The Genius (34 page)

Angela knew nothing of his real thoughts, for because of
sympathy, a secret sense of injustice toward her on his part, a
vigorous, morbid impression of the injustice of life as a whole, a
desire to do things in a kindly or at least a secret and not brutal
way, he was led to pretend at all times that he really cared for
her; to pose as being comfortable and happy; to lay all his moods
to his inability to work. Angela, who could not read him clearly,
saw nothing of this. He was too subtle for her understanding at
times. She was living in a fool's paradise; playing over a sleeping
volcano.

He grew no better and by fall began to get the notion that he
could do better by living in Chicago. His health would come back to
him there perhaps. He was terribly tired of Blackwood. The long
tree-shaded lawn was nothing to him now. The little lake, the
stream, the fields that he had rejoiced in at first were to a great
extent a commonplace. Old Jotham was a perpetual source of delight
to him with his kindly, stable, enduring attitude toward things and
his interesting comment on life, and Marietta entertained him with
her wit, her good nature, her intuitive understanding; but he could
not be happy just talking to everyday, normal, stable people,
interesting and worthwhile as they might be. The doing of simple
things, living a simple life, was just now becoming irritating. He
must go to London, Paris—do things. He couldn't loaf this way. It
mattered little that he could not work. He must try. This isolation
was terrible.

There followed six months spent in Chicago in which he painted
not one picture that was satisfactory to him, that was not messed
into nothingness by changes and changes and changes. There were
then three months in the mountains of Tennessee because someone
told him of a wonderfully curative spring in a delightful valley
where the spring came as a dream of color and the expense of living
was next to nothing. There were four months of summer in southern
Kentucky on a ridge where the air was cool, and after that five
months on the Gulf of Mexico, at Biloxi, in Mississippi, because
some comfortable people in Kentucky and Tennessee told Angela of
this delightful winter resort farther South. All this time Eugene's
money, the fifteen hundred dollars he had when he left Blackwood,
several sums of two hundred, one hundred and fifty and two hundred
and fifty, realized from pictures sold in New York and Paris during
the fall and winter following his Paris exhibition, and two hundred
which had come some months afterward from a fortuitous sale by M.
Charles of one of his old New York views, had been largely
dissipated. He still had five hundred dollars, but with no pictures
being sold and none painted he was in a bad way financially in so
far as the future was concerned. He could possibly return to
Alexandria with Angela and live cheaply there for another six
months, but because of the Frieda incident both he and she objected
to it. Angela was afraid of Frieda and was resolved that she would
not go there so long as Frieda was in the town, and Eugene was
ashamed because of the light a return would throw on his fading art
prospects. Blackwood was out of the question to him. They had lived
on her parents long enough. If he did not get better he must soon
give up this art idea entirely, for he could not live on trying to
paint.

He began to think that he was possessed—obsessed of a devil—and
that some people were pursued by evil spirits, fated by stars,
doomed from their birth to failure or accident. How did the
astrologer in New York know that he was to have four years of bad
luck? He had seen three of them already. Why did a man who read his
palm in Chicago once say that his hand showed two periods of
disaster, just as the New York astrologer had and that he was
likely to alter the course of his life radically in the middle
portion of it? Were there any fixed laws of being? Did any of the
so-called naturalistic school of philosophers and scientists whom
he had read know anything at all? They were always talking about
the fixed laws of the universe—the unalterable laws of chemistry
and physics. Why didn't chemistry or physics throw some light on
his peculiar physical condition, on the truthful prediction of the
astrologer, on the signs and portents which he had come to observe
for himself as foretelling trouble or good fortune for himself. If
his left eye twitched he had observed of late he was going to have
a quarrel with someone—invariably Angela. If he found a penny or
any money, he was going to get money; for every notification of a
sale of a picture with the accompanying check had been preceded by
the discovery of a coin somewhere: once a penny in State Street,
Chicago, on a rainy day—M. Charles wrote that a picture had been
sold in Paris for two hundred; once a three-cent piece of the old
American issue in the dust of a road in Tennessee—M. Charles wrote
that one of his old American views had brought one hundred and
fifty; once a penny in sands by the Gulf in Biloxi—another
notification of a sale. So it went. He found that when doors
squeaked, people were apt to get sick in the houses where they
were; and a black dog howling in front of a house was a sure sign
of death. He had seen this with his own eyes, this sign which his
mother had once told him of as having been verified in her
experience, in connection with the case of a man who was sick in
Biloxi. He was sick, and a dog came running along the street and
stopped in front of this place—a black dog—and the man died. Eugene
saw this with his own eyes,—that is, the dog and the sick man's
death notice. The dog howled at four o'clock in the afternoon and
the next morning the man was dead. He saw the crape on the door.
Angela mocked at his superstition, but he was convinced. "There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in
your philosophy."

Eugene was reaching the point where he had no more money and was
compelled to think by what process he would continue to make a
living in the future. Worry and a hypochondriacal despair had
reduced his body to a comparatively gaunt condition. His eyes had a
nervous, apprehensive look. He would walk about speculating upon
the mysteries of nature, wondering how he was to get out of this,
what was to become of him, how soon, if ever, another picture would
be sold, when? Angela, from having fancied that his illness was a
mere temporary indisposition, had come to feel that he might be
seriously affected for some time. He was not sick physically: he
could walk and eat and talk vigorously enough, but he could not
work and he was worrying, worrying, worrying.

Angela was quite as well aware as Eugene that their finances
were in a bad way or threatening to become so, though he said
nothing at all about them. He was ashamed to confess at this day,
after their very conspicuous beginning in New York, that he was in
fear of not doing well. How silly—he with all his ability! Surely
he would get over this, and soon.

Angela's economical upbringing and naturally saving instinct
stood her in good stead now, for she could market with the greatest
care, purchase to the best advantage, make every scrap and penny
count. She knew how to make her own clothes, as Eugene had found
out when he first visited Blackwood, and was good at designing
hats. Although she had thought in New York, when Eugene first began
to make money, that now she would indulge in tailor-made garments
and the art of an excellent dressmaker, she had never done so. With
true frugality she had decided to wait a little while, and then
Eugene's health having failed she had not the chance any more.
Fearing the possible long duration of this storm she had begun to
mend and clean and press and make over whatever seemed to require
it. Even when Eugene suggested that she get something new she would
not do it. Her consideration for their future—the difficulty he
might have in making a living, deterred her.

Eugene noted this, though he said nothing. He was not unaware of
the fear that she felt, the patience she exhibited, the sacrifice
she made of her own whims and desires to his, and he was not
entirely unappreciative. It was becoming very apparent to him that
she had no life outside his own—no interests. She was his shadow,
his alter ego, his servant, his anything he wanted her to be.
"Little Pigtail" was one of his jesting pet names for her because
in the West as a boy they had always called anyone who ran errands
for others a pigtailer. In playing "one old cat," if one wanted
another to chase the struck balls he would say: "You pig-tail for
me, Willie, will you?" And Angela was his "little pigtail."

There were no further grounds for jealousy during the time,
almost two years, in which they were wandering around together, for
the reason that she was always with him, almost his sole companion,
and that they did not stay long enough in any one place and under
sufficiently free social conditions to permit him to form those
intimacies which might have resulted disastrously. Some girls did
take his eye—the exceptional in youth and physical perfection were
always doing that, but he had no chance or very little of meeting
them socially. They were not living with people they knew, were not
introduced in the local social worlds, which they visited. Eugene
could only look at these maidens whom he chanced to spy from time
to time, and wish that he might know them better. It was hard to be
tied down to a conventional acceptance of matrimony—to pretend that
he was interested in beauty only in a sociological way. He had to
do it before Angela though (and all conventional people for that
matter), for she objected strenuously to the least interest he
might manifest in any particular woman. All his remarks had to be
general and guarded in their character. At the least show of
feeling or admiration Angela would begin to criticize his choice
and to show him wherein his admiration was ill-founded. If he were
especially interested she would attempt to tear his latest ideal to
pieces. She had no mercy, and he could see plainly enough on what
her criticism was based. It made him smile but he said nothing. He
even admired her for her heroic efforts to hold her own, though
every victory she seemed to win served only to strengthen the bars
of his own cage.

It was during this time that he could not help learning and
appreciating just how eager, patient and genuine was her regard for
his material welfare. To her he was obviously the greatest man in
the world, a great painter, a great thinker, a great lover, a great
personality every way. It didn't make so much difference to her at
this time that he wasn't making any money. He would sometime,
surely, and wasn't she getting it all in fame anyhow, now? Why, to
be Mrs. Eugene Witla, after what she had seen of him in New York
and Paris, what more could she want? Wasn't it all right for her to
rake and scrape now, to make her own clothes and hats, save, mend,
press and patch? He would come out of all this silly feeling about
other women once he became a little older, and then he would be all
right. Anyhow he appeared to love her now; and that was something.
Because he was lonely, fearsome, uncertain of himself, uncertain of
the future, he welcomed these unsparing attentions on her part, and
this deceived her. Who else would give them to him, he thought; who
else would be so faithful in times like these? He almost came to
believe that he could love her again, be faithful to her, if he
could keep out of the range of these other enticing personalities.
If only he could stamp out this eager desire for other women, their
praise and their beauty!

But this was more because he was sick and lonely than anything
else. If he had been restored to health then and there, if
prosperity had descended on him as he so eagerly dreamed, it would
have been the same as ever. He was as subtle as nature itself; as
changeable as a chameleon. But two things were significant and
real—two things to which he was as true and unvarying as the needle
to the pole—his love of the beauty of life which was coupled with
his desire to express it in color, and his love of beauty in the
form of the face of a woman, or rather that of a girl of eighteen.
That blossoming of life in womanhood at eighteen!—there was no
other thing under the sun like it to him. It was like the budding
of the trees in spring; the blossoming of flowers in the early
morning; the odor of roses and dew, the color of bright waters and
clear jewels. He could not be faithless to that. He could not get
away from it. It haunted him like a joyous vision, and the fact
that the charms of Stella and Ruby and Angela and Christina and
Frieda in whom it had been partially or wholly shadowed forth at
one time or another had come and gone, made little difference. It
remained clear and demanding. He could not escape it—the thought;
he could not deny it. He was haunted by this, day after day, and
hour after hour; and when he said to himself that he was a fool,
and that it would lure him as a will-o'-the-wisp to his destruction
and that he could find no profit in it ultimately, still it would
not down. The beauty of youth; the beauty of eighteen! To him life
without it was a joke, a shabby scramble, a work-horse job, with
only silly material details like furniture and houses and steel
cars and stores all involved in a struggle for what? To make a
habitation for more shabby humanity? Never! To make a habitation
for beauty? Certainly! What beauty? The beauty of old age?—How
silly! The beauty of middle age? Nonsense! The beauty of maturity?
No! The beauty of youth? Yes. The beauty of eighteen. No more and
no less. That was the standard, and the history of the world proved
it. Art, literature, romance, history, poetry—if they did not turn
on this and the lure of this and the wars and sins because of this,
what did they turn on? He was for beauty. The history of the world
justified him. Who could deny it?