The Magnificent Ambersons Page 24

  The four photographs and the painted Florentine box went to their cremation within the same hour that Miss Fanny spoke; and a little later Lucy called her father in, as he passed her door, and pointed to the blackened area on the underside of the mantelpiece, and to the burnt heap upon the coal, where some metallic shapes still retained outline. She flung her arms about his neck in passionate sympathy, telling him that she knew what had happened to him; and presently he began to comfort her and managed an embarrassed laugh.

  “Well, well—” he said. “I was too old for such foolishness to be getting into my head, anyhow.”

  “No, no!” she sobbed. “And if you knew how I despise myself for—for ever having thought one instant about—oh, Miss Fanny called him the right name: that monkey! He is!”

  “There, I think I agree with you,” Eugene said grimly, and in his eyes there was a steady light of anger that was to last. “Yes, I think I agree with you about that!”

  “There’s only one thing to do with such a person,” she said vehemently. “That’s to put him out of our thoughts forever—forever!”

  And yet, the next day, at six o’clock, which was the hour, Fanny had told her, when George and his mother were to leave upon their long journey, Lucy touched that scorched place on her mantel with her hand just as the little clock above it struck. Then, after this odd, unconscious gesture, she went to a window and stood between the curtains, looking out into the cold November dusk; and in spite of every reasoning and reasonable power within her, a pain of loneliness struck through her heart. The dim street below her window, the dark houses across the way, the vague air itself—all looked empty, and cold and (most of all) uninteresting. Something more sombre than November dusk took the colour from them and gave them that air of desertion.

  The light of her fire, flickering up behind her showed suddenly a flying group of tiny snowflakes nearing the window-pane; and for an instant she felt the sensation of being dragged through a snows drift under a broken cutter, with a boy’s arms about her—an arrogant, handsome, too-conquering boy, who nevertheless did his best to get hurt himself, keeping her from any possible harm.

  She shook the picture out of her eyes indignantly, then came and sat before her fire, and looked long and long at the blackened mantelpiece. She did not have the mantelpiece repainted—and, since she did not, might as well have kept his photographs. One forgets what made the scar upon his hand but not what made the scar upon his wall.

  She played no marche funebre upon her piano, even though Chopin’s romantic lamentation was then at the top of nine-tenths of the music- racks in the country, American youth having recently discovered the distinguished congeniality between itself and this deathless bit of deathly gloom. She did not even play “Robin Adair”; she played “Bedelia” and all the new cake-walks, for she was her father’s housekeeper, and rightly looked upon the office as being the same as that of his heart-keeper. Therefore it was her affair to keep both house and heart in what state of cheerfulness might be contrived. She made him “go out” more than ever; made him take her to all the gayeties of that winter, declining to go herself unless he took her, and, though Eugene danced no more, and quoted Shakespeare to prove all lightfoot caperings beneath the dignity of his age, she broke his resolution for him at the New Year’s Eve “Assembly” and half coaxed, half dragged him forth upon the floor, and made him dance the New Year in with her.

  New faces appeared at the dances of the winter; new faces had been appearing everywhere, for that matter, and familiar ones were disappearing, merged in the increasing crowd, or gone forever and missed a little and not long; for the town was growing and changing as it never had grown and changed before.

  It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run; a raw, new house would appear on a country road; four or five others would presently be built at intervals between it and the outskirts of the town; the country road would turn into an asphalt street with a brick-faced drugstore and a frame grocery at a corner; then bungalows and six-room cottages would swiftly speckle the open green spaces—and a farm had become a suburb which would immediately shoot out other suburbs into the country, on one side, and, on the other, join itself solidly to the city. You drove between pleasant fields and woodland groves one spring day; and in the autumn, passing over the same ground, you were warned off the tracks by an interurban trolley-car’s gonging, and beheld, beyond cement sidewalks just dry, new house- owners busy “moving in.” Gasoline and electricity were performing the miracles Eugene had predicted.

  But the great change was in the citizenry itself. What was left of the patriotic old-stock generation that had fought the Civil War, and subsequently controlled politics, had become venerable and was little heeded. The descendants of the pioneers and early settlers were merging into the new crowd, becoming part of it, little to be distinguished from it. What happened to Boston and to Broadway happened in degree to the Midland city; the old stock became less and less typical, and of the grown people who called the place home, less than a third had been born in it. There was a German quarter; there was a Jewish quarter; there was a negro quarter—square miles of it— called “Bucktown”; there were many Irish neighbourhoods; and there were large settlements of Italians, and of Hungarians, and of Rumanians, and of Serbians and other Balkan peoples. But not the emigrants, themselves, were the almost dominant type on the streets downtown. That type was the emigrant’s prosperous offspring: descendant of the emigrations of the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, those great folk-journeyings in search not so directly of freedom and democracy as of more money for the same labour. A new Midlander—in fact, a new American—was beginning dimly to emerge.

  A new spirit of citizenship had already sharply defined itself. It was idealistic, and its ideals were expressed in the new kind of young men in business downtown. They were optimists—optimists to the point of belligerence—their motto being “Boost! Don’t Knock!” And they were hustlers, believing in hustling and in honesty because both paid. They loved their city and worked for it with a plutonic energy which was always ardently vocal. They were viciously governed, but they sometimes went so far to struggle for better government on account of the helpful effect of good government on the price of real estate and “betterment” generally; the politicians could not go too far with them, and knew it. The idealists planned and strove and shouted that their city should become a better, better, and better city—and what they meant, when they used the word “better,” was “more prosperous,” and the core of their idealism was this: “The more prosperous my beloved city, the more prosperous beloved I!” They had one supreme theory: that the perfect beauty and happiness of cities and of human life was to be brought about by more factories; they had a mania for factories; there was nothing they would not do to cajole a factory away from another city; and they were never more piteously embittered than when another city cajoled one away from them.

  What they meant by Prosperity was credit at the bank; but in exchange for this credit they got nothing that was not dirty, and, therefore, to a sane mind, valueless; since whatever was cleaned was dirty again before the cleaning was half done. For, as the town grew, it grew dirty with an incredible completeness. The idealists put up magnificent business buildings and boasted of them, but the buildings were begrimed before they were finished. They boasted of their libraries, of their monuments and statues; and poured soot on them. They boasted of their schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the children or their mothers. It was the fault of the idealists, who said: “The more dirt, the more prosperity.” They drew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs. “Boost! Don’t knock!” they said. And every year or so they boomed a great Clean-up Week, when everybody was supposed to get
rid of the tin cans in his backyard.

  They were happiest when the tearing down and building up were most riotous, and when new factory districts were thundering into life. In truth, the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man, skinned, to show his busy works, yet wearing a few barbaric ornaments; and such a figure carved, coloured, and discoloured, and set up in the market-place, would have done well enough as the god of the new people. Such a god they had indeed made in their own image, as all peoples make the god they truly serve; though of course certain of the idealists went to church on Sunday, and there knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. But while the Growing went on, this god of their market-place was their true god, their familiar and spirit-control. They did not know that they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as the first step toward becoming free men) until they should make the strange and hard discovery that matter should serve man’s spirit.

  “Prosperity” meant good credit at the bank, black lungs, and housewives’ Purgatory. The women fought the dirt all they could; but if they let the air into their houses they let in the dirt. It shortened their lives, and kept them from the happiness of ever seeing anything white. And thus, as the city grew, the time came when Lucy, after a hard struggle, had to give up her blue-and-white curtains and her white walls. Indoors, she put everything into dull gray and brown, and outside had the little house painted the dark green nearest to black. Then she knew, of course, that everything was as dirty as ever, but was a little less distressed because it no longer looked so dirty as it was.

  These were bad times for Amberson Addition. This quarter, already old, lay within a mile of the centre of the town, but business moved in other directions; and the Addition’s share of Prosperity was only the smoke and dirt, with the bank credit left out. The owners of the original big houses sold them, or rented them to boarding-house keepers, and the tenants of the multitude of small houses moved “farther out” (where the smoke was thinner) or into apartment houses, which were built by dozens now. Cheaper tenants took their places, and the rents were lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get “farther out” where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, “farther out” was now as close to business as the Addition had been in the days of its prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.

  The five new houses, built so closely where had been the fine lawn of the Amberson Mansion, did not look new. When they were a year old they looked as old as they would ever look; and two of them were vacant, having never been rented, for the Major’s mistake about apartment houses had been a disastrous one. “He guessed wrong,” George Amberson said.. “He guessed wrong at just the wrong time! Housekeeping in a house is harder than in an apartment; and where the smoke and dirt are as thick as they are in the Addition, women can’t stand it. People were crazy for apartments—too bad he couldn’t have seen it in time. Poor man! he digs away at his ledgers by his old gas drop-light lamp almost every night—he still refuses to let the Mansion be torn up for wiring, you know. But he had one painful satisfaction this spring: he got his taxes lowered!”

  Amberson laughed ruefully, and Fanny Minafer asked how the Major could have managed such an economy. They were sitting upon the veranda at Isabel’s one evening during the third summer of the absence of their nephew and his mother; and the conversation had turned toward Amberson finances.

  “I said it was a ‘painful satisfaction,’ Fanny,” he explained. “The property has gone down in value, and they assessed it lower than they did fifteen years ago.”

  “But farther out—”

  “Oh, yes, ‘farther out!’ Prices are magnificent ‘farther out,’ and farther in, too! We just happen to be the wrong spot, that’s all. Not that I don’t think something could be done if father would let me have a hand; but he won’t. He can’t, I suppose I ought to say. He’s ‘always done his own figuring,’ he says; and it’s his lifelong habit to keep his affairs: and even his books, to himself, and just hand us out the money. Heaven knows he’s done enough of that!”

  He sighed; and both were silent, looking out at the long flares of the constantly passing automobile headlights, shifting in vast geometric demonstrations against the darkness. Now and then a bicycle wound its nervous way among these portents, or, at long intervals, a surrey or buggy plodded forlornly by.

  “There seem to be so many ways of making money nowadays,” Fanny said thoughtfully. “Every day I hear of a new fortune some person has got hold of, one way or another—nearly always it’s somebody you never heard of. It doesn’t seem all to be in just making motor cars; I hear there’s a great deal in manufacturing these things that motor cars use—new inventions particularly. I met dear old Frank Bronson the other day, and he told me—”

  “Oh, yes, even dear old Frank’s got the fever,” Amberson laughed. “He’s as wild as any of them. He told me about this invention he’s gone into, too. ‘Millions in it!’ Some new electric headlight better than anything yet—’every car in America can’t help but have ‘em,’ and all that. He’s putting half he’s laid by into it, and the fact is, he almost talked me into getting father to ‘finance me’ enough for me to go into it. Poor father! he’s financed me before! I suppose he would again if I had the heart to ask him; and this seems to be a good thing, though probably old Frank is a little too sanguine. At any rate, I’ve been thinking it over.”

  “So have I,” Fanny admitted. “He seemed to be certain it would pay twenty-five per cent. the first year, and enormously more after that; and I’m only getting four on my little principal. People are making such enormous fortunes out of everything to do with motor cars, it does seem as if—” She paused. “Well, I told him I’d think it over seriously.”

  “We may turn out to be partners and millionaires then,” Amberson laughed. “I thought I’d ask Eugene’s advice.”

  “I wish you would,” said Fanny. “He probably knows exactly how much profit there would be in this.”

  Eugene’s advice was to “go slow”: he thought electric lights for automobiles were “coming—someday but probably not until certain difficulties could be overcome.” Altogether, he was discouraging, but by this time his two friends “had the fever” as thoroughly as old Frank Bronson himself had it; for they had been with Bronson to see the light working beautifully in a machine shop. They were already enthusiastic, and after asking Eugene’s opinion they argued with him, telling him how they had seen with their own eyes that the difficulties he mentioned had been overcome. “Perfectly!” Fanny cried. “And if it worked in the shop it’s bound to work any place else, isn’t it?”

  He would not agree that it was “bound to”—yet, being pressed, was driven to admit that “it might,” and, retiring from what was developing into an oratorical contest, repeated a warning about not “putting too much into it.”

  George Amberson also laid stress on this caution later, though the Major had “financed him” again, and he was “going in.” “You must be careful to leave yourself a ‘margin of safety,’ Fanny,” he said. “I’m confident that is a pretty conservative investment of its kind, and all the chances are with us, but you must be careful to leave yourself enough to fall back on, in case anything should go wrong.”

  Fanny deceived him. In the impossible event of “anything going wrong” she would have enough left to “live on,” she declared, and laughed excitedly, for she was having the best time that had come to her since Wilbur’s death. Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.

  Amberson, in his wearier way, shared her excitement, and in the winter, when the exploiting company ha
d been formed, and he brought Fanny, her importantly engraved shares of stock, he reverted to his prediction of possibilities, made when they first spoke of the new light.

  “We seem to be partners, all right,” he laughed. “Now let’s go ahead and be millionaires before Isabel and young George come home.”

  “When they come home!” she echoed sorrowfully—and it was a phrase which found an evasive echo in Isabel’s letters. In these letters Isabel was always planning pleasant things that she and Fanny and the Major and George and “brother George” would do—when she and her son came home. “They’ll find things pretty changed, I’m afraid,” Fanny said. “If they ever do come home!”

  Amberson went over, the next summer, and joined his sister and nephew in Paris, where they were living. “Isabel does want to come home,” he told Fanny gravely, on the day of his return, in October. “She’s wanted to for a long while—and she ought to come while she can stand the journey—” And he amplified this statement, leaving Fanny looking startled and solemn when Lucy came by to drive him out to dinner at the new house Eugene had just completed.

  This was no white-and-blue cottage, but a great Georgian picture in brick, five miles north of Amberson Addition, with four acres of its own hedged land between it and its next neighbour; and Amberson laughed wistfully as they turned in between the stone and brick gate pillars, and rolled up the crushed stone driveway. “I wonder, Lucy, if history’s going on forever repeating itself,” he said. “I wonder if this town’s going on building up things and rolling over them, as poor father once said it was rolling over his poor old heart. It looks like it: here’s the Amberson Mansion again, only it’s Georgian instead of nondescript Romanesque; but it’s just the same Amberson Mansion that my father built long before you were born. The only difference is that it’s your father who’s built this one now. It’s all the same, in the long run.”