The Genius (43 page)

It was thus that Eugene floundered to and fro, and it was in
this state, brooding and melancholy, that Angela found him on her
arrival. He was as gay as ever at times, when he was not thinking,
but he was very thin and hollow-eyed, and Angela fancied that it
was overwork and worry which kept him in this state. Why had she
left him? Poor Eugene! She had clung desperately to the money he
had given her, and had most of it with her ready to be expended now
for his care. She was so anxious for his recovery and his peace of
mind that she was ready to go to work herself at anything she could
find, in order to make his path more easy. She was thinking that
fate was terribly unjust to him, and when he had gone to sleep
beside her the first night she lay awake and cried. Poor Eugene! To
think he should be tried so by fate. Nevertheless, he should not be
tortured by anything which she could prevent. She was going to make
him as comfortable and happy as she could. She set about to find
some nice little apartment or rooms where they could live in peace
and where she could cook Eugene's meals for him. She fancied that
maybe his food had not been exactly right, and when she got him
where she could manifest a pretence of self-confidence and courage
that he would take courage from her and grow better. So she set
briskly about her task, honeying Eugene the while, for she was
confident that this above all things was the thing he needed. She
little suspected what a farce it all appeared to him, how mean and
contemptible he appeared to himself. He did not care to be mean—to
rapidly disillusion her and go his way; and yet this dual existence
sickened him. He could not help but feel that from a great many
points of view Angela was better than Carlotta. Yet the other woman
was wider in her outlook, more gracious in her appearance, more
commanding, more subtle. She was a princess of the world, subtle,
deadly Machiavellian, but a princess nevertheless. Angela was
better described by the current and acceptable phrase of the time—a
"thoroughly good woman," honest, energetic, resourceful, in all
things obedient to the race spirit and the conventional feelings of
the time. He knew that society would support her thoroughly and
condemn Carlotta, and yet Carlotta interested him more. He wished
that he might have both and no fussing. Then all would be
beautiful. So he thought.

The situation which here presented itself was subject to no such
gracious and generous development. Angela was the soul of
watchfulness, insistence on duty, consideration for right conduct
and for the privileges, opportunities and emoluments which belonged
to her as the wife of a talented artist, temporarily disabled, it
is true, but certain to be distinguished in the future. She was
deluding herself that this recent experience of reverses had
probably hardened and sharpened Eugene's practical instincts, made
him less indifferent to the necessity of looking out for himself,
given him keener instincts of self-protection and economy. He had
done very well to live on so little she thought, but they were
going to do better—they were going to save. She was going to give
up those silly dreams she had entertained of a magnificent studio
and hosts of friends, and she was going to start now saving a
fraction of whatever they made, however small it might be, if it
were only ten cents a week. If Eugene could only make nine dollars
a week by working every day, they were going to live on that. He
still had ninety-seven of the hundred dollars he had brought with
him, he told her, and this was going in the bank. He did not tell
her of the sale of one of his pictures and of the subsequent
dissipation of the proceeds. In the bank, too, they were going to
put any money from subsequent sales until he was on his feet again.
One of these days if they ever made any money, they were going to
buy a house somewhere in which they could live without paying rent.
Some of the money in the bank, a very little of it, might go for
clothes if worst came to worst, but it would not be touched unless
it was absolutely necessary. She needed clothes now, but that did
not matter. To Eugene's ninety-seven was added Angela's two hundred
and twenty-eight which she brought with her, and this total sum of
three hundred and twenty-five dollars was promptly deposited in the
Bank of Riverwood.

Angela by personal energy and explanation found four rooms in
the house of a furniture manufacturer; it had been vacated by a
daughter who had married, and they were glad to let it to an artist
and his wife for practically nothing so far as real worth was
concerned, for this was a private house in a lovely lawn. Twelve
dollars per month was the charge. Mrs. Witla seemed very charming
to Mrs. Desenas, who was the wife of the manufacturer, and for her
especial benefit a little bedroom on the second floor adjoining a
bath was turned into a kitchen, with a small gas stove, and Angela
at once began housekeeping operations on the tiny basis
necessitated by their income. Some furniture had to be secured, for
the room was not completely furnished, but Angela by haunting the
second-hand stores in New York, looking through all the department
stores, and visiting certain private sales, managed to find a few
things which she could buy cheaply and which would fit in with the
dressing table, library table, dining table and one bed which were
already provided. The necessary curtains for the bath and kitchen
windows she cut, decorated and hung for herself. She went down to
the storage company where the unsold and undisplayed portion of
Eugene's pictures were and brought back seven, which she placed in
the general living-room and dining-room. All Eugene's clothes, his
underwear and socks particularly, received her immediate attention,
and she soon had his rather attenuated wardrobe in good condition.
From the local market she bought good vegetables and a little meat
and made delightful stews, ragouts, combinations of eggs and tasty
meat juices after the French fashion. All her housekeeping art was
employed to the utmost to make everything look clean and neat, to
maintain a bountiful supply of varied food on the table and yet to
keep the cost down, so that they could not only live on nine
dollars a week, but set aside a dollar or more of that for what
Angela called their private bank account. She had a little hollow
brown jug, calculated to hold fifteen dollars in change, which
could be opened when full, which she conscientiously endeavored to
fill and refill. Her one desire was to rehabilitate her husband in
the eyes of the world—this time to stay—and she was determined to
do it.

For another thing, reflection and conversation with one person
and another had taught her that it was not well for herself or for
Eugene for her to encourage him in his animal passions. Some woman
in Blackwood had pointed out a local case of locomotor-ataxia which
had resulted from lack of self-control, and she had learned that it
was believed that many other nervous troubles sprang from the same
source. Perhaps Eugene's had. She had resolved to protect him from
himself. She did not believe she could be injured, but Eugene was
so sensitive, so emotional.

The trouble with the situation was that it was such a sharp
change from his recent free and to him delightful mode of existence
that it was almost painful. He could see that everything appeared
to be satisfactory to her, that she thought all his days had been
moral and full of hard work. Carlotta's presence in the background
was not suspected. Her idea was that they would work hard together
now along simple, idealistic lines to the one end—success for him,
and of course, by reflection, for her.

Eugene saw the charm of it well enough, but it was only as
something quite suitable for others. He was an artist. The common
laws of existence could not reasonably apply to an artist. The
latter should have intellectual freedom, the privilege of going
where he pleased, associating with whom he chose. This marriage
business was a galling yoke, cutting off all rational opportunity
for enjoyment, and he was now after a brief period of freedom
having that yoke heavily adjusted to his neck again. Gone were all
the fine dreams of pleasure and happiness which so recently had
been so real—the hope of living with Carlotta—the hope of
associating with her on easy and natural terms in that superior
world which she represented. Angela's insistence on the thought
that he should work every day and bring home nine dollars a week,
or rather its monthly equivalent, made it necessary for him to take
sharp care of the little money he had kept out of the remainder of
the three hundred in order to supply any deficiency which might
occur from his taking time off. For there was no opportunity now of
seeing Carlotta of an evening, and it was necessary to take a
regular number of afternoons or mornings off each week, in order to
meet her. He would leave the little apartment as usual at a quarter
to seven in the morning, dressed suitably for possible out-door
expeditions, for in anticipation of difficulty he had told Angela
that it was his custom to do this, and sometimes he would go to the
factory and sometimes he would not. There was a car line which
carried him rapidly cityward to a rendezvous, and he would either
ride or walk with her as the case might be. There was constant
thought on his and her part of the risk involved, but still they
persisted. By some stroke of ill or good fortune Norman Wilson
returned from Chicago, so that Carlotta's movements had to be
calculated to a nicety, but she did not care. She trusted most to
the automobiles which she could hire at convenient garages and
which would carry them rapidly away from the vicinity where they
might be seen and recognized.

It was a tangled life, difficult and dangerous. There was no
peace in it, for there is neither peace nor happiness in deception.
A burning joy at one time was invariably followed by a disturbing
remorse afterward. There was Carlotta's mother, Norman Wilson, and
Angela, to guard against, to say nothing of the constant pricking
of his own conscience.

It is almost a foregone conclusion in any situation of this kind
that it cannot endure. The seed of its undoing is in itself. We
think that our actions when unseen of mortal eyes resolve
themselves into nothingness, but this is not true. They are woven
indefinably into our being, and shine forth ultimately as the real
self, in spite of all our pretences. One could almost accept the
Brahmanistic dogma of a psychic body which sees and is seen where
we dream all to be darkness. There is no other supposition on which
to explain the facts of intuition. So many individuals have it.
They know so well without knowing why they know.

Angela had this intuitive power in connection with Eugene.
Because of her great affection for him she divined or apprehended
many things in connection with him long before they occurred.
Throughout her absence from him she had been haunted by the idea
that she ought to be with him, and now that she was here and the
first excitement of contact and adjustment was over, she was
beginning to be aware of something. Eugene was not the same as he
had been a little while before he had left her. His attitude, in
spite of a kindly show of affection, was distant and preoccupied.
He had no real power of concealing anything. He appeared at
times—at most times when he was with her—to be lost in a mist of
speculation. He was lonely and a little love-sick, because under
the pressure of home affairs Carlotta was not able to see him quite
so much. At the same time, now that the fall was coming on, he was
growing weary of the shop at Speonk, for the gray days and slight
chill which settled upon the earth at times caused the shop windows
to be closed and robbed the yard of that air of romance which had
characterized it when he first came there. He could not take his
way of an evening along the banks of the stream to the arms of
Carlotta. The novelty of Big John and Joseph Mews and Malachi
Dempsey and Little Suddsy had worn off. He was beginning now to see
also that they were nothing but plain workingmen after all,
worrying over the fact that they were not getting more than fifteen
or seventeen and a half cents an hour; jealous of each other and
their superiors, full of all the frailties and weaknesses to which
the flesh is heir.

His coming had created a slight diversion for them, for he was
very strange, but his strangeness was no longer a novelty. They
were beginning to see him also as a relatively commonplace human
being. He was an artist, to be sure, but his actions and intentions
were not so vastly different from those of other men.

A shop of this kind, like any other institution where people are
compelled by force of circumstances to work together whether the
weather be fair or foul, or the mood grave or gay, can readily
become and frequently does become a veritable hell. Human nature is
a subtle, irritable, irrational thing. It is not so much governed
by rules of ethics and conditions of understanding as a thing of
moods and temperament. Eugene could easily see, philosopher that he
was, that these people would come here enveloped in some mist of
home trouble or secret illness or grief and would conceive that
somehow it was not their state of mind but the things around them
which were the cause of all their woe. Sour looks would breed sour
looks in return; a gruff question would beget a gruff answer; there
were long-standing grudges between one man and another, based on
nothing more than a grouchy observation at one time in the past. He
thought by introducing gaiety and persistent, if make-believe,
geniality that he was tending to obviate and overcome the general
condition, but this was only relatively true. His own gaiety was
capable of becoming as much of a weariness to those who were out of
the spirit of it, as was the sour brutality with which at times he
was compelled to contend. So he wished that he might arrange to get
well and get out of here, or at least change his form of work, for
it was plain to be seen that this condition would not readily
improve. His presence was a commonplace. His power to entertain and
charm was practically gone.

This situation, coupled with Angela's spirit of honest
conservatism was bad, but it was destined to be much worse. From
watching him and endeavoring to decipher his moods, Angela came to
suspect something—she could not say what. He did not love her as
much as he had. There was a coolness in his caresses which was not
there when he left her. What could have happened, she asked
herself. Was it just absence, or what? One day when he had returned
from an afternoon's outing with Carlotta and was holding her in his
arms in greeting, she asked him solemnly:

"Do you love me, Honeybun?"

"You know I do," he asseverated, but without any energy, for he
could not regain his old original feeling for her. There was no
trace of it, only sympathy, pity, and a kind of sorrow that she was
being so badly treated after all her efforts.

"No, you don't," she replied, detecting the hollow ring in what
he said. Her voice was sad, and her eyes showed traces of that
wistful despair into which she could so readily sink at times.

"Why, yes I do, Angelface," he insisted. "What makes you ask?
What's come over you?" He was wondering whether she had heard
anything or seen anything and was concealing her knowledge behind
this preliminary inquiry.

"Nothing," she replied. "Only you don't love me. I don't know
what it is. I don't know why. But I can feel it right here," and
she laid her hand on her heart.

The action was sincere, unstudied. It hurt him, for it was like
that of a little child.

"Oh, hush! Don't say that," he pleaded. "You know I do. Don't
look so gloomy. I love you—don't you know I do?" and he kissed
her.

"No, no!" said Angela. "I know! You don't. Oh, dear; oh, dear; I
feel so bad!"

Eugene was dreading another display of the hysteria with which
he was familiar, but it did not come. She conquered her mood,
inasmuch as she had no real basis for suspicion, and went about the
work of getting him his dinner. She was depressed, though, and he
was fearful. What if she should ever find out!

More days passed. Carlotta called him up at the shop
occasionally, for there was no phone where he lived, and she would
not have risked it if there had been. She sent him registered notes
to be signed for, addressed to Henry Kingsland and directed to the
post office at Speonk. Eugene was not known there as Witla and
easily secured these missives, which were usually very guarded in
their expressions and concerned appointments—the vaguest, most
mysterious directions, which he understood. They made arrangements
largely from meeting to meeting, saying, "If I can't keep it
Thursday at two it will be Friday at the same time; and if not
then, Saturday. If anything happens I'll send you a registered
special." So it went on.