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 mother’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 ‘depot.’
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
that 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 upon 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:
Riffraff!
This was the last “walk home” he was ever to take by the route he was
now following: up National Avenue to Amberson Addition and the two big
old houses at the foot of Amberson Boulevard; for tonight would be
the last night that he and Fanny were to spend in the house which the
Major had forgotten to deed to Isabel. To-morrow they were to “move
out,” and George was to begin his work in Bronson’s office. He had not
come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was
inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly
on. For of all the “ideals of life” which the world, in its rolling,
inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain
a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money. George
Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken
shrewdly when he realized at last that money, like life, was “like
quicksilver in a nest of cracks.” And his nephew had the awakening
experience of seeing the great Amberson Estate vanishing into such
a nest—in a twinkling, it seemed, now that it was indeed so utterly
vanished.
His uncle had suggested that he might write to college friends; perhaps
they could help him to something better than the prospect offered
by Bronson’s office; but George flushed and shook his head, without
explaining. In that small and quietly superior “crowd” of his he had
too emphatically supported the ideal of being rather than doing. He
could not appeal to one of its members now to help him to a job.
Besides, they were not precisely the warmest-hearted crew in the world,
and he had long ago dropped the last affectation of a correspondence
with any of them. He was as aloof from any survival of intimacy with
his boyhood friends in the city, and, in truth, had lost track of
most of them. “The Friends of the Ace,” once bound by oath to succour
one another in peril or poverty, were long ago dispersed; one or two
had died; one or two had gone to live elsewhere; the others were
disappeared into the smoky bigness of the heavy city. Of the brethren,
there remained within his present cognizance only his old enemy, the
red-haired Kinney, now married to Janie Sharon, and Charlie Johnson,
who, out of deference to his mother’s memory, had passed the Amberson
Mansion one day, when George stood upon the front steps, and, looking
in fiercely, had looked away with continued fierceness—his only token
of recognition.
On this last homeward walk of his, when George reached the entrance
to Amberson Addition—that is, when he came to where the entrance had
formerly been—he gave a little start, and halted for a moment to
stare. This was the first time he had noticed that the stone pillars,
marking the entrance, had been removed. Then he realized that for
a long time he had been conscious of a queerness about this corner
without being aware of what made the difference. National Avenue met
Amberson Boulevard here at an obtuse angle, and the removal of the
pillars made the Boulevard seem a cross-street of no overpowering
importance—certainly it did not seem to be a boulevard!
At the next corner Neptune’s Fountain remained, and one could still
determine with accuracy what its designer’s intentions had been. It
stood in sore need of just one last kindness; and if the thing had
possessed any friends they would have done that doleful shovelling
after dark.
George did not let his eyes linger upon the relic; nor did he look
steadfastly at the Amberson Mansion. Massive as the old house was, it
managed to look gaunt: its windows stared with the skull emptiness of
all windows in empty houses that are to be lived in no more. Of course
the rowdy boys of the neighbourhood had been at work: many of these
haggard windows were broken; the front door stood ajar, forced open;
and idiot salacity, in white chalk, was smeared everywhere upon the
pillars and stonework of the verandas.
George walked by the Mansion hurriedly, and came home to his mother’s
house for the last time.
Emptiness was there, too, and the closing of the door resounded through
bare rooms; for downstairs there was no furniture in the house except
a kitchen table in the dining room, which Fanny had kept “for dinner,”
she said, though as she was to cook and serve that meal herself George
had his doubts about her name for it. Upstairs, she had retained her
own furniture, and George had been living in his mother’s room, having
sent everything from his own to the auction. Isabel’s room was still
as it had been, but the furniture would be moved with Fanny’s to new
quarters in the morning. Fanny had made plans for her nephew as well
as herself; she had found a three-room “kitchenette apartment” in an
apartment house where several old friends of hers had established
themselves—elderly widows of citizens once “prominent” and other
retired gentry. People used their own “kitchenettes” for breakfast
and lunch, but there was a table-d’hote arrangement for dinner on
the ground floor; and after dinner bridge was played all evening, an
attraction powerful with Fanny. She had “made all the arrangements,”
she reported, and nervously appealed for approval, asking if she hadn’t
shown herself “pretty practical” in such matters. George acquiesced
absent-mindedly, not thinking of what she said and not realizing to
what it committed him.
He began to realize it now, as he wandered about the dismantled
house; he was far from sure that he was willing to go and live in a
“three-room apartment” with Fanny and eat breakfast and lunch with her
(prepared by herself in the “kitchenette”) and dinner at the table
d’hote in “such a pretty Colonial dining room” (so Fanny described it)
at a little round table they would have all to themselves in the midst
of a dozen little round tables which other relics of disrupted families
would have all to themselves. For the first time, now that the change
was imminent, George began to develop before his mind’s eye pictures
of what he was in for; and they appalled him. He decided that such a
life verged upon the sheerly unbearable, and that after all there were
some things left that he just couldn’t stand. So he made up his mind to
speak to his aunt about it at “dinner,” and tell her that he preferred
to ask Bronson to let him put a sofa-bed, a trunk, and a folding rubber
bathtub behind a screen in the dark rear room of the office. George
felt that this would be infinitely more tolerable; and he could eat at
restaurants, especially as about all he ever wanted nowadays was coffee.
But at “dinner” he decided to put off telling Fanny of his plan until
later: she was so nervous, and so distressed about the failure of her
efforts with sweetbreads and macaroni; and she was so eager in her talk
of how comfortable they would be “by this time to-morrow night.” She
fluttered on, her nervousness increasing, saying how “nice” it would
be for him, when he came from work in the evenings, to be among “nice
people—people who know who we are,” and to have a pleasant game of
bridge with “people who are really old friends of the family?”
When they stopped probing among the scorched fragments she had set
forth, George lingered downstairs, waiting for a better opportunity
to introduce his own subject, but when he heard dismaying sounds from
the kitchen he gave up. There was a crash, then a shower of crashes;
falling tin clamoured to be heard above the shattering of porcelain;
and over all rose Fanny’s wail of lamentation for the treasures saved
from the sale, but now lost forever to the “kitchenette.” Fanny was
nervous indeed; so nervous that she could not trust her hands.
For a moment George thought she might have been injured, but, before he
reached the kitchen, he heard her sweeping at the fragments, and turned
back. He put off speaking to Fanny until morning.
Things more insistent than his vague plans for a sofa-bed in Bronson’s
office had possession of his mind as he went upstairs, moving his hand
slowly along the smooth walnut railing of the balustrade. Half way to
the landing he stopped, turned, and stood looking down at the heavy
doors masking the black emptiness that had been the library. Here he
had stood on what he now knew was the worst day of his life; here he
had stood when his mother passed through that doorway, hand-in-hand
with her brother, to learn what her son had done.
He went on more heavily, more slowly; and, more heavily and slowly
still, entered Isabel’s room and shut the door. He did not come forth
again, and bade Fanny good-night through the closed door when she
stopped outside it later.
“I’ve put all the lights out, George,” she said. “Everything’s all
right.”
“Very well,” he called. “Good-night.”
She did not go. “I’m sure we’re going to enjoy the new little home,
George,” she said timidly. “I’ll try hard to make things nice for you,
and the people really are lovely. You mustn’t feel as if things are
altogether gloomy, George. I know everything’s going to turn out all
right. You’re young and strong and you have a good mind and I’m sure—”
she hesitated—“I’m sure your mother’s watching over you, Georgie.
Good-night, dear.”
“Good-night, Aunt Fanny.”
His voice had a strangled sound in spite of him; but she seemed not to
notice it, and he heard her go to her own room and lock herself in with
bolt and key against burglars. She had said the one thing she should
not have said just then: “I’m sure your mother’s watching over you,
Georgie.” She had meant to be kind, but it destroyed his last chance
for sleep that night. He would have slept little if she had not said
it, but since she had said it, he could not sleep at all. For he knew
that it was true—if it could be true—and that his mother, if she still
lived in spirit, would be weeping on the other side of the wall of
silence, weeping and seeking for some gate to let her through so that
she could come and “watch over him.”
He felt that if there were such gates they were surely barred: they
were like those awful library doors downstairs, which had shut her in
to begin the suffering to which he had consigned her.
The room was still Isabel’s. Nothing had been changed: even the
photographs of George, of the Major, and of “brother George” still
stood on her dressing-table, and in a drawer of her desk was an old
picture of Eugene and Lucy, taken together, which George had found, but
had slowly closed away again from sight, not touching it. To-morrow
everything would be gone; and he had heard there was not long to wait
before the house itself would be demolished. The very space which
tonight was still Isabel’s room would be cut into new shapes by new
walls and floors and ceilings; yet the room would always live, for it
could not die out of George’s memory. It would live as long as he did,
and it would always be murmurous with a tragic, wistful whispering.
And if space itself can be haunted, as memory is haunted, then some
time, when the space that was Isabel’s room came to be made into the
small bedrooms and “kitchenettes” already designed as its destiny,
that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel
that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it—a wraith of the
passion that filled it throughout the last night that George Minafer
spent there.
Whatever remnants of the old high-handed arrogance were still within
him, he did penance for his deepest sin that night—and it may be that
to this day some impressionable, overworked woman in a “kitchenette,”
after turning out the light will seem to see a young man kneeling in
the darkness, shaking convulsively, and, with arms outstretched through
the wall, clutching at the covers of a shadowy bed. It may seem to her
that she hears the faint cry, over and over:
“Mother, forgive me! God, forgive me!”