The "Genius"

"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.

CHAPTER XII

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.

CHAPTER XIII

If it had not been for the lurking hope of some fresh exciting experience with a woman, he would have been unconscionably lonely. As it was, this thought with him – quite as the confirmed drunkard's thought of whiskey – buoyed him up, kept him from despairing utterly, gave his mind the only diversion it had from the ever present thought of failure. If by chance he should meet some truly beautiful girl, gay, enticing, who would fall in love with him! that would be happiness. Only, Angela was constantly watching him these days and, besides, more girls would simply mean that his condition would be aggravated. Yet so powerful was the illusion of desire, the sheer animal magnetism of beauty, that when it came near him in the form of a lovely girl of his own temperamental inclinations he could not resist it. One look into an inviting eye, one glance at a face whose outlines were soft and delicate – full of that subtle suggestion of youth and health which is so characteristic of girlhood – and the spell was cast. It was as though the very form of the face, without will or intention on the part of the possessor, acted hypnotically upon its beholder. The Arabians believed in the magic power of the word Abracadabra to cast a spell. For Eugene the form of a woman's face and body was quite as powerful.

While he and Angela were in Alexandria from February to May, he met one night at his sister's house a girl who, from the point of view of the beauty which he admired and to which he was so susceptible, was extremely hypnotic, and who for the ease and convenience of a flirtation was very favorably situated. She was the daughter of a traveling man, George Roth by name, whose wife, the child's mother, was dead, but who lived with his sister in an old tree-shaded house on the edge of Green Lake not far from the spot where Eugene had once attempted to caress his first love, Stella Appleton. Frieda was the girl's name. She was extremely attractive, not more than eighteen years of age, with large, clear, blue eyes, a wealth of yellowish-brown hair and a plump but shapely figure. She was a graduate of the local high school, well developed for her years, bright, rosy-cheeked, vivacious and with a great deal of natural intelligence which attracted the attention of Eugene at once. Normally he was extremely fond of a natural, cheerful, laughing disposition. In his present state he was abnormally so. This girl and her foster mother had heard of him a long time since through his parents and his sister, whom they knew well and whom they visited frequently. George Roth had moved here since Eugene had first left for Chicago, and because he was so much on the road he had not seen him since. Frieda, on all his previous visits, had been too young to take an interest in men, but now at this age, when she was just blossoming into womanhood, her mind was fixed on them. She did not expect to be interested in Eugene because she knew he was married, but because of his reputation as an artist she was curious about him. Everybody knew who he was. The local papers had written up his success and published his portrait. Frieda expected to see a man of about forty, stern and sober. Instead she met a smiling youth of twenty-nine, rather gaunt and hollow-eyed, but none the less attractive for that. Eugene, with Angela's approval, still affected a loose, flowing tie, a soft turn-down collar, brown corduroy suits as a rule, the coat cut with a belt, shooting jacket fashion, a black iron ring of very curious design upon one of his fingers, and a soft hat. His hands were very thin and white, his skin pale. Frieda, rosy, as thoughtless as a butterfly, charmingly clothed in a dress of blue linen, laughing, afraid of him because of his reputation, attracted his attention at once. She was like all the young, healthy, laughing girls he had ever known, delightful. He wished he were single again that he might fall into a jesting conversation with her. She seemed inclined to be friendly from the first.

Angela being present, however, and Frieda's foster mother, it was necessary for him to be circumspect and distant. The latter, Sylvia and Angela, talked of art and listened to Angela's descriptions of Eugene's eccentricities, idiosyncrasies and experiences, which were a never-failing source of interest to the common run of mortals whom they met. Eugene would sit by in a comfortable chair with a weary, genial or indifferent look on his face as his mood happened to be. To-night he was bored and a little indifferent in his manner. No one here interested him save this girl, the beauty of whose face nourished his secret dreams. He longed to have some such spirit of youth near him always. Why could not women remain young?

While they were laughing and talking, Eugene picked up a copy of Howard Pyle's "Knights of the Round Table" with its warm heavy illustrations of the Arthurian heroes and heroines, and began to study the stately and exaggerated characteristics of the various characters. Sylvia had purchased it for her seven-year old boy Jack, asleep upstairs, but Frieda had read it in her girlhood a few years before. She had been moving restlessly about, conscious of an interest in Eugene but not knowing how to find an opportunity for conversation. His smile, which he sometimes directed toward her, was to her entrancing.

"Oh, I read that," she said, when she saw him looking at it. She had drifted to a position not far behind his chair and near one of the windows. She pretended to be looking out at first, but now began to talk to him. "I used to be crazy about every one of the Knights and Ladies – Sir Launcelot, Sir Galahad, Sir Tristram, Sir Gawaine, Queen Guinevere."

"Did you ever hear of Sir Bluff?" he asked teasingly, "or Sir Stuff? or Sir Dub?" He looked at her with a mocking light of humor in his eyes.

"Oh, there aren't such people," laughed Frieda, surprised at the titles but tickled at the thought of them.

"Don't you let him mock you, Frieda," put in Angela, who was pleased at the girl's gayety and glad that Eugene had found someone in whom he could take an interest. She did not fear the simple Western type of girl like Frieda and her own sister Marietta. They were franker, more kindly, better intentioned than the Eastern studio type, and besides they did not consider themselves superior. She was playing the rôle of the condescending leader here.

"Certainly there are," replied Eugene solemnly, addressing Frieda. "They are the new Knights of the Round Table. Haven't you ever heard of that book?"

"No, I haven't," answered Frieda gaily, "and there isn't any such. You're just teasing me."

"Teasing you? Why I wouldn't think of such a thing. And there is such a book. It's published by Harper and Brothers and is called 'The New Knights of the Round Table.' You simply haven't heard of it, that's all."

Frieda was impressed. She didn't know whether to believe him or not. She opened her eyes in a curiously inquiring girlish way which appealed to Eugene strongly. He wished he were free to kiss her pretty, red, thoughtlessly-parted lips. Angela herself was faintly doubtful as to whether he was speaking of a real book or not.

"Sir Stuff is a very famous Knight," he went on, "and so is Sir Bluff. They're inseparable companions in the book. As for Sir Dub and Sir Hack, and the Lady Dope – "

"Oh, hush, Eugene," called Angela gaily. "Just listen to what he's telling Frieda," she remarked to Miss Roth. "You mustn't mind him though. He's always teasing someone. Why didn't you raise him better, Sylvia?" she asked of Eugene's sister.

"Oh, don't ask me. We never could do anything with Gene. I never knew he had much jesting in him until he came back this time."

"They're very wonderful," they heard him telling Frieda, "all fine rosy gentlemen and ladies."

Frieda was impressed by this charming, good-natured man. His spirit was evidently as youthful and gay as her own. She sat before him looking into his smiling eyes while he teased her about this, that and the other foible of youth. Who were her sweethearts? How did she make love? How many boys lined up to see her come out of church on Sunday? He knew. "I'll bet they look like a line of soldiers on dress parade," he volunteered, "all with nice new ties and clean pocket handkerchiefs and their shoes polished and – "

"Oh, ha! ha!" laughed Frieda. The idea appealed to her immensely. She started giggling and bantering with him and their friendship was definitely sealed. She thought he was delightful.