Major Amberson remained dry-eyed through the time that followed: he
knew that this separation from his daughter would be short, that
the separation which had preceded it was the long one. He worked
at his ledgers no more under his old gas drop-light, but would sit
all evening staring into the fire, in his bedroom, and not speaking
unless someone asked him a question. He seemed almost unaware of what
went on around him, and those who were with him thought him dazed by
Isabel’s death, guessing that he was lost in reminiscences and vague
dreams. “Probably his mind is full of pictures of his youth, or the
Civil War, and the days when he and mother were young married people
and all of us children were jolly little things—and the city was a
small town with one cobbled street and the others just dirt roads
with board sidewalks.” This was George Amberson’s conjecture, and
the others agreed; but they were mistaken. The Major was engaged in
the profoundest thinking of his life. No business plans which had
ever absorbed him could compare in momentousness with the plans that
absorbed him now, for he had to plan how to enter the unknown country
where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson—not
sure of anything, except that Isabel would help him if she could. His
absorption produced the outward effect of reverie, but of course it
was not. The Major was occupied with the first really important matter
that had taken his attention since he came home invalided, after the
Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized that
everything which had worried him or delighted him during this lifetime
between then and to-day—all his buying and building and trading and
banking—that it all was trifling and waste beside what concerned him
now.
He seldom went out of his room, and often left untouched the meals they
brought to him there; and this neglect caused them to shake their heads
mournfully, again mistaking for dazedness the profound concentration
of his mind. Meanwhile, the life of the little bereft group still
forlornly centering upon him began to pick up again, as life will, and
to emerge from its own period of dazedness. It was not Isabel’s father
but her son who was really dazed.
A month after her death he walked abruptly into Fanny’s room, one
night, and found her at her desk, eagerly adding columns of figures
with which she had covered several sheets of paper. This mathematical
computation was concerned with her future income to be produced by
the electric headlight, now just placed on the general market; but
Fanny was ashamed to be discovered doing anything except mourning, and
hastily pushed the sheets aside, even as she looked over her shoulder
to greet her hollow-eyed visitor.
“George! You startled me.”
“I beg your pardon for not knocking,” he said huskily. “I didn’t think.”
She turned in her chair and looked at him solicitously. “Sit down,
George, won’t you?”
“No. I just wanted—”
“I could hear you walking up and down in your room,” said Fanny. “You
were doing it ever since dinner, and it seems to me you’re at it almost
every evening. I don’t believe it’s good for you—and I know it would
worry your mother terribly if she—” Fanny hesitated.
“See here,” George said, breathing fast, “I want to tell you once more
that what I did was right. How could I have done anything else but what
I did do?”
“About what, George?”
“About everything!” he exclaimed; and he became vehement. “I did the
right thing, I tell you! In heaven’s name, I’d like to know what else
there was for anybody in my position to do! It would have been a
dreadful thing for me to just let matters go on and not interfere—it
would have been terrible! What else on earth was there for me to do?
I had to stop that talk, didn’t I? Could a son do less than I did?
Didn’t it cost me something to do it? Lucy and I’d had a quarrel, but
that would have come round in time—and it meant the end forever when I
turned her father back from our door. I knew what it meant, yet I went
ahead and did it because I knew it had to be done if the talk was to be
stopped. I took mother away for the same reason. I knew that would help
to stop it. And she was happy over there—she was perfectly happy. I
tell you, I think she had a happy life, and that’s my only consolation.
She didn’t live to be old; she was still beautiful and young looking,
and I feel she’d rather have gone before she got old. She’d had a good
husband, and all the comfort and luxury that anybody could have—and how
could it be called anything but a happy life? She was always cheerful,
and when I think of her I can always see her laughing—I can always hear
that pretty laugh of hers. When I can keep my mind off of the trip
home, and that last night, I always think of her gay and laughing.
So how on earth could she have had anything but a happy life? People
that aren’t happy don’t look cheerful all the time, do they? They look
unhappy if they are unhappy; that’s how they look! See here”—he faced
her challengingly—“do you deny that I did the right thing?”
“Oh, I don’t pretend to judge,” Fanny said soothingly, for his voice
and gesture both partook of wildness. “I know you think you did,
George.”
“Think I did!” he echoed violently. “My God in heaven!” And he began to
walk up and down the floor. “What else was there to do? What choice
did I have? Was there any other way of stopping the talk?” He stopped,
close in front of her, gesticulating, his voice harsh and loud: “Don’t
you hear me? I’m asking you: Was there any other way on earth of
protecting her from the talk?”
Miss Fanny looked away. “It died down before long, I think,” she said
nervously.
“That shows I was right, doesn’t it?” he cried. “If I hadn’t acted as
I did, that slanderous old Johnson woman would have kept on with her
slanders—she’d still be—”
“No,” Fanny interrupted. “She’s dead. She dropped dead with apoplexy
one day about six weeks after you left. I didn’t mention it in my
letters because I didn’t want—I thought—”
“Well, the other people would have kept on, then. They’d have—”
“I don’t know,” said Fanny, still averting her troubled eyes. “Things
are so changed here, George. The other people you speak of—one hardly
knows what’s become of them. Of course not a great many were doing the
talking, and they—well, some of them are dead, and some might as well
be—you never see them any more—and the rest, whoever they were, are
probably so mixed in with the crowds of new people that seem never even
to have heard of us—and I’m sure we certainly never heard of them—and
people seem to forget things so soon—they seem to forget anything. You
can’t imagine how things have changed here!”
George gulped painfully before he could speak. “You—you mean to sit
there and tell me that if I’d just let things go on—Oh!” He swung away,
walking the floor again. “I tell you I did the only right thing! If
you don’t think so, why in the name of heaven can’t you say what else
I should have done? It’s easy enough to criticize, but the person who
criticizes a man ought at least to tell him what else he should have
done! You think I was wrong!”
“I’m not saying so,” she said.
“You did at the time!” he cried. “You said enough then, I think! Well,
what have you to say now, if you’re so sure I was wrong?”
“Nothing, George.”
“It’s only because you’re afraid to!” he said, and he went on with a
sudden bitter divination: “You’re reproaching yourself with what you
had to do with all that; and you’re trying to make up for it by doing
and saying what you think mother would want you to, and you think I
couldn’t stand it if I got to thinking I might have done differently.
Oh, I know! That’s exactly what’s in your mind: you do think I was
wrong! So does Uncle George. I challenged him about it the other
day, and he answered just as you’re answering—evaded, and tried to
be gentler. I don’t care to be handled with gloves! I tell you I was
right, and I don’t need any coddling by people that think I wasn’t! And
I suppose you believe I was wrong not to let Morgan see her that last
night when he came here, and she—she was dying. If you do, why in the
name of God did you come and ask me? You could have taken him in! She
did want to see him. She—”
Miss Fanny looked startled. “You think—”
“She told me so!” And the tortured young man choked. “She said—‘just
once.’ She said ‘I’d like to have seen him—just once!’ She meant—to
tell him good-bye! That’s what she meant! And you put this on me, too;
you put this responsibility on me! But I tell you, and I told Uncle
George, that the responsibility isn’t all mine! If you were so sure I
was wrong all the time—when I took her away, and when I turned Morgan
out—if you were so sure, what did you let me do it for? You and Uncle
George were grown people, both of you, weren’t you? You were older than
I, and if you were so sure you were wiser than I, why did you just
stand around with your hands hanging down, and let me go ahead? You
could have stopped it if it was wrong, couldn’t you?”
Fanny shook her head. “No, George,” she said slowly. “Nobody could have
stopped you. You were too strong, and—”
“And what?” he demanded loudly.
“And she loved you—too well.”
George stared at her hard, then his lower lip began to move
convulsively, and he set his teeth upon it but could not check its
frantic twitching.
He ran out of the room.
She sat still, listening. He had plunged into his mother’s room, but
no sound came to Fanny’s ears after the sharp closing of the door;
and presently she rose and stepped out into the hall—but could hear
nothing. The heavy black walnut door of Isabel’s room, as Fanny’s
troubled eyes remained fixed upon it, seemed to become darker and
vaguer; the polished wood took the distant ceiling light, at the
end of the hall, in dim reflections which became mysterious; and to
Fanny’s disturbed mind the single sharp point of light on the bronze
door-knob was like a continuous sharp cry in the stillness of night.
What interview was sealed away from human eye and ear within the lonely
darkness on the other side of that door—in that darkness where Isabel’s
own special chairs were, and her own special books, and the two great
walnut wardrobes filled with her dresses and wraps? What tragic
argument might be there vainly striving to confute the gentle dead? “In
God’s name, what else could I have done?” For his mother’s immutable
silence was surely answering him as Isabel in life would never have
answered him, and he was beginning to understand how eloquent the dead
can be. They cannot stop their eloquence, no matter how they have loved
the living: they cannot choose. And so, no matter in what agony George
should cry out, “What else could I have done?” and to the end of his
life no matter how often he made that wild appeal, Isabel was doomed to
answer him with the wistful, faint murmur:
“I’d like to have—seen him. Just—just once.”
A cheerful darkey went by the house, loudly and tunelessly whistling
some broken thoughts upon women, fried food and gin; then a group of
high school boys, returning homeward after important initiations, were
heard skylarking along the sidewalk, rattling sticks on the fences,
squawking hoarsely, and even attempting to sing in the shocking new
voices of uncompleted adolescence. For no reason, and just as a poultry
yard falls into causeless agitation, they stopped in front of the
house, and for half an hour produced the effect of a noisy multitude in
full riot.
To the woman standing upstairs in the hall, this was almost unbearable;
and she felt that she would have to go down and call to them to stop;
but she was too timid, and after a time went back to her room, and sat
at her desk again. She left the door open, and frequently glanced out
into the hall, but gradually became once more absorbed in the figures
which represented her prospective income from her great plunge in
electric lights for automobiles. She did not hear George return to his
own room.
A superstitious person might have thought it unfortunate that her
partner in this speculative industry (as in Wilbur’s disastrous
rolling-mills) was that charming but too haphazardous man of the world,
George Amberson. He was one of those optimists who believe that if you
put money into a great many enterprises one of them is sure to turn out
a fortune, and therefore, in order to find the lucky one, it is only
necessary to go into a large enough number of them. Altogether gallant
in spirit, and beautifully game under catastrophe, he had gone into a
great many, and the unanimity of their “bad luck,” as he called it,
gave him one claim to be a distinguished person, if he had no other. In
business he was ill fated with a consistency which made him, in that
alone, a remarkable man; and he declared, with some earnestness, that
there was no accounting for it except by the fact that there had been
so much good luck in his family before he was born that something had
to balance it.
“You ought to have thought of my record and stayed out,” he told Fanny,
one day the next spring, when the affairs of the headlight company had
begun to look discouraging. “I feel the old familiar sinking that’s
attended all my previous efforts to prove myself a business genius.
I think it must be something like the feeling an aeronaut has when
his balloon bursts, and, looking down, he sees below him the old home
farm where he used to live—I mean the feeling he’d have just before he
flattened out in that same old clay barnyard. Things do look bleak, and
I’m only glad you didn’t go into this confounded thing to the extent I
did.”
Miss Fanny grew pink. “But it must go right!” she protested. “We saw
with our own eyes how perfectly it worked in the shop. The light was so
bright no one could face it, and so there can’t be any reason for it
not to work. It simply—”
“Oh, you’re right about that,” Amberson said. “It certainly was a
perfect thing—in the shop! The only thing we didn’t know was how fast
an automobile had to go to keep the light going. It appears that this
was a matter of some importance.”
“Well, how fast does one have to—”
“To keep the light from going entirely out,” he informed her with
elaborate deliberation, “it is computed by those enthusiasts who have
bought our product—and subsequently returned it to us and got their
money back—they compute that a motor car must maintain a speed of
twenty-five miles an hour, or else there won’t be any light at all. To
make the illumination bright enough to be noticed by an approaching
automobile, they state the speed must be more than thirty miles an
hour. At thirty-five, objects in the path of the light begin to become
visible; at forty they are revealed distinctly; and at fifty and above
we have a real headlight. Unfortunately many people don’t care to drive
that fast at all times after dusk, especially in the traffic, or where
policemen are likely to become objectionable.”
“But think of that test on the road when we—”
“That test was lovely,” he admitted. “The inventor made us happy with
his oratory, and you and Frank Bronson and I went whirling through the
night at a speed that thrilled us. It was an intoxicating sensation: we
were intoxicated by the lights, the lights and the music. We must never
forget that drive, with the cool wind kissing our cheeks and the road
lit up for miles ahead. We must never forget it and we never shall. It
cost—”
“But something’s got to be done.”
“It has, indeed! My something would seem to be leaving my watch at my
uncle’s. Luckily, you—”
The pink of Fanny’s cheeks became deeper. “But isn’t that man going to
do anything to remedy it? can’t he try to—”
“He can try,” said Amberson. “He is trying, in fact. I’ve sat in the
shop watching him try for several beautiful afternoons, while outside
the windows all Nature was fragrant with spring and smoke. He hums
ragtime to himself as he tries, and I think his mind is wandering to
something else less tedious—to some new invention in which he’d take
more interest.”
“But you mustn’t let him,” she cried. “You must make him keep on
trying!”
“Oh, yes. He understands that’s what I sit there for. I’ll keep
sitting!”
However, in spite of the time he spent sitting in the shop, worrying
the inventor of the fractious light, Amberson found opportunity to
worry himself about another matter of business. This was the settlement
of Isabel’s estate.
“It’s curious about the deed to her house,” he said to his nephew.
“You’re absolutely sure it wasn’t among her papers?”
“Mother didn’t have any papers,” George told him. “None at all. All she
ever had to do with business was to deposit the cheques grandfather
gave her and then write her own cheques against them.”
“The deed to the house was never recorded,” Amberson said thoughtfully.
“I’ve been over to the courthouse to see. I asked father if he never
gave her one, and he didn’t seem able to understand me at first. Then
he finally said he thought he must have given her a deed long ago; but
he wasn’t sure. I rather think he never did. I think it would be just
as well to get him to execute one now in your favour. I’ll speak to him
about it.”
George sighed. “I don’t think I’d bother him about it: the house is
mine, and you and I understand that it is. That’s enough for me, and
there isn’t likely to be much trouble between you and me when we come
to settling poor grandfather’s estate. I’ve just been with him, and I
think it would only confuse him for you to speak to him about it again.
I notice he seems distressed if anybody tries to get his attention—he’s
a long way off, somewhere, and he likes to stay that way. I think—I
think mother wouldn’t want us to bother him about it; I’m sure she’d
tell us to let him alone. He looks so white and queer.”
Amberson shook his head. “Not much whiter and queerer than you do,
young fellow! You’d better begin to get some air and exercise and quit
hanging about in the house all day. I won’t bother him any more than I
can help; but I’ll have the deed made out ready for his signature.”
“I wouldn’t bother him at all. I don’t see—”
“You might see,” said his uncle uneasily. “The estate is just about
as involved and mixed-up as an estate can well get, to the best of my
knowledge; and I haven’t helped it any by what he let me have for this
infernal headlight scheme which has finally gone trolloping forever to
where the woodbine twineth. Leaves me flat, and poor old Frank Bronson
just half flat, and Fanny—well, thank heaven! I kept her from going in
so deep that it would leave her flat. It’s rough on her as it is, I
suspect. You ought to have that deed.”
“No. Don’t bother him.”
“I’ll bother him as little as possible. I’ll wait till some day when he
seems to brighten up a little.”
But Amberson waited too long. The Major had already taken eleven months
since his daughter’s death to think important things out. He had got as
far with them as he could, and there was nothing to detain him longer
in the world. One evening his grandson sat with him—the Major seemed
to like best to have young George with him, so far as they were able
to guess his preferences—and the old gentleman made a queer gesture:
he slapped his knee as if he had made a sudden discovery, or else
remembered that he had forgotten something.
George looked at him with an air of inquiry, but said nothing. He had
grown to be almost as silent as his grandfather. However, the Major
spoke without being questioned.
“It must be in the sun,” he said. “There wasn’t anything here but the
sun in the first place, and the earth came out of the sun, and we came
out of the earth. So, whatever we are, we must have been in the sun. We
go back to the earth we came out of, so the earth will go back to the
sun that it came out of. And time means nothing—nothing at all—so in a
little while we’ll all be back in the sun together. I wish—”
He moved his hand uncertainly as if reaching for something, and George
jumped up. “Did you want anything, grandfather?”
“What?”
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No—no. No; I don’t want anything.” The reaching hand dropped back upon
the arm of his chair, and he relapsed into silence; but a few minutes
later he finished the sentence he had begun:
“I wish—somebody could tell me!”
The next day he had a slight cold, but he seemed annoyed when his son
suggested calling the doctor, and Amberson let him have his own way
so far, in fact, that after he had got up and dressed, the following
morning, he was all alone when he went away to find out what he hadn’t
been able to think out—all those things he had wished “somebody” would
tell him.
Old Sam, shuffling in with the breakfast tray, found the Major in his
accustomed easy-chair by the fireplace—and yet even the old darkey
could see instantly that the Major was not there.