The Genius (31 page)

Angela cogitated this argument further. He had married her! Why
had he? He might have cared for Christina and Ruby, but he must
have cared for her too. Why hadn't she thought of that? There was
something in it—something besides a mere desire to deceive her.
Perhaps he did care for her a little. Anyway it was plain that she
could not get very far by arguing with him—he was getting stubborn,
argumentative, contentious. She had not seen him that way
before.

"Oh!" she sobbed, taking refuge from this very difficult realm
of logic in the safer and more comfortable one of illogical tears.
"I don't know what to do! I don't know what to think!"

She was badly treated, no doubt of that. Her life was a failure,
but even so there was some charm about him. As he stood there,
looking aimlessly around, defiant at one moment, appealing at
another, she could not help seeing that he was not wholly bad. He
was just weak on this one point. He loved pretty women. They were
always trying to win him to them. He was probably not wholly to
blame. If he would only be repentant enough, this thing might be
allowed to blow over. It couldn't be forgiven. She never could
forgive him for the way he had deceived her. Her ideal of him had
been pretty hopelessly shattered—but she might live with him on
probation.

"Angela!" he said, while she was still sobbing, and feeling that
he ought to apologize to her. "Won't you believe me? Won't you
forgive me? I don't like to hear you cry this way. There's no use
saying that I didn't do anything. There's no use my saying anything
at all, really. You won't believe me. I don't want you to; but I'm
sorry. Won't you believe that? Won't you forgive me?"

Angela listened to this curiously, her thoughts going around in
a ring for she was at once despairing, regretful, revengeful,
critical, sympathetic toward him, desirous of retaining her state,
desirous of obtaining and retaining his love, desirous of punishing
him, desirous of doing any one of a hundred things. Oh, if he had
only never done this! And he was sickly, too. He needed her
sympathy.

"Won't you forgive me, Angela?" he pleaded softly, laying his
hand on her arm. "I'm not going to do anything like that any more.
Won't you believe me? Come on now. Quit crying, won't you?"

Angela hesitated for a while, lingering dolefully. She did not
know what to do, what to say. It might be that he would not sin
against her any more. He had not thus far, in so far as she knew.
Still this was a terrible revelation. All at once, because he
manœuvred himself into a suitable position and because she herself
was weary of fighting and crying, and because she was longing for
sympathy, she allowed herself to be pulled into his arms, her head
to his shoulder, and there she cried more copiously than ever.
Eugene for the moment felt terribly grieved. He was really sorry
for her. It wasn't right. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He
should never have done anything like that.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, "really I am. Won't you forgive
me?"

"Oh, I don't know what to do! what to think!" moaned Angela
after a time.

"Please do, Angela," he urged, holding her questioningly.

There was more of this pleading and emotional badgering until
finally out of sheer exhaustion Angela said yes. Eugene's nerves
were worn to a thread by the encounter. He was pale, exhausted,
distraught. Many scenes like this, he thought, would set him crazy;
and still he had to go through a world of petting and love-making
even now. It was not easy to bring her back to her normal self. It
was bad business, this philandering, he thought. It seemed to lead
to all sorts of misery for him, and Angela was jealous. Dear
Heaven! what a wrathful, vicious, contentious nature she had when
she was aroused. He had never suspected that. How could he truly
love her when she acted like that? How could he sympathize with
her? He recalled how she sneered at him—how she taunted him with
Christina's having discarded him. He was weary, excited, desirous
of rest and sleep, but now he must make more love. He fondled her,
and by degrees she came out of her blackest mood; but he was not
really forgiven even then. He was just understood better. And she
was not truly happy again but only hopeful—and watchful.

Spring, summer and fall came and went with Eugene and Angela
first in Alexandria and then in Blackwood. In suffering this
nervous breakdown and being compelled to leave New York, Eugene
missed some of the finest fruits of his artistic efforts, for M.
Charles, as well as a number of other people, were interested in
him and were prepared to entertain him in an interesting and
conspicuous way. He could have gone out a great deal, but his
mental state was such that he was poor company for anyone. He was
exceedingly morbid, inclined to discuss gloomy subjects, to look on
life as exceedingly sad and to believe that people generally were
evil. Lust, dishonesty, selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander,
hate, theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity—these
and death and decay occupied his thoughts. There was no light
anywhere. Only a storm of evil and death. These ideas coupled with
his troubles with Angela, the fact that he could not work, the fact
that he felt he had made a matrimonial mistake, the fact that he
feared he might die or go crazy, made a terrible and agonizing
winter for him.

Angela's attitude, while sympathetic enough, once the first
storm of feeling was over, was nevertheless involved with a
substratum of criticism. While she said nothing, agreed that she
would forget, Eugene had the consciousness all the while that she
wasn't forgetting, that she was secretly reproaching him and that
she was looking for new manifestations of weakness in this
direction, expecting them and on the alert to prevent them.

The spring-time in Alexandria, opening as it did shortly after
they reached there, was in a way a source of relief to Eugene. He
had decided for the time being to give up trying to work, to give
up his idea of going either to London or Chicago, and merely rest.
Perhaps it was true that he was tired. He didn't feel that way. He
couldn't sleep and he couldn't work, but he felt brisk enough. It
was only because he couldn't work that he was miserable. Still he
decided to try sheer idleness. Perhaps that would revive his
wonderful art for him. Meantime he speculated ceaselessly on the
time he was losing, the celebrities he was missing, the places he
was not seeing. Oh, London, London! If he could only do that.

Mr. and Mrs. Witla were immensely pleased to have their boy back
with them again. Being in their way simple, unsophisticated people,
they could not understand how their son's health could have
undergone such a sudden reverse.

"I never saw Gene looking so bad in all his life," observed
Witla pére to his wife the day Eugene arrived. "His eyes are so
sunken. What in the world do you suppose is ailing him?"

"How should I know?" replied his wife, who was greatly
distressed over her boy. "I suppose he's just tired out, that's
all. He'll probably be all right after he rests awhile. Don't let
on that you think he's looking out of sorts. Just pretend that he's
all right. What do you think of his wife?"

"She appears to be a very nice little woman," replied Witla.
"She's certainly devoted to him. I never thought Eugene would marry
just that type, but he's the judge. I suppose people thought that I
would never marry anybody like you, either," he added jokingly.

"Yes, you did make a terrible mistake," jested his wife in
return. "You worked awfully hard to make it."

"I was young! I was young! You want to remember that," retorted
Witla. "I didn't know much in those days."

"You don't appear to know much better yet," she replied, "do
you?"

He smiled and patted her on the back. "Well, anyhow I'll have to
make the best of it, won't I? It's too late now."

"It certainly is," replied his wife.

Eugene and Angela were given his old room on the second floor,
commanding a nice view of the yard and the street corner, and they
settled down to spend what the Witla parents hoped would be months
of peaceful days. It was a curious sensation to Eugene to find
himself back here in Alexandria looking out upon the peaceful
neighborhood in which he had been raised, the trees, the lawn, the
hammock replaced several times since he had left, but still in its
accustomed place. The thought of the little lakes and the small
creek winding about the town were a comfort to him. He could go
fishing now and boating, and there were some interesting walks here
and there. He began to amuse himself by going fishing the first
week, but it was still a little cold, and he decided, for the time
being, to confine himself to walking.

Days of this kind grow as a rule quickly monotonous. To a man of
Eugene's turn of mind there was so little in Alexandria to
entertain him. After London and Paris, Chicago and New York, the
quiet streets of his old home town were a joke. He visited the
office of the
Appeal
but both Jonas Lyle and Caleb
Williams had gone, the former to St. Louis, the latter to
Bloomington. Old Benjamin Burgess, his sister's husband's father,
was unchanged except in the matter of years. He told Eugene that he
was thinking of running for Congress in the next campaign—the
Republican organization owed it to him. His son Henry, Sylvia's
husband, had become a treasurer of the local bank. He was working
as patiently and quietly as ever, going to church Sundays, going to
Chicago occasionally on business, consulting with farmers and
business men about small loans. He was a close student of the
several banking journals of the country, and seemed to be doing
very well financially. Sylvia had little to say of how he was
getting along. Having lived with him for eleven years, she had
become somewhat close-mouthed like himself. Eugene could not help
smiling at the lean, slippered subtlety of the man, young as he
was. He was so quiet, so conservative, so intent on all the little
things which make a conventionally successful life. Like a cabinet
maker, he was busy inlaying the little pieces which would
eventually make the perfect whole.

Angela took up the household work, which Mrs. Witla grudgingly
consented to share with her, with a will. She liked to work and
would put the house in order while Mrs. Witla was washing the
dishes after breakfast. She would make special pies and cakes for
Eugene when she could without giving offense, and she tried to
conduct herself so that Mrs. Witla would like her. She did not
think so much of the Witla household. It wasn't so much better than
her own—hardly as good. Still it was Eugene's birthplace and for
that reason important. There was a slight divergence of view-point
though, between his mother and herself, over the nature of life and
how to live it. Mrs. Witla was of an easier, more friendly outlook
on life than Angela. She liked to take things as they came without
much worry, while Angela was of a naturally worrying disposition.
The two had one very human failing in common—they could not work
with anyone else at anything. Each preferred to do all that was to
be done rather than share it at all. Both being so anxious to be
conciliatory for Eugene's sake and for permanent peace in the
family, there was small chance for any disagreement, for neither
was without tact. But there was just a vague hint of something in
the air—that Angela was a little hard and selfish, on Mrs. Witla's
part; that Mrs. Witla was just the least bit secretive, or shy or
distant—from Angela's point of view. All was serene and lovely on
the surface, however, with many won't-you-let-me's and
please-do-now's on both sides. Mrs. Witla, being so much older,
was, of course, calmer and in the family seat of dignity and
peace.

To be able to sit about in a chair, lie in a hammock, stroll in
the woods and country fields and be perfectly happy in idle
contemplation and loneliness, requires an exceptional talent for
just that sort of thing. Eugene once fancied he had it, as did his
parents, but since he had heard the call of fame he could never be
still any more. And just at this time he was not in need of
solitude and idle contemplation but of diversion and entertainment.
He needed companionship of the right sort, gayety, sympathy,
enthusiasm. Angela had some of this, when she was not troubled
about anything, his parents, his sister, his old acquaintances had
a little more to offer. They could not, however, be forever talking
to him or paying him attention, and beyond them there was nothing.
The town had no resources. Eugene would walk the long country roads
with Angela or go boating or fishing sometimes, but still he was
lonely. He would sit on the porch or in the hammock and think of
what he had seen in London and Paris—how he might be at work. St.
Paul's in a mist, the Thames Embankment, Piccadilly, Blackfriars
Bridge, the muck of Whitechapel and the East End—how he wished he
was out of all this and painting them. If he could only paint. He
rigged up a studio in his father's barn, using a north loft door
for light and essayed certain things from memory, but there was no
making anything come out right. He had this fixed belief, which was
a notion purely, that there was always something wrong. Angela, his
mother, his father, whom he occasionally asked for an opinion,
might protest that it was beautiful or wonderful, but he did not
believe it. After a few altering ideas of this kind, under the
influences of which he would change and change and change things,
he would find himself becoming wild in his feelings, enraged at his
condition, intensely despondent and sorry for himself.

"Well," he would say, throwing down his brush, "I shall simply
have to wait until I come out of this. I can't do anything this
way." Then he would walk or read or row on the lakes or play
solitaire, or listen to Angela playing on the piano that his father
had installed for Myrtle long since. All the time though he was
thinking of his condition, what he was missing, how the gay world
was surging on rapidly elsewhere, how long it would be before he
got well, if ever. He talked of going to Chicago and trying his
hand at scenes there, but Angela persuaded him to rest for a while
longer. In June she promised him they would go to Blackwood for the
summer, coming back here in the fall if he wished, or going on to
New York or staying in Chicago, just as he felt about it. Now he
needed rest.

"Eugene will probably be all right by then," Angela volunteered
to his mother, "and he can make up his mind whether he wants to go
to Chicago or London."

She was very proud of her ability to talk of where they would go
and what they would do.