars were glittering. And then they were at the familiar porch, and Jane took the big iron key from her bag.

“I thought I might just get down, so I brung it,” she said.

Susan went first into the house.

“Wait,” said Jane, “I know exactly. I left the lamp here on the hall table and matches—safety—you can’t trust mice with any others.”

The lamp flared and they stood in the hall, looking about them.

“I remember now,” said John. His voice was full of wonder.

“I don’t, still,” said Marcia. “It seems funny to me here.”

But Susan did not hear them. She was thinking, “I shall have to tell Blake. I shall tell him I have a piece of work to do which I must do here.” In an instant it was clear to her that she could not possibly make the statue of her father in that crowded noisy street. He had never been there with her, and he would escape her if she took him there now. But here she could work, here in this silence, in this space. She stood upon her own ground, as though indeed she was at last come home.

S
HE WROTE TO BLAKE
every day. For it was only just that she make known to him each day what she discovered in herself. She wrote at first, “I shall be here awhile until I see what I want to make. You will understand that one is able to see a certain person more clearly in one place than another. I see him here.”

Blake had replied, “Of course I understand that.” And then he had gone on to say the thing he was really thinking about. “I have clipped the criticisms of your exhibition. All the critics had something to say, as I thought they would after what Barnes wrote. On the whole you’ve come out pretty well—of course they all said there was considerable merit in your work, since there is a peculiar handicap, especially in sculpture, for women.”

She did not care what they said and told him so. For now the block of marble—she had telegraphed for it—had come, and she was beginning her new work. What was past was gone. She accepted without understanding it this forgetting and this fresh pressing on to new creation.

In the house Jane was cleaning and cooking, and her mother was polishing silver and mending curtains, weeping a little now and then, pausing when anyone was near, to tell something she had said and thought and what he said….

John said to Susan, “I think I’ll carve Granddaddy’s head out of wood, maybe, Mother. I sort of would like to have it myself. Would you use cherry? I found a good dry piece in the barn. Could you help me a little with the drawing?”

Only Marcia was restless. “There’s nothing to do here,” she said many times a day. “If we aren’t going back to school till after Christmas, Mother, what’ll I do all day?”

For day by day Susan pushed away their leaving this place. She went from room to room, gazing out of the windows at fields and hills and sky, thinking, pondering. She had wondered if Mark would come back to her here in this house, but he did not. He was gone, except as his life would always be a part of her life, as everything was a part of her life. Old friends came to see her, to ask her, “How long will you stay, Sue?”, to hear her say, “I don’t know,” to tell her bits of gossip—“You remember Trina, Sue? Her husband was always fooling around—well, she finally committed suicide a couple of years ago, and he’s married to another girl who is livelier than he is and he’s doing the worrying now—serves him right, we all say.”

She had gone her way which had not been theirs, and yet at meeting they took their old places in her life. Everything she had ever had she had still.

Once David Barnes wrote to her. “I’m going to have my exhibition in New York in January and then I’m going back to France to stay. I have finished my Titans. There won’t be any more in my lifetime. I feel as though I were thrust out of Olympus. I have been living with gods so long I can’t see as small as humans any more. You’ve got a grand start now. The critics don’t know whether they like you or not, and so you aren’t going to be forgotten. You’ve only got to go on doing your own stuff. You don’t need anybody. Let me know if you come back to town.”

She folded his letter and put it away. She would perhaps never see him again but it did not matter. They had given to each other all they had to give. One gave as he was able, and as the other could receive. Nothing was lost.

Blake wrote, “I begin to think you are not coming back to me.”

And she wrote, “I don’t know what I am going to do. Somehow I see only a day ahead.”

It was then he telegraphed to her that he was coming at once.

She had not allowed herself to discover whether or not she wanted to see Blake. She would be completely guided by what he was to her. For now she knew she no longer saw Blake as she once had. He was a new person, to be newly seen. And she would not think only of how she saw him, but also of how he saw her. If he needed her she must consider it. But she knew she no longer needed him.

She said casually in the morning, “Blake is coming today.”

Marcia’s face lit and she cried out, “Oh, how spiffy! I
have
missed Blake, Mother!”

Jane said, “I’ll have to get another piece of meat, Mum. He’ll never eat Irish stew.”

“To think your father never saw him,” her mother sighed.

But John said nothing. He was drawing at the table and he went on with it.

He would be there at three o’clock, Blake had wired, Bantie driving him down. She dressed herself carefully, and waited for him in the living room. A few minutes after three she saw him, wrapped in his fur coat, stepping out of his car, his stick in his hand, mounting the steps. She went and opened the door.

“Come in, Blake,” she said.

“Well, Susanne,” he said, and bending, kissed her cheek.

He was so strange to her here in this house that his kiss on her cheek was a surprise. She stood waiting while he took off his coat.

“It’s a hard place to find,” he said. “Almost no one knew it. Beastly cold day, as well.”

The tip of his handsome nose was a little red and he rubbed his hands together and there was the dry sound of dead leaves that his father’s hands made when he rubbed them.

“Come in to the fire,” Susan said.

John had brought in logs and built up a huge fire in the old chimney place. The room, sparely furnished, looked warm and cheerful and spacious. Jane had set tea on a small table by the fire, and her mother was seated by it, waiting.

“This is Blake, Mother,” Susan said, and Blake bent over her mother’s hand, and she looked up at him, a little frightened.

“I was just telling Susan before you came—” she began, and suddenly Marcia flew into the room.

“Blake, Blake!” she cried. “Oh, at last you’ve come!”

She had put on her best frock of crimson taffeta and tied a crimson ribbon about her short black hair, and her cheeks and lips were too bright.

“Marcia!” Susan cried. “Come here to me!”

Marcia looked at her with suddenly sullen eyes and came toward her slowly.

“What is it?” she muttered.

But Susan had seized her and was rubbing her cheeks and lips with her handkerchief.

“For shame, Marcia!” she cried, and Blake burst into his high intense laughter. They were all staring at the stains of rouge on the white handkerchief, and Marcia’s black eyes were furious.

“I don’t see what business it is of yours!” she cried.

“My soul and body!” murmured Mrs. Gaylord.

John came in. “I told her you wouldn’t like it, Mother,” he was saying. “How do you do, Blake?” He put out his hand and Blake took it, his eyes still teasing bright with laughter.

“I appreciate it, Marcia,” he protested. “Indeed—”

“Go and wash your face, Marcia,” Susan begged. She was secretly grateful to Marcia for being absurd, and she called after her, “And hurry back, darling! Jane has little raisin cakes for tea!”

But all the time she was conscious of Blake, and of Blake only. For she saw with every movement that there was no longer any bond of flesh between them. His flesh was strange to her. There was no magic in it any more. She did not want to touch his hand, and that he should kiss her filled her with disgust.

She sat in growing dismay while she poured tea, while Marcia came back to sit chattering on Blake’s knee, pretending nothing had happened. Once she buried her face in his neck and whispered, suffocating, “I love you best!”

And Blake had laughed at her again.

And all the time Susan knew the moment was approaching, was here, when she and Blake must meet or part. Before night fell it had to come. She rose suddenly.

“Now all of you run away,” she commanded them. “Blake and I must talk.”

Some power in her voice compelled even Marcia, and she and Blake were left alone at last.

She was waiting for Blake to begin that she might know whether or not he wanted her. For if he wanted her or needed her, there was her promise to him to remember, made that day in the little office in Paris. She waited, half afraid, and it seemed he must speak to demand of her with passion, “When are you coming back to me, Susanne?”

But when he spoke he said, “I came down partly on business, Susanne. Joseph Hart, the old eccentric—” he paused, half laughing—“you must feel very flattered now, Susanne—he wants to put two of your things in the museum.”

She was so stunned, so turned aside, that it was hard to check her expectation and force her mind to his words. What he had said was at this moment of no importance to her. She could not answer at once. Blake lit a cigarette.

“He said he wanted your consent, or whatever the form is.” He drew hard, and blew out smoke. “I suppose I could act for you,” he added.

She forced herself to think.

“I don’t want that series broken,” she said at last. “It’s incomplete. I have at least eight more figures to add. If ever it is to go into a museum, it must go in entire.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I say, Susanne!” he murmured. “You don’t expect anything, do you?” His voice was ironical, and her heart flew up.