The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington

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THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

By Booth Tarkington

Chapter I

Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1873, when other people were
losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.
Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as
even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt
New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and
place. Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their
Midland town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost
during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a
Newfoundland dog.

In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet
knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet, and when there was a
new purchase of sealskin, sick people were got to windows to see it go
by. Trotters were out, in the winter afternoons, racing light sleighs
on National Avenue and Tennessee Street; everybody recognized both the
trotters and the drivers; and again knew them as well on summer
evenings, when slim buggies whizzed by in renewals of the snow-time
rivalry. For that matter, everybody knew everybody else's family
horse-and-carriage, could identify such a silhouette half a mile down
the street, and thereby was sure who was going to market, or to a
reception, or coming home from office or store to noon dinner or
evening supper.

During the earlier years of this period, elegance of personal
appearance was believed to rest more upon the texture of garments than
upon their shaping. A silk dress needed no remodelling when it was a
year or so old; it remained distinguished by merely remaining silk.
Old men and governors wore broadcloth; "full dress" was broadcloth
with "doeskin" trousers; and there were seen men of all ages to whom a
hat meant only that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a
"stove-pipe." In town and country these men would wear no other hat,
and, without self-consciousness, they went rowing in such hats.

Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture:
dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning
and in power, found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion
of the "Derby" hat arrived: one season the crown of this hat would be
a bucket; the next it would be a spoon. Every house still kept its
bootjack, but high-topped boots gave way to shoes and "congress
gaiters"; and these were played through fashions that shaped them now
with toes like box-ends and now with toes like the prows of racing
shells.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved
that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made";
these betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to
the shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were
having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the
"dude" was invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-
pointed shoes, a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a
"Chesterfield," with short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical
collar, laundered to a polish and three inches high, while his other
neckgear might be a heavy, puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a
doll's braids. With evening dress he wore a tan overcoat so short
that his black coat-tails hung visible, five inches below the over-
coat; but after a season or two he lengthened his overcoat till it
touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight trousers into
trousers like great bags. Then, presently, he was seen no more,
though the word that had been coined for him remained in the
vocabularies of the impertinent.

It was a hairier day than this. Beards were to the wearers' fancy,
and things as strange as the Kaiserliche boar-tusk moustache were
commonplace. "Side-burns" found nourishment upon childlike profiles;
great Dundreary whiskers blew like tippets over young shoulders;
moustaches were trained as lambrequins over forgotten mouths; and it
was possible for a Senator of the United States to wear a mist of
white whisker upon his throat only, not a newspaper in the land
finding the ornament distinguished enough to warrant a lampoon.
Surely no more is needed to prove that so short a time ago we were
living in another age!

At the beginning of the Ambersons' great period most of the houses of
the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style,
but also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all
has style enough. They stood in commodious yards, well shaded by
leftover forest trees, elm and walnut and beech, with here and there a
line of tall sycamores where the land had been made by filling bayous
from the creek. The house of a "prominent resident," facing Military
Square, or National Avenue, or Tennessee Street, was built of brick
upon a stone foundation, or of wood upon a brick foundation. Usually
it had a "front porch" and a "back porch"; often a "side porch," too.
There was a "front hall"; there was a "side hall"; and sometimes a
"back hall." From the "front hall" opened three rooms, the "parlour,"
the "sitting room," and the "library"; and the library could show
warrant to its title--for some reason these people bought books.
Commonly, the family sat more in the library than in the "sitting
room," while callers, when they came formally, were kept to the
"parlour," a place of formidable polish and discomfort. The
upholstery of the library furniture was a little shabby; but the
hostile chairs and sofa of the "parlour" always looked new. For all
the wear and tear they got they should have lasted a thousand years.

Upstairs were the bedrooms; "mother-and-father's room" the largest; a
smaller room for one or two sons another for one or two daughters;
each of these rooms containing a double bed, a "washstand," a
"bureau," a wardrobe, a little table, a rocking-chair, and often a
chair or two that had been slightly damaged downstairs, but not enough
to justify either the expense of repair or decisive abandonment in the
attic. And there was always a "spare-room," for visitors (where the
sewing-machine usually was kept), and during the 'seventies there
developed an appreciation of the necessity for a bathroom. Therefore
the architects placed bathrooms in the new houses, and the older
houses tore out a cupboard or two, set up a boiler beside the kitchen
stove, and sought a new godliness, each with its own bathroom. The
great American plumber joke, that many-branched evergreen, was planted
at this time.

At the rear of the house, upstairs was a bleak little chamber, called
"the girl's room," and in the stable there was another bedroom,
adjoining the hayloft, and called "the hired man's room." House and
stable cost seven or eight thousand dollars to build, and people with
that much money to invest in such comforts were classified as the
Rich. They paid the inhabitant of "the girl's room" two dollars a
week, and, in the latter part of this period, two dollars and a half,
and finally three dollars a week. She was Irish, ordinarily, or
German or it might be Scandinavian, but never native to the land
unless she happened to be a person of colour. The man or youth who
lived in the stable had like wages, and sometimes he, too, was lately
a steerage voyager, but much oftener he was coloured.

After sunrise, on pleasant mornings, the alleys behind the stables
were gay; laughter and shouting went up and down their dusty lengths,
with a lively accompaniment of curry-combs knocking against back
fences and stable walls, for the darkies loved to curry their horses
in the alley. Darkies always prefer to gossip in shouts instead of
whispers; and they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is
almost worthless. Horrible phrases were caught by early rising
children and carried to older people for definition, sometimes at
inopportune moments; while less investigative children would often
merely repeat the phrases in some subsequent flurry of agitation, and
yet bring about consequences so emphatic as to be recalled with ease
in middle life.

They have passed, those darky hired-men of the Midland town; and the
introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably
cursed--those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more.
For all their seeming permanence they might as well have been
buffaloes--or the buffalo laprobes that grew bald in patches and used
to slide from the careless drivers' knees and hang unconcerned, half
way to the ground. The stables have been transformed into other
likenesses, or swept away, like the woodsheds where were kept the
stove-wood and kindling that the "girl" and the "hired-man" always
quarrelled over: who should fetch it. Horse and stable and woodshed,
and the whole tribe of the "hired-man," all are gone. They went
quickly, yet so silently that we whom they served have not yet really
noticed that they are vanished.

So with other vanishings. There were the little bunty street-cars on
the long, single track that went its troubled way among the
cobblestones. At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but
a step where passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad
and the car crowded. The patrons--if not too absent-minded--put their
fares into a slot; and no conductor paced the heaving floor, but the
driver would rap remindingly with his elbow upon the glass of the door
to his little open platform if the nickels and the passengers did not
appear to coincide in number. A lone mule drew the car, and sometimes
drew it off the track, when the passengers would get out and push it
on again. They really owed it courtesies like this, for the car was
genially accommodating: a lady could whistle to it from an upstairs
window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut
the window, put on her hat and cloak, went downstairs, found an
umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner, and came forth from
the house.

The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the
part of the car: they were wont to expect as much for themselves on
like occasion. In good weather the mule pulled the car a mile in a
little less than twenty minutes, unless the stops were too long; but
when the trolley-car came, doing its mile in five minutes and better,
it would wait for nobody. Nor could its passengers have endured such
a thing, because the faster they were carried the less time they had
to spare! In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them
through their lives, and when they had no telephones--another ancient
vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure--they had time for
everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a
lady!

They even had time to dance "square dances," quadrilles, and
"lancers"; they also danced the "racquette," and schottisches and
polkas, and such whims as the "Portland Fancy." They pushed back the
sliding doors between the "parlour" and the "sitting room," tacked
down crash over the carpets, hired a few palms in green tubs,
stationed three or four Italian musicians under the stairway in the
"front hall"--and had great nights!

But these people were gayest on New Year's Day; they made it a true
festival--something no longer known. The women gathered to "assist"
the hostesses who kept "Open House"; and the carefree men, dandified
and perfumed, went about in sleighs, or in carriages and ponderous
"hacks," going from Open House to Open House, leaving fantastic cards
in fancy baskets as they entered each doorway, and emerging a little
later, more carefree than ever, if the punch had been to their liking.
It always was, and, as the afternoon wore on, pedestrians saw great
gesturing and waving of skin-tight lemon gloves, while ruinous
fragments of song were dropped behind as the carriages rolled up and
down the streets.

"Keeping Open House" was a merry custom; it has gone, like the all-day
picnic in the woods, and like that prettiest of all vanished customs,
the serenade. When a lively girl visited the town she did not long go
unserenaded, though a visitor was not indeed needed to excuse a
serenade. Of a summer night, young men would bring an orchestra under
a pretty girl's window--or, it might be, her father's, or that of an
ailing maiden aunt--and flute, harp, fiddle, 'cello, cornet, and bass
viol would presently release to the dulcet stars such melodies as sing
through "You'll Remember Me," "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,"
"Silver Threads Among the Gold," "Kathleen Mavourneen," or "The
Soldier's Farewell."

They had other music to offer, too, for these were the happy days of
"Olivette" and "The Macotte" and "The Chimes of Normandy" and
"Girofle-Girofla" and "Fra Diavola." Better than that, these were
the days of "Pinafore" and "The Pirates of Penzance" and of
"Patience." This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere,
for the "aesthetic movement" had reached thus far from London, and
terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens
sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers
from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs; they gilded the
easels that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles.
In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax
flowers and wax fruit, and the protecting glass domes, out upon the
trash-heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or
sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble-
topped tables. They embroidered daisies (which they called
"marguerites") and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and
peacock feathers upon plush screens and upon heavy cushions, then
strewed these cushions upon floors where fathers fell over them in the
dark. In the teeth of sinful oratory, the daughters went on
embroidering: they embroidered daisies and sunflowers and sumac and
cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon "throws" which they had
the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas; they painted owls and
daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and peacock feathers
upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the
chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They "studied"
painting on china, these girls; they sang Tosti's new songs; they
sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and
were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a
basket phaeton, on a spring morning.

Croquet and the mildest archery ever known were the sports of people
still young and active enough for so much exertion; middle-age played
euchre. There was a theatre, next door to the Amberson Hotel, and
when Edwin Booth came for a night, everybody who could afford to buy a
ticket was there, and all the "hacks" in town were hired. "The Black
Crook" also filled the theatre, but the audience then was almost
entirely of men who looked uneasy as they left for home when the final
curtain fell upon the shocking girls dressed as fairies. But the
theatre did not often do so well; the people of the town were still
too thrifty.

They were thrifty because they were the sons or grandsons of the
"early settlers," who had opened the wilderness and had reached it
from the East and the South with wagons and axes and guns, but with no
money at all. The pioneers were thrifty or they would have perished:
they had to store away food for the winter, or goods to trade for
food, and they often feared they had not stored enough--they left
traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most
of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion: to save,
even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline.
No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either
upon "art," or upon mere luxury and entertainment, without a sense of
sin.

Against so homespun a background the magnificence of the Ambersons was
as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. Major Amberson bought
two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue; and through
this tract he built broad streets and cross-streets; paved them with
cedar block, and curbed them with stone. He set up fountains, here
and there, where the streets intersected, and at symmetrical intervals
placed cast-iron statues, painted white, with their titles clear upon
the pedestals: Minerva, Mercury, Hercules, Venus, Gladiator, Emperor
Augustus, Fisher Boy, Stag-hound, Mastiff, Greyhound, Fawn, Antelope,
Wounded Doe, and Wounded Lion. Most of the forest trees had been left
to flourish still, and, at some distance, or by moonlight, the place
was in truth beautiful; but the ardent citizen, loving to see his city
grow, wanted neither distance nor moonlight. He had not seen
Versailles, but, standing before the Fountain of Neptune in Amberson
Addition, at bright noon, and quoting the favourite comparison of the
local newspapers, he declared Versailles outdone. All this Art showed
a profit from the start, for the lots sold well and there was
something like a rush to build in the new Addition. Its main
thoroughfare, an oblique continuation of National Avenue, was called
Amberson Boulevard, and here, at the juncture of the new Boulevard and
the Avenue, Major Amberson reserved four acres for himself, and built
his new house--the Amberson Mansion, of course.

This house was the pride of the town. Faced with stone as far back as
the dining-room windows, it was a house of arches and turrets and
girdling stone porches: it had the first porte-cochere seen in that
town. There was a central "front hall" with a great black walnut
stairway, and open to a green glass skylight called the "dome," three
stories above the ground floor. A ballroom occupied most of the third
story; and at one end of it was a carved walnut gallery for the
musicians. Citizens told strangers that the cost of all this black
walnut and wood-carving was sixty thousand dollars. "Sixty thousand
dollars for the wood-work alone! Yes, sir, and hardwood floors all
over the house! Turkish rugs and no carpets at all, except a Brussels
carpet in the front parlour--I hear they call it the 'reception-room.'
Hot and cold water upstairs and down, and stationary washstands in
every last bedroom in the place! Their sideboard's built right into
the house and goes all the way across one end of the dining room. It
isn't walnut, it's solid mahogany! Not veneering--solid mahogany!
Well, sir, I presume the President of the United States would be
tickled to swap the White House for the new Amberson Mansion, if the
Major'd give him the chance--but by the Almighty Dollar, you bet your
sweet life the Major wouldn't!"

The visitor to the town was certain to receive further enlightenment,
for there was one form of entertainment never omitted: he was always
patriotically taken for "a little drive around our city," even if his
host had to hire a hack, and the climax of the display was the
Amberson Mansion. "Look at that greenhouse they've put up there in
the side yard," the escort would continue. "And look at that brick
stable! Most folks would think that stable plenty big enough and good
enough to live in; it's got running water and four rooms upstairs for
two hired men and one of 'em's family to live in. They keep one hired
man loafin' in the house, and they got a married hired man out in the
stable, and his wife does the washing. They got box-stalls for four
horses, and they keep a coupay, and some new kinds of fancy rigs you
never saw the beat of! 'Carts' they call two of 'em--'way up in the
air they are--too high for me! I guess they got every new kind of
fancy rig in there that's been invented. And harness--well, everybody
in town can tell when Ambersons are out driving after dark, by the
jingle. This town never did see so much style as Ambersons are
putting on, these days; and I guess it's going to be expensive,
because a lot of other folks'll try to keep up with 'em. The Major's
wife and the daughter's been to Europe, and my wife tells me since
they got back they make tea there every afternoon about five o'clock,
and drink it. Seems to me it would go against a person's stomach,
just before supper like that, and anyway tea isn't fit for much--not
unless you're sick or something. My wife says Ambersons don't make
lettuce salad the way other people do; they don't chop it up with
sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their
vinegar, and they have it separate--not along with the rest of the
meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are,
something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a
good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she's going to buy
some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like 'em, she says.
Well, I wouldn't eat nine bad hickory-nuts to get to like them, and
I'm going to let these olives alone. Kind of a woman's dish, anyway,
I suspect, but most everybody'll be makin' a stagger to worm through
nine of 'em, now Ambersons brought 'em to town. Yes, sir, the rest'll
eat 'em, whether they get sick or not! Looks to me like some people
in this city'd be willing to go crazy if they thought that would help
'em to be as high-toned as Ambersons. Old Aleck Minafer--he's about
the closest old codger we got--he come in my office the other day, and
he pretty near had a stroke tellin' me about his daughter Fanny.
Seems Miss Isabel Amberson's got some kind of a dog--they call it a
Saint Bernard--and Fanny was bound to have one, too. Well, old Aleck
told her he didn't like dogs except rat-terriers, because a rat-
terrier cleans up the mice, but she kept on at him, and finally he
said all right she could have one. Then, by George! she says
Ambersons bought their dog, and you can't get one without paying for
it: they cost from fifty to a hundred dollars up! Old Aleck wanted to
know if I ever heard of anybody buyin' a dog before, because, of
course, even a Newfoundland or a setter you can usually get somebody
to give you one. He says he saw some sense in payin' a nigger a dime,
or even a quarter, to drown a dog for you, but to pay out fifty
dollars and maybe more--well, sir, he like to choked himself to death,
right there in my office! Of course everybody realizes that Major
Amberson is a fine business man, but what with throwin' money around
for dogs, and every which and what, some think all this style's bound
to break him up, if his family don't quit!"

One citizen, having thus discoursed to a visitor, came to a thoughtful
pause, and then added, "Does seem pretty much like squandering, yet
when you see that dog out walking with this Miss Isabel, he seems
worth the money."

"What's she look like?"

"Well, sir," said the citizen, "she's not more than just about
eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, and I don't know as I know just
how to put it--but she's kind of a delightful lookin' young lady!"

Chapter II

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 Isabelle
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.

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