Booth Tarkington Page 17

  “Fanny!” exclaimed her sister-in-law. “You’re not in earnest?”

  “I am, though!”

  Isabel’s sweet-toned laugh came out of the dusk where she sat. “Then you didn’t mean it when you told Eugene you’d enjoyed the drive this afternoon?”

  “I didn’t say it so very enthusiastically, did I?”

  “Perhaps not, but he certainly thought he’d pleased you.”

  “I don’t think I gave him any right to think he’d pleased me,” Fanny said slowly.

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t you, Fanny?”

  Fanny did not reply at once, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible, but much more reproachful than plaintive. “I hardly think I’d want any one to get the notion he’d pleased me just now. It hardly seems time, yet—to me.”

  Isabel made no response, and for a time the only sound upon the dark veranda was the creaking of the wicker rocking-chair in which Fanny sat—a creaking which seemed to denote content and placidity on the part of the chair’s occupant, though at this juncture a series of human shrieks could have been little more eloquent of emotional disturbance. However, the creaking gave its hearer one great advantage: it could be ignored.

  “Have you given up smoking, George?” Isabel asked presently.

  “No.”

  “I hoped perhaps you had, because you’ve not smoked since dinner. We shan’t mind if you care to.”

  “No, thanks.”

  There was silence again, except for the creaking of the rocking-chair; then a low, clear whistle, singularly musical, was heard softly rendering an old air from “Fra Diavolo.” The creaking stopped.

  “Is that you, George?” Fanny asked abruptly.

  “Is that me what?”

  “Whistling ‘On Yonder Rock Reclining’?”

  “It’s I,” said Isabel.

  “Oh,” Fanny said dryly.

  “Does it disturb you?”

  “Not at all. I had an idea George was depressed about something, and merely wondered if he could be making such a cheerful sound.” And Fanny resumed her creaking.

  “Is she right, George?” his mother asked quickly, leaning forward in her chair to peer at him through the dusk. “You didn’t eat a very hearty dinner, but I thought it was probably because of the warm weather. Are you troubled about anything?”

  “No!” he said angrily.

  “That’s good. I thought we had such a nice day, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” he muttered, and, satisfied, she leaned back in her chair; but “Fra Diavolo” was not revived. After a time she rose, went to the steps, and stood for several minutes looking across the street. Then her laughter was faintly heard.

  “Are you laughing about something?” Fanny inquired.

  “Pardon?” Isabel did not turn, but continued her observation of what had interested her upon the opposite side of the street.

  “I asked: Were you laughing at something?”

  “Yes, I was!” And she laughed again. “It’s that funny, fat old Mrs. Johnson. She has a habit of sitting at her bedroom window with a pair of opera-glasses.”

  “Really!”

  “Really. You can see the window through the place that was left when we had the dead walnut tree cut down. She looks up and down the street, but mostly at father’s and over here. Sometimes she forgets to put out the light in her room, and there she is, spying away for all the world to see!”

  However, Fanny made no effort to observe this spectacle, but continued her creaking. “I’ve always thought her a very good woman,” she said primly.

  “So she is,” Isabel agreed. “She’s a good, friendly old thing, a little too intimate in her manner, sometimes, and if her poor old opera-glasses afford her the quiet happiness of knowing what sort of young man our new cook is walking out with, I’m the last to begrudge it to her! Don’t you want to come and look at her, George?”

  “What? I beg your pardon. I hadn’t noticed what you were talking about.”

  “It’s nothing,” she laughed. “Only a funny old lady—and she’s gone now. I’m going, too—at least, I’m going indoors to read. It’s cooler in the house, but the heat’s really not bad anywhere, since nightfall. Summer’s dying. How quickly it goes, once it begins to die.”

  When she had gone into the house, Fanny stopped rocking, and, leaning forward, drew her black gauze wrap about her shoulders and shivered. “Isn’t it queer,” she said drearily, “how your mother can use such words?”

  “What words are you talking about?” George asked.

  “Words like ‘die’ and ‘dying.’ I don’t see how she can bear to use them so soon after your poor father——” She shivered again.

  “It’s almost a year,” George said absently, and he added: “It seems to me you’re using them yourself.”

  “I? Never!”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “When?”

  “Just this minute.”

  “Oh!” said Fanny. “You mean when I repeated what she said? That’s hardly the same thing, George.”

  He was not enough interested to argue the point. “I don’t think you’ll convince anybody that mother’s unfeeling,” he said indifferently.

  “I’m not trying to convince anybody. I mean merely that in my opinion—well, perhaps it may be just as wise for me to keep my opinions to myself.”

  She paused expectantly, but her possible anticipation that George would urge her to discard wisdom and reveal her opinion was not fulfilled. His back was toward her, and he occupied himself with opinions of his own about other matters. Fanny may have felt some disappointment as she rose to withdraw.

  However, at the last moment she halted with her hand upon the latch of the screen door.

  “There’s one thing I hope,” she said. “I hope at least she won’t leave off her full mourning on the very anniversary of Wilbur’s death!”

  The light door clanged behind her, and the sound annoyed her nephew. He had no idea why she thus used inoffensive wood and wire to dramatize her departure from the veranda, the impression remaining with him being that she was critical of his mother upon some point of funeral millinery. Throughout the desultory conversation he had been profoundly concerned with his own disturbing affairs, and now was preoccupied with a dialogue taking place (in his mind) between himself and Miss Lucy Morgan. As he beheld the vision, Lucy had just thrown herself at his feet. “George, you must forgive me!” she cried. “Papa was utterly wrong! I have told him so, and the truth is that I have come to rather dislike him as you do, and as you always have, in your heart of hearts. George, I understand you: thy people shall be my people and thy gods my gods. George, won’t you take me back?”

  “Lucy, are you sure you understand me?” And in the darkness George’s bodily lips moved in unison with those which uttered the words in his imaginary rendering of this scene. An eavesdropper, concealed behind the column, could have heard the whispered word “sure,” the emphasis put upon it in the vision was so poignant. “You say you understand me, but are you sure?”

  Weeping, her head bowed almost to her waist, the ethereal Lucy made reply: “Oh, so sure! I will never listen to father’s opinions again. I do not even care if I never see him again!”

  “Then I pardon you,” he said gently.

  This softened mood lasted for several moments—until he realized that it had been brought about by processes strikingly lacking in substance. Abruptly he swung his feet down from the copestone to the floor of the veranda. “Pardon nothing!” No meek Lucy had thrown herself in remorse at his feet; and now he pictured her as she probably really was at this moment: sitting on the white steps of her own front porch in the moonlight, with red-headed Fred Kinney and silly Charlie Johnson and four or five others—all of them laughing, most likely, and some idiot playing the guitar!

  George spok
e aloud: “Riffraff!”

  And because of an impish but all too natural reaction of the mind, he could see Lucy with much greater distinctness in this vision than in his former pleasing one. For a moment she was miraculously real before him, every line and colour of her. He saw the moonlight shimmering in the chiffon of her skirt, brightest on her crossed knee and the tip of her slipper; saw the blue curve of the characteristic shadow behind her, as she leaned back against the white step; saw the watery twinkling of sequins in the gauze wrap over her white shoulders as she moved, and the faint, symmetrical lights in her black hair—and not one alluring, exasperating twentieth-of-an-inch of her laughing profile was spared him as she seemed to turn to the infernal Kinney——

  “Riffraff!” And George began furiously to pace the stone floor. “Riffraff!” By this hard term—a favourite with him since childhood’s scornful hour—he meant to indicate, not Lucy, but the young gentlemen who, in his vision, surrounded her. “Riffraff!” he said again, aloud, and again:

  “Riffraff!”

  At that moment, as it happened, Lucy was playing chess with her father; and her heart, though not remorseful, was as heavy as George could have wished. But she did not let Eugene see that she was troubled, and he was pleased when he won three games of her. Usually she beat him.

  Chapter XIX

  * * *

  GEORGE WENT driving the next afternoon alone, and, encountering Lucy and her father on the road, in one of Morgan’s cars, lifted his hat, but nowise relaxed his formal countenance as they passed. Eugene waved a cordial hand quickly returned to the steering-wheel; but Lucy only nodded gravely and smiled no more than George did. Nor did she accompany Eugene to the Major’s for dinner, the following Sunday evening, though both were bidden to attend that feast, which was already reduced in numbers and gayety by the absence of George Amberson. Eugene explained to his host that Lucy had gone away to visit a school-friend.

  The information, delivered in the library, just before old Sam’s appearance to announce dinner, set Miss Minafer in quite a flutter. “Why, George!” she said, turning to her nephew. “How does it happen you didn’t tell us?” And with both hands opening, as if to express her innocence of some conspiracy, she exclaimed to the others, “He’s never said one word to us about Lucy’s planning to go away!”

  “Probably afraid to,” the Major suggested. “Didn’t know but he might break down and cry if he tried to speak of it!” He clapped his grandson on the shoulder, inquiring jocularly, “That it, Georgie?”

  Georgie made no reply, but he was red enough to justify the Major’s developing a chuckle into laughter; though Miss Fanny, observing her nephew keenly, got an impression that this fiery blush was in truth more fiery than tender. She caught a glint in his eye less like confusion than resentment, and saw a dilation of his nostrils which might have indicated not so much a sweet agitation as an inaudible snort. Fanny had never been lacking in curiosity, and, since her brother’s death, this quality was more than ever alert. The fact that George had spent all the evenings of the past week at home had not been lost upon her, nor had she failed to ascertain, by diplomatic inquiries, that since the day of the visit to Eugene’s shops George had gone driving alone.

  At the dinner-table she continued to observe him, sidelong; and toward the conclusion of the meal she was not startled by an episode which brought discomfort to the others. After the arrival of coffee the Major was rallying Eugene upon some rival automobile shops lately built in a suburb, and already promising to flourish.

  “I suppose they’ll either drive you out of the business,” said the old gentleman, “or else the two of you’ll drive all the rest of us off the streets.”

  “If we do, we’ll even things up by making the streets five or ten times as long as they are now,” Eugene returned.

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “It isn’t the distance from the centre of a town that counts,” said Eugene; “it’s the time it takes to get there. This town’s already spreading; bicycles and trolleys have been doing their share, but the automobile is going to carry city streets clear out to the county line.”

  The Major was skeptical. “Dream on, fair son!” he said. “It’s lucky for us that you’re only dreaming; because if people go to moving that far, real estate values in the old residence part of town are going to be stretched pretty thin.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Eugene assented. “Unless you keep things so bright and clean that the old section will stay more attractive than the new ones.”

  “Not very likely! How are things going to be kept ‘bright and clean’ with soft coal and our kind of city government?”

  “They aren’t,” Eugene replied quickly. “There’s no hope of it, and already the boarding-house is marching up National Avenue. There are two in the next block below here, and there are a dozen in the half-mile below that. My relatives, the Sharons, have sold their house and are building in the country—at least, they call it ‘the country.’ It will be city in two or three years.”

  “Good gracious!” the Major exclaimed, affecting dismay. “So your little shops are going to ruin all your old friends, Eugene!”

  “Unless my old friends take warning in time, or abolish smoke and get a new kind of city government. I should say the best chance is to take warning.”

  “Well, well!” the Major laughed. “You have enough faith in miracles, Eugene—granting that trolleys and bicycles and automobiles are miracles. So you think they’re to change the face of the land, do you?”

  “They’re already doing it, Major; and it can’t be stopped. Automobiles——”

  At this point he was interrupted. George was the interrupter. He had said nothing since entering the dining room, but now he spoke in a loud and peremptory voice, using the tone of one in authority who checks idle prattle and settles a matter forever.

  “Automobiles are a useless nuisance,” he said.

  There fell a moment’s silence.

  Isabel gazed incredulously at George, colour slowly heightening upon her cheeks and temples, while Fanny watched him with a quick eagerness, her eyes alert and bright. But Eugene seemed merely quizzical, as if not taking this brusquerie to himself. The Major was seriously disturbed.

  “What did you say, George?” he asked, though George had spoken but too distinctly.

  “I said all automobiles were a nuisance,” George answered, repeating not only the words but the tone in which he had uttered them. And he added, “They’ll never amount to anything but a nuisance. They had no business to be invented.”

  The Major frowned. “Of course you forget that Mr. Morgan makes them, and also did his share in inventing them. If you weren’t so thoughtless he might think you rather offensive.”

  “That would be too bad,” said George coolly. “I don’t think I could survive it.”

  Again there was a silence, while the Major stared at his grandson, aghast. But Eugene began to laugh cheerfully.

  “I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles,” he said. “With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization—that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that George is right, and that the spiritual alteration will be bad for us. Perhaps, ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles ‘h
ad no business to be invented.’” He laughed good-naturedly, and looking at his watch, apologized for having an engagement which made his departure necessary when he would so much prefer to linger. Then he shook hands with the Major, and bade Isabel, George, and Fanny a cheerful good-night—a collective farewell cordially addressed to all three of them together—and left them at the table.

  Isabel turned wondering, hurt eyes upon her son. “George, dear!” she said. “What did you mean?”

  “Just what I said,” he returned, lighting one of the Major’s cigars, and his manner was imperturbable enough to warrant the definition (sometimes merited by imperturbability) of stubbornness.

  Isabel’s hand, pale and slender, upon the tablecloth, touched one of the fine silver candlesticks aimlessly: the fingers were seen to tremble. “Oh, he was hurt!” she murmured.

  “I don’t see why he should be,” George said. “I didn’t say anything about him. He didn’t seem to me to be hurt—seemed perfectly cheerful. What made you think he was hurt?”

  “I know him!” was all of her reply, half whispered.

  The Major stared hard at George from under his white eyebrows. “You didn’t mean ‘him,’ you say, George? I suppose if we had a clergyman as a guest here you’d expect him not to be offended, and to understand that your remarks were neither personal nor untactful, if you said the church was a nuisance and ought never to have been invented. By Jove, but you’re a puzzle!”

  “In what way, may I ask, sir?”

  “We seem to have a new kind of young people these days,” the old gentleman returned, shaking his head. “It’s a new style of courting a pretty girl, certainly, for a young fellow to go deliberately out of his way to try and make an enemy of her father by attacking his business! By Jove! That’s a new way to win a woman!”

  George flushed angrily and seemed about to offer a retort, but held his breath for a moment; and then held his peace. It was Isabel who responded to the Major. “Oh, no!” she said. “Eugene would never be anybody’s enemy—he couldn’t!—and last of all Georgie’s. I’m afraid he was hurt, but I don’t fear his not having understood that George spoke without thinking of what he was saying—I mean, without realizing its bearing on Eugene.”