Booth Tarkington Read online

  “But something’s got to be done.”

  “It has, indeed! My something would seem to be leaving my watch at my uncle’s. Luckily, you——”

  The pink of Fanny’s cheeks became deeper. “But isn’t that man going to do anything to remedy it? Can’t he try to——”

  “He can try,” said Amberson. “He is trying, in fact. I’ve sat in the shop watching him try for several beautiful afternoons, while outside the windows all Nature was fragrant with spring and smoke. He hums ragtime to himself as he tries, and I think his mind is wandering to something else less tedious—to some new invention in which he’d take more interest.”

  “But you mustn’t let him,” she cried. “You must make him keep on trying!”

  “Oh, yes. He understands that’s what I sit there for. I’ll keep sitting!”

  However, in spite of the time he spent sitting in the shop, worrying the inventor of the fractious light, Amberson found opportunity to worry himself about another matter of business. This was the settlement of Isabel’s estate.

  “It’s curious about the deed to her house,” he said to his nephew. “You’re absolutely sure it wasn’t among her papers?”

  “Mother didn’t have any papers,” George told him. “None at all. All she ever had to do with business was to deposit the cheques grandfather gave her and then write her own cheques against them.”

  “The deed to the house was never recorded,” Amberson said thoughtfully. “I’ve been over to the courthouse to see. I asked father if he never gave her one, and he didn’t seem able to understand me at first. Then he finally said he thought he must have given her a deed long ago; but he wasn’t sure. I rather think he never did. I think it would be just as well to get him to execute one now in your favour. I’ll speak to him about it.”

  George sighed. “I don’t think I’d bother him about it: the house is mine, and you and I understand that it is. That’s enough for me, and there isn’t likely to be much trouble between you and me when we come to settling poor grand­father’s estate. I’ve just been with him, and I think it would only confuse him for you to speak to him about it again. I notice he seems distressed if anybody tries to get his attention—he’s a long way off, somewhere, and he likes to stay that way. I think—I think mother wouldn’t want us to bother him about it; I’m sure she’d tell us to let him alone. He looks so white and queer.”

  Amberson shook his head. “Not much whiter and queerer than you do, young fellow! You’d better begin to get some air and exercise and quit hanging about in the house all day. I won’t bother him any more than I can help; but I’ll have the deed made out ready for his signature.”

  “I wouldn’t bother him at all. I don’t see——”

  “You might see,” said his uncle uneasily. “The estate is just about as involved and mixed-up as an estate can well get, to the best of my knowledge; and I haven’t helped it any by what he let me have for this infernal headlight scheme which has finally gone trolloping forever to where the woodbine twineth. Leaves me flat, and poor old Frank Bronson just half flat, and Fanny—well, thank heaven! I kept her from going in so deep that it would leave her flat. It’s rough on her as it is, I suspect. You ought to have that deed.”

  “No. Don’t bother him.”

  “I’ll bother him as little as possible. I’ll wait till some day when he seems to brighten up a little.”

  But Amberson waited too long. The Major had already taken eleven months since his daughter’s death to think important things out. He had got as far with them as he could, and there was nothing to detain him longer in the world. One evening his grandson sat with him—the Major seemed to like best to have young George with him, so far as they were able to guess his preferences—and the old gentleman made a queer gesture: he slapped his knee as if he had made a sudden discovery, or else remembered that he had forgotten something.

  George looked at him with an air of inquiry, but said nothing. He had grown to be almost as silent as his grandfather. However, the Major spoke without being questioned.

  “It must be in the sun,” he said. “There wasn’t anything here but the sun in the first place, and the earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the earth. So, whatever we are, we must have been in the sun. We go back to the earth we came out of, so the earth will go back to the sun that it came out of. And time means nothing—nothing at all—so in a little while we’ll all be back in the sun together. I wish——”

  He moved his hand uncertainly as if reaching for something, and George jumped up. “Did you want anything, grandfather?”

  “What?”

  “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No—no. No; I don’t want anything.” The reaching hand dropped back upon the arm of his chair, and he relapsed into silence; but a few minutes later he finished the sentence he had begun:

  “I wish—somebody could tell me!”

  The next day he had a slight cold, but he seemed annoyed when his son suggested calling the doctor, and Amberson let him have his own way so far, in fact, that after he had got up and dressed, the following morning, he was all alone when he went away to find out what he hadn’t been able to think out—all those things he had wished “somebody” would tell him.

  Old Sam, shuffling in with the breakfast tray, found the Major in his accustomed easy-chair by the fireplace—and yet even the old darkey could see instantly that the Major was not there.

  Chapter XXXI

  * * *

  WHEN THE great Amberson Estate went into court for settlement, “there wasn’t any,” George Amberson said—that is, when the settlement was concluded there was no estate. “I guessed it,” Amberson went on. “As an expert on prosperity, my career is disreputable, but as a prophet of calamity I deserve a testimonial banquet.” He reproached himself bitterly for not having long ago discovered that his father had never given Isabel a deed to her house. “And those pigs, Sydney and Amelia!” he added, for this was another thing he was bitter about. “They won’t do anything. I’m sorry I gave them the opportunity of making a polished refusal. Amelia’s letter was about half in Italian; she couldn’t remember enough ways of saying no in English. One has to live quite a long while to realize there are people like that! The estate was badly crippled, even before they took out their ‘third,’ and the ‘third’ they took was the only good part of the rotten apple. Well, I didn’t ask them for restitution on my own account, and at least it will save you some trouble, young George. Never waste any time writing to them; you mustn’t count on them.”

  “I don’t,” George said quietly. “I don’t count on anything.”

  “Oh, we’ll not feel that things are quite desperate,” Amberson laughed, but not with great cheerfulness. “We’ll survive, Georgie—you will, especially. For my part I’m a little too old and too accustomed to fall back on somebody else for supplies to start a big fight with life: I’ll be content with just surviving, and I can do it on an eighteen-hundred-dollar-a-year consulship. An ex-congressman can always be pretty sure of getting some such job, and I hear from Washington the matter’s about settled. I’ll live pleasantly enough with a pitcher of ice under a palm tree, and black folks to wait on me—that part of it will be like home—and I’ll manage to send you fifty dollars every now and then, after I once get settled. So much for me! But you—of course you’ve had a poor training for making your own way, but you’re only a boy after all, and the stuff of the old stock is in you. It’ll come out and do something. I’ll never forgive myself about that deed: it would have given you something substantial to start with. Still, you have a little tiny bit, and you’ll have a little tiny salary, too; and of course your Aunt Fanny’s here, and she’s got something you can fall back on if you get too pinched, until I can begin to send you a dribble now and then.”

  George’s “little tiny bit” was six hundred dollars which had come to him from the sale of his moth
er’s furniture; and the “little tiny salary” was eight dollars a week which old Frank Bronson was to pay him for services as a clerk and student-at-law. Old Frank would have offered more to the Major’s grandson, but since the death of that best of clients and his own experience with automobile headlights, he was not certain of being able to pay more and at the same time settle his own small bills for board and lodging. George had accepted haughtily, and thereby removed a burden from his uncle’s mind.

  Amberson himself, however, had not even a “tiny bit”; though he got his consular appointment; and to take him to his post he found it necessary to borrow two hundred of his nephew’s six hundred dollars. “It makes me sick, George,” he said. “But I’d better get there and get that salary started. Of course Eugene would do anything in the world, and the fact is he wanted to, but I felt that—ah—under the circumstances——”

  “Never!” George exclaimed, growing red. “I can’t imagine one of the family——” He paused, not finding it necessary to explain that “the family” shouldn’t turn a man from the door and then accept favours from him. “I wish you’d take more.”

  Amberson declined. “One thing I’ll say for you, young George; you haven’t a stingy bone in your body. That’s the Amberson stock in you—and I like it!”

  He added something to this praise of his nephew on the day he left for Washington. He was not to return, but to set forth from the capital on the long journey to his post. George went with him to the station, and their farewell was lengthened by the train’s being several minutes late.

  “I may not see you again, Georgie,” Amberson said; and his voice was a little husky as he set a kind hand on the young man’s shoulder. “It’s quite probable that from this time on we’ll only know each other by letter—until you’re notified as my next of kin that there’s an old valise to be forwarded to you, and perhaps some dusty curios from the consulate mantelpiece. Well, it’s an odd way for us to be saying good-bye: one wouldn’t have thought it, even a few years ago, but here we are, two gentlemen of elegant appearance in a state of bustitude. We can’t ever tell what will happen at all, can we? Once I stood where we’re standing now, to say good-bye to a pretty girl—only it was in the old station before this was built, and we called it the ‘dépôt.’ She’d been visiting your mother, before Isabel was married, and I was wild about her, and she admitted she didn’t mind that. In fact, we decided we couldn’t live without each other, and we were to be married. But she had to go abroad first with her father, and when we came to say good-bye we knew we wouldn’t see each other again for almost a year. I thought I couldn’t live through it—and she stood here crying. Well, I don’t even know where she lives now, or if she is living—and I only happen to think of her sometimes when I’m here at the station waiting for a train. If she ever thinks of me she probably imagines I’m still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion, and she probably thinks of the Mansion as still beautiful—still the finest house in town. Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. And when they’re gone we can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em! But I believe I’ll say now—while there isn’t much time left for either of us to get embarrassed about it—I believe I’ll say that I’ve always been fond of you, Georgie, but I can’t say that I always liked you. Sometimes I’ve felt you were distinctly not an acquired taste. Until lately, one had to be fond of you just naturally—this isn’t very ‘tactful,’ of course—for if he didn’t, well, he wouldn’t! We all spoiled you terribly when you were a little boy and let you grow up en prince—and I must say you took to it! But you’ve received a pretty heavy jolt, and I had enough of your disposition, myself, at your age, to understand a little of what cocksure youth has to go through inside when it finds that it can make terrible mistakes. Poor old fellow! You get both kinds of jolts together, spiritual and material—and you’ve taken them pretty quietly and—well, with my train coming into the shed, you’ll forgive me for saying that there have been times when I thought you ought to be hanged—but I’ve always been fond of you, and now I like you! And just for a last word: there may be somebody else in this town who’s always felt about you like that—fond of you, I mean, no matter how much it seemed you ought to be hanged. You might try—— Hello, I must run. I’ll send back the money as fast as they pay me—so, good-bye and God bless you, Georgie!”

  He passed through the gates, waved his hat cheerily from the other side of the iron screen, and was lost from sight in the hurrying crowd. And as he disappeared, an unexpected poignant loneliness fell upon his nephew so heavily and so suddenly that he had no energy to recoil from the shock. It seemed to him that the last fragment of his familiar world had disappeared, leaving him all alone forever.

  He walked homeward slowly through what appeared to be the strange streets of a strange city; and, as a matter of fact, the city was strange to him. He had seen little of it during his years in college, and then had followed the long absence and his tragic return. Since then he had been “scarcely outdoors at all,” as Fanny complained, warning him that his health would suffer, and he had been downtown only in a closed carriage. He had not realized the great change.

  The streets were thunderous; a vast energy heaved under the universal coating of dinginess. George walked through the begrimed crowds of hurrying strangers and saw no face that he remembered. Great numbers of the faces were even of a kind he did not remember ever to have seen; they were partly like the old type that his boyhood knew, and partly like types he knew abroad. He saw German eyes with American wrinkles at their corners; he saw Irish eyes and Neapolitan eyes, Roman eyes, Tuscan eyes, eyes of Lombardy, of Savoy, Hungarian eyes, Balkan eyes, Scandinavian eyes—all with a queer American look in them. He saw Jews who had been German Jews, Jews who had been Russian Jews, Jews who had been Polish Jews but were no longer German or Russian or Polish Jews. All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending, though here and there a woman with bundles would be laughing to a companion about some adventure of the department stores, or perhaps an escape from the charging traffic of the streets—and not infrequently a girl, or a free-and-easy young matron, found time to throw an encouraging look to George.

  He took no note of these, and, leaving the crowded sidewalks, turned north into National Avenue, and presently reached the quieter but no less begrimed region of smaller shops and old-fashioned houses. Those latter had been the homes of his boyhood playmates; old friends of his grandfather had lived here;—in this alley he had fought with two boys at the same time, and whipped them; in that front yard he had been successfully teased into temporary insanity by a Sunday-school class of pinky little girls. On that sagging porch a laughing woman had fed him and other boys with doughnuts and gingerbread; yonder he saw the staggered relics of the iron picket fence he had made his white pony jump, on a dare, and in the shabby, stone-faced house behind the fence he had gone to children’s parties, and, when he was a little older he had danced there often, and fallen in love with Mary Sharon, and kissed her, apparently by force, under the stairs in the hall. The double front doors, of meaninglessly carved walnut, once so glossily varnished, had been painted smoke gray, but the smoke grime showed repulsively, even on the smoke gray; and over the doors a smoked sign proclaimed the place to be a “Stag Hotel.”

  Other houses had become boarding-houses too genteel for signs, but many were franker, some offering “board by the day, week or meal,” and some, more laconic, contenting themselves with the label: “Rooms.” One, having torn out part of an old stone-trimmed bay window for purposes of commercial display, showed forth two suspended petticoats and a pair of oyster-coloured flannel trousers to prove the claims of its black-and-gilt sign: “French Cleaning and Dye House.” Its next neighbour also sported a remodelled front and permitted no doubt that its mission in life was to attend cosily u
pon death: “J. M. Rolsener. Caskets. The Funeral Home.” And beyond that, a plain old honest four-square gray-painted brick house was flamboyantly decorated with a great gilt scroll on the railing of the old-fashioned veranda: “Mutual Benev’t Order Cavaliers and Dames of Purity.” This was the old Minafer house.

  George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime. He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile. This was a fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in dress. The ladies of this party were favourably affected at sight of the pedestrian upon the sidewalk, and, as the machine was moving slowly, and close to the curb, they had time to observe him in detail, which they did with a frankness not pleasing to the object of their attentions. “One sees so many nice-looking people one doesn’t know nowadays,” said the youngest of the young ladies. “This old town of ours is really getting enormous. I shouldn’t mind knowing who he is.”

  “I don’t know,” the youth beside her said, loudly enough to be heard at a considerable distance. “I don’t know who he is, but from his looks I know who he thinks he is: he thinks he’s the Grand Duke Cuthbert!” There was a burst of tittering as the car gathered speed and rolled away, with the girl continuing to look back until her scandalized companions forced her to turn by pulling her hood over her face. She made an impression upon George, so deep a one, in fact, that he unconsciously put his emotion into a muttered word: