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

felt that this would be infinitely more tolerable; and he could eat at restaurants, especially as about all he ever wanted nowadays was coffee.

But at “dinner” he decided to put off telling Fanny of his plan until later: she was so nervous, and so distressed about the failure of her efforts with sweetbreads and macaroni; and she was so eager in her talk of how comfortable they would be “by this time tomorrow night.” She fluttered on, her nervousness increasing, saying how “nice” it would be for him, when he came from work in the evenings, to be among “nice people⁠—people who know who we are,” and to have a pleasant game of bridge with “people who are really old friends of the family.”

When they stopped probing among the scorched fragments she had set forth, George lingered downstairs, waiting for a better opportunity to introduce his own subject, but when he heard dismaying sounds from the kitchen he gave up. There was a crash, then a shower of crashes; falling tin clamoured to be heard above the shattering of porcelain; and over all rose Fanny’s wail of lamentation for the treasures saved from the sale, but now lost forever to the “kitchenette.” Fanny was nervous indeed; so nervous that she could not trust her hands.

For a moment George thought she might have been injured, but, before he reached the kitchen, he heard her sweeping at the fragments, and turned back. He put off speaking to Fanny until morning.

Things more insistent than his vague plans for a sofa-bed in Bronson’s office had possession of his mind as he went upstairs, moving his hand slowly along the smooth walnut railing of the balustrade. Half way to the landing he stopped, turned, and stood looking down at the heavy doors masking the black emptiness that had been the library. Here he had stood on what he now knew was the worst day of his life; here he had stood when his mother passed through that doorway, hand-in-hand with her brother, to learn what her son had done.

He went on more heavily, more slowly; and, more heavily and slowly still, entered Isabel’s room and shut the door. He did not come forth again, and bade Fanny good night through the closed door when she stopped outside it later.

“I’ve put all the lights out, George,” she said. “Everything’s all right.”

“Very well,” he called. “Good night.”

She did not go. “I’m sure we’re going to enjoy the new little home, George,” she said timidly. “I’ll try hard to make things nice for you, and the people really are lovely. You mustn’t feel as if things are altogether gloomy, George. I know everything’s going to turn out all right. You’re young and strong and you have a good mind and I’m sure⁠—” she hesitated⁠—“I’m sure your mother’s watching over you, Georgie. Good night, dear.”

“Good night, Aunt Fanny.”

His voice had a strangled sound in spite of him; but she seemed not to notice it, and he heard her go to her own room and lock herself in with bolt and key against burglars. She had said the one thing she should not have said just then: “I’m sure your mother’s watching over you, Georgie.” She had meant to be kind, but it destroyed his last chance for sleep that night. He would have slept little if she had not said it, but since she had said it, he could not sleep at all. For he knew that it was true⁠—if it could be true⁠—and that his mother, if she still lived in spirit, would be weeping on the other side of the wall of silence, weeping and seeking for some gate to let her through so that she could come and “watch over him.”

He felt that if there were such gates they were surely barred: they were like those awful library doors downstairs, which had shut her in to begin the suffering to which he had consigned her.

The room was still Isabel’s. Nothing had been changed: even the photographs of George, of the Major, and of “brother George” still stood on her dressing-table, and in a drawer of her desk was an old picture of Eugene and Lucy, taken together, which George had found, but had slowly closed away again from sight, not touching it. Tomorrow everything would be gone; and he had heard there was not long to wait before the house itself would be demolished. The very space which tonight was still Isabel’s room would be cut into new shapes by new walls and floors and ceilings; yet the room would always live, for it could not die out of George’s memory. It would live as long as he did, and it would always be murmurous with a tragic, wistful whispering.

And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some time, when the space that was Isabel’s room came to be made into the small bedrooms and “kitchenettes” already designed as its destiny, that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it⁠—a wraith of the passion that filled it throughout the last night that George Minafer spent there.

Whatever remnants of the old high-handed arrogance were still within him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night⁠—and it may be that to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a “kitchenette,” after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched through the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her that she hears the faint cry, over and over:

“Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!”

XXXII

At least, it may be claimed for George that his last night in the house where he had been born was not occupied with his own disheartening future, but with sorrow for what sacrifices his pride and youth had demanded of others. And early