Booth Tarkington Page 31
He was conscious of gigantic violence; of roaring and jolting and concussion; of choking clouds of dust, shot with lightning, about his head; he heard snapping sounds as loud as shots from a small pistol, and was stabbed by excruciating pains in his legs. Then he became aware that the machine was being lifted off of him. People were gathering in a circle round him, gabbling.
His forehead was bedewed with the sweat of anguish, and he tried to wipe off this dampness, but failed. He could not get his arm that far.
“Nev’ mind,” a policeman said; and George could see above his eyes the skirts of the blue coat, covered with dust and sunshine. “Amb’lance be here in a minute. Nev’ mind tryin’ to move any. You want ’em to send for some special doctor?”
“No.” George’s lips formed the word.
“Or to take you to some private hospital?”
“Tell them to take me,” he said faintly, “to the City Hospital.”
“A’ right.”
A smallish young man in a duster fidgeted among the crowd, explaining and protesting, and a strident voiced girl, his companion, supported his argument, declaring to everyone her willingness to offer testimony in any court of law that every blessed word he said was the God’s truth.
“It’s the fella that hit you,” the policeman said, looking down on George. “I guess he’s right; you must of b’en thinkin’ about somep’m’ or other. It’s wunnerful the damage them little machines can do—you’d never think it—but I guess they ain’t much case ag’in this fella that was drivin’ it.”
“You bet your life they ain’t no case on me!” the young man in the duster agreed, with great bitterness. He came and stood at George’s feet, addressing him heatedly: “I’m sorry fer you all right, and I don’t say I ain’t. I hold nothin’ against you, but it wasn’t any more my fault than the state-house! You run into me, much as I run into you, and if you get well you ain’t goin’ to get not one single cent out o’ me! This lady here was settin’ with me and we both yelled at you. Wasn’t goin’ a step over eight mile an hour! I’m perfectly willing to say I’m sorry for you though, and so’s the lady with me. We’re both willing to say that much, but that’s all, understand!”
George’s drawn eyelids twitched; his misted glance rested fleetingly upon the two protesting motorists, and the old imperious spirit within him flickered up in a single word. Lying on his back in the middle of the street, where he was regarded by an increasing public as an unpleasant curiosity, he spoke this word clearly from a mouth filled with dust, and from lips smeared with blood.
. . . It was a word which interested the policeman. When the ambulance clanged away, he turned to a fellow patrolman who had joined him. “Funny what he says to the little cuss that done the damage. That’s all he did call him—nothin’ else at all—and the cuss had broke both his legs fer him and God-knows-what-all!”
“I wasn’t here then. What was it?”
“‘Riffraff!’”
Chapter XXXV
* * *
EUGENE’S FEELING about George had not been altered by his talk with Kinney in the club window, though he was somewhat disturbed. He was not disturbed by Kinney’s hint that Fanny Minafer might be left on the hands of her friends through her nephew’s present dealings with nitro-glycerin, but he was surprised that Kinney had “led up” with intentional tact to the suggestion that a position might be made for George in the Morgan factory. Eugene did not care to have any suggestions about Georgie Minafer made to him. Kinney had represented Georgie as a new Georgie—at least in spots—a Georgie who was proving that decent stuff had been hid in him; in fact, a Georgie who was doing rather a handsome thing in taking a risky job for the sake of his aunt, poor old silly Fanny Minafer! Eugene didn’t care what risks Georgie took, or how much decent stuff he had in him: nothing that Georgie would ever do in this world or the next could change Eugene Morgan’s feeling toward him.
If Eugene could possibly have brought himself to offer Georgie a position in the automobile business, he knew full well the proud devil wouldn’t have taken it from him; though Georgie’s proud reason would not have been the one attributed to him by Eugene. George would never reach the point where he could accept anything material from Eugene and preserve the self-respect he had begun to regain.
But if Eugene had wished, he could easily have taken George out of the nitro-glycerin branch of the chemical works. Always interested in apparent impossibilities of invention, Eugene had encouraged many experiments in such gropings as those for the discovery of substitutes for gasoline and rubber; and, though his mood had withheld the information from Kinney, he had recently bought from the elder Akers a substantial quantity of stock on the condition that the chemical company should establish an experimental laboratory. He intended to buy more; Akers was anxious to please him; and a word from Eugene would have placed George almost anywhere in the chemical works. George need never have known it, for Eugene’s purchases of stock were always quiet ones: the transaction remained, so far, between him and Akers, and could be kept between them.
The possibility just edged itself into Eugene’s mind; that is, he let it become part of his perceptions long enough for it to prove to him that it was actually a possibility. Then he half started with disgust that he should be even idly considering such a thing over his last cigar for the night, in his library. “No!” And he threw the cigar into the empty fireplace and went to bed.
His bitterness for himself might have worn away, but never his bitterness for Isabel. He took that thought to bed with him—and it was true that nothing George could do would ever change this bitterness of Eugene. Only George’s mother could have changed it.
And as Eugene fell asleep that night, thinking thus bitterly of Georgie, Georgie in the hospital was thinking of Eugene. He had come “out of ether” with no great nausea, and had fallen into a reverie, though now and then a white sailboat staggered foolishly into the small ward where he lay. After a time he discovered that this happened only when he tried to open his eyes and look about him; so he kept his eyes shut, and his thoughts were clearer. He thought of Eugene Morgan and of the Major; they seemed to be the same person for awhile, but he managed to disentangle them and even to understand why he had confused them. Long ago his grandfather had been the most striking figure of success in the town: “As rich as Major Amberson!” they used to say. Now it was Eugene. “If I had Eugene Morgan’s money,” he would hear the workmen day-dreaming at the chemical works; or, “If Eugene Morgan had hold of this place you’d see things hum!” And the boarders at the table d’hôte spoke of “the Morgan Place” as an eighteenth-century Frenchman spoke of Versailles. Like his uncle, George had perceived that the “Morgan Place” was the new Amberson Mansion. His reverie went back to the palatial days of the Mansion, in his boyhood, when he would gallop his pony up the driveway and order the darkey stablemen about, while they whooped and obeyed, and his grandfather, observing from a window, would laugh and call out to him, “That’s right, Georgie. Make those lazy rascals jump!” He remembered his gay young uncles, and how the town was eager concerning everything about them, and about himself. What a clean, pretty town it had been! And in his reverie he saw like a pageant before him the magnificence of the Ambersons—its passing, and the passing of the Ambersons themselves. They had been slowly engulfed without knowing how to prevent it, and almost without knowing what was happening to them. The family lot, in the shabby older quarter, out at the cemetery, held most of them now; and the name was swept altogether from the new city. But the new great people who had taken their places—the Morgans and Akerses and Sheridans—they would go, too. George saw that. They would pass, as the Ambersons had passed, and though some of them might do better than the Major and leave the letters that spelled a name on a hospital or a street, it would be only a word and it would not stay forever. Nothing stays or holds or keeps where there is growth, he somehow perceived vaguely but truly. Great Cæsar de
ad and turned to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away; dead Cæsar was nothing but a tiresome bit of print in a book that schoolboys study for awhile and then forget. The Ambersons had passed, and the new people would pass, and the new people that came after them, and then the next new ones, and the next—and the next——
He had begun to murmur, and the man on duty as night nurse for the ward came and bent over him.
“Did you want something?”
“There’s nothing in this family business,” George told him confidentially. “Even George Washington is only something in a book.”
. . . Eugene read a report of the accident in the next morning’s paper. He was on the train, having just left for New York, on business, and with less leisure would probably have overlooked the obscure item:
LEGS BROKEN
G. A. Minafer, an employe of the Akers Chemical Co., was run down by an automobile yesterday at the corner of Tennessee and Main and had both legs broken. Minafer was to blame for the accident according to patrolman F. A. Kax, who witnessed the affair. The automobile was a small one driven by Herbert Cottleman of 2173 Noble Avenue who stated that he was making less than 4 miles an hour. Minafer is said to belong to a family formerly of considerable prominence in the city. He was taken to the City Hospital where physicians stated later that he was suffering from internal injuries besides the fracture of his legs but might recover.
Eugene read the item twice, then tossed the paper upon the opposite seat of his compartment, and sat looking out of the window. His feeling toward Georgie was changed not a jot by his human pity for Georgie’s human pain and injury. He thought of Georgie’s tall and graceful figure, and he shivered, but his bitterness was untouched. He had never blamed Isabel for the weakness which had cost them the few years of happiness they might have had together; he had put the blame all on the son, and it stayed there.
He began to think poignantly of Isabel: he had seldom been able to “see” her more clearly than as he sat looking out of his compartment window, after reading the account of this accident. She might have been just on the other side of the glass, looking in at him—and then he thought of her as the pale figure of a woman, seen yet unseen, flying through the air, beside the train, over the fields of springtime green and through the woods that were just sprouting out their little leaves. He closed his eyes and saw her as she had been long ago. He saw the brown-eyed, brown-haired, proud, gentle, laughing girl he had known when first he came to town, a boy just out of the State College. He remembered—as he had remembered ten thousand times before—the look she gave him when her brother George introduced him to her at a picnic; it was “like hazel starlight” he had written her, in a poem, afterward. He remembered his first call at the Amberson Mansion, and what a great personage she seemed, at home in that magnificence; and yet so gay and friendly. He remembered the first time he had danced with her—and the old waltz song began to beat in his ears and in his heart. They laughed and sang it together as they danced to it:
“Oh, love for a year, a week, a day,
But alas for the love that lasts alway——”
Most plainly of all he could see her dancing; and he became articulate in the mourning whisper: “So graceful—oh, so graceful——”
All the way to New York it seemed to him that Isabel was near him, and he wrote of her to Lucy from his hotel the next night:
I saw an account of the accident to George Minafer. I’m sorry, though the paper states that it was plainly his own fault. I suppose it may have been as a result of my attention falling upon the item that I thought of his mother a great deal on the way here. It seemed to me that I had never seen her more distinctly or so constantly, but, as you know, thinking of his mother is not very apt to make me admire him! Of course, however, he has my best wishes for his reeovery.
He posted the letter, and by the morning’s mail received one from Lucy written a few hours after his departure from home. She enclosed the item he had read on the train.
I thought you might not see it,
I have seen Miss Fanny and she has got him put into a room by himself. Oh, poor Rides-Down-Everything! I have been thinking so constantly of his mother and it seemed to me that I have never seen her more distinctly. How lovely she was—and how she loved him!
If Lucy had not written this letter Eugene might not have done the odd thing he did that day. Nothing could have been more natural than that both he and Lucy should have thought intently of Isabel after reading the account of George’s accident, but the fact that Lucy’s letter had crossed his own made Eugene begin to wonder if a phenomenon of telepathy might not be in question, rather than a chance coincidence. The reference to Isabel in the two letters was almost identical: he and Lucy, it appeared, had been thinking of Isabel at the same time—both said “constantly” thinking of her—and neither had ever “seen her more distinctly.” He remembered these phrases in his own letter accurately.
Reflection upon the circumstance stirred a queer spot in Eugene’s brain—he had one. He was an adventurer; if he had lived in the sixteeth century he would have sailed the unknown new seas, but having been born in the latter part of the nineteenth, when geography was a fairly well-settled matter, he had become an explorer in mechanics. But the fact that he was a “hard-headed business man” as well as an adventurer did not keep him from having a queer spot in his brain, because hard-headed business men are as susceptible to such spots as adventurers are. Some of them are secretly troubled when they do not see the new moon over the lucky shoulder; some of them have strange, secret incredulities—they do not believe in geology, for instance; and some of them think they have had supernatural experiences. “Of course there was nothing in it—still it was queer!” they say.
Two weeks after Isabel’s death, Eugene had come to New York on urgent business and found that the delayed arrival of a steamer gave him a day with nothing to do. His room at the hotel had become intolerable; outdoors was intolerable; everything was intolerable. It seemed to him that he must see Isabel once more, hear her voice once more; that he must find some way to her, or lose his mind. Under this pressure he had gone, with complete scepticism, to a “trance-medium” of whom he had heard wild accounts from the wife of a business acquaintance. He thought despairingly that at least such an excursion would be “trying to do something!” He remembered the woman’s name; found it in the telephone book, and made an appointment.
The experience had been grotesque, and he came away with an encouraging message from his father, who had failed to identify himself satisfactorily, but declared that everything was “on a higher plane” in his present state of being, and that all life was “continuous and progressive.” Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a “psychic”; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the conclusion that if any credulity were played upon by Mrs. Horner’s exhibitions, it was her own.
Nevertheless, his queer spot having been stimulated to action by the coincidence of the letters, he went to Mrs. Horner’s after his directors’ meeting to-day. He used the telephone booth in the directors’ room to make the appointment; and he laughed feebly at himself, and wondered what the group of men in that mahogany apartment would think if they knew what he was doing. Mrs. Horner had changed her address, but he found the new one, and somebody purporting to be a niece of hers talked to him and made an appointment for a “sitting” at five o’clock.
He was prompt, and the niece, a dull-faced fat girl with a magazine under her arm, admitted him to Mrs. Horner’s apartment, which smelt of camphor; and showed him into a room with gray painted walls, no rug on the floor and no furniture except a table (with nothing on it) and two chairs: one a leather easy-chair and the other a stiff little brute with a wooden seat. Th
ere was one window with the shade pulled down to the sill, but the sun was bright outside, and the room had light enough.
Mrs. Horner appeared in the doorway, a wan and unenterprising looking woman in brown, with thin hair artificially waved—but not recently—and parted in the middle over a bluish forehead. Her eyes were small and seemed weak, but she recognized the visitor.
“Oh, you been here before,” she said, in a thin voice, not unmusical. “I recollect you. Quite a time ago, wa’n’t it?”
“Yes, quite a long time.”
“I recollect because I recollect you was disappointed. Anyway, you was kind of cross.” She laughed faintly.
“I’m sorry if I seemed so,” Eugene said. “Do you happen to have found out my name?”
She looked surprised and a little reproachful. “Why, no. I never try to find out people’s names. Why should I? I don’t claim anything for the power; I only know I have it—and some ways it ain’t always such a blessing, neither, I can tell you!”