Spring, summer and fall came and went with Eugene and Angela first in
Alexandria and then in Blackwood. In suffering this nervous breakdown
and being compelled to leave New York, Eugene missed some of the finest
fruits of his artistic efforts, for M. Charles, as well as a number of
other people, were interested in him and were prepared to entertain him
in an interesting and conspicuous way. He could have gone out a great
deal, but his mental state was such that he was poor company for anyone.
He was exceedingly morbid, inclined to discuss gloomy subjects, to look
on life as exceedingly sad and to believe that people generally were
evil. Lust, dishonesty, selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander, hate,
theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity--these and death
and decay occupied his thoughts. There was no light anywhere. Only a
storm of evil and death. These ideas coupled with his troubles with
Angela, the fact that he could not work, the fact that he felt he had
made a matrimonial mistake, the fact that he feared he might die or go
crazy, made a terrible and agonizing winter for him.
Angela's attitude, while sympathetic enough, once the first storm of
feeling was over, was nevertheless involved with a substratum of
criticism. While she said nothing, agreed that she would forget, Eugene
had the consciousness all the while that she wasn't forgetting, that she
was secretly reproaching him and that she was looking for new
manifestations of weakness in this direction, expecting them and on the
alert to prevent them.
The spring-time in Alexandria, opening as it did shortly after they
reached there, was in a way a source of relief to Eugene. He had decided
for the time being to give up trying to work, to give up his idea of
going either to London or Chicago, and merely rest. Perhaps it was true
that he was tired. He didn't feel that way. He couldn't sleep and he
couldn't work, but he felt brisk enough. It was only because he couldn't
work that he was miserable. Still he decided to try sheer idleness.
Perhaps that would revive his wonderful art for him. Meantime he
speculated ceaselessly on the time he was losing, the celebrities he was
missing, the places he was not seeing. Oh, London, London! If he could
only do that.
Mr. and Mrs. Witla were immensely pleased to have their boy back with
them again. Being in their way simple, unsophisticated people, they
could not understand how their son's health could have undergone such a
sudden reverse.
"I never saw Gene looking so bad in all his life," observed Witla pere
to his wife the day Eugene arrived. "His eyes are so sunken. What in the
world do you suppose is ailing him?"
"How should I know?" replied his wife, who was greatly distressed over
her boy. "I suppose he's just tired out, that's all. He'll probably be
all right after he rests awhile. Don't let on that you think he's
looking out of sorts. Just pretend that he's all right. What do you
think of his wife?"
"She appears to be a very nice little woman," replied Witla. "She's
certainly devoted to him. I never thought Eugene would marry just that
type, but he's the judge. I suppose people thought that I would never
marry anybody like you, either," he added jokingly.
"Yes, you did make a terrible mistake," jested his wife in return. "You
worked awfully hard to make it."
"I was young! I was young! You want to remember that," retorted Witla.
"I didn't know much in those days."
"You don't appear to know much better yet," she replied, "do you?"
He smiled and patted her on the back. "Well, anyhow I'll have to make
the best of it, won't I? It's too late now."
"It certainly is," replied his wife.
Eugene and Angela were given his old room on the second floor,
commanding a nice view of the yard and the street corner, and they
settled down to spend what the Witla parents hoped would be months of
peaceful days. It was a curious sensation to Eugene to find himself back
here in Alexandria looking out upon the peaceful neighborhood in which
he had been raised, the trees, the lawn, the hammock replaced several
times since he had left, but still in its accustomed place. The thought
of the little lakes and the small creek winding about the town were a
comfort to him. He could go fishing now and boating, and there were some
interesting walks here and there. He began to amuse himself by going
fishing the first week, but it was still a little cold, and he decided,
for the time being, to confine himself to walking.
Days of this kind grow as a rule quickly monotonous. To a man of
Eugene's turn of mind there was so little in Alexandria to entertain
him. After London and Paris, Chicago and New York, the quiet streets of
his old home town were a joke. He visited the office of the _Appeal_ but
both Jonas Lyle and Caleb Williams had gone, the former to St. Louis,
the latter to Bloomington. Old Benjamin Burgess, his sister's husband's
father, was unchanged except in the matter of years. He told Eugene that
he was thinking of running for Congress in the next campaign--the
Republican organization owed it to him. His son Henry, Sylvia's husband,
had become a treasurer of the local bank. He was working as patiently
and quietly as ever, going to church Sundays, going to Chicago
occasionally on business, consulting with farmers and business men about
small loans. He was a close student of the several banking journals of
the country, and seemed to be doing very well financially. Sylvia had
little to say of how he was getting along. Having lived with him for
eleven years, she had become somewhat close-mouthed like himself. Eugene
could not help smiling at the lean, slippered subtlety of the man, young
as he was. He was so quiet, so conservative, so intent on all the little
things which make a conventionally successful life. Like a cabinet
maker, he was busy inlaying the little pieces which would eventually
make the perfect whole.
Angela took up the household work, which Mrs. Witla grudgingly consented
to share with her, with a will. She liked to work and would put the
house in order while Mrs. Witla was washing the dishes after breakfast.
She would make special pies and cakes for Eugene when she could without
giving offense, and she tried to conduct herself so that Mrs. Witla
would like her. She did not think so much of the Witla household. It
wasn't so much better than her own--hardly as good. Still it was
Eugene's birthplace and for that reason important. There was a slight
divergence of view-point though, between his mother and herself, over
the nature of life and how to live it. Mrs. Witla was of an easier, more
friendly outlook on life than Angela. She liked to take things as they
came without much worry, while Angela was of a naturally worrying
disposition. The two had one very human failing in common--they could
not work with anyone else at anything. Each preferred to do all that was
to be done rather than share it at all. Both being so anxious to be
conciliatory for Eugene's sake and for permanent peace in the family,
there was small chance for any disagreement, for neither was without
tact. But there was just a vague hint of something in the air--that
Angela was a little hard and selfish, on Mrs. Witla's part; that
Mrs. Witla was just the least bit secretive, or shy or distant--from
Angela's point of view. All was serene and lovely on the surface,
however, with many won't-you-let-me's and please-do-now's on both sides.
Mrs. Witla, being so much older, was, of course, calmer and in the
family seat of dignity and peace.
To be able to sit about in a chair, lie in a hammock, stroll in the
woods and country fields and be perfectly happy in idle contemplation
and loneliness, requires an exceptional talent for just that sort of
thing. Eugene once fancied he had it, as did his parents, but since he
had heard the call of fame he could never be still any more. And just at
this time he was not in need of solitude and idle contemplation but of
diversion and entertainment. He needed companionship of the right sort,
gayety, sympathy, enthusiasm. Angela had some of this, when she was not
troubled about anything, his parents, his sister, his old acquaintances
had a little more to offer. They could not, however, be forever talking
to him or paying him attention, and beyond them there was nothing. The
town had no resources. Eugene would walk the long country roads with
Angela or go boating or fishing sometimes, but still he was lonely. He
would sit on the porch or in the hammock and think of what he had seen
in London and Paris--how he might be at work. St. Paul's in a mist, the
Thames Embankment, Piccadilly, Blackfriars Bridge, the muck of
Whitechapel and the East End--how he wished he was out of all this and
painting them. If he could only paint. He rigged up a studio in his
father's barn, using a north loft door for light and essayed certain
things from memory, but there was no making anything come out right. He
had this fixed belief, which was a notion purely, that there was always
something wrong. Angela, his mother, his father, whom he occasionally
asked for an opinion, might protest that it was beautiful or wonderful,
but he did not believe it. After a few altering ideas of this kind,
under the influences of which he would change and change and change
things, he would find himself becoming wild in his feelings, enraged at
his condition, intensely despondent and sorry for himself.
"Well," he would say, throwing down his brush, "I shall simply have to
wait until I come out of this. I can't do anything this way." Then he
would walk or read or row on the lakes or play solitaire, or listen to
Angela playing on the piano that his father had installed for Myrtle
long since. All the time though he was thinking of his condition, what
he was missing, how the gay world was surging on rapidly elsewhere, how
long it would be before he got well, if ever. He talked of going to
Chicago and trying his hand at scenes there, but Angela persuaded him to
rest for a while longer. In June she promised him they would go to
Blackwood for the summer, coming back here in the fall if he wished, or
going on to New York or staying in Chicago, just as he felt about it.
Now he needed rest.
"Eugene will probably be all right by then," Angela volunteered to his
mother, "and he can make up his mind whether he wants to go to Chicago
or London."
She was very proud of her ability to talk of where they would go and
what they would do.