Part 27

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.)