Chapter IV (2)

Matilda’s father was shy and the only German thing about him was his name. There was a foreign gleam in his hazel eyes and the hair that fimbriated his bald head was black. He had not inherited Mathilde Lantier’s fire--that fire which had made the submitting required of her a thing almost as prismatic as the unrealizable dreams of other people. But he hated the store. Matilda was the only one who suspected this and she knew it from the gingerly manner in which he handled grubby potatoes and the delicate way he turned up his nose over a slab of ancient cheese. Once Matilda caught him trying to carve the head of a Greek goddess out of a bar of American Family Soap, and after that she had a dim kind of respect for the thin man who shuffled uncomplainingly about the murky store at all hours.

This, then, was Matilda’s family. It was no worse than the usual run of families, but Matilda thought she was uniquely cursed. The trouble was that Matilda’s frustrations blinded her to everything but her own point of view. If only her French blood were given an opportunity to riot uncensored! But no opportunity had materialized ... that is none which iridescently mattered. To be sure, she had taken a degree from the little sectarian college on the edge of Crittenden, but that experience had only enabled her to rebel against fate in terms of bad poetry.

Matilda deserted her sugar and went over and stood in the doorway. She glanced up and down the clapboarded vista of Main Street. Dora Todd, the blue-and-gold daughter of the banker, clicked by on her new red heels. Envious tears smarted Matilda’s eyelids. She did not envy Dora because the wind tossed her curls flaxenly, nor did she covet eyes made of azure china, but those heels were another matter. They typified Dora’s power to dress herself up. Matilda adored her own dark obliqueness and she would have liked to keep it in the style to which it deserved to be accustomed. Those heels now--they might have been those of her ancestress, young Mathilde Lantier, setting Paris boulevards to music! Matilda shook herself impatiently. Why couldn’t her grandmother stay out of it? She even appropriated the heels of that silly cream-coloured girl who didn’t know Balzac from buttons! And that wasn’t the worst of it. Pretty soon that other woman would take command of her resentment--that irritatingly brilliant woman who had flooded the world with printed proofs that she had lived the fullest life of her generation and who had given Mathilde Lantier such vivid advice one afternoon in her drawing room at Nohant. Sometimes Matilda wished that her grandmother had kept that memory to herself, for the bright taint of it simmered through her blood like some high and mighty poison.

* * * * *

This was what had happened.

It was the summer Matilda was twelve. Mathilde Lantier Gessler had come to Crittenden from Baltimore to see her son once more before she died. Grandmother Gessler was tall and every inch of her was swarthy. Her eyes were as black as bottomless water and as imperishable as diamonds. There was a tuft of hair on her jutting chin, and it was proudly apparent that her lips had curved once. She came and stayed three days. Before she left she took Matilda aside.

“_Ma petite_,” she whispered harshly, “I am content that it is the _père_ you resemble and not that fat _other_.”

“Why?” asked Matilda, perversely delighted at this allusion to her mother’s size.

“Because, _ma cherie_, it is the dark and slender ones of the earth that know how to suffer, and yet keep their joy.”

“Oh, Grandma,” exclaimed the child, “you are happy then!”

“Of course,” the old woman assured her gallantly, “and a great number of tears I might have shed and did not. I laughed sixteen hours out of the twenty-four and smiled in my sleep the other eight. The dreams I had under the crimson canopy of that ancient bed across the sea! But that was before it was decided that I marry Franz Gessler, the merchant, and make an end in Baltimore.”

“Merchant?” queried Matilda. “Is that why Papa keeps a store?”

Mathilde shrugged her aristocratic old shoulders.

“God punished us. I was young and dark and it made trouble. Franz Gessler was fat and yellow and he dropped dead of it.”

“Is that why we are so poor and the store smells so awful?”

And then it had seemed to Matilda that her grandmother peered down at her for the first time. “Ah, yes,” she sighed, stroking the braided silk of her granddaughter’s hair. “Ah, yes!”

“Tell me more,” begged Matilda. “Tell me everything.”

But the old woman had suddenly grown stubborn or weary. She sat there and kept quiet about the walled gardens in which she had strolled; the suitors she had tormented over sundials; the mistake she made that night the moon shone with such Hellenic tenderness; the tearful morning they packed her into the eager arms of the old German merchant and hurried them both off to Baltimore. But she did rouse from her romantic napping long enough to say:

“_Ma petite fille_, there was a thing or two I had from a woman who knew how to love beyond bounds and suffer with triumph. One summer afternoon I saw her at Nohant. There were books on the floor, an unfinished letter to Flaubert on the writing table, and Dumas sitting in a corner. She deserted everything to talk to me. Her eyes were wisdom, her hands were comforting, and her smile contagious. I left, but before that she gave me these,” and the old woman drew up a yellowed package from the capacious pocket of her gown.

“They are for you.” And she smiled a wise and curious smile.

The package contained a picture and a book, and very old they both looked.

“The original,” explained the grandmother, holding up the picture, “was painted by Delacroix.”

“It’s a man,” observed the child ruefully, taking in the long aquiline face framed by short thick hair above a tightly buttoned waistcoat.

Mathilde Lantier snorted. “You have only to observe how the mouth is of a sympathy and the bosom of a tenderness to know!”

“Oh,” said Matilda, “excuse me!”

“And this,” continued the woman, “is just one of the so many books she wrote. Ah, _ce roman dépeint une existence malheureuse d’artiste_!”

“C-o-n-s-u-e-l-o,” spelled Matilda, bending over the tattered cover.

“_C’est ça, ma cherie._”

“You talk funny, Grandma.”

The grandmother pointed to a line of faded script on the fly-leaf. A long bony finger caressed each word as the foreign staccato of it sharpened the air like thin music: “_Quand on a aimé un homme, il est bien difficile d’aimer Dieu ... c’est si différent!_”

There was a silence in which the stately reveries and tingling regrets of an old coquette mingled with the timid wonder of a child.

“She said truly,” sighed the withered woman at last, “too truly for peace.”

“Peace?” asked the little girl, “and what is that, Grandma?”

“A thing a woman longs for but does not want, _ma petite fille_.”

Mathilde Gessler returned to Baltimore. A week later a telegram came announcing her very sudden death. But she hadn’t quite died. A goodly fraction of her alternately dreamed and despaired under the olive-tinted skin of her granddaughter, and her granddaughter thought at times she would die of it. And that wasn’t all. There was that unholy booty from Nohant. Matilda longed to achieve the expression which illumined the experienced features of the woman Delacroix painted, and the unintelligible copy of _Consuelo_ with the scribbled sentence on the fly-leaf finally drove her to the little college just outside of Crittenden. It had been rumoured that French was taught there.

Doctor Pusey, professor of Romance languages, was a retired Presbyterian. He threw up his hands at mention of the lady’s name. His attitude, combined with her dead grandmother’s enthusiasm, put Matilda into a palpitation that drove her to the little college library ransacking for information. One short paragraph in the encyclopedia rewarded her:

Sand, George (1804-1876), the pseudonym of Madame Amandine Lucile
Aurore Dudevant, _née_ Dupin, the most prolific authoress in the
history of literature and unapproached among women novelists of
France. Her life was as strange and adventurous as any of her novels,
which for the most part are idealized versions of the multifarious
incidents of her life.

Matilda fumed at the inadequacy of it. It gave no clue as to why the college curriculum had been cleansed of her. Of course there was that reference to an adventurous life, but that might mean anything from tea parties with kings to lions in Africa. And Delacroix had made her look like a clever Madonna masquerading as a nobleman up to nothing more damnable than courageous benevolences.

There came a day, thanks to old Pusey’s French exercises, when she could spell her way through _Consuelo_ and make what was scrawled on the fly-leaf her own. That sentence tormented Matilda like music which must be experienced to be appreciated: “_Quand on a aimé un homme, il est bien difficile d’aimer Dieu ... c’est si différent!_”

No wonder old Mathilde had looked a bit wan over that sentiment! But before a woman could look wan like that she would have lived some intoxicating moments in ballroom corners and rose arbours. Love ... it would be slow and silken and happen in a far place. How fiercely and, at times, almost resentfully Matilda envied this George Sand who could be so flip about the love of God! She had more or less ceased envying Mathilde Lantier. After all, that lady had in some subtle fashion wound up in Crittenden.

Crittenden ... every harsh tight syllable of it made Matilda feel manacled. Her history had run a quarter of a century and here she still was loitering in the doorway of her father’s store while another girl’s red heels made the minutes flash and click on Main Street. Of course, before the sun shortened April another hour a thing would have happened to her, too, but Matilda was not aware of this. She just stood there in the doorway shifting her unhappy weight from one miserable foot to the other and thought bitterly of all the drawing rooms she could make historic if God would only stop being a Methodist.

Matilda snatched up a hat faded by last summer’s sun and walked down a street paved with clay, past houses whose eaves were dripping with sunlight to where a wet yellow road cut uncertainly through the pastures. She walked until a rickety wooden bridge spanned Sandy Creek. Matilda liked Sandy Creek. The willows that bent to it reminded her of churchyards filled with people who had died loving one another. A cottonwood or two dropped white fluff and it floated on the sluggish water like tufts of foam. But the water wasn’t so sluggish this morning. Last night’s rain made it behave like the brooks one read about. Matilda leaned over the rachitic railing and looked at it.

If one had the nerve one could start being adventurous from this very spot. All one would have to do would be to follow Sandy Creek as it flowed through three great rivers and sprayed into a gulf on the brink of which was a French town where dark men lurked passionately under iron balconies.

Just then Matilda noticed something which disfigured the sandy smoothness of the creek bank. Her fingers tightened resentfully on the railing. It was so like any one of those people back there in Crittenden to sacrifice beauty to the easiest way by dumping worn-out shoes, broken bottles, and old papers off the only bridge within ten miles! And there was something almost shamelessly revelatory about such rubbish. Matilda leaned over and peered down at it. Well, of all things! Somebody had tossed away his library, for edging the heap were a half-dozen books, their backs broken and their tattered leaves flapping hysterically in the wind. Matilda scrambled down and turned over the mass with a stick. Her lip curled. They were well thrown away--nothing but a lurid copy or two of the adventures of Nick Carter and the pale experiences of Elsie Dinsmore. Just as she was about to abandon the pile a name caught her eye. She snatched up the volume and rubbed the black lettering with an unconvinced finger. It wasn’t merely a coincidence. It was probably Providence warning her, or the shade of the mad mistress of Nohant mockingly reminding her that the road to a salon is paved with something more definite than intentions.

A man named Francis Gribble had been so intrigued by those daring feet which had blazed the way to a high banned place that he had written a volume about George Sand and Her Lovers and somebody in this town had bought it--a woman, perhaps, who had glimpsed it in a window in a city and to whom it had appealed as a Baedeker to romance intoxicatingly beyond the stilted prelude to a husband and a family of children. And she had tossed it away....

Matilda hurried home. And it was only the excessive brightness of the sun that prevented her seeing a waistcoated shade striding gallantly along beside her.

Once home, she locked the door of her room so she could have her mythical headache in peace. She threw herself flat on the bed and was oblivious to everything but a certain world compressed between those two brown covers. One paragraph of the preface gave everything away.

Living in an extravagant age, George Sand gloried in her own
contributions to its extravagance. She not only lived her own life
but boldly asserted her right to do so. Her feeling was that when she
loved she was making history.

A pretty brazen creed for the timorous daughter of a sad little grocer in a prairie town, but we must not forget that Matilda had inherited a way of dreaming. That was why these words burned slogan-wise in her brain after every other page was devoured and why at six o’clock the following evening she was able to seize her opportunity by something more than the tenuous tail of it as it whisked over her dazzled head.

The whole point about George Sand was that she would have got nowhere if she had been content to be a home girl. The fact that she was a descendant of kings and that a grisette gave birth to her in an alcove adjoining a ballroom wouldn’t have availed her much had she not answered when Paris called. She could have stayed down in the country, being a dutiful wife to Casimir Dudevant until kingdom come and that would have been all there was to it--no Latin Quarter to be free in, no salons to dominate, no editors to cajole, no poet to be adored by--and what woman doesn’t dream of being adored by one of the shallow ethereal creatures? Then, too, George Sand had a sense of values. It would be more interesting to coddle Chopin on an island than to keep Maurice and Solange tidy at Nohant; so she up and had the courage of her romantic convictions.

Just as the dawn was turning the blurred square of her window to rose Matilda decided what she would do. She would go to a city, Chicago, perhaps; change her name to Mathilde Lantier, and open a salon. She might even write when she had lived long enough to have a viewpoint about her lovers. In the meantime she would make a collection of bon mots. To hear her one would think that opening a salon in Chicago was as simple as setting up a millinery shop on Main Street at home.

The next day Matilda went about the detested store in a daze of intrepid graciousness, and so hypnotized was she by her borrowed boldness that she verily believed she was bringing something to pass.

When the school children trooped in at noon she tossed lemon drops across the counter as if they were largesse. She sold farmhand overalls with the charming condescension of a princess. A notoriously stingy old fellow who “batched it” in a tumbledown cottage across the tracks came in and bought china recklessly because Matilda’s way among the chipped dusty cups was that of a hostess tendering a senator tea.

At six o’clock that evening it was her father who swung open the door she dreamed of.

The four of them were at supper. The fat, hairy mother headed the board like a pink general whose idea of relaxation is being as plump as possible in a flowered wrapper. Her handsome son Fred sat there glorying sullenly in a prowess which enabled him to juggle night into day and make sibyls, sheriffs, virgins, and hoboes stand in awe of him or succumb, as the case might be. There was Matilda herself, hollow-eyed, brooding, with a heritage in her breast clamouring to be aired and a book upstairs which was making her poignantly sure that at last she had found a way up the hill. At the foot of everything sat Franz, the grocer, who clung to the tangled faded ends of dreams with the same kind of shamefaced pride that he clung to the last faint fringe of his hair. He was gumptionless and meant too well for his own good, but it was he who spoke.

“I’m thinkin’ of puttin’ in a line of fancy glassware and some electrical stuff. We gotta be more modern.”

“A fool notion,” grunted Minnie Gessler.

“Go to it, Dad,” said Fred. “When you get the place fixed up maybe I’ll clerk for you.”

“Where you plannin’ to get the truck?” asked Minnie, Fred’s interest making her visibly weaken in favour of the proposition.

“Chicago,” confessed poor Franz, hanging his head.

“Well, you’re not goin’ traipsin’ off there and leave the store. Runnin’ up and down those stairs would jest kill me ... my corns....”

“Fred’ll go,” decided her husband, growing sallower and stringier than ever under her accusation and his own disappointment.

“And I’m going with him,” announced Matilda, clutching the tablecloth between her knees with hands that tingled and trembled.

“For the land’s sakes, what for?”

“To buy hats,” said Franz, going white with inspiration. “I’m thinkin’ o’ puttin’ in a line o’ women’s hats.”

“Hats,” snorted Minnie, “in a grocery store!”

“It’s a general store,” he reminded her courageously, and his eyes sought help from his daughter. But Matilda was silent. Gratitude and pity choked her.

“I won’t have ’Tilda tagging me to Chicago,” objected Fred sourly.

Minnie Gessler became as alert as her bulk would permit. Suspicion twitched at her features. It was one thing to give this beloved son the trip he wanted but jeopardizing his purity might be another. Chicago was sheer Babylon.

“Go ’long with him, ’Tildy,” she said, “and keep your eye on him.”

* * * * *

The train shuttled noisily through the windy dust of two states and finally deposited them on the station platform in Chicago. A terrifying kaleidoscope this platform. Was it possible for a city to be big enough to supply destinations for all those people? Matilda clung to the arm of her brother and was in despair about theirs. Fred hailed a taxi and gave the chauffeur a number out on North Dearborn Street.

“What’s that?” asked Matilda timorously.

“Boarding house run by Old Lady Campbell. Clyde Eggers, the drummer, told me about it. Said just to give his name and she’d treat us white.”

“How nice!” agreed Matilda meekly. Where had this uncouth brother of hers kept all this unsuspected savoir faire? He didn’t know George Sand from Adam, and yet he was the one who was brave and unabashed. Matilda leaned back in the taxi, which was very swift and very yellow. Time enough to check up on her own courage after the cinders were washed off and she knew where she was.

They were dropped in front of a high narrow brownstone house. Flora Campbell met them. She was a large imposing woman with coarse black curly hair which she wore in a high chignon. A tight black-satin gown accentuated the amplitude of her bust and the grotesque narrowness of her hips. There was something innately gaudy about her which her clothes barely hinted at. Notwithstanding her advanced ideas about adventure, Matilda would have been shocked had she even so much as suspected what her prospective landlady had been through. Carl Eggers, the drummer, knew by what perilous, unconventional steps Flora Campbell had finally arrived at this boarding house--the genteel goal of her dreams. And, in spite of the flagrant past of its mistress, it had turned out to be the most respectable of boarding houses. The only off-colour thing about the establishment was the violent toilettes of the owner herself, but she was complacently confident that she dressed as all dignified matrons must eventually dress.

She eyed Matilda and Fred proprietarily.

“So you’re friends o’ Clyde’s from Crittenden! Glad to take care o’ you. I have only the nicest people. People like Mr. Goodwillie who is at Field’s, Mrs. Kelsey whose daughter paints, and Mr. Eugene Walter who writes.”

“Writes?” asked Matilda, hypnotized by Mrs. Campbell’s tone.

“Yes,” answered Flora importantly, “books in his room.”

Matilda turned to Fred. “We’ll stay, won’t we?” she asked timidly.

“’Spose so,” grunted Fred. He didn’t much care where he slept.

They stayed a week. Matilda helped Fred with his buying and spent the rest of her time poking purposelessly in and out of the stores on State Street and gazing despairingly at the flashing modishness of the boulevard. She could fairly feel herself shrinking under the expensively turned out gaiety of the city, so impersonally musical and so inexorably full of motion!

The boarding house hadn’t been a success either. Mr Goodwillie turned out to be an amiable old bore with a manner which was a courtly hang-over from his floorwalking days. Mrs. Kelsey was a plump gray woman whose only claim to distinction was a lorgnette on a silver chain studded with amethysts, and a daughter who studied at the Art Institute. Enid Kelsey was a yellow-haired, green-eyed, freckled little creature with a large shapely mouth full of white teeth. She and the young man who wrote books in his room seemed to have a great deal in common.

Eugene Walter was tall, lank, and mouse-haired. He had an Adam’s apple and blue eyes that twinkled behind horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed to have unlimited leisure. Matilda wondered when he wrote his books, but the mere fact that it had been said that he wrote them was glamorous enough. Mr. Walter was anything but an Apollo; but even the irresistible George Sand had had to make a choice between beauty and genius. There had been that lover of hers, Michel de Bourges. He must have been queer enough with his shrunken body and his unwieldy head several sizes too large for him. And yet in spite of Matilda’s willingness to overlook his lack of pulchritude, Mr. Walter continued to ignore her. The only person in the house who noticed Matilda was a Miss Slattery who taught English somewhere and she was acidly superior to everything but hot water and the Elizabethans. The week wore on. Fred was out every night. Matilda smelled whisky on his breath and once she surprised him amorously counting a roll of dirty greenbacks. Had he gambled and won? He apparently had. Matilda sighed. Fred, as usual, was making his dreams come true.

It was Monday evening. Matilda and Fred were due to start back to Crittenden in the morning. They were sitting in the parlour. Enid was playing the piano, and Eugene Walter was hanging loosely over her. Matilda watched them narrowly and bitterly. That giggling little blonde was monopolizing the only male in the room worth talking to, while she, Matilda Gessler, the granddaughter of a certain not inconsiderable French coquette, was forced to sit moping beside a brother whose mind was busy with exploits which he meant to turn into cash or kisses.

Why hadn’t Eugene Walter noticed her? God knows, it only needed one warm word or a bent look to make all her stifled vividness leap into flower. She could be ten times more arresting than that stupid flaxen-topped creature who used her gleaming teeth to make up for her lack of brains. What was the matter?

And then a strip of iridescent silk slipping from a white shoulder made her divine the truth with devastating thoroughness. It was the clothes. She leaned forward, studying her rival from a purely sartorial angle. She _was_ effective in spite of her freckled skin and turned-up nose. The green gown emphasized the emerald lights in her eyes. Gold banded her hips, and a large cornelian made a splash of flame against her breast. Matilda looked down and fingered her own brown serge disgustedly. Why had she been so blind? She gritted her teeth. Then her hot rage cooled into a resolve. She wouldn’t let her French blood go to waste. She would warm it yet or know the reason why. There was a woman once who charmed a romantic doctor out of Venice by the velvet eccentricity of her attire.

“I’m not going back to Crittenden,” announced Matilda with soft suddenness.

“Gee!” he whistled. “What’s the big idea?”

“I’m going to stay here and be an authoress.”

“Like fun you are.”

“Yes,” said Matilda, and wondered why more people didn’t lie for the sheer intoxication of it. It could miraculously commit one to anything. “Yes,” continued Matilda, “Dad will miss me. Mother won’t like it, but you must lend me two hundred dollars.” She held out her hand.

Fred shifted his gum from one cheek to the other. He chewed peppermint gum so that his sister would not detect the odour of liquor on his breath.

“I ain’t got any money,” he said sullenly.

“Yes, you have. I saw you pull a roll of it out of your pocket. You must lend it to me. If you don’t I’ll write the folks what you’ve been up to. Mother’d be furious if she knew you drank and gambled. She’d take the car away from you.”

Poor Fred looked shaken. Life in Crittenden without that Ford would be awful. They had sent Matilda to Chicago to spy on him and this was the result.

“Two hundred,” insisted Matilda ominously.

He squirmed miserably as he counted the money into her palm.

The next afternoon Matilda’s locks made a dark swirling island on the floor of a State Street barber shop. Then a department store claimed her. She could imitate George Sand’s haircut but the waistcoat was another matter. Something intuitive counselled her that if she didn’t dare be mannish she must be as feminine as possible. So she bought a dinner gown of flame-coloured crêpe de chine. To this she added a long swathing kind of cape and a pair of black-satin pumps buckled in gold.

She spent a whole hour before dinner nerving herself to the point of slipping that sheath of ignescent silk over her cropped head. She finally surveyed herself in the mirror and was panic stricken at what she saw. She was too lithe, almost colubrine, and every inch of her from shoulder to knee cap looked on fire. She cooled herself at a window and then returned to the mirror practising nonchalance. How broad and white her back was! But would George Sand have hesitated knowing that she was probably beautiful? Matilda shuddered and snatched up a long black motor veil from a hook. It would do duty as a scarf. She would let her shoulders slide out by inches.

Matilda slipped into her seat at table and nervously attacked her soup. She did not raise her head. She felt that the least motion on her part would ignite a neighbour. Mr. Goodwillie coughed, and Miss Slattery sniffed. It was over the last spoonful of bread pudding that she caught Eugene Walter’s eyes fixed upon her. Flora Campbell gave the signal to rise. Mr. Goodwillie ceremoniously escorted her into the parlour.

“Very tasty ... that frock. Going to the theatre?”

“No,” she answered, “I just got tired wearing that stuffy serge.”

“One does,” agreed Mr. Goodwillie stiltedly, seating her on the sofa.

Enid floated to her place at the piano, where she postured and shook her flaxen halo in vain. Mr. Walter was not disposed to lean over her to-night. He sat gazing at a herd of fluffy sheep framed in hard gold which was suspended over Matilda’s head. Miss Slattery glared at her over the flapping pages of a woman’s magazine. Mrs. Kelsey inspected her through her lorgnette. They both left the room. After strumming fruitlessly on the piano for awhile, Enid whirled and murmured something about being bored and drifted out, leaving a faint odour of lilies of the valley.

Matilda sank into a silence so absolute that even the brook-like garrulity of the loquacious Goodwillie could not weather it, and so he, too, rose and left.

It was nine-thirty.

She and Eugene Walter avoided looking at each other. It was as if they wordlessly conspired to rid themselves of the others and now that they were alone it was meet and proper they should sit there in a moment’s decent silence and not gloat. He advanced finally and stood in front of her, his eyes still on the white animals huddled under a white storm.

“I wonder,” and he did not succeed in making his voice casual, “why artists paint sheep? Inane things.”

“Isn’t that the trouble with everything?” asked Matilda heavily.

“That gown isn’t inane. It’s gorgeous.” And he gave her a direct look.

“I was so sick of that old serge,” she said weakly, drawing the veil about her shoulders a shade more tightly.

He sat down beside her and gave the veil a little pull which exposed one shoulder. It glistened in the light like marble and made her feel like a Diana submitting to the brazen teasing of a satyr. “You’ve no right ...” she murmured.

“You’ve no right to cover up such eburnean loveliness,” he whispered.

Eburnean? What was that? Her whole being wondered what it meant and it thrilled her because she did not know.

“Take that funereal rag off,” he said pettishly twitching the veil.

“I feel funereal,” she said, despondent once more at his touch.

“Why?” he asked, his hand barely touching her knee.

“Because I’ve been in Chicago a whole week and nothing has happened.”

“Doesn’t eating dinner in the presence of a novelist thrill you?”

“It did at first,” she admitted ruefully.

“Well, you thrill me in that gown. You’re epical.”

Matilda gasped. He talked like a book. She became suddenly oblivious to Eugene Walter’s Adam’s apple, his pasty pallor, and the clamminess of his fingers as they caressed her elbow. She glowed under his elaborate infatuation and told him everything. More than everything.

She told him about her French grandmother who had jilted a title to follow an adventurous lover to Baltimore; how she herself lived in a copy of a French château surrounded by a vast western garden; about her father who sat all day in his tapestried library, reading Balzac. She told him about her majestic mother who sceptred it over everybody and dispensed formidable charity to a grateful countryside. But she did not dare refer to the one thing that would have impressed Eugene Walter more than all her guilty exaggerations. She did not dare refer to her grandmother’s momentous interview with the famous chatelaine of Nohant; for to have brought Madame Sand into it would have in some subtle fashion given her own secret away. Therefore, there was nothing for it but to gild everything else.

At midnight Eugene Walter stooped and gallantly kissed her hand.

“Good-night, Egeria,” he whispered, and his eyes were two promises lighting her up the darkened stairs.

Matilda tottered happily to her room. She had been flattered for over two hours in words five syllables long, and her adroit fictions had enabled her to measure up to the flame of her gown. And he had called her Egeria. That sounded involved and classical. Just who was this divinity? Some goddess, perhaps, who had turned Mount Olympus upside down by appearing on it attired in a crimson tunic.

Matilda hung her own bright gown caressingly away in the closet and tumbled into bed too stirred for sleep. This was it. This was the beginning. George Sand herself had probably hung around Paris a week or two before Sandeau noticed her. And hadn’t Eugene promised to introduce her to his crowd and dedicate his novel to _Mathilde_ Gessler? And out there among those powerful literary friends of his perhaps there was a poet whose hands were not moist and who looked like Byron.

* * * * *

Matilda Gessler and Eugene Walter stole out every night after dinner. She descended Flora Campbell’s stairs in scarlet silk with the long dark cape wrapped romantically about her. They wandered along the shore of the Lake, and while the spray misted the sidewalk with pearl, he concealed the thinness of his soul under trappings borrowed from Oscar Wilde. Occasionally he stepped back and allowed Swinburne to make love to Matilda. And Matilda was satisfied.

Once when a scimitar-shaped moon cut the wet purple clouds with silver, Eugene wound his long arms about Matilda and kissed her on the mouth. His lips were thin and cold and savoured in some ridiculous fashion of bitter tea. She very nearly cried out against she knew not what, but ten minutes later the old complacency came surging back when he murmured in her ear, “_Ma Mathilde ... Ma belle ... Ma princesse adorée._”

French! How many generations of dark heads in France had dropped to catch the flattering music of those very words! Just so De Musset must have apostrophized George Sand....

Every night it was the same. Once she hinted that it was time to invade that literary circle of his, but he passionately flouted the idea. He must keep her to himself awhile, for all too soon the clamouring world would claim her. This made Matilda prey to conflicting emotions. She wanted above everything to feel the world under her feet, but the only way of getting it there seemed to be via somebody’s arms--somebody whose head was above the horizon. Ah, yes, she would marry Eugene when he asked her and then slip from one pair of arms to another until....

And so it was that they strolled every night by poetic water, and when she wearied of the interminable contacts that got nowhere he would lure her back by a quotation.

It was two o’clock in the morning, Eugene had preceded her up the damp stairs. Matilda had taken off her shoes so that she could steal up in noiseless security. Just as she was turning to tiptoe down to her room, she felt a soft plump hand on her shoulder. She turned sharply, suppressing a scream. It was Flora Campbell in a sky-blue kimono latticed with yellow roses. “Come into my room,” she hissed, the gold in her teeth gleaming.

Matilda mutely allowed herself to be propelled into a tiny alcove garishly ruffled in pink cretonne and stuffed with bird’s-eye maple.

“Sit down, miss,” ordered Flora, shoving a low stool toward her.

Mathilda took it heavily, although she had no intention of doing so. Flora remained standing, her two hands ruthlessly crushing the blossoms on her hips.

“I ran a decent house until you came, miss,” she accused shrilly. “I’ve had complaints.”

“Complaints,” hazarded poor Mathilda, “what are those?”

“Do you mean to sit down there and tell me that you can dress yourself up in flashy low-necks and sit in my parlour and make eyes at my best-paying boarder and philander on park benches with him until two in the morning and then pretend you don’t know what I mean when I say I’ve had complaints?”

“I don’t,” answered Matilda, her lips trembling childishly. Oh, it was dreadful being pushed into this horrible pink place minus the dignity of shoes and to be hissed at by this awful harpy in a terrible wrapper!

“You can’t put over any of that big-eyed innocent stuff on me. I ain’t lived fifty-seven years for nothing. I’ll give you until to-morrow to pack and find a new place.”

“Who--who complained about me?” quavered Matilda.

“Everybody,” replied Flora cryptically. “There’s that sweet little Enid Kelsey. What kind of an example are you for her, I’d like to know? And Miss Slattery can’t bear the sight of that red dress and she’s been with me five years.”

“But,” objected Matilda faintly, “there’s Mr. Walter. He was out, too.”

“He’s a man. I never interfere with what they do. Besides, he was friendly with that Kelsey kid and going to bed at ten until you came along. Why should I turn him out?”

Why, indeed? Matilda rose. “Good-night,” she said succinctly and opened the door.

“If I was you,” warned Flora, “I’d reform. Men don’t marry light women.”

Matilda did not reply to this excellent advice. It was doubtful if she heard it. Her head hummed and something in her throat whirred. Once in her room, she threw herself full length across the bed and sobbed. She didn’t weep because she felt guilty. She wept because the vulgar words of that coarse woman had pounded her brilliant conception of herself into the dust. It was like seeing a beloved rose go worm-eaten--to have her dream go like that. She wasn’t in love with Eugene. It was more tragic than that. She was still in her Crittenden cage. A bar would have to be broken, and she had counted on Eugene’s ardour. He represented her only way out. Once out, there would be countless hands to help her up. And now she was about to be driven into the street like the scarlet-lettered women one read about. How had George Sand managed things? How would she have managed an irate landlady? Well, she was done for ... done for.... Then a ray of hope filtered through the gloom. She had one more night.

She would put Eugene to the test. He adored her. He had said so over and over until her ears ached with it. Confronted with the possibility of losing her, he would make something happen--something that would make it radiantly unnecessary to return to Crittenden.

Matilda slept finally--slept across her bed in wrinkled crêpe de chine while a noisy gas jet drew the hot yellow walls together....

When she awoke it was past noon. Her temples throbbed and her gown was a wreck, but that didn’t matter. Eugene would be glad to take her, headache and all, in her old serge; for deep down inside Matilda Gessler there was an inherited technic which up until now she had not been stirred enough to use. She would use it now. She would return Eugene’s kisses. Perhaps she would find herself in love with Eugene if she returned one of his kisses, and then she, too, would be entitled to feel that, “_Quand on a aimé un homme, il est bien difficile d’aimer Dieu ... c’est si différent!_”

Matilda hummed under her breath as she crammed her dingy wardrobe into a wicker suitcase.

At six o’clock Matilda stole out and ate a hasty sandwich in the little white-tiled lunch room around the corner. She would have died rather than face the polite hostility in Flora Campbell’s dining room. At six-thirty she slipped back into the front hall. Uncertainty assailed her and made her cheeks tingle with something not unlike shame. If only Eugene would appear and they could unobtrusively slip out together! She smiled as she visualized his probable uneasiness about her non-appearance at dinner. He might even omit pudding and rush out.

She wavered there at the foot of the stairs, her breath shortening and thickening in her throat.

Then the portières between the parlour and the hall parted. Enid appeared muffled to the chin in a green-velvet cape edged with soft gray fur. Over the top of her spiralling mop of hair towered Eugene Walter. Matilda gasped and her despair sharpened. It was wretchedly evident that in the glow of Enid’s pride in being reappropriated by him and under the unbearable intensity of her own need of him, Eugene Walter had taken on some of the remote perfection of an Adonis and the poetic dignity of a Galahad. He paused in front of the rack and took down his hat--the very hat that had lain crushed between them last night on that bench by the Lake when he had all but promised her the Mediterranean. Matilda made a brown blot against the wall and somehow managed to ascend three steps.

“If there isn’t Miss Gessler!” lilted Enid, nudging Eugene. Matilda turned and looked unseeingly down into their faces. She felt curiously like a person who had died and after a fitting funeral had had the bad taste to come back to life.

“We thought you’d gone,” said Enid, balancing her fairy proportions against her escort.

“I’m going,” apologized Matilda dully, “in the morning.”

“How distressing!” exclaimed Eugene nervously, twirling his hat.

“How funny!” chanted Enid, laying her white fingers on his sleeve.

“Is there anything I can do?” he said with that cool, impersonal courtesy which is not meant to be taken advantage of.

“No, thank you,” answered Matilda mechanically, heavily, mounting another step.

“Good-bye then, _Mathilde_ ... and good luck!” he called up to her, feigning a casualness he clearly did not feel. He made a forward motion as if to take her hand, but Enid with birdlike deftness fluttered in front of him and sank gracefully down on the bottom step.

“My slipper’s unfastened,” she murmured.

He knelt and took the slender golden foot in his hand.

Matilda gained the upper hall. Just as she turned to enter her room she glimpsed Flora’s coloured bulk in close communion with Mrs. Kelsey’s gray dumpiness. Matilda clenched her fists. How fast they must have tossed her name about at dinner and with what eager celerity they must have sprayed it with venom! And there was Eugene. How easily he was filling the gap between dessert and bedtime with the fluffy green and gold that was Enid! And yet if those two hens had held their tongues she might have....

Matilda sank down in the darkness beside her window and leaned her forehead against the sooty glass. Paint peeling from clapboards, pork fat congealing on thick china, dust sifting through the vulgar meshes of coarse lace curtains, smells crowding one another through the damp tumult of the store, bolts of cross-barred gingham stuffily waiting to become high-necked dresses, two books and a picture under a pile of cotton chemises reminding one of freedoms taken in silk ... this was what she was doomed to return to. Matilda writhed there beside the window on the other side of which a city went adventuring without her. She even cried out to her mother’s Methodist God.

Then something seemed to materialize close beside her--something that laid a cool shadowy hand upon her shoulder and brushed its dark velvet waistcoat against her cheek. For one ghostly moment she believed that she was her grandmother being comforted at Nohant. Then she looked up. It was as if she were aware of eyes ... mocking at first and then softly united with hers.

They sat there for hours grimly enjoying an old disillusionment together.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes

• Italic text represented with surrounding _underscores_.

• Small capitals converted to ALL CAPS.

• Obvious typograpic errors silently corrected.

• Variations in hyphenation, spelling, and word choice kept as in the
original. (Some words seem like obvious errors, but the
transcriber has compared the reprinted text here with the original
publications, and the book accurately reproduced the originals.)