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.)