This Proud Heart (33 page)

Blake sent her a telegram every day and she replied and then she did not miss him. She was amazed that this was so, and sometimes dismayed. Surely she would miss him. Some day, some night, the need for him would seize her and then she would say in the morning, “I must go back to Blake.”

Day followed day and still she did not want to go away. She waited in silence, wanting nothing beyond its deep rest. She thought once of the farmhouse but she did not want even to go there. Mark’s memory would be there and she wanted nothing and nobody. She felt something slowly releasing itself within her, growing back, as a tree bent by a weight grows back when it is freed.

“Don’t you want to have some of the girls in?” her mother asked. But she shook her head. What did she have to say to them?

They went to church on the Sunday before Christmas and in a pew ahead she saw Hal and Lucile and three children between them. Afterwards Lucile came rushing at her screaming, “Oh, Susan, it’s wonderful to see you! We hear the most wonderful things—don’t tell me these are your children! You don’t look a day older—oh, I’m a fright—so fat! I began to put on weight after Jimmy. Yes, this is my only girl, Leora.”

Susan looked down at a pale, silent little girl, who looked, of all the children, the only one like Hal.

“Once I heard you crying and I went and picked you up,” she said. “You don’t remember it.”

The little girl shook her head and Lucile gave her great bouncing laugh. “Leora’s still a cry baby,” she said cheerfully. “Here’s Hal, Susan!” Hal was there, tall and shy of her, and he was growing bald. Instantly she was overcome with the feeling of Mark. If Mark had lived she would have gone on being one of them all. And she—what would have become of her if Mark had lived? But now she was very far away.

She walked a great deal during these days. The winter was very warm.

“No snow this year, much,” her father said when the children were searching the skies for clouds. “The corn husks were thin, I noticed, in the fall, and the squirrels haven’t hurried to hide their nuts—nuts lying around everywhere in the woods. That means a mild winter.”

Christmas Eve dawned like a day in October, full of still, warm sunshine. She walked that day to Mrs. Fontane’s garden. The house was closed and the gates locked, and she climbed over a low stone wall and crossed the leaf-covered lawns until she saw the pool, rimmed in the fallen leaves. There knelt her little Cupid, gazing into the water. She stood looking at it as though she had never seen it before. She had forgotten it for years, as one might forget a child who scarcely lived to draw its breath. It seemed no more than such a beginning. Yet, as she looked, she did not remember why it had been made, that she and Mark might marry.

“It is rather good,” she thought, forgetting. “It looks alive, in spite of all I didn’t know then. Yes, I caught life somehow, though I didn’t know I did.”

A wind flurried down a shower of last leaves and they fell past the Cupid, catching, and falling past and settling gently on the silent shallow pool…. How long ago it was! She felt herself wrapped into the endless silence.

Even Christmas did not bring her out of her silence. She went through its familiar ways, still apart. When the day was over and she was alone in her room again, in bed ready for sleep, she remembered that Blake had sent her no message. His gift had been on the Christmas tree, a small square watch set with diamonds, but there was no message with it. It had been sent straight from a shop. She half rose to go to the telephone and then she did not. She lay a moment, half deciding, and then without knowing it she fell into sleep.

Her father said, “Come up to the attic and play a little, Susan. I don’t get much music nowadays.” So she went upstairs and played the things she had not played in many years. He sat listening, his mouth covered with his beautiful old hand. He always hid his mouth when he listened to music.

“Do you ever write poetry any more, Father?” she asked him while she played.

“No, I’ve given it up,” he replied, and sighed.

“You haven’t given up the South Seas?” she asked, smiling. In the high sweet upper notes her right hand was wandering, and the soft bass followed, echoing.

“I think a little bit about it sometimes,” he said. Then he smiled back at her, shamefaced as a child. “Of course you know I always knew I’d never get there,” he said gently. He closed his eyes and she went on for an hour while he listened.

And then, when she had finished playing his favorite Sibelius she turned. He was looking at her, trembling, a look of fright in his blue eyes.

“Dad!” she cried, sharply.

“I took a wrong turn somewhere in my life, Susan,” he whispered. “I thought I was going up the main road, and it has been only a blind alley. I haven’t come out anywhere.”

“Don’t,” she said. She went and put her arms around him and held him and pressed her head against him. To grow old, to know too late that somewhere one had taken the wrong road, to understand that there was no return, life having been spent in bright fragments—this was the first death. “It’s wasted,” he whispered. “I’ve wasted myself. The years fooled me—I haven’t done what I was sure I would.” She knelt beside him, holding him hard in an instant terror greater than his own, feeling to the depths what he meant.

This was what happened. Year followed year, that was all. One day there was plenty of time, and the next day there was none at all. “I don’t suppose it matters,” her father was saying. “It isn’t the world that’s missed me—it’s I who have missed it. I don’t suppose that matters—but it does to me.”

“Father!” she whispered. She knelt beside him. “You haven’t really missed everything.”

“If you don’t get what you wanted at the end, nothing seems to count,” he said. Then suddenly he shook her off and rose to his feet. “Oh, well!” he said.

He had turned away from her, but the terror was still in his eyes.

And this terror was a light to her soul. She lay awake in the night, and the terror played about her as fierce as lightning and in its clarity she saw that Blake, Blake was what was wrong with her. She who should yield to no one had yielded to him because she loved him. She knew now she had not loved Mark enough and so he had done her no harm. But Blake was strangling her. She was subduing herself to him, letting the years pass over her. She loved him and feared him, and lest he be angry with her she had let him make her what he wanted. That was why she had grown so spent and so mortally weary. She had been shaped as surely as he shaped his figures of clay, and her spirit, now docile, was fainting, though she had not been aware of it until she left him. For the shape into which he was making her was not her own…. Once she remembered her father had told her in one of his abrupt, half confidences, “When I married your mother she was a small pink-cheeked creature with yellow hair. I thought she would do anything for me. It was only afterwards I discovered she was the stubbornest thing on earth. She’s sweet and stupid and she always knows best and she takes her way. She will crush anyone near her. If I could only stop loving her—”

But he had never stopped loving her. The horrible thing was that he still loved this woman to whom he had yielded. He had never gone away from her even for a night, though he dreamed of the islands in the sea and though he had built the cabin by the lake. But at night he came home, loving her, and hating her.

It was when one could not go away … She must go away from Blake. But she did not know how because she loved him. Other women might lose themselves and live on, but she could not.

Lying in the dark of her old room, she began to plan, bitterly awake. Blake was a poison in her veins. She had been infatuated with him. She was, still. She would always be, though she was his wife. And this infatuation would be the end of herself, if she did not drag herself out of it. She must lay hold on herself, command her life before it was too late.

“Guilt!” she thought suddenly. “I know what David meant. Of course I am guilty!” Love was wicked when it did what she had let it do. She sat up in bed and hugged her knees. What if she waked like this one morning to find her hair white and her hands too old to work, what if the years fooled her, too, stealing past her silently, secretly, making no sound to disturb her so that she did not know they passed? And then one morning it would be too late. Her hands would be withered and her sight dim.

She sprang out of bed and turned on the light and stared into the mirror. She was still young, still strong. Her hands were still her hands. She could work with them. There was time. She had caught the years at their evil game, and she would march ahead of them for the rest of her life. She stood, looking at herself. She was ruddy with rest and sunshine. Strength welled up in her body. She wished it were not night. She was finished with sleeping and now she was impatient for the morning. And Blake? What should she tell him? What but the one truth, that she had been idle and now she must work? If he laughed at her, if he pulled her back into himself, she would remember the fear of waking to find herself old and life finished.

She could do it. She went back to bed and curled into her own warmth and thought of Blake. She did not hate him, she would never be able to hate him. Some part of her would always be tender and passionate because of him. He had made her for a little while to be nothing but a woman like other women. It was one of the rooms of her life. She had lived in it and now she had come out of it. But the door was not shut. She could come in and go out at her will, only she must never let Blake lock her in any more. No one must ever lock her in anywhere. “I can do anything!” she exclaimed aloud, and the sound of her own voice in the old confident words drove away her last terror. She lay in the soundless dark and at last she slept.

T
HEY WENT BACK THE
day after the new year. Blake was not at home. “The master reckoned you’d not be here for an hour yet, Madame,” Crowne said, looking at her as though she were an unexpected guest.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Susan.

There was an hour in which she could take new possession of this house. She went with the children to their rooms and together they unpacked and hung up their clothes.

“Oh, I wish we could always live in the country,” John said moodily.

“So do I, to be sure,” Jane sighed.

“I don’t,” said Marcia. She was growing into a tall child with a sharp preciseness of speech and movement. She had asked Susan again and again, “When are we going back to Blake?” She admired Blake and adored him, because he paid her such fitful attention. He would play with her and then for days forget her. And she pursued him and talked to him in affected vivacity to make him laugh. Susan thought, “I must send her away from him to school. I don’t want her growing into the kind of girl Blake likes.” She was afraid for Marcia. Within her a robust and healthy instinct began to rise. There was something a little wrong in Blake. He deadened whomever he loved, whoever loved him. She longed for his footstep and dreaded it. She would stay here with the children and let him find her here.

Then he came, handsome and immaculate, very gay and glad to see them, and he gave her his quick hard kiss, his hands on either side of her face, his palms cool and smooth.

“Susanne, I’m glad to see you! But how hot your cheeks are!” he said. “I don’t care to tell you how the time dragged. I won’t let you think yourself indispensable to me, though in your way you are. I do hate Christmas! How do you do, John! Marcia, come here and let me kiss you.”

Marcia ran to him and he lifted her and kissed her on the mouth.

“Kiss me again, Blake!” she begged him.

“Marcia!” Susan cried sharply.

“It’s only because she likes the way Blake’s face smells,” said John with scorn. “She told me so.” He stood aloof, his hands in his pockets.

But Blake laughed and kissed Marcia again, looking at Susan, his eyes teasing her.

“Have you forgotten all the dance steps, Marcia?” he demanded. He had once taught her little stiff precise dances which he said suited her square-cut straight hair and thin child’s shape.

“No, I haven’t—not one,” she cried, and she began to dance.

Susan could see the child’s eyes fixed on Blake and her body grow tense to Blake’s command. He was singing in a sharp syncopated melody, beating time in a nervous ragged rhythm. When he stopped Marcia was quivering. “More—more—” she begged him.

“No more,” said Susan. “Blake, it’s bad for her. She is too highly strung as it is.”

“She loves it,” he said calmly, “don’t you, kid?”

He ruffled her hair and she looked at him in ecstasy.

“Yes—yes!” she whispered.

And Susan thought, “What is this power he has?”

… “I’m going to send them both away to school in the country,” she told Blake that night.

“As you like,” he said, his tone careless. He was looking at her. “Put on that new thing, Susanne—the red and gold.”

“No, Blake,” she replied.

“Why not?” he asked, surprised.

“I’d rather not,” she said tranquilly, and chose a soft blue gown she had not worn in a long time.

“I don’t like you in blue,” he said sulkily, watching her.

“Don’t you?” she said quietly. “I like blue.”

And she would not notice the looks he threw at her. It was so small a thing, and yet in that moment she felt her body reclaimed. For she would not have done even this if she had not had her terror.

Slow and deep there came out of her with this first small independence the huge need to begin to do her own work. She awoke to it as one awakes again to health after illness, feeling herself well again and her muscles ready and her mind clear and willing. They went downstairs together and Blake put his arm around her, his hand in the warm pit beneath her shoulder. She turned toward him and smiled, and checked the old instant submission of her being, the sweet, half-fainting instant yielding which was once the power of his touch upon her. She had herself again.

She was about to say, “Blake, do you mind if I work?”, but instead she said, “I am going to begin to work again, Blake.” They were at breakfast the next morning.