Booth Tarkington Page 21

  He walked the dark streets of Amberson Addition for an hour, then went downtown and got coffee at a restaurant. After that he walked through the lighted parts of the town until ten o’clock, when he turned north and came back to the purlieus of the Addition. He strode through the length and breadth of it again, his hat pulled down over his forehead, his overcoat collar turned up behind. He walked fiercely, though his feet ached, but by and by he turned homeward, and, when he reached the Major’s, went in and sat upon the steps of the huge stone veranda in front—an obscure figure in that lonely and repellent place. All lights were out at the Major’s, and finally, after twelve, he saw his mother’s window darken at home.

  He waited half an hour longer, then crossed the front yards of the new houses and let himself noiselessly in the front door. The light in the hall had been left burning, and another in his own room, as he discovered when he got there. He locked the door quickly and without noise, but his fingers were still upon the key when there was a quick footfall in the hall outside.

  “Georgie, dear?”

  He went to the other end of the room before replying.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d been wondering where you were, dear.”

  “Had you?”

  There was a pause; then she said timidly: “Wherever it was, I hope you had a pleasant evening.”

  After a silence, “Thank you,” he said, without expression.

  Another silence followed before she spoke again.

  “You wouldn’t care to be kissed good-night, I suppose?” And with a little flurry of placative laughter, she added: “At your age, of course!”

  “I’m going to bed, now,” he said. “Good-night.”

  Another silence seemed blanker than those which had preceded it, and finally her voice came—it was blank, too.

  “Good-night.”

  . . . After he was in bed his thoughts became more tumultuous than ever; while among all the inchoate and fragmentary sketches of this dreadful day, now rising before him, the clearest was of his uncle collapsed in a big chair with a white tie dangling from his hand; and one conviction, following upon that picture, became definite in George’s mind: that his Uncle George Amberson was a hopeless dreamer from whom no help need be expected, an amiable imbecile lacking in normal impulses, and wholly useless in a struggle which required honour to be defended by a man of action.

  Then would return a vision of Mrs. Johnson’s furious round head, set behind her great bosom like the sun far sunk on the horizon of a mountain plateau—and her crackling, asthmatic voice . . . “Without sharing in other people’s disposition to put an evil interpretation on what may be nothing more than unfortunate appearances.” . . . “Other people may be less considerate in not confining their discussion of it, as I have, to charitable views.” . . . “You’ll know something pretty quick! You’ll know you’re out in the street.” . . . And then George would get up again—and again—and pace the floor in his bare feet.

  That was what the tormented young man was doing when daylight came gauntly in at his window—pacing the floor, rubbing his head in his hands, and muttering:

  “It can’t be true: this can’t be happening to me!”

  Chapter XXIV

  * * *

  BREAKFAST WAS brought to him in his room, as usual; but he did not make his normal healthy raid upon the dainty tray: the food remained untouched, and he sustained himself upon coffee—four cups of it, which left nothing of value inside the glistening little percolator. During this process he heard his mother being summoned to the telephone in the hall, not far from his door, and then her voice responding: “Yes? Oh, it’s you! . . . Indeed I should! . . . Of course. . . . Then I’ll expect you about three. . . . Yes. . . . Good-bye till then.” A few minutes later he heard her speaking to someone beneath his window and, looking out, saw her directing the removal of plants from a small garden bed to the Major’s conservatory for the winter. There was an air of briskness about her; as she turned away to go into the house, she laughed gaily with the Major’s gardener over something he said, and this unconcerned cheerfulness of her was terrible to her son.

  He went to his desk, and, searching the jumbled contents of a drawer, brought forth a large, unframed photograph of his father, upon which he gazed long and piteously, till at last hot tears stood in his eyes. It was strange how the inconsequent face of Wilbur seemed to increase in high significance during this belated interview between father and son; and how it seemed to take on a reproachful nobility—and yet, under the circumstances, nothing could have been more natural than that George, having paid but the slightest attention to his father in life, should begin to deify him, now that he was dead. “Poor, poor father!” the son whispered brokenly. “Poor man, I’m glad you didn’t know!”

  He wrapped the picture in a sheet of newspaper, put it under his arm, and, leaving the house hurriedly and stealthily, went downtown to the shop of a silversmith, where he spent sixty dollars on a resplendently festooned silver frame for the picture. Having lunched upon more coffee, he returned to the house at two o’clock, carrying the framed photograph with him, and placed it upon the centre-table in the library, the room most used by Isabel and Fanny and himself. Then he went to a front window of the long “reception room,” and sat looking out through the lace curtains.

  The house was quiet, though once or twice he heard his mother and Fanny moving about upstairs, and a ripple of song in the voice of Isabel—a fragment from the romantic ballad of Lord Bateman.

  “Lord Bateman was a noble lord,

  A noble lord of high degree;

  And he sailed West and he sailed East,

  Far countries for to see. . . .”

  The words became indistinct; the air was hummed absently; the humming shifted to a whistle, then drifted out of hearing, and the place was still again.

  George looked often at his watch, but his vigil did not last an hour. At ten minutes of three, peering through the curtain, he saw an automobile stop in front of the house and Eugene Morgan jump lightly down from it. The car was of a new pattern, low and long, with an ample seat in the tonneau, facing forward; and a professional driver sat at the wheel, a strange figure in leather, goggled out of all personality and seemingly part of the mechanism.

  Eugene himself, as he came up the cement path to the house, was a figure of the new era which was in time to be so disastrous to stiff hats and skirted coats; and his appearance afforded a debonair contrast to that of the queer-looking duck capering at the Amberson Ball in an old dress coat, and next day chugging up National Avenue through the snow in his nightmare of a sewing-machine. Eugene, this afternoon, was richly in the new outdoor mode: his motoring coat was soft gray fur; his cap and gloves were of gray suede; and though Lucy’s hand may have shown itself in the selection of these high garnitures, he wore them easily, even with a becoming hint of jauntiness. Some change might be seen in his face, too, for a successful man is seldom to be mistaken, especially if his temper be genial. Eugene had begun to look like a millionaire.

  But above everything else, what was most evident about him, as he came up the path, was his confidence in the happiness promised by his present errand; the anticipation in his eyes could have been read by a stranger. His look at the door of Isabel’s house was the look of a man who is quite certain that the next moment will reveal something ineffably charming, inexpressibly dear.

  . . . When the bell rang, George waited at the entrance of the “reception room” until a housemaid came through the hall on her way to answer the summons.

  “You needn’t mind, Mary,” he told her. “I’ll see who it is and what they want. Probably it’s only a pedlar.”

  “Thank you, sir, Mister George,” said Mary; and returned to the rear of the house.

  George went slowly to the front door, and halted, regarding the misty silhouette of the caller up
on the ornamental frosted glass. After a minute of waiting, this silhouette changed outline so that an arm could be distinguished—an arm outstretched toward the bell, as if the gentleman outside doubted whether or not it had sounded, and were minded to try again. But before the gesture was completed George abruptly threw open the door, and stepped squarely upon the middle of the threshold.

  A slight change shadowed the face of Eugene; his look of happy anticipation gave way to something formal and polite. “How do you do, George,” he said. “Mrs. Minafer expects to go driving with me, I believe—if you’ll be so kind as to send her word that I’m here.”

  George made not the slightest movement.

  “No,” he said.

  Eugene was incredulous, even when his second glance revealed how hot of eye was the haggard young man before him. “I beg your pardon. I said——”

  “I heard you,” said George. “You said you had an engagement with my mother, and I told you, No!”

  Eugene gave him a steady look, and then he asked quietly: “What is the—the difficulty?”

  George kept his own voice quiet enough, but that did not mitigate the vibrant fury of it. “My mother will have no interest in knowing that you came for her to-day,” he said. “Or any other day!”

  Eugene continued to look at him with a scrutiny in which began to gleam a profound anger, none the less powerful because it was so quiet. “I am afraid I do not understand you.”

  “I doubt if I could make it much plainer,” George said, raising his voice slightly, “but I’ll try. You’re not wanted in this house, Mr. Morgan, now or at any other time. Perhaps you’ll understand—this!”

  And with the last word he closed the door in Eugene’s face.

  Then, not moving away, he stood just inside the door, and noted that the misty silhouette remained upon the frosted glass for several moments, as if the forbidden gentleman debated in his mind what course to pursue. “Let him ring again!” George thought grimly. “Or try the side door—or the kitchen!”

  But Eugene made no further attempt; the silhouette disappeared; footsteps could be heard withdrawing across the floor of the veranda; and George, returning to the window in the “reception room,” was rewarded by the sight of an automobile manufacturer in baffled retreat, with all his wooing furs and fineries mocking him. Eugene got into his car slowly, not looking back at the house which had just taught him such a lesson; and it was easily visible—even from a window seventy feet distant—that he was not the same light suitor who had jumped so gallantly from the car only a few minutes earlier. Observing the heaviness of his movements as he climbed into the tonneau, George indulged in a sickish throat rumble which bore a distant cousinship to mirth.

  The car was quicker than its owner; it shot away as soon as he had sunk into his seat; and George, having watched its impetuous disappearance from his field of vision, ceased to haunt the window. He went to the library, and, seating himself beside the table whereon he had placed the photograph of his father, picked up a book, and pretended to be engaged in reading it.

  Presently Isabel’s buoyant step was heard descending the stairs, and her low, sweet whistling, renewing the air of “Lord Bateman.” She came into the library, still whistling thoughtfully, a fur coat over her arm, ready to put on, and two veils round her small black hat, her right hand engaged in buttoning the glove upon her left; and, as the large room contained too many pieces of heavy furniture, and the inside shutters excluded most of the light of day, she did not at once perceive George’s presence. Instead, she went to the bay window at the end of the room, which afforded a view of the street, and glanced out expectantly; then bent her attention upon her glove; after that, looked out toward the street again, ceased to whistle, and turned toward the interior of the room.

  “Why, Georgie!”

  She came, leaned over from behind him, and there was a faint, exquisite odour as from distant apple-blossoms as she kissed his cheek. “Dear, I waited lunch almost an hour for you, but you didn’t come! Did you lunch out somewhere?”

  “Yes.” He did not look up from the book.

  “Did you have plenty to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? Wouldn’t you like to have Maggie get you something now in the dining room? Or they could bring it to you here, if you think it would be cosier. Shan’t I——”

  “No.”

  A tinkling bell was audible, and she moved to the doorway into the hall. “I’m going out driving, dear. I’m——” She interrupted herself to address the house-maid, who was passing through the hall: “I think it’s Mr. Morgan, Mary. Tell him I’ll be there at once.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mary returned. “’Twas a pedlar, ma’am.”

  “Another one?” Isabel said, surprised. “I thought you said it was a pedlar when the bell rang a little while ago.”

  “Mister George said it was, ma’am; he went to the door,” Mary informed her, disappearing.

  “There seem to be a great many of them,” Isabel mused. “What did yours want to sell, George?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You must have cut him off short!” she laughed; and then, still standing in the doorway, she noticed the big silver frame upon the table beside him. “Gracious, Georgie!” she exclaimed. “You have been investing!” and as she came across the room for a closer view, “Is it—is it Lucy?” she asked half timidly, half archly. But the next instant she saw whose likeness was thus set forth in elegiac splendour—and she was silent, except for a long, just-audible “Oh!”

  He neither looked up nor moved.

  “That was nice of you, Georgie,” she said, in a low voice presently. “I ought to have had it framed, myself, when I gave it to you.”

  He said nothing, and, standing beside him, she put her hand gently upon his shoulder, then as gently withdrew it, and went out of the room. But she did not go upstairs; he heard the faint rustle of her dress in the hall, and then the sound of her footsteps in the “reception room.” After a time, silence succeeded even these slight tokens of her presence; whereupon George rose and went warily into the hall, taking care to make no noise, and he obtained an oblique view of her through the open double doors of the “reception room.” She was sitting in the chair which he had occupied so long; and she was looking out of the window expectantly—a little troubled.

  He went back to the library, waited an interminable half hour, then returned noiselessly to the same position in the hall, where he could see her. She was still sitting patiently by the window.

  Waiting for that man, was she? Well, it might be quite a long wait! And the grim George silently ascended the stairs to his own room, and began to pace his suffering floor.

  Chapter XXV

  * * *

  HE LEFT his door open, however, and when he heard the front door-bell ring, by and by, he went half way down the stairs and stood to listen. He was not much afraid that Morgan would return, but he wished to make sure.

  Mary appeared in the hall below him, but, after a glance toward the front of the house, turned back, and withdrew. Evidently Isabel had gone to the door. Then a murmur was heard, and George Amberson’s voice, quick and serious: “I want to talk to you, Isabel” . . . and another murmur; then Isabel and her brother passed the foot of the broad, dark stairway, but did not look up, and remained unconscious of the watchful presence above them. Isabel still carried her cloak upon her arm, but Amberson had taken her hand, and retained it; and as he led her silently into the library there was something about her attitude, and the pose of her slightly bent head, that was both startled and meek. Thus they quickly disappeared from George’s sight, hand in hand; and Amberson at once closed the massive double doors of the library.

  For a time all that George could hear was the indistinct sound of his uncle’s voice: what he was saying could not be surmised, though the troubled brotherliness
of his tone was evident. He seemed to be explaining something at considerable length, and there were moments when he paused, and George guessed that his mother was speaking, but her voice must have been very low, for it was entirely inaudible to him.

  Suddenly he did hear her. Through the heavy doors her outcry came, clear and loud:

  “Oh, no!”

  It was a cry of protest, as if something her brother told her must be untrue, or, if it were true, the fact he stated must be undone; and it was a sound of sheer pain.

  Another sound of pain, close to George, followed it; this was a vehement sniffling which broke out just above him, and, looking up, he saw Fanny Minafer on the landing, leaning over the banisters and applying her handkerchief to her eyes and nose.

  “I can guess what that was about,” she whispered huskily. “He’s just told her what you did to Eugene!”

  George gave her a dark look over his shoulder. “You go on back to your room!” he said; and he began to descend the stairs; but Fanny, guessing his purpose, rushed down and caught his arm, detaining him.

  “You’re not going in there?” she whispered huskily. “You don’t——”

  “Let go of me!”

  But she clung to him savagely. “No, you don’t, Georgie Minafer! You’ll keep away from there! You will!”

  “You let go of——”

  “I won’t! You come back here! You’ll come upstairs and let them alone; that’s what you’ll do!” And with such passionate determination did she clutch and tug, never losing a grip of him somewhere, though George tried as much as he could, without hurting her, to wrench away—with such utter forgetfulness of her maiden dignity did she assault him, that she forced him, stumbling upward, to the landing.

  “Of all the ridiculous——” he began furiously; but she spared one hand from its grasp of his sleeve and clapped it over his mouth.