The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington (top novels of all time TXT) 📗

Elderly people and middle-aged people moved away to let him pass with his honoured fair beside him. Worthy middle-class creatures, they seemed, leading dull lives but appreciative of better things when they saw them⁠—and George’s bosom was fleetingly touched with a pitying kindness. And since the primordial day when caste or heritage first set one person, in his own esteem, above his fellow-beings, it is to be doubted if anybody ever felt more illustrious, or more negligently grand, than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party.

As he conducted Miss Morgan through the hall, toward the stairway, they passed the open double doors of a card room, where some squadrons of older people were preparing for action, and, leaning gracefully upon the mantelpiece of this room, a tall man, handsome, high-mannered, and sparklingly point-device, held laughing converse with that queer-looking duck, the Sharon girls’ uncle. The tall gentleman waved a gracious salutation to George, and Miss Morgan’s curiosity was stirred. “Who is that?”

“I didn’t catch his name when my mother presented him to me,” said George. “You mean the queer-looking duck.”

“I mean the aristocratic duck.”

“That’s my Uncle George Honourable George Amberson. I thought everybody knew him.”

“He looks as though everybody ought to know him,” she said. “It seems to run in your family.”

If she had any sly intention, it skipped over George harmlessly. “Well, of course, I suppose most everybody does,” he admitted⁠—“out in this part of the country especially. Besides, Uncle George is in Congress; the family like to have someone there.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s sort of a good thing in one way. For instance, my Uncle Sydney Amberson and his wife, Aunt Amelia, they haven’t got much of anything to do with themselves⁠—get bored to death around here, of course. Well, probably Uncle George’ll have Uncle Sydney appointed minister or ambassador, or something like that, to Russia or Italy or somewhere, and that’ll make it pleasant when any of the rest of the family go travelling, or things like that. I expect to do a good deal of travelling myself when I get out of college.”

On the stairway he pointed out this prospective ambassadorial couple, Sydney and Amelia. They were coming down, fronting the ascending tide, and as conspicuous over it as a king and queen in a play. Moreover, as the clear-eyed Miss Morgan remarked, the very least they looked was ambassadorial. Sydney was an Amberson exaggerated, more pompous than gracious; too portly, flushed, starched to a shine, his stately jowl furnished with an Edward the Seventh beard. Amelia, likewise full-bodied, showed glittering blond hair exuberantly dressed; a pink, fat face cold under a white-hot tiara; a solid, cold bosom under a white-hot necklace; great, cold, gloved arms, and the rest of her beautifully upholstered. Amelia was an Amberson born, herself, Sydney’s second-cousin: they had no children, and Sydney was without a business or a profession; thus both found a great deal of time to think about the appropriateness of their becoming Excellencies. And as George ascended the broad stairway, they were precisely the aunt and uncle he was most pleased to point out, to a girl from out of town, as his appurtenances in the way of relatives. At sight of them the grandeur of the Amberson family was instantly conspicuous as a permanent thing: it was impossible to doubt that the Ambersons were entrenched, in their nobility and riches, behind polished and glittering barriers which were as solid as they were brilliant, and would last.

The hero of the fête, with the dark-eyed little beauty upon his arm, reached the top of the second flight of stairs; and here, beyond a spacious landing, where two proud-like darkies tended a crystalline punch bowl, four wide archways in a rose-vine lattice framed gliding silhouettes of waltzers, already smoothly at it to the castanets of “La Paloma.” Old John Minafer, evidently surfeited, was in the act of leaving these delights. “D’want ’ny more o’ that!” he barked. “Just slidin’ around! Call that dancin’? Rather see a jig any day in the world! They ain’t very modest, some of ’em. I don’t mind that, though. Not me!”

Miss Fanny Minafer was no longer in charge of him: he emerged from the ballroom escorted by a middle-aged man of commonplace appearance. The escort had a dry, lined face upon which, not ornamentally but as a matter of course, there grew a business man’s short moustache; and his thin neck showed an Adam’s apple, but not conspicuously, for there was nothing conspicuous about him. Baldish, dim, quiet, he was an unnoticeable part of this festival, and although there were a dozen or more middle-aged men present, not casually to be distinguished from him in general aspect, he was probably the last person in the big house at whom a stranger would have glanced twice. It did not enter George’s mind to mention to Miss Morgan that this was his father, or to say anything whatever about him.

Mr. Minafer shook his son’s hand unobtrusively in passing.

“I’ll take Uncle John home,” he said, in a low voice. “Then I guess I’ll go on home myself⁠—I’m not a great hand at parties, you know. Good night, George.”

George murmured a friendly enough good night without pausing. Ordinarily he was not ashamed of the Minafers; he seldom thought about them at all, for he belonged, as most American children do, to the mother’s family⁠—but he was anxious not to linger with Miss Morgan in the vicinity of old John, whom he felt to be a disgrace.

He pushed brusquely through the fringe of calculating youths who were gathered in the arches, watching for chances to dance only with girls who would soon be taken off their hands, and led his stranger lady out upon the floor. They caught the time instantly, and were away in the waltz.

George danced well, and Miss Morgan seemed to float as part of the music, the very dove itself of “La Paloma.” They said nothing as they