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 retained
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 snowdrift
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 funebre 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 cake-walks, 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 lightfoot
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 drugstore 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 Serbians
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 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 backyard.
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 wearing 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.
The five new houses, built so closely where had been the fine lawn of
the Amberson Mansion, did not look new. When they were a year old they
looked as old as they would ever look; and two of them were vacant,
having never been rented, for the Major’s mistake about apartment
houses had been a disastrous one. “He guessed wrong,” George Amberson
said. “He guessed wrong at just the wrong time! Housekeeping in a house
is harder than in an apartment; and where the smoke and dirt are as
thick as they are in the Addition, women can’t stand it. People were
crazy for apartments—too bad he couldn’t have seen it in time. Poor
man! he digs away at his ledgers by his old gas drop-light lamp almost
every night—he still refuses to let the Mansion be torn up for wiring,
you know. But he had one painful satisfaction this spring: he got his
taxes lowered!”
Amberson laughed ruefully, and Fanny Minafer asked how the Major could
have managed such an economy. They were sitting upon the veranda at
Isabel’s one evening during the third summer of the absence of their
nephew and his mother; and the conversation had turned toward Amberson
finances.
“I said it was a ‘painful satisfaction,’ Fanny,” he explained. “The
property has gone down in value, and they assessed it lower than they
did fifteen years ago.”
“But farther out—”
“Oh, yes, ‘farther out!’ Prices are magnificent ‘farther out,’ and
farther in, too! We just happen to be the wrong spot, that’s all. Not
that I don’t think something could be done if father would let me have
a hand; but he won’t. He can’t, I suppose I ought to say. He’s ‘always
done his own figuring,’ he says; and it’s his lifelong habit to keep
his affairs: and even his books, to himself, and just hand us out the
money. Heaven knows he’s done enough of that!”
He sighed; and both were silent, looking out at the long flares of the
constantly passing automobile headlights, shifting in vast geometric
demonstrations against the darkness. Now and then a bicycle wound its
nervous way among these portents, or, at long intervals, a surrey or
buggy plodded forlornly by.
“There seem to be so many ways of making money nowadays,” Fanny said
thoughtfully. “Every day I hear of a new fortune some person has got
hold of, one way or another—nearly always it’s somebody you never heard
of. It doesn’t seem all to be in just making motor cars; I hear there’s
a great deal in manufacturing these things that motor cars use—new
inventions particularly. I met dear old Frank Bronson the other day,
and he told me—”
“Oh, yes, even dear old Frank’s got the fever,” Amberson laughed. “He’s
as wild as any of them. He told me about this invention he’s gone into,
too. ‘Millions in it!’ Some new electric headlight better than anything
yet—‘every car in America can’t help but have ’em,’ and all that. He’s
putting half he’s laid by into it, and the fact is, he almost talked me
into getting father to ‘finance me’ enough for me to go into it. Poor
father! he’s financed me before! I suppose he would again if I had the
heart to ask him; and this seems to be a good thing, though probably
old Frank is a little too sanguine. At any rate, I’ve been thinking it
over.”
“So have I,” Fanny admitted. “He seemed to be certain it would pay
twenty-five per cent. the first year, and enormously more after that;
and I’m only getting four on my little principal. People are making
such enormous fortunes out of everything to do with motor cars, it does
seem as if—” She paused. “Well, I told him I’d think it over seriously.”
“We may turn out to be partners and millionaires then,” Amberson
laughed. “I thought I’d ask Eugene’s advice.”
“I wish you would,” said Fanny. “He probably knows exactly how much
profit there would be in this.”
Eugene’s advice was to “go slow”: he thought electric lights for
automobiles were “coming—someday but probably not until certain
difficulties could be overcome.” Altogether, he was discouraging, but
by this time his two friends “had the fever” as thoroughly as old Frank
Bronson himself had it; for they had been with Bronson to see the light
working beautifully in a machine shop. They were already enthusiastic,
and after asking Eugene’s opinion they argued with him, telling him how
they had seen with their own eyes that the difficulties he mentioned
had been overcome. “Perfectly!” Fanny cried. “And if it worked in the
shop it’s bound to work any place else, isn’t it?”
He would not agree that it was “bound to”—yet, being pressed, was
driven to admit that “it might,” and, retiring from what was developing
into an oratorical contest, repeated a warning about not “putting too
much into it.”
George Amberson also laid stress on this caution later, though the
Major had “financed him” again, and he was “going in.” “You must be
careful to leave yourself a ‘margin of safety,’ Fanny,” he said. “I’m
confident that is a pretty conservative investment of its kind, and
all the chances are with us, but you must be careful to leave yourself
enough to fall back on, in case anything should go wrong.”
Fanny deceived him. In the impossible event of “anything going wrong”
she would have enough left to “live on,” she declared, and laughed
excitedly, for she was having the best time that had come to her since
Wilbur’s death. Like so many women for whom money has always been
provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a
thorough and irresponsible plunger.
Amberson, in his wearier way, shared her excitement, and in the winter,
when the exploiting company had been formed, and he brought Fanny her
importantly engraved shares of stock, he reverted to his prediction of
possibilities, made when they first spoke of the new light.
“We seem to be partners, all right,” he laughed. “Now let’s go ahead
and be millionaires before Isabel and young George come home.”
“When they come home!” she echoed sorrowfully—and it was a phrase which
found an evasive echo in Isabel’s letters. In these letters Isabel was
always planning pleasant things that she and Fanny and the Major and
George and “brother George” would do—when she and her son came home.
“They’ll find things pretty changed, I’m afraid,” Fanny said. “If they
ever do come home!”
Amberson went over, the next summer, and joined his sister and nephew
in Paris, where they were living. “Isabel does want to come home,”
he told Fanny gravely, on the day of his return, in October. “She’s
wanted to for a long while—and she ought to come while she can stand
the journey—” And he amplified this statement, leaving Fanny looking
startled and solemn when Lucy came by to drive him out to dinner at the
new house Eugene had just completed.
This was no white-and-blue cottage, but a great Georgian picture in
brick, five miles north of Amberson Addition, with four acres of its
own hedged land between it and its next neighbour; and Amberson laughed
wistfully as they turned in between the stone and brick gate pillars,
and rolled up the crushed stone driveway. “I wonder, Lucy, if history’s
going on forever repeating itself,” he said. “I wonder if this town’s
going on building up things and rolling over them, as poor father once
said it was rolling over his poor old heart. It looks like it: here’s
the Amberson Mansion again, only it’s Georgian instead of nondescript
Romanesque; but it’s just the same Amberson Mansion that my father
built long before you were born. The only difference is that it’s your
father who’s built this one now. It’s all the same, in the long run.”
Lucy did not quite understand, but she laughed as a friend should, and,
taking his arm, showed him through vast rooms where ivory-panelled
walls and trim window hangings were reflected dimly in dark, rugless
floors, and the sparse furniture showed that Lucy had been “collecting”
with a long purse. “By Jove!” he said. “You have been going it! Fanny
tells me you had a great ‘house-warming’ dance, and you keep right on
being the belle of the ball, not any softer-hearted than you used to
be. Fred Kinney’s father says you’ve refused Fred so often that he got
engaged to Janie Sharon just to prove that someone would have him in
spite of his hair. Well, the material world do move, and you’ve got the
new kind of house it moves into nowadays—if it has the new price! And
even the grand old expanses of plate glass we used to be so proud of at
the other Amberson Mansion—they’ve gone, too, with the crowded heavy
gold and red stuff. Curious! We’ve still got the plate glass windows,
though all we can see out of ’em is the smoke and the old Johnson
house, which is a counter-jumper’s boardinghouse now, while you’ve got
a view, and you cut it all up into little panes. Well, you’re pretty
refreshingly out of the smoke up here.”
“Yes, for a while,” Lucy laughed. “Until it comes and we have to move
out farther.”
“No, you’ll stay here,” he assured her. “It will be somebody else
who’ll move out farther.”
He continued to talk of the house after Eugene arrived, and gave them
no account of his journey until they had retired from the dinner table
to Eugene’s library, a gray and shadowy room, where their coffee was
brought. Then, equipped with a cigar, which seemed to occupy his
attention, Amberson spoke in a casual tone of his sister and her son.
“I found Isabel as well as usual,” he said, “only I’m afraid ‘as usual’
isn’t particularly well. Sydney and Amelia had been up to Paris in the
spring, but she hadn’t seen them. Somebody told her they were there, it
seems. They’d left Florence and were living in Rome; Amelia’s become
a Catholic and is said to give great sums to charity and to go about
with the gentry in consequence, but Sydney’s ailing and lives in a
wheel-chair most of the time. It struck me Isabel ought to be doing the
same thing.”
He paused, bestowing minute care upon the removal of the little band
from his cigar; and as he seemed to have concluded his narrative,
Eugene spoke out of the shadow beyond a heavily shaded lamp: “What do
you mean by that?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, she’s cheerful enough,” said Amberson, still not looking at either
his young hostess or her father. “At least,” he added, “she manages to
seem so. I’m afraid she hasn’t been really well for several years. She
isn’t stout you know—she hasn’t changed in looks much—and she seems
rather alarmingly short of breath for a slender person. Father’s been
that way for years, of course; but never nearly so much as Isabel is
now. Of course she makes nothing of it, but it seemed rather serious
to me when I noticed she had to stop and rest twice to get up the one
short flight of stairs in their two-floor apartment. I told her I
thought she ought to make George let her come home.”
“Let her?” Eugene repeated, in a low voice. “Does she want to?”
“She doesn’t urge it. George seems to like the life there—in his grand,
gloomy, and peculiar way; and of course she’ll never change about
being proud of him and all that—he’s quite a swell. But in spite of
anything she said, rather than because, I know she does indeed want to
come. She’d like to be with father, of course; and I think she’s—well,
she intimated one day that she feared it might even happen that she
wouldn’t get to see him again. At the time I thought she referred to
his age and feebleness, but on the boat, coming home, I remembered the
little look of wistfulness, yet of resignation, with which she said
it, and it struck me all at once that I’d been mistaken: I saw she was
really thinking of her own state of health.”
“I see,” Eugene said, his voice even lower than it had been before.
“And you say he won’t ‘let’ her come home?”
Amberson laughed, but still continued to be interested in his cigar.
“Oh, I don’t think he uses force! He’s very gentle with her. I doubt
if the subject is mentioned between them, and yet—and yet, knowing my
interesting nephew as you do, wouldn’t you think that was about the way
to put it?”
“Knowing him as I do—yes,” said Eugene slowly. “Yes, I should think
that was about the way to put it.”
A murmur out of the shadows beyond him—a faint sound, musical and
feminine, yet expressive of a notable intensity—seemed to indicate that
Lucy was of the same opinion.