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

word and it would not stay forever. Nothing stays or holds or keeps where there is growth, he somehow perceived vaguely but truly. Great Caesar dead and turned to clay stopped no hole to keep the wind away. Dead Caesar 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 employee 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 9173 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 always⁠—”

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 recovery.

He posted the letter, and by the morning’s mail he 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 sixteenth century he would have sailed the unknown new seas, but having been born