The Magnificent Ambersons/Chapter XX

Isabel came to George’s door that night, and when she had kissed him good-night she remained in the open doorway with her hand upon his shoulder and her eyes thoughtfully lowered, so that her wish to say something more than good-night was evident. Not less obvious was her perplexity about the manner of saying it; and George, divining her thought, amiably made an opening for her.

“Well, old lady,” he said indulgently, “you needn’t look so worried. I won’t be tactless with Morgan again. After this I’ll just keep out of his way.”

Isabel looked up, searching his face with the fond puzzlement which her eyes sometimes showed when they rested upon him; then she glanced down the hall toward Fanny’s room, and, after another moment of hesitation, came quickly in, and closed the door.

“Dear,” she said, “I wish you’d tell me something: Why don’t you like Eugene?”

“Oh, I like him well enough,” George returned, with a short laugh, as he sat down and began to unlace his shoes. “I like him well enough—in his place.”

“No, dear,” she said hurriedly. “I’ve had a feeling from the very first that you didn’t really like him—that you really never liked him. Sometimes you’ve seemed to be friendly with him, and you’d laugh with him over something in a jolly, companionable way, and I’d think I was wrong, and that you really did like him, after all; but to-night I’m sure my other feeling was the right one: you don’t like him. I can’t understand it, dear; I don’t see what can be the matter.”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

This easy declaration naturally failed to carry great weight, and Isabel went on, in her troubled voice, “It seems so queer, especially when you feel as you do about his daughter.”

At this, George stopped unlacing his shoes abruptly, and sat up. “How do I feel about his daughter?” he demanded.

“Well, it’s seemed—as if—as if” Isabel began timidly. “It did seem” At least, you haven’t looked at any other girl, ever since they came here and—and certainly you’ve seemed very much interested in her. Certainly you’ve been very great friends?”

“Well, what of that?”

“It’s only that I’m like your grandfather: I can’t see how you could be so much interested in a girl and—and not feel very pleasantly toward her father.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” George said slowly; and a frown of concentration could be seen upon his brow, as from a profound effort at self-examination. “I haven’t ever thought much on that particular point, but I admit there may be a little something in what you say. The truth is, I don’t believe I’ve ever thought of the two together, exactly—at least, not until lately. I’ve always thought of Lucy just as Lucy, and of Morgan just as Morgan. I’ve always thought of her as a person herself, not as anybody’s daughter. I don’t see what’s very extraordinary about that. You’ve probably got plenty of friends, for instance, that don’t care much about your son”

“No, indeed!” she protested quickly. “And if I knew anybody who felt like that, I wouldn’t”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “I’ll try to explain a little more. If I have a friend, I don’t see that it’s incumbent upon me to like that friend’s relatives. If I didn’t like them, and pretended to, I’d be a hypocrite. If that friend likes me and wants to stay my friend he’ll have to stand my not liking his relatives, or else he can quit. I decline to be a hypocrite about it; that’s all. Now, suppose I have certain ideas or ideals which I have chosen for the regulation of my own conduct in life. Suppose some friend of mine has a relative with ideals directly the opposite of mine, and my friend believes more in the relative’s ideals than in mine: Do you think I ought to give up my own just to please a person who’s taken up ideals that I really despise?”

“No, dear; of course people can’t give up their ideals; but I don’t see what this has to do with dear little Lucy and”

“I didn’t say it had anything to do with them,” he interrupted. “I was merely putting a case to show how a person would be justified in being a friend of one member of a family, and feeling anything but friendly toward another. I don’t say, though, that I feel unfriendly to Mr. Morgan. I don’t say that I feel friendly to him, and I don’t say that I feel unfriendly; but if you really think that I was rude to him to-night”

“Just thoughtless, dear. You didn’t see that what you said to-night”

“Well, I’ll not say anything of that sort again where he can hear it. There, isn’t that enough?”

This question, delivered with large indulgence, met with no response; for Isabel, still searching his face with her troubled and perplexed gaze, seemed not to have heard it. On that account, George repeated it, and rising, went to her and patted her reassuringly upon the shoulder. “There, old lady, you needn’t fear my tactlessness will worry you again. I can’t quite promise to like people I don’t care about one way or another, but you can be sure I’ll be careful, after this, not to let them see it. It’s all right, and you’d better toddle along to bed, because I want to undress.”

“But, George,” she said earnestly, “you would like him, if you’d just let yourself. You say you don’t dislike him. Why don’t you like him? I can’t understand at all. What is it that you don’t”

“There, there!” he said. “It’s all right, and you toddle along.”

“But, George, dear”

“Now, now! I really do want to get into bed. Good-night, old lady.”

“Good-night, dear. But”

“Let’s not talk of it any more,” he said. “It’s all right, and nothing in the world to worry about. So good-night, old lady. I’ll be polite enough to him, never fear—if we happen to be thrown together. So good-night!”

“But, George, dear”

“I’m going to bed, old lady; so good-night.”

Thus the interview closed perforce. She kissed him again before going slowly to her own room, her perplexity evidently not dispersed; but the subject was not renewed between them the next day or subsequently. Nor did Fanny make any allusion to the cryptic approbation she had bestowed upon her nephew after the Major’s “not very successful little dinner”; though she annoyed George by looking at him oftener and longer than he cared to be looked at by an aunt. He could not glance her way, it seemed, without finding her red-rimmed eyes fixed upon him eagerly, with an alert and hopeful calculation in them which he declared would send a nervous man into fits. For thus, one day, he broke out, in protest:

“It would!” he repeated vehemently. “Given time it would—straight into fits! What do you find the matter with me? Is my tie always slipping up behind? Can’t you look at something else? My Lord! We’d better buy a cat for you to stare at, Aunt Fanny! A cat could stand it, maybe. What in the name of goodness do you expect to see?”

But Fanny laughed good-naturedly, and was not offended. “It’s more as if I expected you to see something, isn’t it?” she said quietly, still laughing.

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“Never mind!”

“All right, I don’t. But for heaven’s sake stare at somebody else awhile. Try it on the housemaid!”

“Well, well,” Fanny said indulgently, and then chose to be more obscure in her meaning than ever, for she adopted a tone of deep sympathy for her final remark, as she left him: “I don’t wonder you’re nervous these days, poor boy!”

And George indignantly supposed that she referred to the ordeal of Lucy’s continued absence. During this period he successfully avoided contact with Lucy’s father, though Eugene came frequently to the house, and spent several evenings with Isabel and Fanny; and sometimes persuaded them and the Major to go for an afternoon’s motoring. He did not, however, come again to the Major’s Sunday evening dinner, even when George Amberson returned. Sunday evening was the time, he explained, for going over the week’s work with his factory managers.

... When Lucy came home the autumn was far enough advanced to smell of burning leaves, and for the annual editorials, in the papers, on the purple haze, the golden branches, the ruddy fruit, and the pleasure of long tramps in the brown forest. George had not heard of her arrival, and he met her, on the afternoon following that event, at the Sharons’, where he had gone in the secret hope that he might hear something about her. Janie Sharon had just begun to tell him that she heard Lucy was expected home soon, after having “a perfectly gorgeous time”—information which George received with no responsive enthusiasm—when Lucy came demurely in, a proper little autumn figure in green and brown.

Her cheeks were flushed, and her dark eyes were bright indeed; evidences, as George supposed, of the excitement incidental to the perfectly gorgeous time just concluded; though Janie and Mary Sharon both thought they were the effect of Lucy’s having seen George’s runabout in front of the house as she came in. George took on colour, himself, as, he rose and nodded indifferently; and the hot suffusion to which he became subject extended its area to include his neck and ears. Nothing could have made him much more indignant than his consciousness of these symptoms of the icy indifference which it was his purpose not only to show but to feel.

She kissed her cousins, gave George her hand, said “How d’you do,” and took a chair beside Janie with a composure which augmented George’s indignation.

“How d’you do,” he said. “I trust that ah—I trust—I do trust”

He stopped, for it seemed to him that the word “trust” sounded idiotic. Then, to cover his awkwardness, he coughed, and even to his own rosy ears his cough was ostentatiously a false one. Whereupon, seeking to be plausible, he coughed again, and instantly hated himself: the sound he made was an atrocity. Meanwhile, Lucy sat silent, and the two Sharon girls leaned forward, staring at him with strained eyes, their lips tightly compressed; and both were but too easily diagnosed as subject to an agitation which threatened their self-control. He began again.

“I er—I hope you have had a—a pleasant time. I er—I hope you are well. I hope you are extremely—I hope extremely—extremely” And again he stopped in the midst of his floundering, not knowing how to progress beyond “extremely,” and unable to understand why the infernal word kept getting into his mouth.

“I beg your pardon?” Lucy said.

George was never more furious; he felt that he was “making a spectacle of himself”; and no young gentleman in the world was more loath than George Amberson Minafer to look a figure of fun. And while he stood there, undeniably such a figure, with Janie and Mary Sharon threatening to burst at any moment, if laughter were longer denied them. Lucy sat looking at him with her eyebrows delicately lifted in casual, polite inquiry. Her own complete composure was what most galled him.

“Nothing of the slightest importance!” he managed to say. “I was just leaving. Good afternoon!” And with long strides he reached the door and hastened through the hall; but before he closed the front door he heard from Janie and Mary Sharon the outburst of wild, irrepressible emotion which his performance had inspired.

He drove home in a tumultuous mood, and almost ran down two ladies who were engaged in absorbing conversation at a crossing. They were his Aunt Fanny and the stout Mrs. Johnson; a jerk of the reins at the last instant saved them by a few inches; but their conversation was so interesting that they were unaware of their danger, and did not notice the runabout, nor how close it came to them. George was so furious with himself and with the girl whose unexpected coming into a room could make him look such a fool, that it might have soothed him a little if he had actually run over the two absorbed ladies without injuring them beyond repair. At least, he said to himself that he wished he had; it might have taken his mind off of himself for a few minutes. For, in truth, to be ridiculous (and know it) was one of several things that George was unable to endure. He was savage.

He drove into the Major’s stable too fast, the sagacious Pendennis saving himself from going through a partition by a swerve which splintered a shaft of the runabout and almost threw the driver to the floor. George swore, and then swore again at the fat old darkey, Tom, for giggling at his swearing.

“Hoopee!” said old Tom. “Mus’ been some white lady use Mist’ Jawge mighty bad! White lady say, ‘No, suh, I ain’ go’n out ridin’ ’ith Mist’ Jawge no mo’!’ Mist’ Jawge drive in. ‘Dam de dam worl’! Dam de dam hoss! Dam de dam nigga’! Dam de dam dam!’ Hoopee!”

“That’ll do!” George said sternly.

“Yessuh!”

George strode from the stable, crossed the Major’s back yard, then passed behind the new houses, on his way home. These structures were now approaching completion, but still in a state of rawness hideous to George—though, for that matter, they were never to be anything except hideous to him. Behind them, stray planks, bricks, refuse of plaster and lath, shingles, straw, empty barrels, strips of twisted tin and broken tiles were strewn everywhere over the dried and pitted gray mud where once the suave lawn had lain like a green lake around those stately islands, the two Amberson houses. And George’s state of mind was not improved by his present view of this repulsive area, nor by his sensations when he kicked an uptilted shingle only to discover that what uptilted it was a brickbat on the other side of it. After that, the whole world seemed to be one solid conspiracy of malevolence.

In this temper he emerged from behind the house nearest to his own, and, glancing toward the street, saw his mother standing with Eugene Morgan upon the cement path that led to the front gate. She was bareheaded, and Eugene held his hat and stick in his hand; evidently he had been calling upon her, and she had come from the house with him, continuing their conversation and delaying their parting.

They had paused in their slow walk from the front door to the gate, yet still stood side by side, their shoulders almost touching, as though neither Isabel nor Eugene quite realized that their feet had ceased to bear them forward; and they were not looking at each other, but at some indefinite point before them, as people do who consider together thoughtfully and in harmony. The conversation was evidently serious; his head was bent, and Isabel’s lifted left hand rested against her cheek; but all the significances of their thoughtful attitude denoted companionableness and a shared understanding. Yet, a stranger, passing, would not have thought them married: somewhere about Eugene, not quite to be located, there was a romantic gravity; and Isabel, tall and graceful, with high colour and absorbed eyes, was visibly no wife walking down to the gate with her husband.

George stared at them. A hot dislike struck him at the sight of Eugene; and a vague revulsion, like a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth, came over him as he looked at his mother: her manner was eloquent of so much thought about her companion and of such reliance upon him. And the picture the two thus made was a vivid one indeed, to George, whose angry eyes, for some reason, fixed themselves most intently upon Isabel’s lifted hand, upon the white ruffle at her wrist, bordering the graceful black sleeve, and upon the little indentations in her cheek where the tips of her fingers rested. She should not have worn white at her wrist, or at the throat either, George felt; and then, strangely, his resentment concentrated upon those tiny indentations at the tips of her fingers—actual changes, however slight and fleeting, in his mother’s face, made because of Mr. Eugene Morgan. For the moment, it seemed to George that Morgan might have claimed the ownership of a face that changed for him. It was as if he owned Isabel.

The two began to walk on toward the gate, where they stopped again, turning to face each other, and Isabel’s glance, passing Eugene, fell upon George. Instantly she smiled and waved her hand to him; while Eugene turned and nodded; but George, standing as in some rigid trance, and staring straight at them, gave these signals of greeting no sign of recognition whatever. Upon this, Isabel called to him, waving her hand again.

“Georgie!” she called, laughing. “Wake up, dear! Georgie, hello!”

George turned away as if he had neither seen nor heard, and stalked into the house by the side door.