The Magnificent Ambersons/Chapter XVIII

That evening, after dinner, George sat with his mother and his Aunt Fanny upon the veranda. In former summers, when they sat outdoors in the evening, they had customarily used an open terrace at the side of the house, looking toward the Major’s, but that more private retreat now afforded too blank and abrupt a view of the nearest of the new houses; so, without consultation, they had abandoned it for the Romanesque stone structure in front, an oppressive place.

Its oppression seemed congenial to George; he sat upon the copestone of the stone parapet, his back against a stone pilaster; his attitude not comfortable, but rigid, and his silence not comfortable, either, but heavy. However, to the eyes of his mother and his aunt, who occupied wicker chairs at a little distance, he was almost indistinguishable except for the stiff white shield of his evening frontage.

“It’s so nice of you always to dress in the evening, Georgie,” his mother said, her glance resting upon this surface. “Your Uncle George always used to, and so did father, for years; but they both stopped quite a long time ago. Unless there’s some special occasion, it seems to me we don’t see it done any more, except on the stage and in the magazines.”

He made no response, and Isabel, after waiting a little while, as if she expected one, appeared to acquiesce in his mood for silence, and turned her head to gaze thoughtfully out at the street.

There, in the highway, the evening life of the Midland city had begun. A rising moon was bright upon the tops of the shade trees, where their branches met overhead, arching across the street, but only filtered splashings of moonlight reached the block pavement below; and through this darkness flashed the firefly lights of silent bicycles gliding by in pairs and trios—or sometimes a dozen at a time might come, and not so silent, striking their little bells; the riders’ voices calling and laughing; while now and then a pair of invisible experts would pass, playing mandolin and guitar as if handle-bars were of no account in the world—their music would come swiftly, and then too swiftly die away. Surreys rumbled lightly by, with the plod-plod of honest old horses, and frequently there was the glitter of whizzing spokes from a runabout or a sporting buggy, and the sharp, decisive hoof-beats of a trotter. Then, like a cowboy shooting up a peaceful camp, a frantic devil would hurtle out of the distance, bellowing, exhaust racketing like a machine gun gone amuck—and at these horrid sounds the surreys and buggies would hug the curbstone, and the bicycles scatter to cover, cursing; while children rushed from the sidewalks to drag pet dogs from the street. The thing would roar by, leaving a long wake of turbulence; then the indignant street would quiet down for a few minutes—till another came.

“There are a great many more than there used to be,” Miss Fanny observed, in her lifeless voice, as the lull fell after one of these visitations. “Eugene is right about that; there seem to be at least three or four times as many as there were last summer, and you never hear the ragamuffins shouting ‘Get a horse!’ nowadays; but I think he may be mistaken about their going on increasing after this. I don’t believe we’ll see so many next summer as we do now.”

“Why?” asked Isabel.

“Because I’ve begun to agree with George about their being more a fad than anything else, and I think it must be the height of the fad just now. You know how roller-skating came in—everybody in the world seemed to be crowding to the rinks—and now only a few children use rollers for getting to school. Besides, people won’t permit the automobiles to be used. Really, I think they’ll make laws against them. You see how they spoil the bicycling and the driving; people just seem to hate them! They’ll never stand it—never in the world! Of course I’d be sorry to see such a thing happen to Eugene, but I shouldn’t be really surprised to see a law passed forbidding the sale of automobiles, just the way there is with concealed weapons.”

“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 spoke 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 skirts 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.