Part 26

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.