Authors: John Jakes
“Here, don’t pick on the poor man when he can’t defend himself!” Matt laughed, slipping past her to open their door. He slid the portmanteau in. Bless Madame Rochambeau for straightening up after he left for the station!
A gruff, amiable voice said, “But he is able to defend himself. Welcome back, Dolly.”
In French more correctly pronounced than his, she said, “Thank you, Sime.”
Matt waved. “Hello, Sime. Figured out how to overthrow the Emperor yet?”
Leah hung Anton from the crook of her arm and put her other hand to her lips. “Sssh! That sort of thing isn’t safe to say, even in jest.”
Sime Strelnik scratched the front of his wine-spotted shirt. He was a short, overweight man in his mid-thirties. He had round, innocent-looking dark eyes and a beard and hair the color of fire. Strelnik had been born in Russian Georgia and had come to Paris via Berlin, the home of his only living relative, an older brother. Both of them were active in the workingman’s movement. Strelnik carried a card in the First International founded in London in 1864. He spent half the day sleeping, the other half reading or writing pamphlets, and most of the night attending meetings with people Madame Rochambeau characterized as “atheistic, unwashed and sinister.”
For Matt’s benefit, Strelnik had several times tried to differentiate between the various hues and tints of radicalism found in those with whom he associated. There were Jacobins, Proudhonists, Internationalists, Blanquists and several other variations. It was all a meaningless and uninteresting hodgepodge to Matt. But not to his landlady.
“One doesn’t need labels to know what they are. It’s simple. They’re rapists and criminals. Lawless anarchists bent on stealing the wealth of hardworking men and the virtue of decent women. I admit Mr. Strelnik doesn’t
look
like that, which is somewhat confusing, but I know he’ll show his true colors if the Reds ever stage another insurrection such as the one in forty-eight. I suppose he wants to bring that mad revolutionary Blanqui back from exile in Brussels, too. And where do you suppose he gets the money to send all those thick letters to Berlin and St. Petersburg? The authorities will inquire into that mysterious correspondence one of these days, you mark my word!”
Leah passed the child to her husband. “Kindly see that he gets a diaper before he catches cold. I’ve supper to fix, you know. Dolly, it really is wonderful to have you home again.”
She disappeared. Strelnik dangled the child from one forearm and wedged a cigar stub into his mouth with his other hand. He lit the cigar. The smoke set Anton to coughing. Dolly’s eyes narrowed with disapproval.
The paunchy man hoisted the baby over his shoulder and patted the bare rump. “I don’t know why you make snide jokes about the Empire, Matt,” he said in a rather prickly way. “Of all people, Americans should understand the evils of a repressive government. You fought your way out from under one a hundred years ago.”
Matt shrugged. “That spirit’s long gone in my country. Now all the people care about is money.”
The other man smiled. “Perhaps you’ll let me take your place as a citizen, then. I’d love to expropriate and share the wealth of some of those American capitalists.”
“Such as my father?” Matt grinned. He genuinely liked the little Russian, but teased him because he found his pronouncements so pretentious. “Sime, I don’t think you have the nerve to strip so much as a sou from anyone. You’re a man with a conscience.”
“Exactly!” Strelnik retorted. “And because I have a conscience, I can’t tolerate what I see around me. A worker receiving only two or three francs for a twelve-hour day while that harlot the Countess de Castiglione gets a million francs for giving herself to some English milord for sixty minutes. The only way to redress such injustice is by force! By—” Anton shrieked. The smoldering cigar stub clenched in the corner of Strelnik’s mouth had briefly touched the wiggling infant’s bare leg.
“Oh my God,” Strelnik gasped. Anton howled. The bearded man’s eyes filled with tears. “Leah?
Leah, help me!
I’ve hurt the baby—”
Strelnik rushed into his quarters. Matt shook his head, his smile growing cynical.
“Well, Dolly, there’s the marital bliss your sister’s leaping into. I’m glad you’re not interested in that kind of clerically approved misery.”
It was quite the wrong thing to say, nearly as bad, in its way, as his remark to Lepp about an invasion. And it produced the same sort of angry reply.
“I know you and your friends sneer at any kind of convention. But the truth is, I’ve changed my mind. I am interested in marriage. That’s another subject we must talk about. Perhaps it’s the most important subject of all.”
With an intense glance from those lovely eyes, she hurried into their rooms. Stunned and shaken, he stood staring at the open door. This was worse than anything he’d anticipated. Far worse. Something drastic had changed her while she was away.
P
OOR STRELNIK WAS
still wailing for Leah to come to his rescue—which she always did. While he scurried from meeting to meeting, agonizing over political schemes and Utopian programs, she provided the family’s income by working six hours a day in a laundry which serviced the fine hotels down near the Rue de Rivoli. The moment Leah closed the hall door and took charge of Anton, the little boy stopped crying.
Matt walked into the quarters he shared with Dolly. He’d wanted rooms with northern light but hadn’t been able to find any. The large outer room had a slanted skylight facing the southwest. The spring sun cast elongated, slow-moving shadows of windmill vanes on the whitewashed wall at the skylight’s east end.
Directly under the glass stood Matt’s easel and two small cabinets of equipment. On the easel rested the unfinished portrait. The subject of the portrait had already retired to the bedroom with her portmanteau. He could hear her unpacking.
He walked around several tall stacks of books to the one decent armchair in which Madame Rochambeau had piled the dirty laundry. He flung the laundry on the floor, sat down and glumly stared at the work on the easel.
The painting was done on a linen support he’d prepared with a coarse textured ground. He’d posed Dolly in her best dress—the new realism forbade classical drapery—but the picture still looked stiff and unnatural. So far he hadn’t progressed beyond endless repairs on the underpainting.
Dolly returned to the outer room, having put her pelisse and hat aside. She seemed more composed. A scattering of light from overhead created a kind of nimbus around the top of her head. Her face, by contrast, was darker, in shadow. The result was a softening effect that made her features indescribably lovely, and seemed to enlarge and diffuse her eyes, as though Matt were gazing at her under water.
He glanced at the portrait. He’d completely missed the living, breathing reality of his subject.
Her eyes seemed touched with sadness as she sank onto a rickety stool and uttered a little sigh. “Oh, my. The trip was more thing than I thought.” She brushed back a stray yellow curl. “I owe you an explanation for what I said outside.”
“I’d just as soon wait—or dispense with it entirely.”
Firmly, she said, “We can’t, Matt. You see what the post brought while I pour some wine. Then we’ll talk. It won’t become any easier if we wait.”
She patted his hand as she walked by. Somehow he felt as if she’d announced an execution.
Dolly rummaged in the little alcove that served as a combination kitchen and dining area. “I can’t find the wine. I can’t find anything in the middle of these mountains of dirty dishes. Didn’t you wash anything while I was gone?”
“My face.”
She wasn’t amused.
“I forgot about the wine,” he said. “Madame Rochambeau borrowed the last bottle yesterday. She had company unexpectedly.”
“I’ll be right back.”
The outer door closed. He was gripped by a feeling of panic. He didn’t want to sit down for a talk of the sort she had in mind. What she wanted to discuss was obvious from her remarks about her sister.
He loved Dolly, but he resented this new and unexplained thrust toward domesticity. He was frightened by it, too. He felt as if a trap were closing. He didn’t want to be pushed into choosing between mistresses, as Paul put it.
Well, then, he had to get her off the subject. At least for this evening. He decided to try a not unpleasant strategy that had worked before and surely would again.
Nervous, he paced to and fro in front of the easel. He spied the letter lying on a flimsy taboret. The handwriting and the franking registered slowly. From Gideon!
He ripped the letter open, scanned the paragraphs of family news. Gideon’s wife, Margaret, was well, and so were the children, eight-year-old Eleanor and the baby, Will, born in 1869. Jephtha and Molly were in good health too, though Jephtha occasionally complained of pains in his chest. He was too busy to see a doctor, Gideon said.
The real purpose of the letter was to convey some exciting personal news. Rather than take a position with the New York
Union,
the highly successful daily newspaper that had come back into the fold after Louis Kent’s death in late 1868, Gideon had decided to use a portion of his inheritance and start a small journal of his own. A journal devoted primarily to the cause of the workingman, in which Gideon was vitally interested.
“Oh God,” Matt said aloud in disappointment. “Not a Strelnik in the family.”
But it was true. The paper would be called
Labor’s Beacon.
Gideon planned to buy typesetting and printing on a bid basis, but do the editorial work. His office was to be a small rented loft in lower Manhattan. The family had moved to the island from New Jersey a few weeks ago. Another surprise!
Gideon claimed the times demanded a militant response on behalf of the common man who worked for a living. All such men were exploited by those for whom they worked, Gideon believed. Matt was sorry to hear about his new crusade for two reasons. He considered it wasted effort; Gideon could not hope to pit his opinions against powerful business interests and win. More important, he considered it reckless. Gideon could be hurt—physically hurt—if he offended the wrong people. And he had an established family to think about.
Matt wasn’t the only one with that reservation, as it turned out. Just at the end of the letter, Gideon wrote:
—and I might note, in confidence, that Margaret’s reaction to the decision has been odd and not a little upsetting.
As I have so often said before, it was she who brought me to the threshold of the world of ideas, and taught me not to be afraid to enter. It was she who read to me hour after hour in the evening, neither smiling at my inability to understand unfamiliar concepts nor at my clumsiness when I first attempted to pronounce difficult new words which I learned from those readings. It was she who gave me a thirst for knowledge—which in turn generates a thirst to employ that knowledge to some useful end. To accomplish something. Bring about change!
Nowhere is change needed more than in the affairs of the average laboring man. I began to realize that when I worked as an Erie railroad switchman. Margaret used to agree with me—if not outwardly, then tacitly. Now she has begun to exhibit a different attitude. She expresses fear about my establishing the little paper—
Not fear for my safety, though some of that does seem to exist. But her chief fear seems to be that I will become too fond of my endeavor—
Matt was struck by an unexpected feeling of kinship with his older brother. Margaret’s reaction to the labor journal sounded much like Dolly’s reaction to his painting. Women were not so different after all.
—too embroiled in producing the Beacon, and thus too inattentive to her, and to the needs of the family.
The fear is unfounded, Matt. I must do my best to convince her.
He started as a shadow fell across his legs. He hadn’t heard Dolly come in. She was carrying two goblets of white
vin ordinaire.
She saw his strained expression.
“Not bad news, is it?”
He folded the letter. “It may be. You can decide for yourself”—he rose and gently lifted the goblets from her fingers—“after we have a proper welcome home.”
He bent to kiss her cheek, slipped his left arm around her. She struggled away.
“Matt, we must talk!”
“Plenty of time for that later.” He pressed her face with his free hand. A shade too roughly, perhaps, but he was desperate.
“Matthew Kent, I bloody well won’t have you trying to get round me this wa—”
He put his mouth on hers. The kiss was long and intense. Her skin smelled sweetly of the lilac water she wore. He ran his fingers up into her blond hair, ruining the carefully created curls.
Her mouth felt cool, unresponsive. He didn’t break the embrace. She breathed in—an angry little sound—then pulled back abruptly. Tears shone as she exclaimed, “Oh, you’re not fair. Not fair at all.”
He kissed her again, ferociously. He worked his right hand behind her, stroking her back-while the pressure of his lips bore her head back. She uttered that angry little gasp again, then suddenly went limp against him. With a moan, she flung one arm around his neck. Her mouth opened, eager.
Dolly Stubbs was far from being as starched and proper as all the daughters of Victoria were supposed to be. That was a bounty which had brought him great happiness. Once warmed, her passion was boundless—and this evening was no exception. Her corseted breasts crushed against his shirt as she moved in his arms. When she felt how huge and stiff he was, felt him prodding her through layers of clothing, she moaned again.
He spread his legs, lifting her off the floor and kissing her eyelids. She moaned louder. Surrendering.
He carried her to the other room, and the bed. The room was tiny and without windows. The only illumination came from the fading skylight glow. In moments, he had her outer clothes off, then her corset and undergarments. As he bent to hold and kiss one of her soft white breasts, he knew again that his strategy wasn’t mere expediency. He cared for her, deeply.