The Genius

This story has its beginnings in the town of Alexandria,
Illinois, between 1884 and 1889, at the time when the place had a
population of somewhere near ten thousand. There was about it just
enough of the air of a city to relieve it of the sense of rural
life. It had one street-car line, a theatre,—or rather, an opera
house, so-called (why no one might say, for no opera was ever
performed there)—two railroads, with their stations, and a business
district, composed of four brisk sides to a public square. In the
square were the county court-house and four newspapers. These two
morning and two evening papers made the population fairly aware of
the fact that life was full of issues, local and national, and that
there were many interesting and varied things to do. On the edge of
town, several lakes and a pretty stream—perhaps Alexandria's most
pleasant feature—gave it an atmosphere not unakin to that of a
moderate-priced summer resort. Architecturally the town was not
new. It was mostly built of wood, as all American towns were at
this time, but laid out prettily in some sections, with houses that
sat back in great yards, far from the streets, with flower beds,
brick walks, and green trees as concomitants of a comfortable home
life. Alexandria was a city of young Americans. Its spirit was
young. Life was all before almost everybody. It was really good to
be alive.

In one part of this city there lived a family which in its
character and composition might well have been considered typically
American and middle western. It was not by any means poor—or, at
least, did not consider itself so; it was in no sense rich. Thomas
Jefferson Witla, the father, was a sewing machine agent with the
general agency in that county of one of the best known and best
selling machines made. From each twenty, thirty-five or
sixty-dollar machine which he sold, he took a profit of thirty-five
per cent. The sale of machines was not great, but it was enough to
yield him nearly two thousand dollars a year; and on that he had
managed to buy a house and lot, to furnish it comfortably, to send
his children to school, and to maintain a local store on the public
square where the latest styles of machines were displayed. He also
took old machines of other makes in exchange, allowing ten to
fifteen dollars on the purchase price of a new machine. He also
repaired machines,—and with that peculiar energy of the American
mind, he tried to do a little insurance business in addition. His
first idea was that his son, Eugene Tennyson Witla, might take
charge of this latter work, once he became old enough and the
insurance trade had developed sufficiently. He did not know what
his son might turn out to be, but it was always well to have an
anchor to windward.

He was a quick, wiry, active man of no great stature,
sandy-haired, with blue eyes with noticeable eye-brows, an eagle
nose, and a rather radiant and ingratiating smile. Service as a
canvassing salesman, endeavoring to persuade recalcitrant wives and
indifferent or conservative husbands to realize that they really
needed a new machine in their home, had taught him caution, tact,
savoir faire. He knew how to approach people pleasantly. His wife
thought too much so.

Certainly he was honest, hard working, and thrifty. They had
been waiting a long time for the day when they could say they owned
their own home and had a little something laid away for
emergencies. That day had come, and life was not half bad. Their
house was neat,—white with green shutters, surrounded by a yard
with well kept flower beds, a smooth lawn, and some few shapely and
broad spreading trees. There was a front porch with rockers, a
swing under one tree, a hammock under another, a buggy and several
canvassing wagons in a nearby stable. Witla liked dogs, so there
were two collies. Mrs. Witla liked live things, so there were a
canary bird, a cat, some chickens, and a bird house set aloft on a
pole where a few blue-birds made their home. It was a nice little
place, and Mr. and Mrs. Witla were rather proud of it.

Miriam Witla was a good wife to her husband. A daughter of a hay
and grain dealer in Wooster, a small town near Alexandria in McLean
County, she had never been farther out into the world than
Springfield and Chicago. She had gone to Springfield as a very
young girl, to see Lincoln buried, and once with her husband she
had gone to the state fair or exposition which was held annually in
those days on the lake front in Chicago. She was well preserved,
good looking, poetic under a marked outward reserve. It was she who
had insisted upon naming her only son Eugene Tennyson, a tribute at
once to a brother Eugene, and to the celebrated romanticist of
verse, because she had been so impressed with his "Idylls of the
King."

Eugene Tennyson seemed rather strong to Witla père, as the name
of a middle-western American boy, but he loved his wife and gave
her her way in most things. He rather liked the names of Sylvia and
Myrtle with which she had christened the two girls. All three of
the children were good looking,—Sylvia, a girl of twenty-one, with
black hair, dark eyes, full blown like a rose, healthy, active,
smiling. Myrtle was of a less vigorous constitution, small, pale,
shy, but intensely sweet—like the flower she was named after, her
mother said. She was inclined to be studious and reflective, to
read verse and dream. The young bloods of the high school were all
crazy to talk to Myrtle and to walk with her, but they could find
no words. And she herself did not know what to say to them.

Eugene Witla was the apple of his family's eye, younger than
either of his two sisters by two years. He had straight smooth
black hair, dark almond-shaped eyes, a straight nose, a shapely but
not aggressive chin; his teeth were even and white, showing with a
curious delicacy when he smiled, as if he were proud of them. He
was not very strong to begin with, moody, and to a notable extent
artistic. Because of a weak stomach and a semi-anæmic condition, he
did not really appear as strong as he was. He had emotion, fire,
longings, that were concealed behind a wall of reserve. He was shy,
proud, sensitive, and very uncertain of himself.

When at home he lounged about the house, reading Dickens,
Thackeray, Scott and Poe. He browsed idly through one book after
another, wondering about life. The great cities appealed to him. He
thought of travel as a wonderful thing. In school he read Taine and
Gibbon between recitation hours, wondering at the luxury and beauty
of the great courts of the world. He cared nothing for grammar,
nothing for mathematics, nothing for botany or physics, except odd
bits here and there. Curious facts would strike him—the composition
of clouds, the composition of water, the chemical elements of the
earth. He liked to lie in the hammock at home, spring, summer or
fall, and look at the blue sky showing through the trees. A soaring
buzzard poised in speculative flight held his attention fixedly.
The wonder of a snowy cloud, high piled like wool, and drifting as
an island, was like a song to him. He had wit, a keen sense of
humor, a sense of pathos. Sometimes he thought he would draw;
sometimes write. He had a little talent for both, he thought, but
did practically nothing with either. He would sketch now and then,
but only fragments—a small roof-top, with smoke curling from a
chimney and birds flying; a bit of water with a willow bending over
it and perhaps a boat anchored; a mill pond with ducks afloat, and
a boy or woman on the bank. He really had no great talent for
interpretation at this time, only an intense sense of beauty. The
beauty of a bird in flight, a rose in bloom, a tree swaying in the
wind—these held him. He would walk the streets of his native town
at night, admiring the brightness of the store windows, the sense
of youth and enthusiasm that went with a crowd; the sense of love
and comfort and home that spoke through the glowing windows of
houses set back among trees.

He admired girls,—was mad about them,—but only about those who
were truly beautiful. There were two or three in his school who
reminded him of poetic phrases he had come across—"beauty like a
tightened bow," "thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face," "a dancing
shape, an image gay"—but he could not talk to them with ease. They
were beautiful but so distant. He invested them with more beauty
than they had; the beauty was in his own soul. But he did not know
that. One girl whose yellow hair lay upon her neck in great yellow
braids like ripe corn, was constantly in his thoughts. He worshiped
her from afar but she never knew. She never knew what solemn black
eyes burned at her when she was not looking. She left Alexandria,
her family moving to another town, and in time he recovered, for
there is much of beauty. But the color of her hair and the wonder
of her neck stayed with him always.

There was some plan on the part of Witla to send these children
to college, but none of them showed any great desire for education.
They were perhaps wiser than books, for they were living in the
realm of imagination and feeling. Sylvia longed to be a mother, and
was married at twenty-one to Henry Burgess, the son of Benjamin C.
Burgess, editor of the
Morning Appeal
. There was a baby
the first year. Myrtle was dreaming through algebra and
trigonometry, wondering whether she would teach or get married, for
the moderate prosperity of the family demanded that she do
something. Eugene mooned through his studies, learning nothing
practical. He wrote a little, but his efforts at sixteen were
puerile. He drew, but there was no one to tell him whether there
was any merit in the things he did or not. Practical matters were
generally without significance to him. But he was overawed by the
fact that the world demanded practical service—buying and selling
like his father, clerking in stores, running big business. It was a
confusing maze, and he wondered, even at this age, what was to
become of him. He did not object to the kind of work his father was
doing, but it did not interest him. For himself he knew it would be
a pointless, dreary way of making a living, and as for insurance,
that was equally bad. He could hardly bring himself to read through
the long rigamarole of specifications which each insurance paper
itemized. There were times—evenings and Saturdays—when he clerked
in his father's store, but it was painful work. His mind was not in
it.

As early as his twelfth year his father had begun to see that
Eugene was not cut out for business, and by the time he was sixteen
he was convinced of it. From the trend of his reading and his
percentage marks at school, he was equally convinced that the boy
was not interested in his studies. Myrtle, who was two classes
ahead of him but sometimes in the same room, reported that he
dreamed too much. He was always looking out of the window.

Eugene's experience with girls had not been very wide. There
were those very minor things that occur in early youth—girls whom
we furtively kiss, or who furtively kiss us—the latter had been the
case with Eugene. He had no particular interest in any one girl. At
fourteen he had been picked by a little girl at a party as an
affinity, for the evening at least, and in a game of "post-office"
had enjoyed the wonder of a girl's arms around him in a dark room
and a girl's lips against his; but since then there had been no
re-encounter of any kind. He had dreamed of love, with this one
experience as a basis, but always in a shy, distant way. He was
afraid of girls, and they, to tell the truth, were afraid of him.
They could not make him out.

But in the fall of his seventeenth year Eugene came into contact
with one girl who made a profound impression on him. Stella
Appleton was a notably beautiful creature. She was very fair,
Eugene's own age, with very blue eyes and a slender sylph-like
body. She was gay and debonair in an enticing way, without really
realizing how dangerous she was to the average, susceptible male
heart. She liked to flirt with the boys because it amused her, and
not because she cared for anyone in particular. There was no petty
meanness about it, however, for she thought they were all rather
nice, the less clever appealing to her almost more than the
sophisticated. She may have liked Eugene originally because of his
shyness.

He saw her first at the beginning of his last school year when
she came to the city and entered the second high school class. Her
father had come from Moline, Illinois, to take a position as
manager of a new pulley manufactory which was just starting. She
had quickly become friends with his sister Myrtle, being perhaps
attracted by her quiet ways, as Myrtle was by Stella's gaiety.

One afternoon, as Myrtle and Stella were on Main Street, walking
home from the post office, they met Eugene, who was on his way to
visit a boy friend. He was really bashful; and when he saw them
approaching he wanted to escape, but there was no way. They saw
him, and Stella approached confidently enough. Myrtle was anxious
to intercept him, because she had her pretty companion with
her.

"You haven't been home, have you?" she asked, stopping. This was
her chance to introduce Stella; Eugene couldn't escape. "Miss
Appleton, this is my brother Eugene."

Stella gave him a sunny encouraging smile, and her hand, which
he took gingerly. He was plainly nervous.

"I'm not very clean," he said apologetically. "I've been helping
father fix a buggy."

"Oh, we don't mind," said Myrtle. "Where are you going?"

"Over to Harry Morris's," he explained.

"What for?"

"We're going for hickory nuts."

"Oh, I wish I had some," said Stella.

"I'll bring you some," he volunteered gallantly.

She smiled again. "I wish you would."

She almost proposed that they should be taken along, but
inexperience hindered her.

Eugene was struck with all her charm at once. She seemed like
one of those unattainable creatures who had swum into his ken a
little earlier and disappeared. There was something of the girl
with the corn-colored hair about her, only she had been more human,
less like a dream. This girl was fine, delicate, pink, like
porcelain. She was fragile and yet virile. He caught his breath,
but he was more or less afraid of her. He did not know what she
might be thinking of him.