“Don’t you know what that is?”
Mr. and Mrs. Sieverson, standing back, both laughed. The children too
were grinning.
Patricia ventured, “A baby cow!”
Then they all laughed to think that she had known.
“That’s what it is, all right. But don’t you know what baby cows are
called? Calf! That’s a calf! Well, sir, do you want this little calf to
go with us?”
Patricia didn’t know whether or not Uncle Dave meant that for a joke.
But the little calf was so sweet--she loved it so terribly the instant
she saw it--that she couldn’t help risking that and begging, “Oh, yes!”
Its head really was shaped like the tiny kittens’. But its eyes were
very large and coloured a soft deep brown under a surface of rounded
brightness, so gentle and so sad too, that it seemed to her as if the
colour showed in each eye under a big tear. The calf turned its head
toward her. Its frail legs bent inward, to prop it up. Its coat looked
like cream spilled over with shining tar. There were curls, like the
curly knots showing in freshly planed wood; and the shining ends of the
hair looked as if they had curled because the whole coat had just been
licked by the mother.
“Oh, yes, Uncle Dave! Is it going _with_ us?”
“It’s going to be our back-seat passenger. If the boss permits?”
It made Mr. Sieverson laugh--feel tickled--to see how the thought of
riding to town with that calf pleased the little girl. But he said
dutifully to Mr. Lindsay:
“Now, if that calf’s going to be any nuisance to you----”
“No, no. As long as I’ve got the old car, put it in. Tie it up.”
Patricia saw the rope then in Mr. Sieverson’s hand. She cried, “Oh, not
_tie_ the little calf!”
“Sure,” Mr. Sieverson said, grinning kindly at her. “You don’t want it
to jump out, do you?”
She looked at Uncle Dave for confirmation of that. He said:
“Sure! Calves won’t go riding any other way.”
The two boys laughed.
Patricia stood back close to Leone but not saying anything more. She
looked frightened. Mr. Sieverson said, with some feeling of reassuring
her still more:
“You don’t want to let this calf get loose or you won’t get any of it!”
She didn’t understand that.
“Get any of it to eat. This calf’s going to make veal.”
“Eat it?” she cried in horror; and she earnestly put him right. “Oh,
no, I wouldn’t _eat_ it.” Mr. Sieverson was joking.
“Why, sure!” he said. “Don’t you eat good veal? You’re going to take
this calf to the butcher.”
“Oh, no!” He meant that! Patricia was suddenly wild with crying. They
all stood back, shocked, never expecting such a storm as this. “Oh, no!
The little calf isn’t going to be killed! I won’t! I won’t! No!” She
put out her hands blindly and turned from one to the other for help.
Mr. Sieverson didn’t know what to do. She turned to him and beat the
air with her little fists, shrieking, “Oh, you’re _wicked_!”
He couldn’t stand that. His face got red. Even if she was just a child,
he demanded, “Don’t you eat veal?”
“No! No!” Patricia shrieked.
“What, then?” he demanded.
She had to look at him. Her little pink mouth was open and her bright
eyes drowned. She quavered, “Other kinds of meat ... I’ll eat chicken,”
and turned piteously to Uncle Dave.
Mr. Sieverson didn’t like to be called “wicked” by anyone. The
injustice, when he had just been trying to be nice to this little
girl, too, hurt him. His wife murmured, “Well, now, Henry----” But he
insisted, “Don’t chicken have to be killed before you can eat it?”
But even Mr. Sieverson, although he was in the right of it, felt
ashamed when he saw the little thing cry. Mrs. Sieverson gave him a
look, stroked Patricia’s hair, and said, “They won’t take the calf.”
Mr. Lindsay hastened to promise, “No, no. Of course we won’t take the
calf.” They were all trying now to reassure her. Vila was crying, too.
The boys were pleading, “Patricia!” although they didn’t know just
what they would say to her in comfort if they got her to look at them.
“No, no, it isn’t going. It won’t have to be tied up. See, he’s put
away the rope.” The two men settled the thing with a look above her
head. Patricia looked up at last, with piteous drowned eyes, as dark
as wet violets. She broke away from all of them and, running to the
calf--fearful of touching things as she was--she threw her arms in
protection around its neck and stared fiercely at the shamefaced people.
“Oh, no, we couldn’t take it!” Mr. Lindsay muttered. He cleared his
throat.
The children surrounded Patricia again. They were begging her not to
cry. Her cheek was laid against the little calf’s silky ear, and she
was telling it, in her own mind, “Don’t you care, don’t you mind,
precious little calf, I’ve saved you.” She let herself be drawn away
but said “No!” when Mrs. Sieverson wanted to wipe the tears from her
cheeks, and held up the little wet face trustingly for Leone to do it.
That pleased all the Sieversons greatly.
“So now we can go! Hm?” Mr. Lindsay asked her.
She seemed to have forgiven them. She didn’t want to look at Mr.
Sieverson, but when she said good-bye to Mrs. Sieverson she touched
her little skirts and made a curtsey. Clyde pinched Marvin to tell him
to look. The children watched her with as great delight as they had
watched the tightrope walker in the “show.” Mr. Lindsay lifted her into
the car. She smiled faintly at the children, but there were stains of
tears on her pearly cheeks, and her eyes were still as dark as violets.
“You children go get her something--apples or something,” Mrs.
Sieverson whispered.
“We have, Mamma! We’ve got a whole lot of things for her.”
They began piling presents into her lap. “Don’t forget your little
feather, Patricia!” Marvin ran off to find something else. The wilting
flowers, the apple, the six rosy plums, the bluebird’s feather she
carefully took again. Marvin came panting back with his new game of
“Round the World by Aëroplane.” But Mr. Lindsay wouldn’t let him give
her that.
“No, no, my boy! You keep your game. She’s got more things at home now
than she can ever play with.”
Now she seemed happy and appeased. The children crowded close to the
side of the car and pleaded, “Come out again, won’t you, Patricia?”
Vila whispered in her shy voice, “I’ll take care of Pearl and Samphire
and those others, Patricia.” Marvin said fiercely, “If any tomcat comes
round, I’ll----” and ground and gnashed his teeth and made fiercely
appropriate motions. Leone gave him a look for making her think about
the tomcat! But Patricia was still smiling and happy and hadn’t
understood. Now, in her relief and in the flurry of going, she was
more eager and talkative than she had been all afternoon. She promised
everything they asked.
“I will. I will, Leone. I will, Marvin. Thank you for all the beautiful
things.”
In the midst of it Mr. Lindsay leaned over to say in a low tone to Mr.
Sieverson, a little ashamed, “Well, somebody else’ll take that in for
you, Henry, if you can’t go.”
“Sure. That’s all right, Mr. Lindsay.”
“Well, now, my little girl, tell them all good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” “Good-bye, Patricia!” They called and waved madly to her,
all standing back together. She answered them. At the very last minute,
just as the car was going out into the driveway, she leaned out with
her shining hair mussed and blowing in the breeze, and cried:
“Good-bye, calf! I forgot to say good-bye to you.”
Marvin laughed in delight, and then Clyde echoed him.
* * * * *
Mr. Sieverson stood looking after the car. That “wicked” still rankled.
He said, as if very much put out, “Well, now, I’ll have to find another
way of getting this calf in or else take it myself before night.” Then
he said, as if ashamed, “Gosh! I don’t know. I almost hate to take it.
That little thing put up such a fuss.” He couldn’t help adding, “She
was a pretty little kid, wasn’t she?”
Mrs. Sieverson did not answer at once. Then she said in an
expressionless tone, “Well ... maybe you better take the other one,
then.”
He looked at her and seemed to want to assent. Then he cried, “Oh, no!
We can’t do that. This is the one we’d picked on.” He looked angry, and
yet in his light-blue eyes under the shock of lightish hair there was a
hurt, puzzled look. “Oh, well,” he muttered. “Folks can’t be foolish!”
If ever folks were to start thinking of _such_ things....
He went forward resolutely, saying “Hi! Stand still, there!” as he took
hold of the calf. His wife stood back watching him and saying nothing.
The calf turned, bolted a little way, and then let him take hold of
it again. It did not seem to know whether to be afraid of him or not.
Its eyes looked up into his. In the large eyes of dark mute brown and
the smaller eyes of light blue there was much the same reluctant
bewilderment in some far depths. But the man knew what he was after,
and the calf did not know what was to come.
“Come on here!” Mr. Sieverson said sharply.
He put the rope around the calf’s neck.
SHADES OF GEORGE SAND!
BY ELLEN DU POIS TAYLOR
From _Harper’s_
It was one of those April mornings when the sun lacquers yesterday’s
rain puddles with gold, and the meadow larks melodiously promise a
month of blue weather with violets to match it. But all this fruitful
fuss did not warm one apathetic drop of Matilda Gessler’s young blood
nor soften one scornful angle of her averted face.
Matilda was weighing sugar in her father’s dingy little grocery in
Crittenden, South Dakota, when she should have been dozing under
ancestral lace in a château somewhere in France. If Mathilde Lantier,
her paternal grandmother, hadn’t lived with such unwise intensity that
one moonlit hour in a certain French garden, and if old Franz Gessler
hadn’t been so conveniently eager to shoulder the consequences, and if
... but then Matilda knew nothing of all this. But she knew enough. She
knew what her mother’s Methodist God had done to her. He had created
her under a morally tight roof in Crittenden for the good of her soul
when every Latin molecule of her belonged in one of those sophisticated
centres of the earth where it’s dinner in low-cut brocade at eight and
philosophy before kissing.
And so Matilda, weighing sugar, sniffed at the plucky April trying to
make a bright island on the muddy floor. What was the use of looking
like a bayadere when it meant breaking her lithe back over flour bags,
the contents of which were destined to nourish the grace of girls less
graceful than she? She was doomed to make beans into bundles that
others might be strengthened for flight. Only last week Hazel Amberton,
the thick-ankled daughter of the jeweller, packed her gauzy traps and
went forth to conquer Minneapolis.
Matilda shrugged her shoulders. It was a gesture inherited from
Mathilde Lantier and worthy of Ninon de Lenclos herself, but there was
no one to appreciate it except three tobacco-sodden farmers who tramped
out, leaving her to resume her futile musing.
If ancestors would only stay where they belonged and live their lives
in straight lines and leave the tangents to those who deserved them!
Well, no good rebelling against anything as irrevocable as your
grandmother’s mistakes, your father’s failures, or your mother’s God.
That left one thing to rebel against ... the store.
The store was a place of odorous chiaroscuro. Smells fairly nudged one
another and often knocked one another down. There was the fetidness
of stale codfish, the acrid pungency of freshly ground coffee, the
penetrating foulness of rancid butter, and the sickening tropical odour
of decaying bananas. It wasn’t worth looking at either ... rows of tins
whose faded labels betrayed the probable age of the victuals within;
jars of moribund prunes and molasses-coloured horehound drops, counters
piled with coarse denim garments leaking threads, bolts of grotesquely
sprigged calico. Even the dusty jumble of decorated china on the top
shelf didn’t look destined for anything but cooling pork fat. And, if
all this wasn’t enough, they have to live over it. Four of them lived
up there in the huddled stuffiness of a half-dozen rooms ... horrible,
uneasy rooms tenanted by lumpy pieces of golden-oak furniture whose
sharp corners and glittering hostile surfaces constantly threatened one
with eviction.
But there was one member of the family before whom the whole
domineering conglomeration was powerless. That was Minnie Gessler,
Matilda’s fat, unimaginative mother. Every rocker dreaded her
relentless dimensions. There was but one place where she looked
properly engulfed and that was under the steepled bulk of the red-brick
church around the corner. She waddled there regularly. Matilda often
puzzled over her mother’s voluptuous devotion to something that
couldn’t be poked or eaten or wasn’t her son Fred.
Matilda sighed resentfully when she thought of her brother. The
dispatch with which he made his dreams come true was nothing short of
indecent. He rarely came near the store except to eat and sleep over
it. He made quick, successful love to the dimpled daughters of the
Crittenden gentry and bragged about it afterward in Lemke’s Pool Room.
He never kissed the mother who adored him, but he wheedled a Ford car
out of her and went tearing up and down the long yellow road between
Crittenden and a half-dozen towns, seeking other lips to conquer and
getting them. Now Matilda dutifully kissed her mother every night but
it had got her nothing. Minnie Gessler hadn’t even allowed her daughter
to have a French name in peace. It was ’Tilda she grumbled at and not
Mathilde.
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.