The "Genius"

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.

"If I can," said Eugene quietly, with a deprecating wave of the hand, and a faint line of self-scorn about the corners of his mouth. "It may be too late."

"'Too late! Too late!' What nonsense! Do you say that to me? If you can! If you can! Well, I give you up! You with your velvet textures and sure lines. It is too much. It is unbelievable!"

He raised his hands, eyes, and eye-brows in Gallic despair. He shrugged his shoulders, waiting to see a change of expression in Eugene.

"Very good!" said Eugene, when he heard this. "Only I can't promise anything. We will see." And he wrote out his address.

This started him once more. The Frenchman, who had often heard him spoken of and had sold all his earlier pictures, was convinced that there was money in him – if not here then abroad – money and some repute for himself as his sponsor. Some American artists must be encouraged – some must rise. Why not Eugene? Here was one who really deserved it.

So Eugene worked, painting swiftly, feverishly, brilliantly – with a feeling half the time that his old art force had deserted him for ever – everything that came into his mind. Taking a north lighted room near Myrtle he essayed portraits of her and her husband, of her and baby Angela, making arrangements which were classically simple. Then he chose models from the streets, – laborers, washerwomen, drunkards – characters all, destroying canvases frequently, but, on the whole, making steady progress. He had a strange fever for painting life as he saw it, for indicating it with exact portraits of itself, strange, grim presentations of its vagaries, futilities, commonplaces, drolleries, brutalities. The mental, fuzzy-wuzzy maunderings and meanderings of the mob fascinated him. The paradox of a decaying drunkard placed against the vivid persistence of life gripped his fancy. Somehow it suggested himself hanging on, fighting on, accusing nature, and it gave him great courage to do it. This picture eventually sold for eighteen thousand dollars, a record price.

In the meantime his lost dream in the shape of Suzanne was traveling abroad with her mother – in England, Scotland, France, Egypt, Italy, Greece. Aroused by the astonishing storm which her sudden and uncertain fascination had brought on, she was now so shaken and troubled by the disasters which had seemed to flow to Eugene in her wake, that she really did not know what to do or think. She was still too young, too nebulous. She was strong enough in body and mind, but very uncertain philosophically and morally – a dreamer and opportunist. Her mother, fearful of some headstrong, destructive outburst in which her shrewdest calculations would prove of no avail, was most anxious to be civil, loving, courteous, politic anything to avoid a disturbing re-encounter with the facts of the past, or a sudden departure on the part of Suzanne, which she hourly feared. What was she to do? Anything Suzanne wanted – her least whim, her moods in dress, pleasure, travel, friendship, were most assiduously catered to. Would she like to go here? would she like to see that? would this amuse her? would that be pleasant? And Suzanne, seeing always what her mother's motives were, and troubled by the pain and disgrace she had brought on Eugene, was uncertain now as to whether her conduct had been right or not. She puzzled over it continually.

More terrifying, however, was the thought which came to her occasionally as to whether she had really loved Eugene at all or not. Was this not a passing fancy? Had there not been some chemistry of the blood, causing her to make a fool of herself, without having any real basis in intellectual rapprochement. Was Eugene truly the one man with whom she could have been happy? Was he not too adoring, too headstrong, too foolish and mistaken in his calculations? Was he the able person she had really fancied him to be? Would she not have come to dislike him – to hate him even – in a short space of time? Could they have been truly, permanently happy? Would she not be more interested in one who was sharp, defiant, indifferent – one whom she could be compelled to adore and fight for rather than one who was constantly adoring her and needing her sympathy? A strong, solid, courageous man – was not such a one her ideal, after all? And could Eugene be said to be that? These and other questions tormented her constantly.

It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic paradoxes – these astounding blunders which temperament and blood moods bring about and reason and circumstance and convention condemn. The dreams of man are one thing – his capacity to realize them another. At either pole are the accidents of supreme failure and supreme success – the supreme failure of an Abélard for instance, the supreme success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the endless failures for one success.

But in this instance it cannot be said that Suzanne had definitely concluded that she did not love him. Far from it. Although the cleverest devices were resorted to by Mrs. Dale to bring her into contact with younger and to her – now – more interesting personalities, Suzanne – very much of an introspective dreamer and quiet spectator herself, was not to be swiftly deluded by love again – if she had been deluded. She had half decided to study men from now on, and use them, if need be, waiting for the time when some act, of Eugene's, perhaps, or some other personality, might decide for her. The strange, destructive spell of her beauty began to interest her, for now she knew that she really was beautiful. She looked in her mirror very frequently now – at the artistry of a curl, the curve of her chin, her cheek, her arm. If ever she went back to Eugene how well she would repay him for his agony. But would she? Could she? Would he have not recovered his sanity and be able to snap his fingers in her face and smile superciliously? For, after all, no doubt he was a wonderful man and would shine as something somewhere soon again. And when he did – what would he think of her – her silence, her desertion, her moral cowardice?

"After all, I am not of much account," she said to herself. "But what he thought of me! – that wild fever – that was wonderful! Really he was wonderful!"

CHAPTER XXIX

The dénouement of all this, as much as ever could be, was still two years off. By that time Suzanne was considerably more sobered, somewhat more intellectually cultivated, a little cooler – not colder exactly – and somewhat more critical. Men, when it came to her type of beauty, were a little too suggestive of their amorousness. After Eugene their proffers of passion, adoration, undying love, were not so significant.

But one day in New York on Fifth Avenue, there was a re-encounter. She was shopping with her mother, but their ways, for a moment, were divided. By now Eugene was once more in complete possession of his faculties. The old ache had subsided to a dim but colorful mirage of beauty that was always in his eye. Often he had thought what he would do if he saw Suzanne again – what say, if anything. Would he smile, bow – and if there were an answering light in her eye, begin his old courtship all over, or would he find her changed, cold, indifferent? Would he be indifferent, sneering? It would be hard on him, perhaps, afterwards, but it would pay her out and serve her right. If she really cared, she ought to be made to suffer for being a waxy fool and tool in the hands of her mother. He did not know that she had heard of his wife's death – the birth of his child – and that she had composed and destroyed five different letters, being afraid of reprisal, indifference, scorn.

She had heard of his rise to fame as an artist once more, for the exhibition had finally come about, and with it great praise, generous acknowledgments of his ability – artists admired him most of all. They thought him strange, eccentric, but great. M. Charles had suggested to a great bank director that his new bank in the financial district be decorated by Eugene alone, which was eventually done – nine great panels in which he expressed deeply some of his feeling for life. At Washington, in two of the great public buildings and in three state capitols were tall, glowing panels also of his energetic dreaming, – a brooding suggestion of beauty that never was on land or sea. Here and there in them you might have been struck by a face – an arm, a cheek, an eye. If you had ever known Suzanne as she was you would have known the basis – the fugitive spirit at the bottom of all these things.

But in spite of that he now hated her – or told himself that he did. Under the heel of his intellectuality was the face, the beauty that he adored. He despised and yet loved it. Life had played him a vile trick – love – thus to frenzy his reason and then to turn him out as mad. Now, never again, should love affect him, and yet the beauty of woman was still his great lure – only he was the master.

And then one day Suzanne appeared.

He scarcely recognized her, so sudden it was and so quickly ended. She was crossing Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street. He was coming out of a jeweler's, with a birthday ring for little Angela. Then the eyes of this girl, a pale look – a flash of something wonderful that he remembered and then —

He stared curiously – not quite sure.

"He does not even recognize me," thought Suzanne, "or he hates me now. Oh! – all in five years!"

"It is she, I believe," he said to himself, "though I am not quite sure. Well, if it is she can go to the devil!" His mouth hardened. "I will cut her as she deserves to be cut," he thought. "She shall never know that I care."

And so they passed, – never to meet in this world – each always wishing, each defying, each folding a wraith of beauty to the heart.

L'ENVOI

There appears to be in metaphysics a basis, or no basis, according as the temperament and the experience of each shall incline him, for ethical or spiritual ease or peace. Life sinks into the unknowable at every turn and only the temporary or historical scene remains as a guide, – and that passes also. It may seem rather beside the mark that Eugene in his moral and physical depression should have inclined to various religious abstrusities for a time, but life does such things in a storm. They constituted a refuge from himself, from his doubts and despairs as religious thought always does.

If I were personally to define religion I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance; an envelope to pocket him from the unescapable and unstable illimitable. We seek to think of things as permanent and see them so. Religion gives life a habitation and a name apparently – though it is an illusion. So we are brought back to time and space and illimitable mind – as what? And we shall always stand before them attributing to them all those things which we cannot know.

Yet the need for religion is impermanent, like all else in life. As the soul regains its health, it becomes prone to the old illusions. Again women entered his life – never believe otherwise – drawn, perhaps, by a certain wistfulness and loneliness in Eugene, who though quieted by tragedy for a little while was once more moving in the world. He saw their approach with more skepticism, and yet not unmoved – women who came through the drawing rooms to which he was invited, wives and daughters who sought to interest him in themselves and would scarcely take no for an answer; women of the stage – women artists, poetasters, "varietists," critics, dreamers. From the many approaches, letters and meetings, some few relationships resulted, ending as others had ended. Was he not changed, then? Not much – no. Only hardened intellectually and emotionally – tempered for life and work. There were scenes, too, violent ones, tears, separations, renouncements, cold meetings – with little Angela always to one side in Myrtle's care as a stay and consolation.

In Eugene one saw an artist who, pagan to the core, enjoyed reading the Bible for its artistry of expression, and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spinoza and James for the mystery of things which they suggested. In his child he found a charming personality and a study as well – one whom he could brood over with affectionate interest at times, seeing already something of himself and something of Angela, and wondering at the outcome. What would she be like? Would art have any interest for her? She was so daring, gay, self-willed, he thought.