The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington [best android ereader .TXT] 📗

eyebrows was noticeably higher than the other; and there were whimsical lines between them, which gave him an apprehensive expression; but his apprehensions were evidently more humorous than profound, for his prevailing look was that of a genial man of affairs, not much afraid of anything whatever. Nevertheless, observing only his unfashionable hair, his eyebrows, his preoccupied tie and his old coat, the olympic George set him down as a queer-looking duck, and having thus completed his portrait, took no interest in him.

The Sharon girls passed on, taking the queer-looking duck with them, and George became pink with mortification as his mother called his attention to a white-bearded guest waiting to shake his hand. This was George’s great-uncle, old John Minafer: it was old John’s boast that in spite of his connection by marriage with the Ambersons, he never had worn and never would wear a swaller-tail coat. Members of his family had exerted their influence uselessly⁠—at eighty-nine conservative people seldom form radical new habits, and old John wore his “Sunday suit” of black broadcloth to the Amberson ball. The coat was square, with skirts to the knees; old John called it a “Prince Albert” and was well enough pleased with it, but his great-nephew considered it the next thing to an insult. George’s purpose had been to ignore the man, but he had to take his hand for a moment; whereupon old John began to tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time, during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he would live. The great-nephew, in a fury of blushes, dropped old John’s hand with some vigour, and seized that of the next person in the line. “ ’Member you v’ry well ’ndeed!” he said fiercely.

The large room had filled, and so had the broad hall and the rooms on the other side of the hall, where there were tables for whist. The imported orchestra waited in the ballroom on the third floor, but a local harp, cello, violin, and flute were playing airs from “The Fencing Master” in the hall, and people were shouting over the music. Old John Minafer’s voice was louder and more penetrating than any other, because he had been troubled with deafness for twenty-five years, heard his own voice but faintly, and liked to hear it. “Smell o’ flowers like this always puts me in mind o’ funerals,” he kept telling his niece, Fanny Minafer, who was with him; and he seemed to get a great deal of satisfaction out of this reminder. His tremulous yet strident voice cut through the voluminous sound that filled the room, and he was heard everywhere: “Always got to think o’ funerals when I smell so many flowers!” And, as the pressure of people forced Fanny and himself against the white marble mantelpiece, he pursued this train of cheery thought, shouting, “Right here’s where the Major’s wife was laid out at her funeral. They had her in a good light from that big bow window.” He paused to chuckle mournfully. “I s’pose that’s where they’ll put the Major when his time comes.”

Presently George’s mortification was increased to hear this sawmill droning harshly from the midst of the thickening crowd: “Ain’t the dancin’ broke out yet, Fanny? Hoopla! Le’s push through and go see the young women-folks crack their heels! Start the circus! Hoopse-daisy!” Miss Fanny Minafer, in charge of the lively veteran, was almost as distressed as her nephew George, but she did her duty and managed to get old John through the press and out to the broad stairway, which numbers of young people were now ascending to the ballroom. And here the sawmill voice still rose over all others: “Solid black walnut every inch of it, balustrades and all. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth o’ carved woodwork in the house! Like water! Spent money like water! Always did! Still do! Like water! God knows where it all comes from!”

He continued the ascent, barking and coughing among the gleaming young heads, white shoulders, jewels, and chiffon, like an old dog slowly swimming up the rapids of a sparkling river; while down below, in the drawing room, George began to recover from the degradation into which this relic of early settler days had dragged him. What restored him completely was a dark-eyed little beauty of nineteen, very knowing in lustrous blue and jet; at sight of this dashing advent in the line of guests before him, George was fully an Amberson again.

“Remember you very well indeed!” he said, his graciousness more earnest than any he had heretofore displayed. Isabel heard him and laughed.

“But you don’t, George!” she said. “You don’t remember her yet, though of course you will! Miss Morgan is from out of town, and I’m afraid this is the first time you’ve ever seen her. You might take her up to the dancing; I think you’ve pretty well done your duty here.”

“Be d’lighted,” George responded formally, and offered his arm, not with a flourish, certainly, but with an impressiveness inspired partly by the appearance of the person to whom he offered it, partly by his being the hero of this fête, and partly by his youthfulness⁠—for when manners are new they are apt to be elaborate. The little beauty entrusted her gloved fingers to his coat-sleeve, and they moved away together.

Their progress was necessarily slow, and to George’s mind it did not lack stateliness. How could it? Musicians, hired especially for him, were sitting in a grove of palms in the hall and now tenderly playing “Oh, Promise Me” for his pleasuring; dozens and scores of flowers had been brought to life and tended to this hour that they might sweeten the air for him while they died; and the evanescent power that music and floral scents hold over youth stirred his appreciation of strange, beautiful qualities within his own bosom: he seemed to himself to be mysteriously angelic, and about to do something which would overwhelm the