The Genius (87 page)

"That isn't so bad, is it?" she asked consolingly. She wanted to
restore Eugene to a sense of the commonplace. He was so distracted
looking.

Eugene stared at it. A strange feeling came over him. Something
went up and down his body from head to toe, doing something to him.
It was a nervous, titillating, pinching feeling. He touched the
child. He looked at its hands, its face. It looked like Angela.
Yes, it did. It was his child. It was hers. Would she live? Would
he do better? Oh, God, to have this thrust at him now, and yet it
was his child. How could he? Poor little thing. If Angela died—if
Angela died, he would have this and nothing else, this little girl
out of all her long, dramatic struggle. If she died, came this. To
do what to him? To guide? To strengthen? To change? He could not
say. Only, somehow, in spite of himself, it was beginning to appeal
to him. It was the child of a storm. And Angela, so near him
now—would she ever live to see it? There she was unconscious, numb,
horribly cut. Dr. Lambert was taking a last look at her before
leaving.

"Do you think she will live, doctor?" he asked the great surgeon
feverishly. The latter looked grave.

"I can't say. I can't say. Her strength isn't all that it ought
to be. Her heart and kidneys make a bad combination. However, it
was a last chance. We had to take it. I'm sorry. I'm glad we were
able to save the child. The nurse will give her the best of
care."

He went out into his practical world as a laborer leaves his
work. So may we all. Eugene went over and stood by Angela. He was
tremendously sorry for the long years of mistrust that had brought
this about. He was ashamed of himself, of life—of its strange
tangles. She was so little, so pale, so worn. Yes, he had done
this. He had brought her here by his lying, his instability, his
uncertain temperament. It was fairly murder from one point of view,
and up to this last hour he had scarcely relented. But life had
done things to him, too. Now, now—— Oh, hell, Oh, God damn! If she
would only recover, he would try and do better. Yes, he would. It
sounded so silly coming from him, but he would try. Love wasn't
worth the agony it cost. Let it go. Let it go. He could live. Truly
there were hierarchies and powers, as Alfred Russel Wallace pointed
out. There was a God somewhere. He was on His throne. These large,
dark, immutable forces, they were not for nothing. If she would
only not die, he would try—he would behave. He would! he would!

He gazed at her, but she looked so weak, so pale now he did not
think she could come round.

"Don't you want to come home with me, Eugene?" said Myrtle, who
had come back some time before, at his elbow. "We can't do anything
here now! The nurse says she may not become conscious for several
hours. The baby is all right in their care."

The baby! the baby! He had forgotten it, forgotten Myrtle. He
was thinking of the long dark tragedy of his life—the miasma of
it.

"Yes," he said wearily. It was nearly morning. He went out and
got into a taxi and went to his sister's home, but in spite of his
weariness, he could scarcely sleep. He rolled feverishly.

In the morning he was up again, early, anxious to go back and
see how Angela was—and the child.

The trouble with Angela's system, in addition to a weak heart,
was that it was complicated at the time of her delivery by that
peculiar manifestation of nervous distortion or convulsions known
as eclampsia. Once in every five hundred cases (or at least such
was the statistical calculation at the time), some such malady
occurred to reduce the number of the newborn. In every two such
terminations one mother also died, no matter what the anticipatory
preparations were on the part of the most skilled surgeons. Though
not caused by, it was diagnosed by, certain kidney changes. What
Eugene had been spared while he was out in the hall was the sight
of Angela staring, her mouth pulled to one side in a horrible
grimace, her body bent back, canoe shape, the arms flexed, the
fingers and thumbs bending over each other to and fro, in and out,
slowly, not unlike a mechanical figure that is running down. Stupor
and unconsciousness had immediately followed, and unless the child
had been immediately brought into the world and the womb emptied,
she and it would have died a horrible death. As it was she had no
real strength to fight her way back to life and health. A Christian
Science practitioner was trying to "realize her identity with good"
for her, but she had no faith before and no consciousness now. She
came to long enough to vomit terribly, and then sank into a fever.
In it she talked of Eugene. She was in Blackwood, evidently, and
wanted him to come back to her. He held her hand and cried, for he
knew that there was never any recompense for that pain. What a dog
he had been! He bit his lip and stared out of the window.

Once he said: "Oh, I'm no damned good! I should have died!"

That whole day passed without consciousness, and most of the
night. At two in the morning Angela woke and asked to see the baby.
The nurse brought it. Eugene held her hand. It was put down beside
her, and she cried for joy, but it was a weak, soundless cry.
Eugene cried also.

"It's a girl, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes," said Eugene, and then, after a pause, "Angela, I want to
tell you something. I'm so sorry, I'm ashamed. I want you to get
well. I'll do better. Really I will." At the same time he was
wondering, almost subconsciously, whether he would or no. Wouldn't
it be all the same if she were really well—or worse?

She caressed his hand. "Don't cry," she said, "I'll be all
right. I'm going to get well. We'll both do better. It's as much my
fault as yours. I've been too hard." She worked at his fingers, but
he only choked. His vocal cords hurt him.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," he finally managed to say.

The child was taken away after a little while and Angela was
feverish again. She grew very weak, so weak that although she was
conscious later, she could not speak. She tried to make some signs.
Eugene, the nurse, Myrtle, understood. The baby. It was brought and
held up before her. She smiled a weak, yearning smile and looked at
Eugene. "I'll take care of her," he said, bending over her. He
swore a great oath to himself. He would be decent—he would be clean
henceforth and for ever. The child was put beside her for a little
while, but she could not move. She sank steadily and died.

Eugene sat by the bed holding his head in his hands. So, he had
his wish. She was really dead. Now he had been taught what it was
to fly in the face of conscience, instinct, immutable law. He sat
there an hour while Myrtle begged him to come away.

"Please, Eugene!" she said. "Please!"

"No, no," he replied. "Where shall I go? I am well enough
here."

After a time he did go, however, wondering how he would adjust
his life from now on. Who would take care of of——

"Angela" came the name to his mind. Yes, he would call her
"Angela." He had heard someone say she was going to have pale
yellow hair.

The rest of this story is a record of philosophic doubt and
speculation and a gradual return to normality, his kind of
normality—the artistic normality of which he was capable. He
would—he thought—never again be the maundering sentimentalist and
enthusiast, imagining perfection in every beautiful woman that he
saw. Yet there was a period when, had Suzanne returned suddenly,
all would have been as before between them, and even more so,
despite his tremulousness of spirit, his speculative interest in
Christian Science as a way out possibly, his sense of brutality,
almost murder, in the case of Angela—for, the old attraction still
gnawed at his vitals. Although he had Angela, junior, now to look
after, and in a way to divert him,—a child whom he came speedily to
delight in—his fortune to restore, and a sense of responsibility to
that abstract thing, society or public opinion as represented by
those he knew or who knew him, still there was this ache and this
non-controllable sense of adventure which freedom to contract a new
matrimonial alliance or build his life on the plan he schemed with
Suzanne gave him. Suzanne! Suzanne!—how her face, her gestures, her
voice, haunted him. Not Angela, for all the pathos of her tragic
ending, but Suzanne. He thought of Angela often—those last hours in
the hospital, her last commanding look which meant "please look
after our child," and whenever he did so his vocal cords tightened
as under the grip of a hand and his eyes threatened to overflow,
but even so, and even then, that undertow, that mystic cord that
seemed to pull from his solar plexus outward, was to Suzanne and to
her only. Suzanne! Suzanne! Around her hair, the thought of her
smile, her indescribable presence, was built all that substance of
romance which he had hoped to enjoy and which now, in absence and
probably final separation, glowed with a radiance which no doubt
the reality could never have had.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is
rounded with a sleep." We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and
only of dreams are our keen, stinging realities compounded. Nothing
else is so moving, so vital, so painful as a dream.

For a time that first spring and summer, while Myrtle looked
after little Angela and Eugene went to live with her and her
husband, he visited his old Christian Science practitioner, Mrs.
Johns. He had not been much impressed with the result in Angela's
case, but Myrtle explained the difficulty of the situation in a
plausible way. He was in a terrific state of depression, and it was
while he was so that Myrtle persuaded him to go again. She insisted
that Mrs. Johns would overcome his morbid gloom, anyhow, and make
him feel better. "You want to come out of this, Eugene," she
pleaded. "You will never do anything until you do. You are a big
man. Life isn't over. It's just begun. You're going to get well and
strong again. Don't worry. Everything that is is for the best."

He went once, quarreling with himself for doing so, for in spite
of his great shocks, or rather because of them, he had no faith in
religious conclusions of any kind. Angela had not been saved. Why
should he?

Still the metaphysical urge was something—it was so hard to
suffer spiritually and not believe there was some way out. At times
he hated Suzanne for her indifference. If ever she came back he
would show her. There would be no feeble urgings and pleadings the
next time. She had led him into this trap, knowing well what she
was doing—for she was wise enough—and then had lightly deserted
him. Was that the action of a large spirit? he asked himself. Would
the wonderful something he thought he saw there be capable of that?
Ah, those hours at Daleview—that one stinging encounter in
Canada!—the night she danced with him so wonderfully!

During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and
alterations which can possibly afflict a groping and morbid mind
were his. He went from what might be described as
almost
a
belief in Christian Science to almost a belief that a devil ruled
the world, a Gargantuan Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted
tragedy for all ideals and rejoiced in swine and dullards and a
grunting, sweating, beefy immorality. By degrees his God, if he
could have been said to have had one in his consciousness, sank
back into a dual personality or a compound of good and evil—the
most ideal and ascetic good, as well as the most fantastic and
swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a God of storms and
horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He then reached a
state not of abnegation, but of philosophic open-mindedness or
agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know what to believe.
All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps life loved
only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of private
speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it loudest,
he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful, artistic,
gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw,
wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once
loved and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did
not care; he might fail or die, but it could not. He was
negligible—but, oh, the sting and delight of its inner shrines and
favorable illusions.

And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this
way, he went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked
her. She seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of
the old atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria.
This woman, from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which
Mrs. Eddy's book suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she
thought, through her belief in or understanding of, the oneness of
the universe (its non-malicious, affectionate control, the
non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and death itself), had become
so grounded in her faith that evil positively did not exist save in
the belief of mortals, that at times she almost convinced Eugene
that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along these lines
with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as a boy
might on his mother.

The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not
material, and no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful,
could hold against the truth—could gainsay divine harmony. God was
good. All that is, is God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an
illusion. It could not be otherwise. She looked at Eugene's case,
as she had at many a similar one, being sure, in her earnest way,
that she, by realizing his ultimate fundamental spirituality, could
bring him out of his illusions, and make him see the real
spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and desire had
no part.

"Beloved," she loved to quote to him, "now are we the sons of
God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that
when he shall appear"—(and she explained that
he
was this
universal spirit of perfection of which we are a part)—"we shall be
like him; for we shall see him as He is."

"And every man that has this hope in him purifieth himself even
as He is pure."

She once explained to him that this did not mean that the man
must purify himself by some hopeless moral struggle, or emaciating
abstinance, but rather that the fact that he had this hope of
something better in him, would fortify him in spite of himself.

"You laugh at me," she said to him one day, "but I tell you you
are a child of God. There is a divine spark in you. It must come
out. I know it will. All this other thing will fall away as a bad
dream. It has no reality."

She even went so far in a sweet motherly way as to sing hymns to
him, and now, strange to relate, her thin voice was no longer
irritating to him, and her spirit made her seemingly beautiful in
his eyes. He did not try to adjust the curiosities and anomalies of
material defects in so far as she was concerned. The fact that her
rooms were anything but artistically perfect; that her body was
shapeless, or comparatively so, when contrasted with that standard
of which he had always been so conscious; the fact that whales were
accounted by her in some weird way as spiritual, and bugs and
torturesome insects of all kinds as emanations of mortal mind, did
not trouble him at all. There was something in this thought of a
spiritual universe—of a kindly universe, if you sought to make it
so, which pleased him. The five senses certainly could not indicate
the totality of things; beyond them must lie depths upon depths of
wonder and power. Why might not this act? Why might it not be good?
That book that he had once read—"The World Machine"—had indicated
this planetary life as being infinitesimally small; that from the
point of view of infinity it was not even thinkable—and yet here it
appeared to be so large. Why might it not be, as Carlyle had said,
a state of mind, and as such, so easily dissolvable. These thoughts
grew by degrees, in force, in power.

At the same time he was beginning to go out again a little. A
chance meeting with M. Charles, who grasped his hand warmly and
wanted to know where he was and what he was doing, revived his old
art fever. M. Charles suggested, with an air of extreme interest,
that he should get up another exhibition along whatever line he
chose.

"You!" he said, with a touch of heartening sympathy, and yet
with a glow of fine corrective scorn, for he considered Eugene as
an artist only, and a very great one at that. "You,—Eugene Witla—an
editor—a publisher! Pah! You—who could have all the art lovers of
the world at your feet in a few years if you chose—you who could do
more for American art in your life time than anyone I know, wasting
your time art directing, art editing—publishing! Pouf! Aren't you
really ashamed of yourself? But it isn't too late. Come now—a fine
exhibition! What do you say to an exhibition of some kind next
January or February, in the full swing of the season? Everybody's
interested then. I will give you our largest gallery. How is that?
What do you say?" he glowed in a peculiarly Frenchy way,—half
commanding, half inspiring or exhorting.