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.