Another citizen said an eloquent thing about Miss Isabel Amberson’s
looks. This was Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster, the foremost literary
authority and intellectual leader of the community—-for both the daily
newspapers thus described Mrs. Foster when she founded the Women’s
Tennyson Club; and her word upon art, letters, and the drama was
accepted more as law than as opinion. Naturally, when “Hazel Kirke”
finally reached the town, after its long triumph in larger places,
many people waited to hear what Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster thought of
it before they felt warranted in expressing any estimate of the play.
In fact, some of them waited in the lobby of the theatre, as they came
out, and formed an inquiring group about her.
“I didn’t see the play,” she informed them.
“What! Why, we saw you, right in the middle of the fourth row!”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “but I was sitting just behind Isabel
Amberson. I couldn’t look at anything except her wavy brown hair and
the wonderful back of her neck.”
The ineligible young men of the town (they were all ineligible) were
unable to content themselves with the view that had so charmed Mrs.
Henry Franklin Foster: they spent their time struggling to keep Miss
Amberson’s face turned toward them. She turned it most often, observers
said, toward two: one excelling in the general struggle by his sparkle,
and the other by that winning if not winsome old trait, persistence.
The sparkling gentleman “led germans” with her, and sent sonnets to
her with his bouquets—sonnets lacking neither music nor wit. He was
generous, poor, well-dressed, and his amazing persuasiveness was one
reason why he was always in debt. No one doubted that he would be able
to persuade Isabel, but he unfortunately joined too merry a party
one night, and, during a moonlight serenade upon the lawn before the
Amberson Mansion, was easily identified from the windows as the person
who stepped through the bass viol and had to be assisted to a waiting
carriage. One of Miss Amberson’s brothers was among the serenaders,
and, when the party had dispersed, remained propped against the front
door in a state of helpless liveliness; the Major going down in a
dressing-gown and slippers to bring him in, and scolding mildly, while
imperfectly concealing strong impulses to laughter. Miss Amberson also
laughed at this brother, the next day, but for the suitor it was a
different matter: she refused to see him when he called to apologize.
“You seem to care a great deal about bass viols!” he wrote her. “I
promise never to break another.” She made no response to the note,
unless it was an answer, two weeks later, when her engagement was
announced. She took the persistent one, Wilbur Minafer, no breaker of
bass viols or of hearts, no serenader at all.
A few people, who always foresaw everything, claimed that they were not
surprised, because though Wilbur Minafer “might not be an Apollo, as it
were,” he was “a steady young business man, and a good church-goer,”
and Isabel Amberson was “pretty sensible—for such a showy girl.” But
the engagement astounded the young people, and most of their fathers
and mothers, too; and as a topic it supplanted literature at the next
meeting of the “Women’s Tennyson Club.”
“Wilbur _Minafer!_” a member cried, her inflection seeming to imply
that Wilbur’s crime was explained by his surname. “Wilbur _Minafer!_
It’s the queerest thing I ever heard! To think of her taking Wilbur
Minafer, just because a man _any_ woman would like a thousand times
better was a little wild one night at a serenade!”
“No,” said Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. “It isn’t that. It isn’t even
because she’s afraid he’d be a dissipated husband and she wants to be
safe. It isn’t because she’s religious or hates wildness; it isn’t even
because she hates wildness in _him_.”
“Well, but look how she’s thrown him over for it.”
“No, that wasn’t her reason,” said the wise Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster.
“If men only knew it—and it’s a good thing they don’t—a woman doesn’t
really care much about whether a man’s wild or not, if it doesn’t
affect herself, and Isabel Amberson doesn’t care a thing!”
“Mrs. _Foster!_”
“No, she doesn’t. What she minds is his making a clown of himself in
her front yard! It made her think he didn’t care much about _her_.
She’s probably mistaken, but that’s what she thinks, and it’s too late
for her to think anything else now, because she’s going to be married
right away—the invitations will be out next week. It’ll be a big
Amberson-style thing, raw oysters floating in scooped-out blocks of
ice and a band from out-of-town—champagne, showy presents; a colossal
present from the Major. Then Wilbur will take Isabel on the carefulest
little wedding trip he can manage, and she’ll be a good wife to him,
but they’ll have the worst spoiled lot of children this town will ever
see.”
“How on earth do you make _that_ out, Mrs. Foster?”
“She couldn’t love Wilbur, could she?” Mrs. Foster demanded, with no
challengers. “Well, it will all go to her children, and she’ll ruin
’em!”
The prophetess proved to be mistaken in a single detail merely: except
for that, her foresight was accurate. The wedding was of Ambersonian
magnificence, even to the floating oysters; and the Major’s colossal
present was a set of architect’s designs for a house almost as
elaborate and impressive as the Mansion, the house to be built in
Amberson Addition by the Major. The orchestra was certainly not that
local one which had suffered the loss of a bass viol; the musicians
came, according to the prophecy and next morning’s paper, from afar;
and at midnight the bride was still being toasted in champagne, though
she had departed upon her wedding journey at ten. Four days later
the pair had returned to town, which promptness seemed fairly to
demonstrate that Wilbur had indeed taken Isabel upon the carefulest
little trip he could manage. According to every report, she was from
the start “a good wife to him,” but here in a final detail the prophecy
proved inaccurate. Wilbur and Isabel did not have children; they had
only one.
“Only one,” Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster admitted. “But I’d like to know
if he isn’t spoiled enough for a whole carload!”
Again she found none to challenge her.
At the age of nine, George Amberson Minafer, the Major’s one
grandchild, was a princely terror, dreaded not only in Amberson
Addition but in many other quarters through which he galloped on
his white pony. “By golly, I guess you think you own this town!” an
embittered labourer complained, one day, as Georgie rode the pony
straight through a pile of sand the man was sieving. “I will when I
grow up,” the undisturbed child replied. “I guess my grandpa owns it
now, you bet!” And the baffled workman, having no means to controvert
what seemed a mere exaggeration of the facts could only mutter “Oh,
pull down your vest!”
“Don’t haf to! Doctor says it ain’t healthy!” the boy returned
promptly. “But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll pull down my vest if
you’ll wipe off your chin!”
This was stock and stencil: the accustomed argot of street badinage of
the period; and in such matters Georgie was an expert. He had no vest
to pull down; the incongruous fact was that a fringed sash girdled the
juncture of his velvet blouse and breeches, for the Fauntleroy period
had set in, and Georgie’s mother had so poor an eye for appropriate
things, where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to
the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a
silk sash, and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar, with his little
black velvet suit: he had long brown curls, and often came home with
burrs in them.
Except upon the surface (which was not his own work, but his mother’s)
Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The
storied boy’s famous “Lean on _me_, grandfather,” would have been
difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth
birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already
become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of
the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little
boy with long curls might be considered in many respects superior to
their own. He fought them, learning how to go berserk at a certain
point in a fight, bursting into tears of anger, reaching for rocks,
uttering wailed threats of murder and attempting to fulfil them. Fights
often led to intimacies, and he acquired the art of saying things more
exciting than “Don’t haf to!” and “Doctor says it ain’t healthy!” Thus,
on a summer afternoon, a strange boy, sitting bored upon the gate-post
of the Reverend Malloch Smith, beheld George Amberson Minafer rapidly
approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout:
“Shoot the ole jackass! Look at the girly curls! Say, bub, where’d you
steal your mother’s ole sash!”
“Your sister stole it for me!” Georgie instantly replied, checking the
pony. “She stole it off our clo’es-line an’ gave it to me.”
“You go get your hair cut!” said the stranger hotly. “Yah! I haven’t
got any sister!”
“I know you haven’t at home,” Georgie responded. “I mean the one that’s
in jail.”
“I dare you to get down off that pony!”
Georgie jumped to the ground, and the other boy descended from the
Reverend Mr. Smith’s gatepost—but he descended inside the gate. “I dare
you outside that gate,” said Georgie.
“Yah! I dare you half way here. I dare you—”
But these were luckless challenges, for Georgie immediately vaulted
the fence—and four minutes later Mrs. Malloch Smith, hearing strange
noises, looked forth from a window; then screamed, and dashed for the
pastor’s study. Mr. Malloch Smith, that grim-bearded Methodist, came to
the front yard and found his visiting nephew being rapidly prepared by
Master Minafer to serve as a principal figure in a pageant of massacre.
It was with great physical difficulty that Mr. Smith managed to give
his nephew a chance to escape into the house, for Georgie was hard and
quick, and, in such matters, remarkably intense; but the minister,
after a grotesque tussle, got him separated from his opponent, and
shook him.
“You stop that, you!” Georgie cried fiercely; and wrenched himself
away. “I guess you don’t know who I am!”
“Yes, I do know!” the angered Mr. Smith retorted. “I know who you are,
and you’re a disgrace to your mother! Your mother ought to be ashamed
of herself to allow—”
“Shut up about my mother bein’ ashamed of herself!”
Mr. Smith, exasperated, was unable to close the dialogue with dignity.
“She ought to be ashamed,” he repeated. “A woman that lets a bad boy
like you—”
But Georgie had reached his pony and mounted. Before setting off at his
accustomed gallop, he paused to interrupt the Reverend Malloch Smith
again. “You pull down your vest, you ole Billygoat, you!” he shouted,
distinctly. “Pull down your vest, wipe off your chin—an’ go to hell!”
Such precocity is less unusual, even in children of the Rich, than most
grown people imagine. However, it was a new experience for the Reverend
Malloch Smith, and left him in a state of excitement. He at once wrote
a note to Georgie’s mother, describing the crime according to his
nephew’s testimony; and the note reached Mrs. Minafer before Georgie
did. When he got home she read it to him sorrowfully.
Dear Madam:
Your son has caused a painful distress in my household. He made
an unprovoked attack upon a little nephew of mine who is visiting
in my household, insulted him by calling him vicious names and
falsehoods, stating that ladies of his family were in jail. He
then tried to make his pony kick him, and when the child, who is
only eleven years old, while your son is much older and stronger,
endeavoured to avoid his indignities and withdraw quietly, he
pursued him into the enclosure of my property and brutally
assaulted him. When I appeared upon this scene he deliberately
called insulting words to me, concluding with profanity, such as
“go to hell,” which was heard not only by myself but by my wife and
the lady who lives next door. I trust such a state of undisciplined
behaviour may be remedied for the sake of the reputation for
propriety, if nothing higher, of the family to which this unruly
child belongs.
Georgie had muttered various interruptions, and as she concluded the
reading he said: “He’s an ole liar!”
“Georgie, you mustn’t say ‘liar.’ Isn’t this letter the truth?”
“Well,” said Georgie, “how old am I?”
“Ten.”
“Well, look how he says I’m older than a boy eleven years old.”
“That’s true,” said Isabel. “He does. But isn’t some of it true,
Georgie?”
Georgie felt himself to be in a difficulty here, and he was silent.
“Georgie, did you say what he says you did?”
“Which one?”
“Did you tell him to—to—Did you say, ‘Go to hell?’”
Georgie looked worried for a moment longer; then he brightened. “Listen
here, mamma; grandpa wouldn’t wipe his shoe on that ole story-teller,
would he?”
“Georgie, you mustn’t—”
“I mean: none of the Ambersons wouldn’t have anything to do with him,
would they? He doesn’t even know _you_, does he, mamma?”
“That hasn’t anything to do with it.”
“Yes, it has! I mean: none of the Amberson family go to see him, and
they never have him come in their house; they wouldn’t ask him to, and
they prob’ly wouldn’t even let him.”
“That isn’t what we’re talking about.”
“I bet,” said Georgie emphatically, “I bet if he wanted to see any of
’em, he’d haf to go around to the side door!”
“No, dear, they—”
“Yes, they would, mamma! So what does it matter if I did say somep’m’
to him he didn’t like? That 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.