The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington [135]
“Oh, love for a year, a week, a day,
But alas for the love that lasts alway—”
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 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 in the latter part of the nineteenth, when geography was a fairly well-settled matter, he had become an explorer in mechanics. But the fact that he was a “hard-headed business man” as well as an adventurer did not keep him from having a queer spot in his brain, because hard-headed business men are as susceptible to such spots as adventurers are. Some of them are secretly troubled when they do not see the new moon over the lucky shoulder; some of them have strange, secret incredulities—they do not believe in geology, for instance; and some of them think they have had supernatural experiences. “Of course there was nothing in it—still it was queer!” they say.
Two weeks after Isabel’s death, Eugene had come to New York on urgent business and found that the delayed arrival of a steamer gave him a day with nothing to do. His room at the hotel had become intolerable; outdoors was intolerable; everything was intolerable. It seemed to him that he must see Isabel once more, hear her voice once more; that he must find some way to her, or lose his mind. Under this pressure he had gone, with complete scepticism, to a “trance-medium” of whom he had heard wild accounts from the wife of a business acquaintance. He thought despairingly that at least such an excursion would be “trying to do something!” He remembered the woman’s name; found it in the telephone book, and made an appointment.
The experience had been grotesque,