This Proud Heart (6 page)

“I want to hear that Sibelius thing,” he said. “Mary’ll never be able to play it. She picks at it so. And it’s got me by the ears these days so I can’t get that tune out of my head.”

She sat down at his old upright piano, smiling, and opened the pages of
Finlandia.
He stretched himself on the couch and threw his arm over his eyes.

“Go on,” he commanded her.

She played it, fully and deeply, forgetting everything else, as she could not help doing in anything she did. Yes, she could not help forgetting even Mark. She was building a structure of music, filled with stern ineffable pain. She knew how so to fill it. Being so young, pain was still beautiful to her. Though she had never suffered in her life, she knew by an instinct deeper than experience how to make pain. When she finished she was trembling.

She waited a moment and then turned to her father. His arm had fallen from his face, and he lay, his eyes closed, his lips clenched white about his pipe.

“Father!” she whispered.

“Go away,” he muttered. “Go away—go away!” Under his black eyelashes she saw the brightness of tears. “That music—” he muttered.

She went away, down the stairs. The house was still. She paused a moment at her mother’s door and listened. She could hear nothing. She opened the door softly and looked. There on the bed, still unmade, her mother lay asleep, her breath coming peaceably as a child’s. She shut the door softly and went away, out of this house, back again to her own.

S
HE STOPPED ONE DAY
when the morning was half over and looked around her living room. Everything was finished in this house. There was nothing more to do. The house looked back at her brightly, the windows clear, the floor shining, everything in its place. There was no room for anything more she could make. The last cushion, the last curtain was done, and one more would be too much. Her small linen closet was full of linen she had embroidered and hemstitched. Outside, the garden was tended and blooming with midsummer. Mark was to make the garden, but she had run out on sunny days and weeded and planted. Yesterday afternoon she had even mowed the lawn. But he was angry at her for that.

“I was going to do it tonight after supper,” he said. “I looked at it yesterday—it didn’t need it badly.”

“I just did it for fun,” she coaxed him. “I hadn’t anything to do this afternoon, and I didn’t feel like going away from home—so I just did—”

“Don’t do it again,” he warned her. “It’s not woman’s work.”

She looked out of the window and did not answer. It had been pleasant, shaving the long even rows of green.

“I won’t do it again,” she said.

But today there was no more to do. She went to the window and looked out. She felt restless with nothing to do. Down the street Lucile was wheeling a baby carriage onto the porch and then she went into the house quickly. Susan could hear the screen door bang. It was Lucile’s second baby, born six weeks ago. “I’m furious!” Lucile had cried. “Another baby—and Tommy just getting to where I can take him with me! It isn’t as though Hal could afford me a maid. Men are so selfish!”

She had not answered Lucile, remembering Hal, docile and always tired. It did not seem possible he could make Lucile do anything she did not want to do.

Behind her the house was orderly and still. It looked at her when she turned, with the bright and placid look of a well-tended child. Now what should she do? Yesterday she had taken Mary’s new dress to her, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with yellow satin ribbon. She had worked on it every day and she had made it of pale gold metal cloth, buying the stuff out of Mrs. Fontane’s money. She had made it straight and smart. Mary’s eyes had lighted to more warmth than had ever shone in them.

“It’s lovely, Sue,” she said. And without knowing at all why, Susan felt tears hot against her eyelids.

“Do you really like it?” She longed to hear Mary say it again. Perhaps someday she and Mary could grow close.

“I do, I love it,” Mary said.

“Well, I should think so!” her mother said, sighing. “It’s a handsome dress, Susan. I don’t see how you got it all done.”

And her father, pausing at the door, put in his head. “Good heavens!” he cried. “I’m not paying for it, I hope!”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” her mother said. “Susan made it.”

“Did you, Sue?” he said. “You’ve made her look like a daffodil.” His eyes were as mischievous as though there had never been tears in them.

“They liked it,” she told Mark last night. “Mary looked pretty in it.”

“Well, they ought to like it,” Mark said. “It was beautiful. I don’t know how you do it, Sue.”

His voice was tender and his eyes humble as he looked at her, and she shrank a little.

“It was an easy pattern,” she said, not knowing why she needed defense, except from his humility. She did not want Mark humble before her. No, no, for then it made her different from him….

Up the street floated the sound of Lucile’s baby girl crying. The baby cried so much. If she had a baby she wouldn’t put it out and let it cry and cry. She turned suddenly and opened the door and walked quickly down the street. She could say she was just going to see Lucile. She ran silently up the steps and looked into the carriage. Why, the poor little thing was all twisted in the net! She put the net back and lifted the baby out and straightened her skirts. The cap strings were stiff organdy and cut the tiny chin and she loosened them. Then she sat hushing the baby softly, rocking back and forth. A huge blind tenderness rushed up in her as she felt the soft helpless body. Holding it like this in her arms, the small body curved again to the shape of the womb. This helplessness was too much—it was sad. How helplessly life began! She looked down into the small face. The baby had stopped crying now and was looking at her, her little mouth moving. If she modeled a baby face, how could she express what was there?—this naked helpless patience, this submissive patience, as though the newly born child already knew the eternal helplessness of its whole life, not only now but forever.

“Why, Susan!” Lucile’s voice cried sharply. Lucile was at the door. “What on earth—”

“She was crying so,” Susan said humbly.

“Well, of all—but she’s supposed to be having a nap!”

“I’d finished my work, and I thought I would just run down—”

But Lucile was taking the baby away from her. She put her back into the baby carriage and pulled down the net. “Come in, do—the child will never go to sleep at this rate, and if she doesn’t sleep she’s cross all day.”

In the bright sunlight Lucile’s face looked hard and hostile.

“I’m sorry,” Susan faltered. “She was crying so.”

“Well, I don’t see what business it is of yours, I must say, Sue.”

“No,” said Susan quickly, “no, of course, it wasn’t any at all…. I won’t come in this morning,” she added. “You’re not through yet.”

“I never get through, with two children,” Lucile said. “You might as well come in. By the time I get things cleaned up, it’s time to feed the baby.”

“No, I’ll come this afternoon, maybe,” said Susan. She smiled and turning at the foot of the steps waved her hand. Lucile was an old friend. She mustn’t mind Lucile.

But when she reached her house she stood a moment uncertainly. That long deep look in the baby’s eyes—it was a racial look. It was not the solitary look of one soul. It was a human look which the baby was not yet individual enough to combat. Later when she grew more into her own being her will would strengthen and hide this nakedness. But now her eyes were microscopes, magnifying and revealing the beginning of life.

She sat down on the top step of the little front porch and hugged her knees and stared into the garden, seeing none of it. She had already forgotten Lucile. She was remembering the child, feeling it, sinking her being into its immensity. And desire stirred in her, deep and blind, the intolerable, sweet, dark, solitary desire which she knew so well, which she could share with no one. She rose to her feet and she went slowly upstairs, past the bedroom door, up to the attic. She began mixing fresh clay and out of the clay she began to shape and mold a newborn child from whose minute unfinished features breathed an immense inexplicable helpless patience.

The house fell away from beneath her feet and the attic roof was gone from over her head. She remembered no one and nothing. All the past months never were. The very years of her own life were lost. She was standing here making a child out of clay—out of clay shaping its life. She curved the clay into the shape of a newborn being, the bondage of the womb still upon its crouched back, its updrawn legs, its feeble entwined arms. Only the solemn head was large and free, lifted a little, looking out at unknown life with the awful patience. When it was finished she stared at it, half frightened. She did not know what she had made. She was afraid of it. This face, turned to her, was asking, “Why was I born?”

“I don’t know,” she answered aloud. Her voice echoed in the empty room and suddenly she felt the dusk about her. She looked out of the window and there beyond the wood she saw the dark sunset, too red….

“I’ve worked all day,” she thought, dazed, taking off her smock and smoothing her hair. Then she thought, “Mark will be coming home!” Mark! She had not once thought of him. But now, thinking of him, she felt the house was under her feet again, the roof over her head. She did not look at what she had made. She ran downstairs.

She felt, hurrying to get Mark’s dinner, that she had been away for a long time. Up in the attic the thing she had made remained, a presence. It was there, a part of herself and yet separate from her. She felt exhausted, lonely, and yet content. She was suddenly impatient for Mark, hungry to feel his hand, his lips, to know he was there, solid and hearty, in the house, because she had been away from him so long. She flew about making ready for him. And when at last he came in and she heard his loud eager call, “Sue! Where are you?” she ran to him and flung herself upon him and held to him hard.

“Oh, Mark,” she whispered, “oh, Mark—” What would she do if Mark did not come home at night?

“What a long day!” he said. “When I can’t get home to lunch, it’s awful!”

But for her the day had gone like a gust of wind. She thought, her face buried in his neck, “Today is a blank in our life.” She had not lived it with him at all. She did not want to live a day without him. She must stay closely knit to him. She lifted her head impetuously. “Mark,” she cried, “please, please, I want a baby!”

“Well, of all things!” said Mark, astounded. He stared at her, touched, smiling a little. “What a girl you are!” he said unsteadily. Then he laughed. “Anyway, let’s wait until after supper!” he said.

“Grand supper,” he said, and leaning back, he filled his pipe. “Let’s go out on the porch.”

They went out and found a new moon hanging over the wood, and they sat down in the light of it. He took one of the two new wicker chairs, but she sat on the top step and leaned her head against his knee. The moon was so sharply bright it dimmed the lights of the houses. He bent and turned her head suddenly so that the light of the moon fell full upon it.

“What made you cry out to me that you wanted a baby?” he asked abruptly.

She shook her head. “I don’t know—perhaps Lucile’s baby. I held her a little while today and she curled into my arm.”

He smoothed back her hair. “Lucile has made me afraid to let you have one,” he said. “Hal is so worried by the way she feels. He says both their children were accidents. Tommy came before Lucile was ready. They had decided not to until he could afford a maid. I can’t—yet, you know, Susan. You’ve got to be sure—”

“I wouldn’t let whether we had a maid or not decide what I want in my life,” she said quietly. He did not answer but she could hear the deep puff of his pipe. His big steady hand smoothed her hair and touched her neck. They were very close, so close that she nearly said, “I modeled a little baby today, Mark—perhaps that—” But before she could say it he spoke.

“Sometimes I wonder why you married me,” he said. The old hateful humility was thick in his voice.

“Mark!” She turned instantly. “I love you.”

“I can’t see why,” he said wistfully. “I’m a very common sort of fellow.”

“You’re not!” she cried.

“Yes, I am,” he said. “This street’s full of fellows like me—Hal, Tom Page, Bob Shaplin—we’re all off the same piece.”

“Oh, don’t,” she said. “You’re not a bit like them.”

“We’re all good honest hard-working fellows and we’ll be nothing more when we die. I’ll be just like my dad—worrying along in the same little house on the farm he and Mother began with, always expecting to be better off, but never being so. We’re all the same. Hal said today as fast as he got a raise—”

“But if I love you? And I don’t love Hal and Tom and Bob—”

“I don’t see why you love me—you’re different—you’re not like Lucile and—”

“I’m not different! I’m just the same. I don’t want to be different!”

“You can’t help it.”

“Oh, don’t—don’t—it makes me so lonely—”

She put her arms about his knees and held to him. No, now she would not tell him how the day had gone. She would never tell him.

“Let’s have a little baby,” she whispered. “I don’t want anyone to help me. I don’t have half enough to do. I want to be busy.”

“Do you mean—now?” he asked. She could feel his hand trembling on her neck.

“Yes,” she whispered, and held his hand on her throat with both of hers. She could feel her heart throbbing there against his palm. “Now—now—” she whispered.

He waited a few minutes. He bent over her, looking at her. She looked into his young angular face, all lines and planes in the moonlight. He did not speak, and she waited in his silence, a long time, turning her head away, gazing into the dark wood beyond. Then suddenly he rose and drew her to her feet, and his arm about her, they went into the house. Down the street they could hear somebody’s radio singing, “For you’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road!” He shut the door and locked it and in silence they went upstairs.

She thought sometimes of that curved figure in the attic, its questioning head uplifted away from its womb-shaped body. But she put away the thought quickly. Once, remembering Mark’s humility, she went upstairs determined to destroy it, to break it into bits and send it back to its first clay. But when she stood beside it she could not. It had become a creature. It had a life of its own which she could not destroy. It was strange to make an idea in her brain into a creature which could not be destroyed because it had life. She looked at it a long time, pondering on its face. And within her own body a shape was now being made as surely as her two hands had molded this clay. There was no understanding one more than the other. Here in the bare attic she could not even tell which was the greater creation. Could the child of her body be more sentient than this creature out of her brain? She left it quickly, eager to be rid of it.