Booth Tarkington Page 24

  “I don’t know,” he sighed, and his sigh was abysmal. “But what I wanted to tell you is this: when you went away, you didn’t let me know and didn’t care how or when I heard it, but I’m not like that with you. This time, I’m going away. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m going away to-morrow night—indefinitely.”

  She nodded sunnily. “That’s nice for you. I hope you’ll have ever so jolly a time, George.”

  “I don’t expect to have a particularly ‘jolly time’.”

  “Well, then,” she laughed, “if I were you I don’t think I’d go.”

  It seemed impossible to impress this distracting creature, to make her serious. “Lucy,” he said desperately, “this is our last walk together.”

  “Evidently!” she said. “If you’re going away to-morrow night.”

  “Lucy—this may be the last time I’ll see you—ever—ever in my life.”

  At that she looked at him quickly, across her shoulder, but she smiled as brightly as before, and with the same cordial inconsequence: “Oh, I can hardly think that!” she said. “And of course I’d be awfully sorry to think it. You’re not moving away, are you, to live?”

  “No.”

  “And even if you were, of course you’d be coming back to visit your relatives every now and then.”

  “I don’t know when I’m coming back. Mother and I are starting to-morrow night for a trip around the world.”

  At this she did look thoughtful. “Your mother is going with you?”

  “Good heavens!” he groaned. “Lucy, doesn’t it make any difference to you that I am going?”

  At this her cordial smile instantly appeared again. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll miss you ever so much. Are you to be gone long?”

  He stared at her wanly. “I told you indefinitely,” he said. “We’ve made no plans—at all—for coming back.”

  “That does sound like a long trip!” she exclaimed admiringly. “Do you plan to be travelling all the time, or will you stay in some one place the greater part of it? I think it would be lovely to——”

  “Lucy!”

  He halted; and she stopped with him. They had come to a corner at the edge of the “business section” of the city, and people were everywhere about them, brushing against them, sometimes, in passing.

  “I can’t stand this,” George said, in a low voice. “I’m just about ready to go in this drug-store here, and ask the clerk for something to keep me from dying in my tracks! It’s quite a shock, you see, Lucy!”

  “What is?”

  “To find out certainly, at last, how deeply you’ve cared for me! To see how much difference this makes to you! By Jove, I have mattered to you!”

  Her cordial smile was tempered now with good-nature. “George!” She laughed indulgently. “Surely you don’t want me to do pathos on a downtown corner!”

  “You wouldn’t ‘do pathos’ anywhere!”

  “Well—don’t you think pathos is generally rather foozling?”

  “I can’t stand this any longer,” he said. “I can’t! Good-bye, Lucy!” He took her hand. “It’s good-bye—I think it’s good-bye for good, Lucy!”

  “Good-bye! I do hope you’ll have the most splendid trip.” She gave his hand a cordial little grip, then released it lightly. “Give my love to your mother. Good-bye!”

  He turned heavily away, and a moment later glanced back over his shoulder. She had not gone on, but stood watching him, that same casual, cordial smile on her face to the very last; and now, as he looked back, she emphasized her friendly unconcern by waving her small hand to him cheerily, though perhaps with the slightest hint of preoccupation, as if she had begun to think of the errand that brought her downtown.

  In his mind, George had already explained her to his own poignant dissatisfaction—some blond pup, probably, whom she had met during that “perfectly gorgeous time!” And he strode savagely onward, not looking back again.

  But Lucy remained where she was until he was out of sight. Then she went slowly into the drug-store which had struck George as a possible source of stimulant for himself.

  “Please let me have a few drops of aromatic spirits of ammonia in a glass of water,” she said, with the utmost composure.

  “Yes, ma’am!” said the impressionable clerk, who had been looking at her through the display window as she stood on the corner.

  But a moment later, as he turned from the shelves of glass jars against the wall, with the potion she had asked for in his hand, he uttered an exclamation: “For goshes’ sake, Miss!” And, describing this adventure to his fellow-boarders, that evening, “Sagged pretty near to the counter, she was,” he said. “’F I hadn’t been a bright, quick, ready-for-anything young fella she’d ’a’ flummixed plum! I was watchin’ her out the window—talkin’ to some young s’iety fella, and she was all right then. She was all right when she come in the store, too. Yes, sir; the prettiest girl that ever walked in our place and took one good look at me. I reckon it must be the truth what some you town wags say about my face!”

  Chapter XXVIII

  * * *

  AT THAT hour the heroine of the susceptible clerk’s romance was engaged in brightening the rosy little coal fire under the white mantelpiece in her pretty white-and-blue boudoir. Four photographs all framed in decorous plain silver went to the anthracite’s fierce destruction—frames and all—and three packets of letters and notes in a charming Florentine treasure-box of painted wood; nor was the box, any more than the silver frames, spared this rousing finish. Thrown heartily upon live coal, the fine wood sparkled forth in stars, then burst into an alarming blaze which scorched the white mantelpiece, but Lucy stood and looked on without moving.

  It was not Eugene who told her what had happened at Isabel’s door. When she got home, she found Fanny Minafer waiting for her—a secret excursion of Fanny’s for the purpose, presumably, of “letting out” again; because that was what she did. She told Lucy everything (except her own lamentable part in the production of the recent miseries) and concluded with a tribute to George: “The worst of it is, he thinks he’s been such a hero, and Isabel does, too, and that makes him more than twice as awful. It’s been the same all his life: everything he did was noble and perfect. He had a domineering nature to begin with, and she let it go on, and fostered it till it absolutely ruled her. I never saw a plainer case of a person’s fault making them pay for having it! She goes about, overseeing the packing and praising George and pretending to be perfectly cheerful about what he’s making her do and about the dreadful things he’s done. She pretends he did such a fine thing—so manly and protective—going to Mrs. Johnson. And so heroic—doing what his ‘principles’ made him—even though he knew what it would cost him with you! And all the while it’s almost killing her—what he said to your father! She’s always been lofty enough, so to speak, and had the greatest idea of the Ambersons being superior to the rest of the world, and all that, but rudeness, or anything like a ‘scene,’ or any bad manners—they always just made her sick! But she could never see what George’s manners were—oh, it’s been a terrible adulation! . . . It’s going to be a task for me, living in that big house, all alone: you must come and see me—I mean after they’ve gone, of course. I’ll go crazy if I don’t see something of people. I’m sure you’ll come as often as you can. I know you too well to think you’ll be sensitive about coming there, or being reminded of George. Thank heaven you’re too well-balanced,” Miss Fanny concluded, with a profound fervour, “you’re too well-balanced to let anything affect you deeply about that—that monkey!”

  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 r
etained 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 snow-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 funèbre 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 cakewalks, 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 light-foot 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 drug-store 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 Servians 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 as 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 back-yard.

  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 we
aring 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.