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 pére 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.
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