kind o' people, I don't see why you can't say anything you want to, to 'em!”
“No, Georgie. And you haven't answered me whether you said that dreadful thing he says you did.”
“Well—” said Georgie. “Anyway, he said somep'm' to me that made me mad.” And upon this point he offered no further details; he would not explain to his mother that what had made him “mad” was Mr. Smith's hasty condemnation of herself: “Your mother ought to be ashamed,” and, “A woman that lets a bad boy like you—” Georgie did not even consider excusing himself by quoting these insolences.
Isabel stroked his head. “They were terrible words for you to use, dear. From his letter he doesn't seem a very tactful person, but—”
“He's just riffraff,” said Georgie.
“You mustn't say so,” his mother gently agreed “Where did you learn those bad words he speaks of? Where did you hear any one use them?”
“Well, I've heard 'em several places. I guess Uncle George Amberson was the first I ever heard say 'em. Uncle George Amberson said 'em to papa once. Papa didn't like it, but Uncle George was just laughin' at papa, an' then he said 'em while he was laughin'.”
“That was wrong of him,” she said, but almost instinctively he detected the lack of conviction in her tone. It was Isabel's great failing that whatever an Amberson did seemed right to her, especially if the Amberson was either her brother George, or her son George. She knew that she should be more severe with the latter now, but severity with him was beyond her power; and the Reverend Malloch Smith had succeeded only in rousing her resentment against himself. Georgie's symmetrical face—altogether an Amberson face—had looked never more beautiful to her. It always looked unusually beautiful when she tried to be severe with him. “You must promise me,” she said feebly, “never to use those bad words again.”
“I promise not to,” he said promptly—and he whispered an immediate codicil under his breath: “Unless I get mad at somebody!” This satisfied a code according to which, in his own sincere belief, he never told lies.
“That's a good boy,” she said, and he ran out to the yard, his punishment over. Some admiring friends were gathered there; they had heard of his adventure, knew of the note, and were waiting to see what was going to “happen” to him. They hoped for an account of things, and also that he would allow them to “take turns” riding his pony to the end of the alley and back.
They were really his henchmen: Georgie was a lord among boys. In fact, he was a personage among certain sorts of grown people, and was often fawned upon; the alley negroes delighted in him, chuckled over him, flattered him slavishly. For that matter, he often heard well-dressed people speaking of him admiringly: a group of ladies once gathered about him on the pavement where he was spinning a top. “I know this is Georgie!” one exclaimed, and turned to the others with the impressiveness of a showman. “Major Amberson's only grandchild!” The others said, “It is?” and made clicking sounds with their mouths; two of them loudly whispering, “So handsome!”
Georgie, annoyed because they kept standing upon the circle he had chalked for his top, looked at them coldly and offered a suggestion:
“Oh, go hire a hall!”
As an Amberson, he was already a public character, and the story of his adventure in the Reverend Malloch Smith's front yard became a town topic. Many people glanced at him with great distaste, thereafter, when they chanced to encounter him, which meant nothing to Georgie, because he innocently believed most grown people to be necessarily cross-looking as a normal phenomenon resulting from the adult state; and he failed to comprehend that the distasteful glances had any personal bearing upon himself. If he had perceived such a bearing, he would have been affected only so far, probably, as to mutter, “Riffraff!” Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs. Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his indignant voice had become audible: “Well, who is the most important person at my own grandmother's funeral?” And later he had projected his head from the window of the foremost mourners' carriage, as the undertaker happened to pass.
“Riffraff!”
There were people—grown people they were—who expressed themselves longingly: they did hope to live to see the day, they said, when that boy would get his come-upance! (They used that honest word, so much better than “deserts,” and not until many years later to be more clumsily rendered as “what is coming to him.”) Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there! But Georgie heard nothing of this, and the yearners for his taking down went unsatisfied, while their yearning grew the greater as the happy day of fulfilment was longer and longer postponed. His grandeur was not diminished by the Malloch Smith story; the rather it was increased, and among other children (especially among little girls) there was added to the prestige of his gilded position that diabolical glamour which must inevitably attend a boy who has told a minister to go to hell.
Chapter III
Until he reached the age of twelve, Georgie's education was a domestic process; tutors came to the house; and those citizens who yearned for his taking down often said: “Just wait till he has to go to public school; then he'll get it!” But at twelve Georgie was sent to a private school in the town, and there came from this small and dependent institution no report, or even rumour, of Georgie's getting anything that he was thought to deserve; therefore the yearning still persisted, though growing gaunt with feeding upon itself. For, although Georgie's pomposities and impudence in the little school were often almost unbearable, the teachers were fascinated by him. They did not like him—he was too arrogant for that—but he kept them in such a state of emotion that they thought more about him than they did about all of the other ten pupils. The emotion he kept them in was usually one resulting from injured self-respect, but sometimes it was dazzled admiration. So far as their conscientious observation went, he “studied” his lessons sparingly; but sometimes, in class, he flashed an admirable answer, with a comprehension not often shown by the pupils they taught; and he passed his examinations easily. In all, without discernible effort, he acquired at this school some rudiments of a liberal education and learned nothing whatever about himself.
The yearners were still yearning when Georgie, at sixteen, was sent away to a great “Prep School.” “Now,” they said brightly, “he'll get it! He'll find himself among boys just as important in their home towns as he is, and they'll knock the stuffing out of him when he puts on his airs with them! Oh, but that would be worth something to see!” They were mistaken, it appeared, for when Georgie returned, a few months later, he still seemed to have the same stuffing. He had been deported by the authorities, the offense being stated as “insolence and profanity”; in fact, he had given the principal of the school instructions almost identical with those formerly objected to by the Reverend Malloch Smith.
But he had not got his come-upance, and those who counted upon it were embittered by his appearance upon the down-town streets driving a dog-cart at criminal speed, making pedestrians retreat from the crossings, and behaving generally as if he “owned the earth.” A disgusted hardware dealer of middle age, one of those who hungered for Georgie's downfall, was thus driven back upon the sidewalk to avoid being run over, and so far forgot himself as to make use of the pet street insult of the year: “Got 'ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother know you're out?”
Georgie, without even seeming to look at him, flicked the long lash of his whip dexterously, and a little spurt of dust came from the hardware man's trousers, not far below the waist. He was not made of hardware: he raved, looking for a missile; then,
