The Genius (15 page)

Eugene carried home with him not only a curiously deepened
feeling for Angela, due to their altered and more intimate
relationship, but moreover a growing respect for her family. Old
Jotham was so impressive a figure of a man; his wife so kindly and
earnest. Their attitude toward their children and to each other was
so sound, and their whole relationship to society so respectable.
Another observer might have been repelled by the narrowness and
frugality of their lives. But Eugene had not known enough of luxury
to be scornful of the material simplicity of such existence. Here
he had found character, poetry of location, poetry of ambition,
youth and happy prospects. These boys, so sturdy and independent,
were sure to make for themselves such places in the world as they
desired. Marietta, so charming a girl, could not but make a good
marriage. Samuel was doing well in his position with the railroad
company; Benjamin was studying to be a lawyer and David was to be
sent to West Point. He liked them for their familiar, sterling
worth. And they all treated him as the destined husband of Angela.
By the end of his stay he had become as much en rapport with the
family as if he had known it all his life.

Before going back to New York he had stopped in Chicago, where
he had seen Howe and Mathews grinding away at their old tasks, and
then for a few days in Alexandria, where he found his father busy
about his old affairs. Sewing machines were still being delivered
by him in person, and the long roads of the country were as briskly
traversed by his light machine-carrying buggy as in his earliest
days. Eugene saw him now as just a little futile, and yet he
admired him, his patience, his industry. The brisk sewing machine
agent was considerably impressed by his son's success, and was
actually trying to take an interest in art. One evening coming home
from the post office he pointed out a street scene in Alexandria as
a subject for a painting. Eugene knew that art had only been called
to his father's attention by his own efforts. He had noticed these
things all his life, no doubt, but attached no significance to them
until he had seen his son's work in the magazines. "If you ever
paint country things, you ought to paint Cook's Mill, over here by
the falls. That's one of the prettiest things I know anywhere," he
said to him one evening, trying to make his son feel the interest
he took. Eugene knew the place. It was attractive, a little branch
of bright water running at the base of a forty foot wall of red
sandstone and finally tumbling down a fifteen foot declivity of
grey mossy stones. It was close to a yellow road which carried a
good deal of traffic and was surrounded by a company of trees which
ornamented it and sheltered it on all sides. Eugene had admired it
in his youth as beautiful and peaceful.

"It is nice," he replied to his father. "I'll take a look at it
some day."

Witla senior felt set up. His son was doing him honor. Mrs.
Witla, like her husband, was showing the first notable traces of
the flight of time. The crow's-feet at the sides of her eyes were
deeper, the wrinkles in her forehead longer. At the sight of Eugene
the first night she fairly thrilled, for he was so well developed
now, so self-reliant. He had come through his experiences to a kind
of poise which she realized was manhood. Her boy, requiring her
careful guidance, was gone. This was someone who could guide her,
tease her as a man would a child.

"You've got so big I hardly know you," she said, as he folded
her in his arms.

"No, you're just getting little, ma. I used to think I'd never
get to the point where you couldn't shake me, but that's all over,
isn't it?"

"You never did need much shaking," she said fondly.

Myrtle, who had married Frank Bangs the preceding year, had gone
with her husband to live in Ottumwa, Iowa, where he had taken
charge of a mill, so Eugene did not see her, but he spent some
little time with Sylvia, now the mother of two children. Her
husband was the same quiet, conservative plodder Eugene had first
noted him to be. Revisiting the office of the
Appeal
he
found that John Summers had recently died. Otherwise things were as
they had been. Jonas Lyle and Caleb Williams were still in
charge—quite the same as before. Eugene was glad when his time was
up, and took the train back to Chicago with a light heart.

Again as on his entrance to Chicago from the East, and on his
return to it from Blackwood, he was touched keenly by the
remembrance of Ruby. She had been so sweet to him. His opening art
experiences had in a way been centred about her. But in spite of
all, he did not want to go out and see her. Or did he? He asked
himself this question with a pang of sorrow, for in a way he cared.
He cared for her as one might care for a girl in a play or book.
She had the quality of a tragedy about her. She—her life, her
surroundings, her misfortune in loving him, constituted an artistic
composition. He thought he might be able to write a poem about it
some time. He was able to write rather charming verse which he kept
to himself. He had the knack of saying things in a simple way and
with feeling—making you see a picture. The trouble with his verse
was that it lacked as yet any real nobility of thought—was not as
final in understanding as it might have been.

He did not go to see Ruby. The reason he assigned to himself was
that it would not be nice. She might not want him to now. She might
be trying to forget. And he had Angela. It really wasn't fair to
her. But he looked over toward the region in which she lived, as he
travelled out of the city eastward and wished that some of those
lovely moments he had spent with her might be lived again.

Back in New York, life seemed to promise a repetition of the
preceding year, with some minor modifications. In the fall Eugene
went to live with McHugh and Smite, the studio they had consisting
of one big working room and three bed-rooms. They agreed that they
could get along together, and for a while it was good for them all.
The criticism they furnished each other was of real value. And they
found it pleasant to dine together, to walk, to see the
exhibitions. They stimulated each other with argument, each having
a special point of view. It was much as it had been with Howe and
Mathews in Chicago.

During this winter Eugene made his first appearance in one of
the leading publications of the time—
Harper's Magazine
. He
had gone to the Art Director with some proofs of his previous work,
and had been told that it was admirable; if some suitable story
turned up he would be considered. Later a letter came asking him to
call, and a commission involving three pictures for $125 was given
him. He worked them out successfully with models and was
complimented on the result. His associates cheered him on also, for
they really admired what he was doing. He set out definitely to
make Scribner's
and the
Century
, as getting into
those publications was called, and after a time he succeeded in
making an impression on their respective Art Directors, though no
notable commissions were given him. From one he secured a poem,
rather out of his mood to decorate, and from the other a short
story; but somehow he could not feel that either was a real
opportunity. He wanted an appropriate subject or to sell them some
of his scenes.

Building up a paying reputation was slow work. Although he was
being mentioned here and there among artists, his name was anything
but a significant factor with the public or with the Art Directors.
He was still a promising beginner—growing, but not yet arrived by a
long distance.

There was one editor who was inclined to see him at his real
worth, but had no money to offer. This was Richard Wheeler, editor
of
Craft
, a rather hopeless magazine in a commercial
sense, but devoted sincerely enough to art. Wheeler was a blond
young man of poetic temperament, whose enthusiasm for Eugene's work
made it easy for them to become friends.

It was through Wheeler that he met that winter Miriam Finch and
Christina Channing, two women of radically different temperaments
and professions, who opened for Eugene two entirely new worlds.

Miriam Finch was a sculptor by profession—a critic by
temperament, with no great capacity for emotion in herself but an
intense appreciation of its significance in others. To see her was
to be immediately impressed with a vital force in womanhood. She
was a woman who had never had a real youth or a real love affair,
but clung to her ideal of both with a passionate, almost fatuous,
faith that they could still be brought to pass. Wheeler had invited
him to go round to her studio with him one evening. He was
interested to know what Eugene would think of her. Miriam, already
thirty-two when Eugene met her—a tiny, brown haired, brown eyed
girl, with a slender, rather cat-like figure and a suavity of
address and manner which was artistic to the finger tips. She had
none of that budding beauty that is the glory of eighteen, but she
was altogether artistic and delightful. Her hair encircled her head
in a fluffy cloudy mass; her eyes moved quickly, with intense
intelligence, feeling, humor, sympathy. Her lips were sweetly
modelled after the pattern of a Cupid's bow and her smile was
subtly ingratiating. Her sallow complexion matched her brown hair
and the drab velvet or corduroy of her dress. There was a striking
simplicity about the things she wore which gave her a distinctive
air. Her clothes were seldom fashionable but always exceedingly
becoming, for she saw herself as a whole and arrayed herself as a
decorative composition from head to foot, with a sense of fitness
in regard to self and life.

To such a nature as Eugene's, an intelligent, artistic,
self-regulating and self-poised human being was always intensely
magnetic and gratifying. He turned to the capable person as
naturally as a flower turns toward the light, finding a joy in
contemplating the completeness and sufficiency of such a being. To
have ideas of your own seemed to him a marvellous thing. To be able
definitely to formulate your thoughts and reach positive and
satisfying conclusions was a great and beautiful thing. From such
personalities Eugene drank admiringly until his thirst was
satiated—then he would turn away. If his thirst for what they had
to give returned, he might come back—not otherwise.

Hitherto all his relationships with personages of this quality
had been confined to the male sex, for he had not known any women
of distinction. Beginning with Temple Boyle, instructor in the life
class in Chicago, and Vincent Beers, instructor in the illustration
class, he had encountered successively Jerry Mathews, Mitchell
Goldfarb, Peter McHugh, David Smite and Jotham Blue, all men of
intense personal feeling and convictions and men who had impressed
him greatly. Now he was to encounter for the first time some
forceful, really exceptional women of the same calibre. Stella
Appleton, Margaret Duff, Ruby Kenny and Angela Blue were charming
girls in their way, but they did not think for themselves. They
were not organized, self-directed, self-controlled personalities in
the way that Miriam Finch was. She would have recognized herself at
once as being infinitely superior intellectually and artistically
to any or all of them, while entertaining at the same time a
sympathetic, appreciative understanding of their beauty, fitness,
equality of value in the social scheme. She was a student of life,
a critic of emotions and understanding, with keen appreciative
intelligence, and yet longing intensely for just what Stella and
Margaret and Ruby and even Angela had—youth, beauty, interest for
men, the power or magnetism or charm of face and form to compel the
impetuous passion of a lover. She wanted to be loved by someone who
could love madly and beautifully, and this had never come to
her.

Miss Finch's home, or rather studio, was with her family in East
Twenty-sixth Street, where she occupied a north room on the third
floor, but her presence in the bosom of that family did not prevent
her from attaining an individuality and an exclusiveness which was
most illuminating to Eugene. Her room was done in silver, brown and
grey, with a great wax-festooned candlestick fully five feet high
standing in one corner and a magnificent carved chest of early
Flemish workmanship standing in another. There was a brown
combination writing desk and book-shelf which was arrayed with some
of the most curious volumes—Pater's "Marius the Epicurean,"
Daudet's "Wives of Men of Genius," Richard Jefferies' "Story of My
Heart," Stevenson's "Aes Triplex," "The Kasidah" of Richard Burton,
"The House of Life" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Also sprach
Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche. The fact that they were here,
after he had taken one look at the woman and the room, was to
Eugene sufficient proof that they were important. He handled them
curiously, reading odd paragraphs, nosing about, looking at
pictures, and making rapid notes in his mental notebook. This was
someone worth knowing, he felt that. He wanted to make a
sufficiently favorable impression to be permitted to know her
better.

Miriam Finch was at once taken with Eugene. There was such an
air of vigor, inquiry, appreciation and understanding about him
that she could not help being impressed. He seemed somewhat like a
lighted lamp casting a soft, shaded, velvety glow. He went about
her room, after his introduction, looking at her pictures, her
bronzes and clays, asking after the creator of this, the painter of
that, where a third thing came from.

"I never heard of one of these books," he said frankly, when he
looked over the small, specially selected collection.

"There are some very interesting things here," she volunteered,
coming to his side. His simple confession appealed to her. He was
like a breath of fresh air. Richard Wheeler, who had brought him
in, made no objection to being neglected. He wanted her to enjoy
his find.