Chapter XXV

It is a rather dreary thing to come back into the hot city in the summer after a period of beauty in the mountains. The quiet of the hills was in Eugene's mind, the glisten and babble of mountain streams, the soar and poise of hawks and buzzards and eagles sailing the crystal blue. He felt lonely and sick for awhile, out of touch with work and with practical life generally. There were little souvenirs of his recent happiness in the shape of letters and notes from Christina, but he was full of the premonition of the end which had troubled him on leaving.

He must write to Angela. He had not thought of her all the time he had been gone. He had been in the habit of writing to her every third or fourth day at least; while of late his letters had been less passionate they had remained fairly regular. But now this sudden break coming—it was fully three weeks—made her think he must be ill, although she had begun to feel also that he might be changing. His letters had grown steadily less reminiscent of the joys they had experienced together and of the happiness they were anticipating, and more inclined to deal with the color and character of city life and of what he hoped to achieve. Angela was inclined to excuse much of this on the grounds of the special effort he was making to achieve distinction and a living income for themselves. But it was hard to explain three weeks of silence without something quite serious having happened.

Eugene understood this. He tried to explain it on the grounds of illness, stating that he was now up and feeling much better. But when his explanation came, it had the hollow ring of insincerity. Angela wondered what the truth could be. Was he yielding to the temptation of that looser life that all artists were supposed to lead? She wondered and worried, for time was slipping away and he was setting no definite date for their much discussed nuptials.

The trouble with Angela's position was that the delay involved practically everything which was important in her life. She was five years older than Eugene. She had long since lost that atmosphere of youth and buoyancy which is so characteristic of a girl between eighteen and twenty-two. Those few short years following, when the body of maidenhood blooms like a rose and there is about it the freshness and color of all rich, new, lush life, were behind her. Ahead was that persistent decline towards something harder, shrewder and less beautiful. In the case of some persons the decline is slow and the fragrance of youth lingers for years, the artifices of the dressmaker, the chemist, and the jeweller being but little needed. In others it is fast and no contrivance will stay the ravages of a restless, eager, dissatisfied soul. Sometimes art combines with slowness of decay to make a woman of almost perennial charm, loveliness of mind matching loveliness of body, and taste and tact supplementing both. Angela was fortunate in being slow to fade and she had a loveliness of imagination and emotion to sustain her; but she had also a restless, anxious disposition of mind which, if it had not been stayed by the kindly color of her home life and by the fortunate or unfortunate intervention of Eugene at a time when she considered her ideal of love to have fairly passed out of the range of possibility, would already have set on her face the signs of old maidenhood. She was not of the newer order of femininity, eager to get out in the world and follow some individual line of self-development and interest. Rather was she a home woman wanting some one man to look after and love. The wonder and beauty of her dream of happiness with Eugene now made the danger of its loss and the possible compulsory continuance of a humdrum, underpaid, backwoods existence, heart-sickening.

Meanwhile, as the summer passed, Eugene was casually enlarging his acquaintance with women. MacHugh and Smite had gone back home for the summer, and it was a relief from his loneliness to encounter one day in an editorial office, Norma Whitmore, a dark, keen, temperamental and moody but brilliant writer and editor who, like others before her, took a fancy to Eugene. She was introduced to him by Jans Jansen, Art Director of the paper, and after some light banter she offered to show him her office.

She led the way to a little room no larger than six by eight where she had her desk. Eugene noticed that she was lean and sallow, about his own age or older, and brilliant and vivacious. Her hands took his attention for they were thin, shapely and artistic. Her eyes burned with a peculiar lustre and her loose-fitting clothes were draped artistically about her. A conversation sprang up as to his work, which she knew and admired, and he was invited to her apartment. He looked at Norma with an unconsciously speculative eye.

Christina was out of the city, but the memory of her made it impossible for him to write to Angela in his old vein of devotion. Nevertheless he still thought of her as charming. He thought that he ought to write more regularly. He thought that he ought pretty soon to go back and marry her. He was approaching the point where he could support her in a studio if they lived economically. But he did not want to exactly.

He had known her now for three years. It was fully a year and a half since he had seen her last. In the last year his letters had been less and less about themselves and more and more about everything else. He was finding the conventional love letters difficult. But he did not permit himself to realize just what that meant—to take careful stock of his emotions. That would have compelled him to the painful course of deciding that he could not marry her, and asking her to be released from his promise. He did not want to do that. Instead he parleyed, held by pity for her passing youth and her undeniable affection for him, by his sense of the unfairness of having taken up so much of her time to the exclusion of every other person who might have proposed to her, by sorrow for the cruelty of her position in being left to explain to her family that she had been jilted. He hated to hurt any person's feelings. He did not want to be conscious of the grief of any person who had come to suffering through him and he could not make them suffer very well and not be conscious. He was too tender hearted. He had pledged himself to Angela, giving her a ring, begging her to wait, writing her fulsome letters of protest and desire. Now, after three years, to shame her before her charming family—old Jotham, her mother, her sisters and brothers—it seemed a cruel thing to do, and he did not care to contemplate it.

Angela, with her morbid, passionate, apprehensive nature, did not fail to see disaster looming in the distance. She loved Eugene passionately and the pent-up fires of her nature had been waiting all these years the warrant to express their ardor which marriage alone could confer. Eugene, by the charm of his manner and person, no less than by the sensuous character of some of his moods and the subtleties and refinements of his references to the ties of sex, had stirred her to anticipate a perfect fruition of her dreams, and she was now eager for that fruition almost to the point of being willing to sacrifice virginity itself. The remembrance of the one significant scene between her and Eugene tormented her. She felt that if his love was to terminate in indifference now it would have been better to have yielded then. She wished that she had not tried to save herself. Perhaps there would have been a child, and he would have been true to her out of a sense of sympathy and duty. At least she would have had that crowning glory of womanhood, ardent union with her lover, and if worst had come to worst she could have died.

She thought of the quiet little lake near her home, its glassy bosom a mirror to the sky, and how, in case of failure, she would have looked lying on its sandy bottom, her pale hair diffused by some aimless motion of the water, her eyes sealed by the end of consciousness, her hands folded. Her fancy outran her daring. She would not have done this, but she could dream about it, and it made her distress all the more intense.

As time went by and Eugene's ardor did not revive, this problem of her love became more harrassing and she began to wonder seriously what she could do to win him back to her. He had expressed such a violent desire for her on his last visit, had painted his love in such glowing terms that she felt convinced he must love her still, though absence and the excitements of city life had dimmed the memory of her temporarily. She remembered a line in a comic opera which she and Eugene had seen together: "Absence is the dark room in which lovers develop negatives" and this seemed a case in point. If she could get him back, if he could be near her again, his old fever would develop and she would then find some way of making him take her, perhaps. It did not occur to her quite clearly just how this could be done at this time but some vague notion of self-immolation was already stirring vaguely and disturbingly in her brain.

The trying and in a way disheartening conditions of her home went some way to sustain this notion. Her sister Marietta was surrounded by a score of suitors who were as eager for her love as a bee is for the honey of a flower, and Angela could see that they were already looking upon herself as an elderly chaperon. Her mother and father watched her going about her work and grieved because so good a girl should be made to suffer for want of a proper understanding. She could not conceal her feelings entirely and they could see at times that she was unhappy. She could see that they saw it. It was hard to have to explain to her sisters and brothers, who occasionally asked after Eugene, that he was doing all right, and never be able to say that he was coming for her some day soon.

At first Marietta had been envious of her. She thought she would like to win Eugene for herself, and only consideration for Angela's age and the fact that she had not been so much sought after had deterred her. Now that Eugene was obviously neglecting her, or at least delaying beyond any reasonable period, she was deeply sorry. Once, before she had grown into the age of courtship, she had said to Angela: "I'm going to be nice to the men. You're too cold. You'll never get married." And Angela had realized that it was not a matter of "too cold," but an innate prejudice against most of the types she met. And then the average man did not take to her. She could not spur herself to pleasure in their company. It took a fire like Eugene's to stir her mightily, and once having known that she could brook no other. Marietta realized this too. Now because of these three years she had cut herself off from other men, particularly the one who had been most attentive to her—faithful Victor Dean. The one thing that might save Angela from being completely ignored was a spirit of romance which kept her young in looks as in feelings.

With the fear of desertion in her mind Angela began to hint in her letters to Eugene that he should come back to see her, to express the hope in her letters that their marriage need not—because of any difficulty of establishing himself—be postponed much longer. She said to him over and over that she could be happy with him in a cottage and that she so longed to see him again. Eugene began to ask himself what he wanted to do.

The fact that on the passional side Angela appealed to him more than any woman he had ever known was a saving point in her favor at this juncture. There was a note in her make-up which was stronger, deeper, more suggestive of joy to come than anything he had found elsewhere. He remembered keenly the wonderful days he had spent with her—the one significant night when she begged him to save her against herself. All the beauty of the season with which she was surrounded at that time; the charm of her family, the odor of flowers and the shade of trees served to make a setting for her delightfulness which still endured with him as fresh as yesterday. Now, without having completed that romance—a very perfect flower—could he cast it aside?

At this time he was not entangled with any woman. Miriam Finch was too conservative and intellectual; Norma Whitmore not attractive enough. As for some other charming examples of femininity whom he had met here and there, he had not been drawn to them or they to him. Emotionally he was lonely and this for him was always a very susceptible mood. He could not make up his mind that the end had come with Angela.

It so happened that Marietta, after watching her sister's love affair some time, reached the conclusion that she ought to try to help her. Angela was obviously concealing a weariness of heart which was telling on her peace of mind and her sweetness of disposition. She was unhappy and it grieved her sister greatly. The latter loved her in a whole-hearted way, in spite of the fact that their affections might possibly have clashed over Eugene, and she thought once of writing in a sweet way and telling him how things were. She thought he was good and kind, that he loved Angela, that perhaps he was delaying as her sister said until he should have sufficient means to marry well, and that if the right word were said now he would cease chasing a phantom fortune long enough to realize that it were better to take Angela while they were still young, than to wait until they were so old that the romance of marriage would for them be over. She revolved this in her mind a long time, picturing to herself how sweet Angela really was, and finally nerved herself to pen the following letter, which she sent.

Dear Eugene:

You will be surprised to get a letter from me and I want you to promise me that you will never say anything about it to anyone—above all never to Angela. Eugene, I have been watching her for a long time now and I know she is not happy. She is so desperately in love with you. I notice when a letter does not come promptly she is downcast and I can't help seeing that she is longing to have you here with her. Eugene, why don't you marry Angela? She is lovely and attractive now and she is as good as she is beautiful. She doesn't want to wait for a fine house and luxuries—no girl wants to do that, Eugene, when she loves as I know Angela does you. She would rather have you now when you are both young and can enjoy life than any fine house or nice things you might give her later. Now, I haven't talked to her at all, Eugene—never one word—and I know it would hurt her terribly if she thought I had written to you. She would never forgive me. But I can't help it. I can't bear to see her grieving and longing, and I know that when you know you will come and get her. Don't ever indicate in any way, please, that I wrote to you. Don't write to me unless you want to very much. I would rather you didn't. And tear up this letter. But do come for her soon, Eugene, please do. She wants you. And she will make you a perfectly wonderful wife for she is a wonderful girl. We all love her so—papa and mamma and all. I hope you will forgive me. I can't help it.

"With love I am yours,

"Marietta."

When Eugene received this letter he was surprised and astonished, but also distressed for himself and Angela and Marietta and the whole situation. The tragedy of this situation appealed to him perhaps as much from the dramatic as from the personal point of view. Little Angela, with her yellow hair and classic face. What a shame that they could not be together as she wished; as really, in a way, he wished. She was beautiful—no doubt of that. And there was a charm about her which was as alluring as that of any girl barring the intellectually exceptional. Her emotions in a way were deeper than those of Miriam Finch and Christina Channing. She could not reason about them—that was all. She just felt them. He saw all the phases of her anguish—the probable attitude of her parents, her own feelings at being looked at by them, the way her friends wondered. It was a shame, no doubt of that—a cruel situation. Perhaps he had better go back. He could be happy with her. They could live in a studio and no doubt things would work out all right. Had he better be cruel and not go? He hated to think of it.

Anyhow he did not answer Marietta's letter, and he did tear it up into a thousand bits, as she requested. "If Angela knew no doubt she would feel wretched," he thought.

In the meanwhile Angela was thinking, and her brooding led her to the conclusion that it might be advisable, if ever her lover came back, to yield herself in order that he might feel compelled to take her. She was no reasoner about life in any big sense. Her judgment of affairs was more confused at this time than at a later period. She had no clear conception of how foolish any trickery of this sort would be. She loved Eugene, felt that she must have him, felt that she would be willing to die rather than lose him and the thought of trickery came only as a last resource. If he refused her she was determined on one thing—the lake. She would quit this dreary world where love was crossed with despair in its finest moments; she would forget it all. If only there were rest and silence on the other side that would be enough.

The year moved on toward spring and because of some note of this, reiterated in pathetic phrases, he came to feel that he must go back. Marietta's letter preyed on his mind. The intensity of Angela's attitude made him feel that something desperate would happen. He could not, in cold blood, sit down and write her that he would not see her any more. The impressions of Blackwood were too fresh in his mind—the summer incense and green beauty of the world in which she lived. He wrote in April that he would come again in June, and Angela was beside herself with joy.

One of the things which helped Eugene to this conclusion was the fact that Christina Channing was not coming back from Europe that year. She had written a few times during the winter, but very guardedly. A casual reader could not have drawn from what she said that there had ever been anything between them. He had written much more ardently, of course, but she had chosen to ignore his eager references, making him feel by degrees that he was not to know much of her in the future. They were going to be good friends, but not necessarily lovers nor eventually husband and wife. It irritated him to think she could be so calm about a thing which to him seemed so important. It hurt his pride to think she could so deliberately throw him over. Finally he began to be incensed, and then Angela's fidelity appeared in a much finer light. There was a girl who would not treat him so. She really loved him. She was faithful and true. So his promised trip began to look much more attractive, and by June he was in a fever to see her.