The Genius (58 page)

Angela scarcely kept pace with him in all these mental
peregrinations. It was true that now she went to the best
dressmakers only, bought charming hats, the most expensive shoes,
rode in cabs and her husband's auto, but she did not feel about it
as he did. It seemed very much like a dream to her—like something
that had come so suddenly and so exuberantly that it could not be
permanent. There was running in her mind all the time that Eugene
was neither a publisher, nor an editor, nor a financier at heart,
but an artist and that an artist he would remain. He might attain
great fame and make much money out of his adopted profession, but
some day in all likelihood he would leave it and return to art. He
seemed to be making sound investments—at least, they seemed sound
to her, and their stocks and bank accounts, principally convertible
stocks, seemed a safe enough margin for the future to guarantee
peace of mind, but they were not saving so much, after all. It was
costing them something over eight thousand dollars a year to live,
and their expenses were constantly growing larger rather than
smaller. Eugene appeared to become more and more extravagant.

"I think we are doing too much entertaining," Angela had once
protested, but he waived the complaint aside. "I can't do what I'm
doing and not entertain. It's building me up. People in our
position have to." He threw open the doors finally to really
remarkable crowds and most of the cleverest people in all walks of
life—the really exceptionally clever—came to eat his meals, to
drink his wines, to envy his comfort and wish they were in his
shoes.

During all this time Eugene and Angela instead of growing closer
together, were really growing farther and farther apart. She had
never either forgotten or utterly forgiven that one terrific lapse,
and she had never believed that Eugene was utterly cured of his
hedonistic tendencies. Crowds of beautiful women came to Angela's
teas, lunches and their joint evening parties and receptions. Under
Eugene's direction they got together interesting programmes, for it
was no trouble now for him to command musical, theatrical, literary
and artistic talent. He knew men and women who could make rapid
charcoal or crayon sketches of people, could do feats in
legerdemain, and character representation, could sing, dance, play,
recite and tell humorous stories in a droll and off-hand way. He
insisted that only exceptionally beautiful women be invited, for he
did not care to look at the homely ones, and curiously he found
dozens, who were not only extremely beautiful, but singers,
dancers, composers, authors, actors and playwrights in the bargain.
Nearly all of them were brilliant conversationalists and they
helped to entertain themselves—made their own entertainment, in
fact. His table very frequently was a glittering spectacle. One of
his "Stunts" as he called it was to bundle fifteen or twenty people
into three or four automobiles after they had lingered in his rooms
until three o'clock in the morning and motor out to some
out-of-town inn for breakfast and "to see the sun rise." A small
matter like a bill for $75.00 for auto hire or thirty-five dollars
for a crowd for breakfast did not trouble him. It was a glorious
sensation to draw forth his purse and remove four or five or six
yellow backed ten dollar bills, knowing that it made little real
difference. More money was coming to him from the same source. He
could send down to the cashier at any time and draw from five
hundred to a thousand dollars. He always had from one hundred and
fifty to three hundred dollars in his purse in denominations of
five, ten and twenty dollar bills. He carried a small check book
and most frequently paid by check. He liked to assume that he was
known and frequently imposed this assumption on others.

"Eugene Witla! Eugene Witla! George! he's a nice fellow,"—or
"it's remarkable how he has come up, isn't it?" "I was at the
Witlas' the other night. Did you ever see such a beautiful
apartment? It's perfect! That view!"

People commented on the interesting people he entertained, the
clever people you met there, the beautiful women, the beautiful
view. "And Mrs. Witla is so charming."

But down at the bottom of all this talk there was also much envy
and disparagement and never much enthusiasm for the personality of
Mrs. Witla. She was not as brilliant as Eugene—or rather the
comment was divided. Those who liked clever people, show, wit,
brilliance, ease, liked Eugene and not Angela quite so much. Those
who liked sedateness, solidity, sincerity, the commoner virtues of
faithfulness and effort, admired Angela. All saw that she was a
faithful handmaiden to her husband, that she adored the ground he
walked on.

"Such a nice little woman—so homelike. It's curious that he
should have married her, though, isn't it? They are so different.
And yet they appear to have lots of things in common, too. It's
strange—isn't it?"

It was in the course of his final upward progress that Eugene
came once more into contact with Kenyon C. Winfield, Ex-State
Senator of New York, President of the Long Island Realty Company,
land developer, real estate plunger, financier, artist, what not—a
man very much of Eugene's own type and temperament, who at this
time was doing rather remarkable things in a land speculative way.
Winfield was tall and thin, black haired, black eyed, slightly but
not offensively hook nosed, dignified, gracious, intellectual,
magnetic, optimistic. He was forty-eight years of age. Winfield was
a very fair sample of your man of the world who has ideas, dreams,
fancies, executive ability, a certain amount of reserve and
judgment, sufficient to hold his own in this very complicated
mortal struggle. He was not really a great man, but he was so near
it that he gave the impression to many of being so. His deep sunken
black eyes burned with a peculiar lustre, one might almost have
fancied a tint of red in them. His pale, slightly sunken face had
some of the characteristics of your polished Mephisto, though not
too many. He was not at all devilish looking in the true sense of
the word, but keen, subtle, artistic. His method was to ingratiate
himself with men who had money in order to get from them the vast
sums which he found it necessary to borrow to carry out the schemes
or rather dreams he was constantly generating. His fancies were
always too big for his purse, but he had such lovely fancies that
it was a joy to work with them and him.

Primarily Winfield was a real estate speculator, secondarily he
was a dreamer of dreams and seer of visions. His visions consisted
of lovely country areas near some city stocked with charming
country houses, cut up with well paved, tree shaded roads, provided
with sewers, gas, electricity, suitable railway service, street
cars and all the comforts of a well organized living district which
should be at once retired, exclusive, pleasing, conservative and
yet bound up tightly with the great Metropolitan heart of New York
which he so greatly admired. Winfield had been born and raised in
Brooklyn. He had been a politician, orator, insurance dealer,
contractor, and so on. He had succeeded in organizing various
suburban estates—Winfield, Sunnyside, Ruritania, The Beeches—little
forty, fifty, one hundred and two hundred acre flats which with the
help of "O. P. M." as he always called other people's money he had
divided off into blocks, laying out charmingly with trees and
sometimes a strip of green grass running down the centre, concrete
sidewalks, a set of noble restrictions, and so forth. Anyone who
ever came to look at a lot in one of Winfield's perfect suburbs
always found the choicest piece of property in the centre of this
latest burst of improvement set aside for the magnificent house
which Mr. Kenyon C. Winfield, the president of the company, was to
build and live in. Needless to say they were never built. He had
been round the world and seen a great many things and places, but
Winfield or Sunnyside or Ruritania or The Beeches, so the lot
buyers in these places were told, had been finally selected by him
deliberately as the one spot in all the world in which he hoped to
spend the remainder of his days.

At the time Eugene met him, he was planning Minetta Water on the
shores of Gravesend Bay, which was the most ambitious of all his
projects so far. He was being followed financially, by a certain
number of Brooklyn politicians and financiers who had seen him
succeed in small things, taking a profit of from three to four
hundred per cent, out of ten, twenty and thirty acre flats, but for
all his brilliance it had been slow work. He was now worth between
three and four hundred thousand dollars and, for the first time in
his life, was beginning to feel that freedom in financial matters
which made him think that he could do almost anything. He had met
all sorts of people, lawyers, bankers, doctors, merchants, the
"easy classes" he called them, all with a little money to invest,
and he had succeeded in luring hundreds of worth-while people into
his projects. His great dreams had never really been realized,
however, for he saw visions of a great warehouse and shipping
system to be established on Jamaica Bay, out of which he was to
make millions, if it ever came to pass, and also a magnificent
summer resort of some kind, somewhere, which was not yet clearly
evolved in his mind. His ads were scattered freely through the
newspapers: his signs, or rather the signs of his towns, scattered
broadcast over Long Island.

Eugene had met him first when he was working with the
Summerfield Company, but he met him this time quite anew at the
home of the W. W. Willebrand on the North Shore of Long Island near
Hempstead. He had gone down there one Saturday afternoon at the
invitation of Mrs. Willebrand, whom he had met at another house
party and with whom he had danced. She had been pleased with his
gay, vivacious manner and had asked him if he wouldn't come.
Winfield was here as a guest with his automobile.

"Oh, yes," said Winfield pleasantly. "I recall you very well.
You are now with the United Magazines Corporation,—I
understand—someone was telling me—a most prosperous company, I
believe. I know Mr. Colfax very well. I once spoke to Summerfield
about you. A most astonishing fellow, that, tremendously able. You
were doing that series of sugar plantation ads for them or having
them done. I think I copied the spirit of those things in
advertising Ruritania, as you may have noticed. Well, you certainly
have improved your condition since then. I once tried to tell
Summerfield that he had an exceptional man in you, but he would
have nothing of it. He's too much of an egoist. He doesn't know how
to work with a man on equal terms."

Eugene smiled at the thought of Summerfield.

"An able man," he said simply. "He did a great deal for me."

Winfield liked that. He thought Eugene would criticize him. He
liked Eugene's genial manner and intelligent, expressive face. It
occurred to him that when next he wanted to advertise one of his
big development projects, he would go to Eugene or the man who had
done the sugar plantation series of pictures and get him to give
him the right idea for advertising.

Affinity is such a peculiar thing. It draws people so easily,
apart from volition or consciousness. In a few moments Eugene and
Winfield, sitting side by side on the veranda, looking at the
greenwood before them, the long stretch of open sound, dotted with
white sails and the dim, distant shore of Connecticut, were talking
of real estate ventures in general, what land was worth, how
speculations of this kind turned out, as a rule. Winfield was
anxious to take Eugene seriously, for he felt drawn to him and
Eugene studied Winfield's pale face, his thin, immaculate hands,
his suit of soft, gray cloth. He looked as able as his public
reputation made him out to be—in fact, he looked better than
anything he had ever done. Eugene had seen Ruritania and The
Beeches. They did not impress him vastly as territorial
improvements, but they were pretty, nevertheless. For middle-class
people, they were quite the thing he thought.

"I should think it would be a pleasure to you to scheme out a
new section," he said to him once. "The idea of a virgin piece of
land to be converted into streets and houses or a village appeals
to me immensely. The idea of laying it out and sketching houses to
fit certain positions, suits my temperament exactly. I wish
sometimes I had been born an architect."

"It is pleasant and if that were all it would be ideal,"
returned Winfield. "The thing is more a matter of financing than
anything else. You have to raise money for land and improvements.
If you make exceptional improvements they are expensive. You really
can't expect to get much, if any, of your money back, until all
your work is done. Then you have to wait. If you put up houses you
can't rent them, for the moment you rent them, you can't sell them
as new. When you make your improvements your taxes go up
immediately. If you sell a piece of property to a man or woman who
isn't exactly in accord with your scheme, he or she may put up a
house which destroys the value of a whole neighborhood for you. You
can't fix the details of a design in a contract too closely. You
can only specify the minimum price the house is to cost and the
nature of the materials to be used. Some people's idea of beauty
will vary vastly from others. Taste in sections may change. A whole
city like New York may suddenly decide that it wants to build west
when you are figuring on its building east. So—well, all these
things have to be taken into consideration."

"That sounds logical enough," said Eugene, "but wouldn't the
right sort of a scheme just naturally draw to itself the right sort
of people, if it were presented in the right way? Don't you fix the
conditions by your own attitude?"

"You do, you do," replied Winfield, easily. "If you give the
matter sufficient care and attention it can be done. The pity is
you can be too fine at times. I have seen attempts at perfection
come to nothing. People with taste and tradition and money behind
them are not moving into new additions and suburbs, as a rule. You
are dealing with the new rich and financial beginners. Most people
strain their resources to the breaking point to better their living
conditions and they don't always know. If they have the money, it
doesn't always follow that they have the taste to grasp what you
are striving for, and if they have the taste they haven't the
money. They would do better if they could, but they can't. A man in
my position is like an artist and a teacher and a father confessor
and financier and everything all rolled into one. When you start to
be a real estate developer on a big scale you must be these things.
I have had some successes and some notable failures. Winfield is
one of the worst. It's disgusting to me now."

"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.