Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “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 to-night 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 stone-work 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’hôte 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’hôte 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 th
e 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 did 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 to-night 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!”

  Chapter XXXII

  * * *

  AT LEAST, it may be claimed for George that his last night in the house where he had been born was not occupied with his own disheartening future, but with sorrow for what sacrifices his pride and youth had demanded of others. And early in the morning he came downstairs and tried to help Fanny make coffee on the kitchen range.

  “There was something I wanted to say to you last night, Aunt Fanny,” he said, as she finally discovered that an amber fluid, more like tea than coffee, was as near ready to be taken into the human system as it would ever be. “I think I’d better do it now.”

  She set the coffee-pot back upon the stove with a little crash, and, looking at him in a desperate anxiety, began to twist her dainty apron between her fingers without any consciousness of what she was doing.

  “Why—why——” she stammered; but she knew what he was going to say, and that was why she had been more and more nervous. “Hadn’t—perhaps—perhaps we’d better get the—the things moved to the little new home first, George. Let’s——”

  He interrupted quietly, though at her phrase, “the little new home,” his pungent impulse was to utter one loud shout and run. “It was about this new place that I wanted to speak. I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided. I want you to take all the things from mother’s room and use them and keep them for me, and I’m sure the little apartment will be just what you like; and with the extra bedroom probably you could find some woman friend to come and live there, and share the expense with you. But I’ve decided on another arrangement for myself, and so I’m not going with you. I don’t suppose you’ll mind much, and I don’t see why you should mind—particularly, that is. I’m not very lively company these days, or any days, for that matter. I can’t imagine you, or any one else, being much attached to me, so——”

  He stopped in amazement: no chair had been left in the kitchen, but Fanny gave a despairing glance around her, in search of one, then sank abruptly, and sat flat upon the floor.

  “You’re going to leave me in the lurch!” she gasped.

  “What on earth——” George sprang to her. “Get up, Aunt Fanny!”

  “I can’t. I’m too weak. Let me alone, George!” And as he released the wrist he had seized to help her, she repeated the dismal prophecy which for days she had been matching against her hopes: “You’re going to leave me—in the lurch!”

  “Why no, Aunt Fanny!” he protested. “At first I’d have been something of a burden on you. I’m to get eight dollars a week; about thirty-two a month. The rent’s thirty-six dollars a month, and the table-d’hôte dinner runs up to over twenty-two dollars apiece, so with my half of the rent—eighteen dollars—I’d have less than nothing left out of my salary to pay my share of the groceries for all the breakfasts and luncheons. You see you’d not only be doing all the housework and cooking, but you’d be paying more of the expenses than I would.”

  She stared at him with such a forlorn blankness as he had never seen. “I’d be paying——” she said feebly. “I’d be paying——”

  “Certainly you would. You’d be using more of your money than——”

  “My money!” Fanny’s chin drooped upon her thin chest, and she laughed miserably. “I’ve got twenty-eight dollars. That’s all.”

  “You mean until the interest is due again?”

  “I mean that’s all,” Fanny said. “I mean that’s all there is. There won’t be any more interest because there isn’t any principal.”

  “Why, you told——”

  She shook her head. “No. I haven’t told you anything.”

  “Then it was Uncle George. He told me you had enough to fall back on. That’s just what he said: ‘to fall back on.’ He said you’d lost more than you should, in the headlight company, but he’d insisted that you should hold out enough to live on, and you’d very wisely followed his advice.”

  “I know,” she said weakly. “I told him so. He didn’t know, or else he’d forgotten, how much Wilbur’s insurance amounted to, and I—oh, it seemed such a sure way to make a real fortune out of a little—and I thought I could do something for you, George, if you ever came to need it—and it all looked so bright I just thought I’d put it all in. I did—every cent except my last interest payment—and it’s gone.”

  “Good Lord!” George began to pace up and down the worn planks of the bare floor. “Why on earth did you wait till now to tell such a thing as this?”

  “I couldn’t tell till I had to,” she said piteously. “I couldn’t till George Amberson went away. He couldn’t do anything to help, anyhow, and I just didn’t want him to talk to me about it—he’s been at me so much about not putting more in than I could afford to lose, and said he considered he had my—my word I wasn’t putting more t
han that in it. So I thought: What was the use? What was the use of going over it all with him and having him reproach me, and probably reproach himself? It wouldn’t do any good—not any good on earth.” She got out her lace handkerchief and began to cry. “Nothing does any good, I guess, in this old world! Oh, how tired of this old world I am! I didn’t know what to do. I just tried to go ahead and be as practical as I could, and arrange some way for us to live. Oh, I knew you didn’t want me, George! You always teased me and berated me whenever you had a chance from the time you were a little boy—you did so! Later, you’ve tried to be kinder to me, but you don’t want me around—oh, I can see that much! You don’t suppose I want to thrust myself on you, do you? It isn’t very pleasant to be thrusting yourself on a person you know doesn’t want you—but I knew you oughtn’t to be left all alone in the world; it isn’t good. I knew your mother’d want me to watch over you and try to have something like a home for you—I know she’d want me to do what I tried to do!” Fanny’s tears were bitter now, and her voice, hoarse and wet, was tragically sincere. “I tried—I tried to be practical—to look after your interests—to make things as nice for you as I could—I walked my heels down looking for a place for us to live—I walked and walked over this town—I didn’t ride one block on a street-car—I wouldn’t use five cents no matter how tired I—— Oh!” She sobbed uncontrollably. “Oh! and now—you don’t want—you want—you want to leave me in the lurch! You——”

  George stopped walking. “In God’s name, Aunt Fanny,” he said, “quit spreading out your handkerchief and drying it and then getting it all wet again! I mean stop crying! Do! And for heaven’s sake, get up. Don’t sit there with your back against the boiler and——”