The ''Genius'', Theodore Dreiser [classic reads txt] 📗

"I have always wished I could lay out a seaside resort or a suburb," said Eugene dreamily. "I've never been to but one or two of the resorts abroad, but it strikes me that none of the resorts here—certainly none near New York—are right. The opportunities are so wonderful. The things that have been done are horrible. There is no plan, no detail anywhere."

"My views exactly," said Winfield. "I've been thinking of it for years. Some such place could be built, and I suppose if it were done right it would be successful. It would be expensive, though, very, and those who come in would have a long wait for their money."

"It would be a great opportunity to do something really worth while, though," said Eugene. "No one seems to realize how beautiful a thing like that could be made."

Winfield said nothing, but the thought stuck in his mind. He was dreaming a seaside improvement which should be the most perfect place of its kind in the world—a monument to himself if he did it. If Eugene had this idea of beauty he might help. At least he might talk to him about it when the time came. Perhaps Eugene might have a little money to invest. It would take millions to put such a scheme through, but every little would help. Besides Eugene might have ideas which should make money both for himself and for Winfield. It was worth thinking about. So they parted, not to meet again for weeks and months, but they did not forget each other.

It was when Eugene was at the height of his success that a meeting took place between himself and a certain Mrs. Emily Dale.

Mrs. Dale was a strikingly beautiful and intelligent widow of thirty-eight, the daughter of a well-to-do and somewhat famous New York family of Dutch extraction—the widow of an eminent banker of considerable wealth who had been killed in an automobile accident near Paris some years before. She was the mother of four children, Suzanne, eighteen; Kinroy, fifteen; Adele, twelve, and Ninette, nine, but the size of her family had in no way affected the subtlety of her social personality and the delicacy of her charm and manner. She was tall, graceful, willowy, with a wealth of dark hair, which was used in the most subtle manner to enhance the beauty of her face. She was calm, placid apparently, while really running deep with emotion and fancies, with manners which were the perfection of kindly courtesy and good breeding and with those airs of superiority which come so naturally to those who are raised in a fortunate and exclusive atmosphere.

She did not consider herself passionate in a marked degree, but freely admitted to herself that she was vain and coquettish. She was keen and observing, with a single eye to the main chance socially, but with a genuine love for literature and art and a propensity to write. Eugene met her through Colfax, who introduced him to her. He learned from the latter that she was rather unfortunate in her marriage except from a money point of view, and that her husband's death was no irreparable loss. He also learned from the same source that she was a good mother, trying to bring up her children in the manner most suitable to their station and opportunities. Her husband had been of a much poorer social origin than herself, but her own standing was of the very best. She was a gay social figure, being invited much, entertaining freely, preferring the company of younger men to those of her own age or older and being followed ardently by one fortune hunter and another, who saw in her beauty, wealth and station, an easy door to the heaven of social supremacy.

The Dale home, or homes rather, were in several different places—one at Morristown, New Jersey, another on fashionable Grimes Hill on Staten Island, a third—a city residence, which at the time Eugene met them, was leased for a term of years—was in Sixty-seventh Street, near Fifth Avenue in New York City, and a fourth, a small lodge, at Lenox, Massachusetts, which was also rented. Shortly after he met her the house at Morristown was closed and the lodge at Lenox re-occupied.

For the most part Mrs. Dale preferred to dwell in her ancestral home on Staten Island, which, because of its commanding position on what was known as Grimes Hill, controlled a magnificent view of the bay and harbor of New York. Manhattan, its lower wall of buildings, lay like a cloud at the north. The rocking floor of the sea, blue and gray and slate black by turn, spread to the east. In the west were visible the Kill von Kull with its mass of shipping and the Orange Hills. In a boat club at Tompkinsville she had her motor boat, used mostly by her boy; in her garage at Grimes Hill, several automobiles. She owned several riding horses, retained four family servants permanently and in other ways possessed all those niceties of appointment which make up the comfortable life of wealth and ease.

The two youngest of her girls were in a fashionable boarding school at Tarrytown; the boy, Kinroy, was preparing for Harvard; Suzanne, the eldest, was at home, fresh from boarding school experiences, beginning to go out socially. Her début had already been made. Suzanne was a peculiar girl, plump, beautiful, moody, with, at times, a dreamy air of indifference and a smile that ran like a breath of air over water. Her eyes were large, of a vague blue-gray, her lips rosy and arched; her cheeks full and pink. She had a crown of light chestnut hair, a body at once innocent and voluptuous in its outlines. When she laughed it was a rippling gurgle, and her sense of humor was perfect, if not exaggerated. One of those naturally wise but as yet vague and formless artistic types, which suspect without education, nearly all the subtleties of the world, and burst forth full winged and beautiful, but oh, so fragile, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, the radiance of morning upon its body. Eugene did not see her for a long time after he met Mrs. Dale, but when he did, he was greatly impressed with her beauty.

Life sometimes builds an enigma out of common clay, and with a look from a twelve-year-old girl, sets a Dante singing. It can make a god of a bull, a divinity of an ibis, or a beetle, set up a golden calf to be worshipped of the multitude. Paradox! Paradox! In this case an immature and yet nearly perfect body held a seemingly poetic and yet utterly nebulous appreciation of life—a body so youthful, a soul so fumbling that one would ask, How should tragedy lurk in form like this?

A fool?

Not quite, yet so nebulous, so much a dreamer that difficulty might readily follow in the wake of any thoughtless deed.

As a matter of fact, favored as she was by nature and fortune, her very presence was dangerous—provocative, without thought of being so. If a true artist had painted her, synthesizing her spirit with her body, he might have done so showing her standing erect on a mountain top, her limbs outlined amidst fluttering draperies against the wind, her eyes fixed on distant heights, or a falling star. Out of mystery into mystery again, so she came and went. Her mind was not unlike a cloud of mist through which the morning sun is endeavoring to break, irradiating all with its flushes of pink and gold. Again it was like those impearled shells of the South Sea, without design yet suggestive of all perfections and all beauties. Dreams! dreams!—of clouds, sunsets, colors, sounds which a too articulate world would do its best later to corrupt. What Dante saw in Beatrice, what Abélard saw in Héloïse, Romeo in Juliet, so some wondering swain could have seen in her—and suffered a like fate.

Eugene encountered Mrs. Dale at a house party on Long Island one Saturday afternoon, and their friendship began at once. She was introduced to him by Colfax, and because of the latter's brusque, jesting spirit was under no illusions as to his social state.

"You needn't look at him closely," he observed gaily, "he's married."

"That simply makes him all the more interesting," she rippled, and extended her hand.

Eugene took it. "I'm glad a poor married man can find shelter somewhere," he said, smartly.

"You should rejoice," she replied. "It's at once your liberty and your protection. Think how safe you are!"

"I know, I know," he said. "All the slings and arrows of Miss Fortune hurtling by."

"And you in no danger of being hurt."

He offered her his arm, and they strolled through a window onto a veranda.

The day was just the least bit dull for Mrs. Dale. Bridge was in progress in the card room, a company of women and girls gambling feverishly. Eugene was not good at bridge, not quick enough mentally, and Mrs. Dale did not care much for it.

"I have been trying to stir up enough interest to bring to pass a motor ride, but it doesn't work," she said. "They all have the gambling fever today. Are you as greedy as the others?"

"I'm greedy I assure you, but I can't play. The greediest thing I can do is to stay away from the tables. I save most. That sharp Faraday has cleaned me and two others out of four hundred dollars. It's astonishing the way some people can play. They just look at the cards or make mystic signs and the wretched things range themselves in serried ranks to suit them. It's a crime. It ought to be a penitentiary offense, particularly to beat me. I'm such an inoffensive specimen of the non-bridge playing family."

"A burnt child, you know. Stay away. Let's sit here. They can't come out here and rob you."

They sat down in green willow chairs, and after a time a servant offered them coffee. Mrs. Dale accepted. They drifted conversationally from bridge to characters in society—a certain climber by the name of Bristow, a man who had made a fortune in trunks—and from him to travel and from travel to Mrs. Dale's experiences with fortune hunters. The automobile materialized through the intervention of others, but Eugene found great satisfaction in this woman's company and sat beside her. They talked books, art, magazines, the making of fortunes and reputations. Because he was or seemed to be in a position to assist her in a literary way she was particularly nice to him. When he was leaving she asked, "Where are you in New York?"

"Riverside Drive is our present abode," he said.

"Why don't you bring Mrs. Witla and come down to see us some week-end? I usually have a few people there, and the house is roomy. I'll name you a special day if you wish."

"Do. We'll be delighted. Mrs. Witla will enjoy it, I'm sure."

Mrs. Dale wrote to Angela ten days later as to a particular date, and in this way the social intimacy began.

It was never of a very definite character, though. When Mrs. Dale met Angela she liked her quite well as an individual, whatever she may have thought of her as a social figure. Neither Eugene nor Angela saw Suzanne nor any of the other children on this occasion, all of them being away. Eugene admired the view tremendously and hinted at being invited again. Mrs. Dale was delighted. She liked him as a man entirely apart from his position but particularly because of his publishing station. She was ambitious to write. Others had told her that he was the most conspicuous of the rising figures in the publishing world.