The "Genius"

CHAPTER X

The introduction of this astonishing fact in connection with Angela was so unexpected, so morally diverting and peculiar that though Eugene denied it, half believed she was lying, he was harassed by the thought that she might be telling the truth. It was so unfair, though, was all he could think, so unkind! It never occurred to him that it was accidental, as indeed it was not, but only that it was a trick, sharp, cunning, ill-timed for him, just the thing calculated to blast his career and tie him down to the old régime when he wanted most to be free. A new life was dawning for him now. For the first time in his life he was to have a woman after his own heart, so young, so beautiful, so intellectual, so artistic! With Suzanne by his side, he was about to plumb the depths of all the joys of living. Without her, life was to be dark and dreary, and here was Angela coming forward at the critical moment disrupting this dream as best she could by the introduction of a child that she did not want, and all to hold him against his will. If ever he hated her for trickery and sharp dealing, he did so now. What would the effect on Suzanne be? How would he convince her that it was a trick? She must understand; she would. She would not let this miserable piece of chicanery stand between him and her. He turned in his bed wearily after he had gone to it, but he could not sleep. He had to say something, do something. So he arose, slipped on a dressing gown, and went to Angela's room.

That distraught soul, for all her determination and fighting capacity, was enduring for the second time in her life the fires of hell. To think that in spite of all her work, her dreams, this recent effort to bring about peace and happiness, perhaps at the expense of her own life, she was compelled to witness a scene like this. Eugene was trying to get free. He was obviously determined to do so. This scandalous relationship, when had it begun? Would her effort to hold him fail? It looked that way, and yet surely Suzanne, when she knew, when she understood, would leave him. Any woman would.

Her head ached, her hands were hot, she fancied she might be suffering a terrible nightmare, she was so sick and weak; but, no, this was her room. A little while ago she was sitting in her husband's studio, surrounded by friends, the object of much solicitude, Eugene apparently considerate and thoughtful of her, a beautiful programme being rendered for their special benefit. Now she was lying here in her room, a despised wife, an outcast from affection and happiness, the victim of some horrible sorcery of fate whereby another woman stood in her place in Eugene's affection. To see Suzanne, proud in her young beauty, confronting her with bold eyes, holding her husband's hand, saying in what seemed to her to be brutal, or insane, or silly melodramatic make-believe, "But I love him, Mrs. Witla," was maddening. Oh, God! Oh, God! Would her tortures never cease? Must all her beautiful dreams come to nothing? Would Eugene leave her, as he so violently said a little while ago? She had never seen him like this. It was terrible to see him so determined, so cold and brutal. His voice had actually been harsh and guttural, something she had never known before in him.

She trembled as she thought, and then great flashes of rage swept her only to be replaced by rushes of fear. She was in such a terrific position. The woman was with him, young, defiant, beautiful. She had heard him call to her, had heard them talking. Once she thought that now would be the time to murder him, Suzanne, herself, the coming life and end it all; but at this critical moment, having been sick and having grown so much older, with this problem of the coming life before her, she had no chart to go by. She tried to console herself with the thought that he must abandon his course, that he would when the true force of what she had revealed had had time to sink home; but it had not had time yet. Would it before he did anything rash? Would it before he had completely compromised himself and Suzanne? Judging from her talk and his, he had not as yet, or she thought not. What was he going to do? What was he going to do?

Angela feared as she lay there that in spite of her revelation he might really leave her immediately. There might readily spring a terrible public scandal out of all this. The mockery of their lives laid bare; the fate of the child jeopardized; Eugene, Suzanne, and herself disgraced, though she had little thought for Suzanne. Suzanne might get him, after all. She might accidentally be just hard and cold enough. The world might possibly forgive him. She herself might die! What an end, after all her dreams of something bigger, better, surer! Oh, the pity, the agony of this! The terror and horror of a wrecked life!

And then Eugene came into the room.

He was haggard, stormy-eyed, thoughtful, melancholy, as he entered. He stood in the doorway first, intent, then clicked a little night-lamp button which threw on a very small incandescent light near the head of Angela's bed, and then sat down in a rocking-chair which the nurse had placed near the medicine table. Angela had so much improved that no night nurse was needed – only a twelve-hour one.

"Well," he said solemnly but coldly, when he saw her pale, distraught, much of her old, youthful beauty still with her, "you think you have scored a splendid trick, don't you? You think you have sprung a trap? I simply came in here to tell you that you haven't – that you have only seen the beginning of the end. You say you are going to have a child. I don't believe it. It's a lie, and you know it's a lie. You saw that there was an end coming to all this state of weariness some time, and this is your answer. Well, you've played one trick too many, and you've played it in vain. You lose. I win this time. I'm going to be free now, I want to say to you, and I am going to be free if I have to turn everything upside down. I don't care if there were seventeen prospective children instead of one. It's a lie, in the first place; but if it isn't, it's a trick, and I'm not going to be tricked any longer. I've had all I want of domination and trickery and cheap ideas. I'm through now, do you hear me? I'm through."

He felt his forehead with a nervous hand. His head ached, he was half sick. This was such a dreary pit to find himself in, this pit of matrimony, chained by a domineering wife and a trickily manœuvred child. His child! What a mockery at this stage of his life! How he hated the thought of that sort of thing, how cheap it all seemed!

Angela, who was wide-eyed, flushed, exhausted, lying staring on her pillow, asked in a weary, indifferent voice: "What do you want me to do, Eugene, leave you?"

"I'll tell you, Angela," he said sepulchrally, "I don't know what I want you to do just at this moment. The old life is all over. It's as dead as dead can be. For eleven or twelve years now I have lived with you, knowing all the while that I was living a lie. I have never really loved you since we were married. You know that. I may have loved you in the beginning, yes, I did, and at Blackwood, but that was a long, long while ago. I never should have married you. It was a mistake, but I did, and I've paid for it, inch by inch. You have, too. You have insisted all along that I ought to love you. You have browbeaten and abused me for something I could no more do than I could fly. Now, at this last minute, you introduce a child to hold me. I know why you have done it. You imagine that in some way you have been appointed by God to be my mentor and guardian. Well, I tell you now that you haven't. It's all over. If there were fifty children, it's all over. Suzanne isn't going to believe any such cheap story as that, and if she did she wouldn't leave me. She knows why you do it. All the days of weariness are over for me, all the days of being afraid. I'm not an ordinary man, and I'm not going to live an ordinary life. You have always insisted on holding me down to the little, cheap conventions as you have understood them. Out in Wisconsin, out in Blackwood. Nothing doing. It's all over from now on. Everything's over. This house, my job, my real estate deal – everything. I don't care what your condition is. I love this girl in there, and I'm going to have her. Do you hear me? I love her, and I'm going to have her. She's mine. She suits me. I love her, and no power under God is going to stay me. Now you think this child proposition you have fixed up is going to stay me, but you are going to find out that it can't, that it won't. It's a trick, and I know it, and you know it. It's too late. It might have last year, or two years ago, or three, but it won't work now. You have played your last card. That girl in there belongs to me, and I'm going to have her."

Again he smoothed his face in a weary way, pausing to sway the least bit in his chair. His teeth were set, his eyes hard. Consciously he realized that it was a terrible situation that confronted him, hard to wrestle with.

Angela gazed at him with the eyes of one who is not quite sure that she even sees aright. She knew that Eugene had developed. He had become stronger, more urgent, more defiant, during all these years in which he had been going upward. He was no more like the Eugene who had clung to her for companionship in the dark days at Biloxi and elsewhere than a child is like a grown man. He was harder, easier in his manner, more indifferent, and yet, until now, there had never been a want of traces of the old Eugene. What had become of them so suddenly? Why was he so raging, so bitter? This girl, this foolish, silly, selfish girl, with her Circe gift of beauty, by tolerance of his suit, by yielding, perhaps by throwing herself at Eugene's head, had done this thing. She had drawn him away from her in spite of the fact that they had appeared to be happily mated. Suzanne did not know that they were not. In this mood he might actually leave her, even as she was, with child. It depended on the girl. Unless she could influence her, unless she could bring pressure to bear in some way, Eugene might readily be lost to her, and then what a tragedy! She could not afford to have him go now. Why, in six months – ! She shivered at the thought of all the misery a separation would entail. His position, their child, society, this apartment. Dear God, it would drive her crazy if he were to desert her now!

"Oh, Eugene," she said quite sadly and without any wrath in her voice at this moment, for she was too torn, terrified and disheveled in spirit to feel anything save a haunting sense of fear, "you don't know what a terrible mistake you are making. I did do this thing on purpose, Eugene. It is true. Long ago in Philadelphia with Mrs. Sanifore I went to a physician to see if it were possible that I might have a child. You know that I always thought that I couldn't. Well, he told me that I could. I went because I thought that you needed something like that, Eugene, to balance you. I knew you didn't want one. I thought you would be angry when I told you. I didn't act on it for a long while. I didn't want one myself. I hoped that it might be a little girl if ever there was one, because I know that you like little girls. It seems silly now in the face of what has happened tonight. I see what a mistake I have made. I see what the mistake is, but I didn't mean it evilly, Eugene. I didn't. I wanted to hold you, to bind you to me in some way, to help you. Do you utterly blame me, Eugene? I'm your wife, you know."

He stirred irritably, and she paused, scarcely knowing how to go on. She could see how terribly irritated he was, how sick at heart, and yet she resented this attitude on his part. It was so hard to endure when all along she had fancied that she had so many just claims on him, moral, social, other claims, which he dare not ignore. Here she was now, sick, weary, pleading with him for something that ought justly be hers – and this coming child's!

"Oh, Eugene," she said quite sadly, and still without any wrath in her voice, "please think before you make a mistake. You don't really love this girl, you only think you do. You think she is beautiful and good and sweet and you are going to tear everything up and leave me, but you don't love her, and you are going to find it out. You don't love anyone, Eugene. You can't. You are too selfish. If you had any real love in you, some of it would have come out to me, for I have tried to be all that a good wife should be, but it has been all in vain. I've known you haven't liked me all these years. I've seen it in your eyes, Eugene. You have never come very close to me as a lover should unless you had to or you couldn't avoid me. You have been cold and indifferent, and now that I look back I see that it has made me so. I have been cold and hard. I've tried to steel myself to match what I thought was your steeliness, and now I see what it has done for me. I'm sorry. But as for her, you don't love her and you won't. She's too young. She hasn't any ideas that agree with yours. You think she's soft and gentle, and yet big and wise, but do you think if she had been that she could have stood up there as she did tonight and looked me in the eyes – me, your wife – and told me that she loved you – you, my husband? Do you think if she had any shame she would be in there now knowing what she does, for I suppose you have told her? What kind of a girl is that, anyway? You call her good? Good! Would a good girl do anything like that?"

"What is the use of arguing by appearances?" asked Eugene, who had interrupted her with exclamations of opposition and bitter comments all through the previous address. "The situation is one which makes anything look bad. She didn't intend to be put in a position where she would have to tell you that she loved me. She didn't come here to let me make love to her in this apartment. I made love to her. She's in love with me, and I made her love me. I didn't know of this other thing. If I had, it wouldn't have made any difference. However, let that be as it will. So it is. I'm in love with her, and that's all there is to it."

Angela stared at the wall. She was half propped up on a pillow, and had no courage now to speak of and no fighting strength.

"I know what it is with you, Eugene," she said, after a time; "it's the yoke that galls. It isn't me only; it's anyone. It's marriage. You don't want to be married. It would be the same with any woman who might ever have loved and married you, or with any number of children. You would want to get rid of her and them. It's the yoke that galls you, Eugene. You want your freedom, and you won't be satisfied until you have it. A child wouldn't make any difference. I can see that now."

"I want my freedom," he exclaimed bitterly and inconsiderately, "and, what's more, I'm going to have it! I don't care. I'm sick of lying and pretending, sick of common little piffling notions of what you consider right and wrong. For eleven or twelve years now I have stood it. I have sat with you every morning at breakfast and every evening at dinner, most of the time when I didn't want to. I have listened to your theories of life when I didn't believe a word of what you said, and didn't care anything about what you thought. I've done it because I thought I ought to do it so as not to hurt your feelings, but I'm through with all that. What have I had? Spying on me, opposition, searching my pockets for letters, complaining if I dared to stay out a single evening and did not give an account of myself.

"Why didn't you leave me after that affair at Riverdale? Why do you hang on to me when I don't love you? One'd think I was prisoner and you my keeper. Good Christ! When I think of it, it makes me sick! Well, there's no use worrying over that any more. It's all over. It's all beautifully over, and I'm done with it. I'm going to live a life of my own hereafter. I'm going to carve out some sort of a career that suits me. I'm going to live with someone that I can really love, and that's the end of it. Now you run and do anything you want to."

He was like a young horse that had broken rein and that thinks that by rearing and plunging he shall become forever free. He was thinking of green fields and delightful pastures. He was free now, in spite of what she had told him. This night had made him so, and he was going to remain free. Suzanne would stand by him, he felt it. He was going to make it perfectly plain to Angela that never again, come what may, would things be as they were.