This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck Page A

crumbling red brick pillars, up a wide winding sanded path to the columns of the old colonial house. She mounted the steps to the door and rang the bell. Nothing yet had been done to stay the decay. The steps were loose, and the floor boards warped beneath her feet. But her dream stopped at the door. She had no dream of what was beyond it. He would be perhaps tall, rugged, large, like his own work, a sort of Titan, creating Titans.
    But the door was jerked open and a small man with a heavy black beard stood there. He was inches smaller than she was, and his figure was paunchy, his shoulders round. She saw in the same flash his hands, square and strong as a miner’s hands, grimed at the nails.
    “What do you want?” he said.
    “I am Susan Gaylord,” she said. “Michael sent me.”
    He stared out under bushy black eyebrows, under rough black hair. He was as hairy as a gorilla.
    “You’re that girl,” he said. “Come in. That was a good head, abominably cast. You could have cast it better yourself.”
    “I don’t know very much,” she said, ashamed. “I got the name of that place out of a sculptor’s handbook I saw advertised somewhere.”
    He did not answer, and she followed him into what had once been the great room of the old Grainger house. It was full of crates and boxes and figures half unpacked.
    “Sit down,” he said, and she sat down on a crate, seeing nothing.
    “Well, what do you want?” he asked abruptly.
    “I don’t know,” said Susan. “I’m not sure I want anything.”
    He rubbed his broad flat nose with a thick forefinger.
    “You’d better stay here and look around until you do know,” he said, irritated. “I’ll be back after a while. If you’re not here I’ll take it you don’t want anything of me.”
    He rolled off the crate where he was sitting and walked out of the room as clumsily as a sailor, and she was left alone. But after a little while she perceived that she was not alone. The figures of marble and of bronze which had been nothing when she first came in now began to come alive, each with its own meaning. Voice after voice, as she paid heed to one and to another, began to speak. There were two dancers, a man and a woman, rising up from the swath of wood and sacking in which they had been packed. They were people of some savage island, their bodies long and narrow, their faces flat, and the eyes oblique and full. The woman was crouched, her head flung back, and the man was springing over her. They spoke to each other, not to her, but she could hear them murmuring in words she did not understand. She stood before them a while, seeing how their smooth slight strong muscles were moving, or about to move, under the dark supple smooth skin. He had seen them somewhere like that, in a temple or upon a shore by a hot sea. She moved on to the figure of a woman, a silent waiting woman whose hands were locked together in waiting, her head bowed. But under the delicate brows the eyes were anxious and waiting, and from the warm marble of her body she was asking, “Has no one seen him? Has no one seen him coming to me?”
    Behind her was a full-length figure and looking at it, Susan saw it was Michael, his beautiful body bare, his hands clenched. And all about her were packed crates, and she could feel presences bursting from them. She could scarcely keep from tearing at them to let them free, that she might see them.
    There was a mass of clay thrown upon a table and she went over to it restlessly, and broke off a piece and rolled it in her hands, impatient, hungry, craving the textured mass of it in her hands. She crushed it together in her hands and then opened them. It lay in her hands, marked with her finger prints, and she began to press it quickly into a shape.
    “What are you doing?”
    She heard his voice so sharply that she leaped and there was his bearded face at her shoulder.
    “I don’t know,” she said, and held out the clay.
    He took it from her and looked at it a