When Mr. George Amberson Minafer came home for the holidays at
Christmastide, in his sophomore year, probably no great change had
taken place inside him, but his exterior was visibly altered. Nothing
about him encouraged any hope that he had received his come-upance; on
the contrary, the yearners for that stroke of justice must yearn even
more itchingly: the gilded youth’s manner had become polite, but his
politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear.
In a word, M. le Due had returned from the gay life of the capital
to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the
old chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild
amusement.
Cards were out for a ball in his honour, and this pageant of the
tenantry was held in the ballroom of the Amberson Mansion the night
after his arrival. It was, as Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster said of
Isabel’s wedding, “a big Amberson-style thing,” though that wise Mrs.
Henry Franklin Foster had long ago gone the way of all wisdom, having
stepped out of the Midland town, unquestionably into heaven—a long
step, but not beyond her powers. She had successors, but no successor;
the town having grown too large to confess that it was intellectually
led and literarily authoritated by one person; and some of these
successors were not invited to the ball, for dimensions were now so
metropolitan that intellectual leaders and literary authorities loomed
in outlying regions unfamiliar to the Ambersons. However, all “old
citizens” recognizable as gentry received cards, and of course so did
their dancing descendants.
The orchestra and the caterer were brought from away, in the Amberson
manner, though this was really a gesture—perhaps one more of habit
than of ostentation—for servitors of gaiety as proficient as these
importations were nowadays to be found in the town. Even flowers and
plants and roped vines were brought from afar—not, however, until
the stock of the local florists proved insufficient to obliterate
the interior structure of the big house, in the Amberson way. It was
the last of the great, long remembered dances that “everybody talked
about”—there were getting to be so many people in town that no later
than the next year there were too many for “everybody” to hear of even
such a ball as the Ambersons’.
George, white-gloved, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, stood with his
mother and the Major, embowered in the big red and gold drawing room
downstairs, to “receive” the guests; and, standing thus together, the
trio offered a picturesque example of good looks persistent through
three generations. The Major, his daughter, and his grandson were of
a type all Amberson: tall, straight, and regular, with dark eyes,
short noses, good chins; and the grandfather’s expression, no less
than the grandson’s, was one of faintly amused condescension. There
was a difference, however. The grandson’s unlined young face had
nothing to offer except this condescension; the grandfather’s had other
things to say. It was a handsome, worldly old face, conscious of its
importance, but persuasive rather than arrogant, and not without tokens
of sufferings withstood. The Major’s short white hair was parted in the
middle, like his grandson’s, and in all he stood as briskly equipped to
the fashion as exquisite young George.
Isabel, standing between her father and her son caused a vague
amazement in the mind of the latter. Her age, just under forty, was
for George a thought of something as remote as the moons of Jupiter:
he could not possibly have conceived such an age ever coming to be
his own: five years was the limit of his thinking in time. Five years
ago he had been a child not yet fourteen; and those five years were
an abyss. Five years hence he would be almost twenty-four; what the
girls he knew called “one of the older men.” He could imagine himself
at twenty-four, but beyond that, his powers staggered and refused
the task. He saw little essential difference between thirty-eight
and eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman but wholly
a mother. He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to
himself, his mother; nor could he imagine her thinking or doing
anything—falling in love, walking with a friend, or reading a book—as
a woman, and not as his mother. The woman, Isabel, was a stranger to
her son; as completely a stranger as if he had never in his life seen
her or heard her voice. And it was to-night, while he stood with her,
“receiving,” that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this stranger whom
he thus fleetingly encountered for the first time.
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the rôles of
the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most
youthful actors they can find among the competent. Both middle-aged
people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only
middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young
people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged
lovers are a joke—not a very funny one. Therefore, to bring both the
middle-aged people and the young people into his house, the manager
makes his romance as young as he can. Youth will indeed be served, and
its profound instinct is to be not only scornfully amused but vaguely
angered by middle-age romance. So, standing beside his mother, George
was disturbed by a sudden impression, coming upon him out of nowhere,
so far as he could detect, that her eyes were brilliant, that she was
graceful and youthful—in a word, that she was romantically lovely.
He had one of those curious moments that seem to have neither a
cause nor any connection with actual things. While it lasted, he was
disquieted not by thoughts—for he had no definite thoughts—but by a
slight emotion like that caused in a dream by the presence of something
invisible, soundless, and yet fantastic. There was nothing different
or new about his mother, except her new black and silver dress: she
was standing there beside him, bending her head a little in her
greetings, smiling the same smile she had worn for the half-hour that
people had been passing the “receiving” group. Her face was flushed,
but the room was warm; and shaking hands with so many people easily
accounted for the pretty glow that was upon her. At any time she could
have “passed” for twenty-five or twenty-six—a man of fifty would have
honestly guessed her to be about thirty but possibly two or three years
younger—and though extraordinary in this, she had been extraordinary in
it for years. There was nothing in either her looks or her manner to
explain George’s uncomfortable feeling; and yet it increased, becoming
suddenly a vague resentment, as if she had done something unmotherly to
him.
The fantastic moment passed; and even while it lasted, he was doing
his duty, greeting two pretty girls with whom he had grown up, as
people say, and warmly assuring them that he remembered them very
well—an assurance which might have surprised them “in anybody but
Georgie Minafer!” It seemed unnecessary, since he had spent many hours
with them no longer ago than the preceding August. They had with them
their parents and an uncle from out of town; and George negligently
gave the parents the same assurance he had given the daughters, but
murmured another form of greeting to the out-of-town uncle, whom he
had never seen before. This person George absently took note of as
a “queer-looking duck.” Undergraduates had not yet adopted “bird.”
It was a period previous to that in which a sophomore would have
thought of the Sharon girls’ uncle as a “queer-looking bird,” or,
perhaps a “funny-face bird.” In George’s time, every human male was
to be defined, at pleasure, as a “duck”; but “duck” was not spoken
with admiring affection, as in its former feminine use to signify
a “dear”—on the contrary, “duck” implied the speaker’s personal
detachment and humorous superiority. An indifferent amusement was
what George felt when his mother, with a gentle emphasis, interrupted
his interchange of courtesies with the nieces to present him to
the queer-looking duck, their uncle. This emphasis of Isabel’s,
though slight, enabled George to perceive that she considered the
queer-looking duck a person of some importance; but it was far from
enabling him to understand why. The duck parted his thick and longish
black hair on the side; his tie was a forgetful looking thing, and his
coat, though it fitted a good enough middle-aged figure, no product of
this year, or of last year either. One of his eyebrows was noticeably
higher than the other; and there were whimsical lines between them,
which gave him an apprehensive expression; but his apprehensions were
evidently more humorous than profound, for his prevailing look was
that of a genial man of affairs, not much afraid of anything whatever.
Nevertheless, observing only his unfashionable hair, his eyebrows, his
preoccupied tie and his old coat, the olympic George set him down as
a queer-looking duck, and having thus completed his portrait, took no
interest in him.
The Sharon girls passed on, taking the queer-looking duck with them,
and George became pink with mortification as his mother called his
attention to a white-bearded guest waiting to shake his hand. This was
George’s great-uncle, old John Minafer: it was old John’s boast that in
spite of his connection by marriage with the Ambersons, he never had
worn and never would wear a swaller-tail coat. Members of his family
had exerted their influence uselessly—at eighty-nine conservative
people seldom form radical new habits, and old John wore his “Sunday
suit” of black broadcloth to the Amberson ball. The coat was square,
with skirts to the knees; old John called it a “Prince Albert” and was
well enough pleased with it, but his great-nephew considered it the
next thing to an insult. George’s purpose had been to ignore the man,
but he had to take his hand for a moment; whereupon old John began to
tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time,
during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he
would live. The great-nephew, in a fury of blushes, dropped old John’s
hand with some vigour, and seized that of the next person in the line.
“Member you v’ry well ’ndeed!” he said fiercely.
The large room had filled, and so had the broad hall and the rooms
on the other side of the hall, where there were tables for whist.
The imported orchestra waited in the ballroom on the third floor,
but a local harp, ’cello, violin, and flute were playing airs from
“The Fencing Master” in the hall, and people were shouting over the
music. Old John Minafer’s voice was louder and more penetrating than
any other, because he had been troubled with deafness for twenty-five
years, heard his own voice but faintly, and liked to hear it. “Smell o’
flowers like this always puts me in mind o’ funerals,” he kept telling
his niece, Fanny Minafer, who was with him; and he seemed to get a
great deal of satisfaction out of this reminder. His tremulous yet
strident voice cut through the voluminous sound that filled the room,
and he was heard everywhere: “Always got to think o’ funerals when I
smell so many flowers!” And, as the pressure of people forced Fanny and
himself against the white marble mantelpiece, he pursued this train
of cheery thought, shouting, “Right here’s where the Major’s wife was
laid out at her funeral. They had her in a good light from that big
bow window.” He paused to chuckle mournfully. “I s’pose that’s where
they’ll put the Major when his time comes.”
Presently George’s mortification was increased to hear this sawmill
droning harshly from the midst of the thickening crowd: “Ain’t the
dancin’ broke out yet, Fanny? Hoopla! Le’s push through and go see the
young women-folks crack their heels! Start the circus! Hoopse-daisy!”
Miss Fanny Minafer, in charge of the lively veteran, was almost as
distressed as her nephew George, but she did her duty and managed to
get old John through the press and out to the broad stairway, which
numbers of young people were now ascending to the ballroom. And here
the sawmill voice still rose over all others: “Solid black walnut
every inch of it, balustrades and all. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth
o’ carved woodwork in the house! Like water! Spent money like water!
Always did! Still do! Like water! God knows where it all comes from!”
He continued the ascent, barking and coughing among the gleaming young
heads, white shoulders, jewels, and chiffon, like an old dog slowly
swimming up the rapids of a sparkling river; while down below, in the
drawing room, George began to recover from the degradation into which
this relic of early settler days had dragged him. What restored him
completely was a dark-eyed little beauty of nineteen, very knowing in
lustrous blue and jet; at sight of this dashing advent in the line of
guests before him, George was fully an Amberson again.
“Remember you very well _indeed!_” he said, his graciousness more
earnest than any he had heretofore displayed. Isabel heard him and
laughed.
“But you don’t, George!” she said. “You don’t remember her yet, though
of course you _will!_ Miss Morgan is from out of town, and I’m afraid
this is the first time you’ve ever seen her. You might take her up to
the dancing; I think you’ve pretty well done your duty here.”
“Be d’lighted,” George responded formally, and offered his arm, not
with a flourish, certainly, but with an impressiveness inspired partly
by the appearance of the person to whom he offered it, partly by
his being the hero of this fête, and partly by his youthfulness—for
when manners are new they are apt to be elaborate. The little beauty
entrusted her gloved fingers to his coat-sleeve, and they moved away
together.
Their progress was necessarily slow, and to George’s mind it did not
lack stateliness. How could it? Musicians, hired especially for him,
were sitting in a grove of palms in the hall and now tenderly playing
“Oh, Promise Me” for his pleasuring; dozens and scores of flowers had
been brought to life and tended to this hour that they might sweeten
the air for him while they died; and the evanescent power that music
and floral scents hold over youth stirred his appreciation of strange,
beautiful qualities within his own bosom: he seemed to himself to be
mysteriously angelic, and about to do something which would overwhelm
the beautiful young stranger upon his arm.
Elderly people and middle-aged people moved away to let him pass with
his honoured fair beside him. Worthy middle-class creatures, they
seemed, leading dull lives but appreciative of better things when they
saw them—and George’s bosom was fleetingly touched with a pitying
kindness. And since the primordial day when caste or heritage first
set one person, in his own esteem, above his fellow-beings, it is to
be doubted if anybody ever felt more illustrious, or more negligently
grand, than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party.
As he conducted Miss Morgan through the hall, toward the stairway, they
passed the open double doors of a card room, where some squadrons of
older people were preparing for action, and, leaning gracefully upon
the mantelpiece of this room, a tall man, handsome, high-mannered,
and sparklingly point-device, held laughing converse with that
queer-looking duck, the Sharon girls’ uncle. The tall gentleman waved a
gracious salutation to George, and Miss Morgan’s curiosity was stirred.
“Who is that?”
“I didn’t catch his name when my mother presented him to me,” said
George. “You mean the queer-looking duck.”
“I mean the aristocratic duck.”
“That’s my Uncle George. Honourable George Amberson. I thought
everybody knew him.”
“He looks as though everybody ought to know him,” she said. “It seems
to run in your family.”
If she had any sly intention, it skipped over George harmlessly. “Well,
of course, I suppose most everybody does,” he admitted—“out in this
part of the country especially. Besides, Uncle George is in Congress;
the family like to have someone there.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s sort of a good thing in one way. For instance, my Uncle
Sydney Amberson and his wife, Aunt Amelia, they haven’t got much of
anything to do with themselves—get bored to death around here, of
course. Well, probably Uncle George’ll have Uncle Sydney appointed
minister or ambassador, or something like that, to Russia or Italy or
somewhere, and that’ll make it pleasant when any of the rest of the
family go travelling, or things like that. I expect to do a good deal
of travelling myself when I get out of college.”
On the stairway he pointed out this prospective ambassadorial couple,
Sydney and Amelia. They were coming down, fronting the ascending tide,
and as conspicuous over it as a king and queen in a play. Moreover,
as the clear-eyed Miss Morgan remarked, the very least they looked
was ambassadorial. Sydney was an Amberson exaggerated, more pompous
than gracious; too portly, flushed, starched to a shine, his stately
jowl furnished with an Edward the Seventh beard. Amelia, likewise
full-bodied, showed glittering blond hair exuberantly dressed; a pink,
fat face cold under a white-hot tiara; a solid, cold bosom under a
white-hot necklace; great, cold, gloved arms, and the rest of her
beautifully upholstered. Amelia was an Amberson born, herself, Sydney’s
second-cousin: they had no children, and Sydney was without a business
or a profession; thus both found a great deal of time to think about
the appropriateness of their becoming Excellencies. And as George
ascended the broad stairway, they were precisely the aunt and uncle
he was most pleased to point out, to a girl from out of town, as his
appurtenances in the way of relatives. At sight of them the grandeur of
the Amberson family was instantly conspicuous as a permanent thing: it
was impossible to doubt that the Ambersons were entrenched, in their
nobility and riches, behind polished and glittering barriers which were
as solid as they were brilliant, and would last.