The appearance of Miss Lucy Morgan the next day, as she sat in George’s
fast cutter, proved so charming that her escort was stricken to soft
words instantly, and failed to control a poetic impulse. Her rich
little hat was trimmed with black fur; her hair was almost as dark as
the fur; a great boa of black fur was about her shoulders; her hands
were vanished into a black muff; and George’s laprobe was black. “You
look like—” he said. “Your face looks like—it looks like a snowflake on
a lump of coal. I mean a—a snowflake that would be a rose-leaf, too!”
“Perhaps you’d better look at the reins,” she returned. “We almost
upset just then.”
George declined to heed this advice. “Because there’s too much pink in
your cheeks for a snowflake,” he continued. “What’s that fairy story
about snow-white and rose-red—”
“We’re going pretty fast, Mr. Minafer!”
“Well, you see, I’m only here for two weeks.”
“I mean the sleigh!” she explained. “We’re not the only people on the
street, you know.”
“Oh, _they’ll_ keep out of the way.”
“That’s very patrician charioteering, but it seems to me a horse like
this needs guidance. I’m sure he’s going almost twenty miles an hour.”
“That’s nothing,” said George; but he consented to look forward again.
“He can trot under three minutes, all right.” He laughed. “I suppose
your father thinks he can build a horseless carriage to go that fast!”
“They go that fast already, sometimes.”
“Yes,” said George; “they do—for about a hundred feet! Then they give a
yell and burn up.”
Evidently she decided not to defend her father’s faith in horseless
carriages, for she laughed, and said nothing. The cold air was
polka-dotted with snowflakes, and trembled to the loud, continuous
jingling of sleighbells. Boys and girls, all aglow and panting jets of
vapour, darted at the passing sleighs to ride on the runners, or sought
to rope their sleds to any vehicle whatever, but the fleetest no more
than just touched the flying cutter, though a hundred soggy mittens
grasped for it, then reeled and whirled till sometimes the wearers
of those daring mittens plunged flat in the snow and lay a-sprawl,
reflecting. For this was the holiday time, and all the boys and girls
in town were out, most of them on National Avenue.
But there came panting and chugging up that flat thoroughfare a thing
which some day was to spoil all their sleigh-time merriment—save
for the rashest and most disobedient. It was vaguely like a topless
surry, but cumbrous with unwholesome excrescences fore and aft, while
underneath were spinning leather belts and something that whirred and
howled and seemed to stagger. The ride-stealers made no attempt to
fasten their sleds to a contrivance so nonsensical and yet so fearsome.
Instead, they gave over their sport and concentrated all their energies
in their lungs, so that up and down the street the one cry shrilled
increasingly: “Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Mister, why don’t
you git a hoss?” But the mahout in charge, sitting solitary on the
front seat, was unconcerned—he laughed, and now and then ducked a
snowball without losing any of his good-nature. It was Mr. Eugene
Morgan who exhibited so cheerful a countenance between the forward
visor of a deer-stalker cap and the collar of a fuzzy gray ulster. “Git
a hoss!” the children shrieked, and gruffer voices joined them. “Git a
hoss! Git a hoss! Git a _hoss!_”
George Minafer was correct thus far: the twelve miles an hour of such
a machine would never over-take George’s trotter. The cutter was
already scurrying between the stone pillars at the entrance to Amberson
Addition.
“That’s my grandfather’s,” said George, nodding toward the Amberson
Mansion.
“I ought to know that!” Lucy exclaimed. “We stayed there late enough
last night: papa and I were almost the last to go. He and your mother
and Miss Fanny Minafer got the musicians to play another waltz when
everybody else had gone downstairs and the fiddles were being put away
in their cases. Papa danced part of it with Miss Minafer and the rest
with your mother. Miss Minafer’s your aunt, isn’t she?”
“Yes; she lives with us. I tease her a good deal.”
“What about?”
“Oh, anything handy—whatever’s easy to tease an old maid about.”
“Doesn’t she mind?”
“She usually has sort of a grouch on me,” laughed George. “Nothing
much. That’s our house just beyond grandfather’s.” He waved a sealskin
gauntlet to indicate the house Major Amberson had built for Isabel as
a wedding gift. “It’s almost the same as grandfather’s, only not as
large and hasn’t got a regular ballroom. We gave the dance, last night,
at grandfather’s on account of the ballroom, and because I’m the only
grandchild, you know. Of course, some day that’ll be my house, though I
expect my mother will most likely go on living where she does now, with
father and Aunt Fanny. I suppose I’ll probably build a country house,
too—somewhere East, I guess.” He stopped speaking, and frowned as they
passed a closed carriage and pair. The body of this comfortable vehicle
sagged slightly to one side; the paint was old and seamed with hundreds
of minute cracks like little rivers on a black map; the coachman, a fat
and elderly darky, seemed to drowse upon the box; but the open window
afforded the occupants of the cutter a glimpse of a tired, fine old
face, a silk hat, a pearl tie, and an astrachan collar, evidently out
to take the air.
“There’s your grandfather now,” said Lucy. “Isn’t it?”
George’s frown was not relaxed. “Yes, it is; and he ought to give
that rat-trap away and sell those old horses. They’re a disgrace, all
shaggy—not even clipped. I suppose he doesn’t notice it—people get
awful funny when they get old; they seem to lose their self-respect,
sort of.”
“He seemed a real Brummell to me,” she said.
“Oh, he keeps up about what he wears, well enough, but—well, look
at that!” He pointed to a statue of Minerva, one of the cast-iron
sculptures Major Amberson had set up in opening the Addition
years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended
unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a
few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon the folds of
her drapery.
“That must be from soot,” said Lucy. “There are so many houses around
here.”
“Anyhow, somebody ought to see that these statues are kept clean. My
grandfather owns a good many of these houses, I guess, for renting.
Of course, he sold most of the lots—there aren’t any vacant ones, and
there used to be heaps of ’em when I was a boy. Another thing I don’t
think he ought to allow: a good many of these people bought big lots
and they built houses on ’em; then the price of the land kept getting
higher, and they’d sell part of their yards and let the people that
bought it build houses on it to live in, till they haven’t hardly any
of ’em got big, open yards any more, and it’s getting all too much
built up. The way it used to be, it was like a gentleman’s country
estate, and that’s the way my grandfather ought to keep it. He lets
these people take too many liberties: they do anything they want to.”
“But how could he stop them?” Lucy asked, surely with reason. “If he
sold them the land, it’s theirs, isn’t it?”
George remained serene in the face of this apparently difficult
question. “He ought to have all the trades-people boycott the families
that sell part of their yards that way. All he’d have to do would be
to tell the trades-people they wouldn’t get any more orders from the
family if they didn’t do it.”
“From ‘the family’? What family?”
“Our family,” said George, unperturbed. “The Ambersons.”
“I see!” she murmured, and evidently she did see something that he did
not, for, as she lifted her muff to her face, he asked:
“What are you laughing at now?”
“Why?”
“You always seem to have some little secret of your own to get happy
over!”
“Always!” she exclaimed. “What a big word when we only met last night!”
“That’s another case of it,” he said, with obvious sincerity. “One of
the reasons I don’t like you—much!—is you’ve got that way of seeming
quietly superior to everybody else.”
“I!” she cried. “I have?”
“Oh, you think you keep it sort of confidential to yourself, but it’s
plain enough! I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”
“You don’t?”
“No,” said George emphatically. “Not with me! I think the world’s like
this: there’s a few people that their birth and position, and so on,
puts them at the top, and they ought to treat each other entirely as
equals.” His voice betrayed a little emotion as he added, “I wouldn’t
speak like this to everybody.”
“You mean you’re confiding your deepest creed—or code, whatever it
is—to me?”
“Go on, make fun of it, then!” George said bitterly. “You do think
you’re terribly clever! It makes me tired!”
“Well, as you don’t like my seeming ‘quietly superior,’ after this I’ll
be noisily superior,” she returned cheerfully. “We aim to please!”
“I had a notion before I came for you today that we were going to
quarrel,” he said.
“No, we won’t; it takes two!” She laughed and waved her muff toward a
new house, not quite completed, standing in a field upon their right.
They had passed beyond Amberson Addition, and were leaving the northern
fringes of the town for the open country. “Isn’t that a beautiful
house!” she exclaimed. “Papa and I call it our Beautiful House.”
George was not pleased. “Does it belong to you?”
“Of course not! Papa brought me out here the other day, driving in
his machine, and we both loved it. It’s so spacious and dignified and
plain.”
“Yes, it’s plain enough!” George grunted.
“Yet it’s lovely; the gray-green roof and shutters give just enough
colour, with the trees, for the long white walls. It seems to me the
finest house I’ve seen in this part of the country.”
George was outraged by an enthusiasm so ignorant—not ten minutes ago
they had passed the Amberson Mansion. “Is that a sample of your taste
in architecture?” he asked.
“Yes. Why?”
“Because it strikes me you better go somewhere and study the subject a
little!”
Lucy looked puzzled. “What makes you have so much feeling about it?
Have I offended you?”
“‘Offended’ nothing!” George returned brusquely. “Girls usually
think they know it all as soon as they’ve learned to dance and dress
and flirt a little. They never know anything about things like
architecture, for instance. That house is about as bum a house as any
house I ever saw!”
“Why?”
“Why?” George repeated. “Did you ask me why?”
“Yes.”
“Well, for one thing—” he paused—“for one thing—well, just look at it!
I shouldn’t think you’d have to do any more than look at it if you’d
ever given any attention to architecture.”
“What is the matter with its architecture, Mr. Minafer?”
“Well, it’s this way,” said George. “It’s like this. Well, for
instance, that house—well, it was built like a town house.” He spoke of
it in the past tense, because they had now left it far behind them—a
human habit of curious significance. “It was like a house meant for a
street in the city. What kind of a house was that for people of any
taste to build out here in the country?”
“But papa says it’s built that way on purpose. There are a lot of other
houses being built in this direction, and papa says the city’s coming
out this way; and in a year or two that house will be right in town.”
“It was a bum house, anyhow,” said George crossly. “I don’t even know
the people that are building it. They say a lot of riffraff come to
town every year nowadays and there’s other riffraff that have always
lived here, and have made a little money, and act as if they owned the
place. Uncle Sydney was talking about it yesterday: he says he and some
of his friends are organizing a country club, and already some of these
riffraff are worming into it—people he never heard of at all! Anyhow, I
guess it’s pretty clear you don’t know a great deal about architecture.”
She demonstrated the completeness of her amiability by laughing. “I’ll
know something about the North Pole before long,” she said, “if we keep
going much farther in this direction!”
At this he was remorseful. “All right, we’ll turn, and drive south
awhile till you get warmed up again. I expect we have been going
against the wind about long enough. Indeed, I’m sorry!”
He said, “Indeed, I’m sorry,” in a nice way, and looked very strikingly
handsome when he said it, she thought. No doubt it is true that
there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over
all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare, sudden
gentlenesses of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the
continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts
the heart; and Lucy gave her companion a little sidelong, sunny nod of
acknowledgment. George was dazzled by the quick glow of her eyes, and
found himself at a loss for something to say.
Having turned about, he kept his horse to a walk, and at this gait the
sleighbells tinkled but intermittently. Gleaming wanly through the
whitish vapour that kept rising from the trotter’s body and flanks,
they were like tiny fog-bells, and made the only sounds in a great
winter silence. The white road ran between lonesome rail fences; and
frozen barnyards beyond the fences showed sometimes a harrow left to
rust, with its iron seat half filled with stiffened snow, and sometimes
an old dead buggy, its wheels forever set, it seemed, in the solid ice
of deep ruts. Chickens scratched the metallic earth with an air of
protest, and a masterless ragged colt looked up in sudden horror at the
mild tinkle of the passing bells, then blew fierce clouds of steam at
the sleigh. The snow no longer fell, and far ahead, in a grayish cloud
that lay upon the land, was the town.
Lucy looked at this distant thickening reflection. “When we get this
far out we can see there must be quite a little smoke hanging over the
town,” she said. “I suppose that’s because it’s growing. As it grows
bigger it seems to get ashamed of itself, so it makes this cloud and
hides in it. Papa says it used to be a bit nicer when he lived here:
he always speaks of it differently—he always has a gentle look, a
particular tone of voice, I’ve noticed. He must have been very fond
of it. It must have been a lovely place: everybody must have been so
jolly. From the way he talks, you’d think life here then was just one
long midsummer serenade. He declares it was always sunshine, that
the air wasn’t like the air anywhere else—that, as he remembers it,
there always seemed to be gold-dust in the air. I doubt it! I think it
doesn’t seem to be duller air to him now just on account of having a
little soot in it sometimes, but probably because he was twenty years
younger then. It seems to me the gold-dust he thinks was here is just
his being young that he remembers. I think it was just youth. It is
pretty pleasant to be young, isn’t it?” She laughed absently, then
appeared to become wistful. “I wonder if we really do enjoy it as much
as we’ll look back and think we did! I don’t suppose so. Anyhow, for
my part I feel as if I must be missing something about it, somehow,
because I don’t ever seem to be thinking about what’s happening at the
present moment; I’m always looking forward to something—thinking about
things that will happen when I’m older.”
“You’re a funny girl,” George said gently. “But your voice sounds
pretty nice when you think and talk along together like that!”
The horse shook himself all over, and the impatient sleighbells made
his wish audible. Accordingly, George tightened the reins, and the
cutter was off again at a three-minute trot, no despicable rate of
speed. It was not long before they were again passing Lucy’s Beautiful
House, and here George thought fit to put an appendix to his remark.
“You’re a funny girl, and you know a lot—but I don’t believe you know
much about architecture!”
Coming toward them, black against the snowy road, was a strange
silhouette. It approached moderately and without visible means of
progression, so the matter seemed from a distance; but as the cutter
shortened the distance, the silhouette was revealed to be Mr. Morgan’s
horseless carriage, conveying four people atop: Mr. Morgan with
George’s mother beside him, and, in the rear seat, Miss Fanny Minafer
and the Honourable George Amberson. All four seemed to be in the
liveliest humour, like high-spirited people upon a new adventure; and
Isabel waved her handkerchief dashingly as the cutter flashed by them.
“For the Lord’s sake!” George gasped.
“Your mother’s a dear,” said Lucy. “And she does wear the most
bewitching _things!_ She looked like a Russian princess, though I doubt
if they’re that handsome.”
George said nothing; he drove on till they had crossed Amberson
Addition and reached the stone pillars at the head of National Avenue.
There he turned.
“Let’s go back and take another look at that old sewing-machine,” he
said. “It certainly is the weirdest, craziest—”
He left the sentence unfinished, and presently they were again in sight
of the old sewing-machine. George shouted mockingly.
Alas! three figures stood in the road, and a pair of legs, with the
toes turned up, indicated that a fourth figure lay upon its back in the
snow, beneath a horseless carriage that had decided to need a horse.
George became vociferous with laughter, and coming up at his trotter’s
best gait, snow spraying from runners and every hoof, swerved to the
side of the road and shot by, shouting, “Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a
hoss!”
Three hundred yards away he turned and came back, racing; leaning
out as he passed, to wave jeeringly at the group about the disabled
machine: “Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a—”
The trotter had broken into a gallop, and Lucy cried a warning: “Be
careful!” she said. “Look where you’re driving! There’s a ditch on that
side. _Look_—”
George turned too late; the cutter’s right runner went into the ditch
and snapped off; the little sleigh upset, and, after dragging its
occupants some fifteen yards, left them lying together in a bank
of snow. Then the vigorous young horse kicked himself free of all
annoyances, and disappeared down the road, galloping cheerfully.