Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Welcome, Friend of the Ace.”

  “Welcome, Friend of the Ace,” Georgie responded, and all of the other boys repeated the words, “Welcome, Friend of the Ace.”

  “Take your seat in the secret semicircle,” said the presiding officer. “We will now proceed to—”

  But Georgie was disposed to be informal. He interrupted, turning to the boy who had admitted him: “Look here, Charlie Johnson, what’s Fred Kinney doing in the president’s chair? That’s my place, isn’t it? What you men been up to here, anyhow? Didn’t you all agree I was to be president just the same, even if I was away at school?”

  “Well—” said Charlie Johnson uneasily. “Listen! I didn’t have much to do with it. Some of the other members thought that long as you weren’t in town or anything, and Fred gave the sideboard, why—”

  Mr. Kinney, presiding, held in his hand, in lieu of a gavel, and considered much more impressive, a Civil War relic known as a “horse-pistol.” He rapped loudly for order. “All Friends of the Ace will take their seats!” he said sharply. “I’m president of the F. O. T. A. now, George Minafer, and don’t you forget it! You and Charlie Johnson sit down, because I was elected perfectly fair, and we’re goin’ to hold a meeting here.”

  “Oh, you are, are you?” said George skeptically.

  Charlie Johnson thought to mollify him. “Well, didn’t we call this meeting just especially because you told us to? You said yourself we ought to have a kind of celebration because you’ve got back to town, George, and that’s what we’re here for now, and everything. What do you care about being president? All it amounts to is just calling the roll and—”

  The president de facto hammered the table. “This meeting will now proceed to—”

  “No, it won’t,” said George, and he advanced to the desk, laughing contemptuously. “Get off that platform.”

  “This meeting will come to order!” Mr. Kinney commanded fiercely.

  “You put down that gavel,” said George. “Whose is it, I’d like to know? It belongs to my grandfather, and you quit hammering it that way or you’ll break it, and I’ll have to knock your head off.”

  “This meeting will come to order! I was legally elected here, and I’m not going to be bulldozed!”

  “All right,” said Georgie. “You’re president. Now we’ll hold another election.”

  “We will not!” Fred Kinney shouted. “We’ll have our reg’lar meeting, and then we’ll play euchre & nickel a corner, what we’re here for. This meeting will now come to ord—”

  Georgie addressed the members. “I’d like to know who got up this thing in the first place,” he said. “Who’s the founder of the F.O.T.A., if you please? Who got this room rent free? Who got the janitor to let us have most of this furniture? You suppose you could keep this clubroom a minute if I told my grandfather I didn’t want it for a literary club any more? I’d like to say a word on how you members been acting, too! When I went away I said I didn’t care if you had a vice-president or something while I was gone, but here I hardly turned my back and you had to go and elect Fred Kinney president! Well, if that’s what you want, you can have it. I was going to have a little celebration down here some night pretty soon, and bring some port wine, like we drink at school in our crowd there, and I was going to get my grandfather to give the club an extra room across the hall, and prob’ly I could get my Uncle George to give us his old billiard table, because he’s got a new one, and the club could put it in the other room. Well, you got a new president now!” Here Georgie moved toward the door and his tone became plaintive, though undeniably there was disdain beneath his sorrow. “I guess all I better do is — resign!”

  And he opened the door, apparently intending to withdraw.

  “All in favour of having a new election,” Charlie Johnson shouted hastily, “say, ‘Aye’!”

  “Aye” was said by everyone present except Mr. Kinney, who began a hot protest, but it was immediately smothered.

  “All in favour of me being president instead of Fred Kinney,” shouted

  Georgie, “say ‘Aye.’ The ‘Ayes’ have it!”

  “I resign,” said the red-headed boy, gulping as he descended from the

  platform. “I resign from the club!”

  Hot-eyed, he found his hat and departed, jeers echoing after him as he plunged down the corridor. Georgie stepped upon the platform, and took up the emblem of office.

  “Ole red-head Fred’ll be around next week,” said the new chairman. “He’ll be around boot-lickin’ to get us to take him back in again, but I guess we don’t want him: that fellow always was a trouble-maker. We will now proceed with our meeting. Well, fellows, I suppose you want to hear from your president. I don’t know that I have much to say, as I have already seen most of you a few times since I got back. I had a good time at the old school, back East, but had a little trouble with the faculty and came on home. My family stood by me as well as I could ask, and I expect to stay right here in the old town until whenever I decide to enter college. Now, I don’t suppose there’s any more business before the meeting. I guess we might as well play cards. Anybody that’s game for a little quarter-limit poker or any limit they say, why I’d like to have ’em sit at the president’s card-table.”

  When the diversions of the Friends of the Ace were concluded for that afternoon, Georgie invited his chief supporter, Mr. Charlie Johnson, to drive home with him to dinner, and as they jingled up National Avenue in the dog-cart, Charlie asked:

  “What sort of men did you run up against at that school, George?”

  “Best crowd there: finest set of men I ever met.”

  “How’d you get in with ’em?”

  Georgie laughed. “I let them get in with me, Charlie,” he said in a tone of gentle explanation. “It’s vulgar to do any other way. Did I tell you the nickname they gave me— ‘King’? That was what they called me at that school, ‘King Minafer.”

  “How’d they happen to do that?” his friend asked innocently.

  “Oh, different things,” George answered lightly. “Of course, any of ’em that came from anywhere out in this part the country knew about the family and all that, and so I suppose it was a good deal on account of — oh, on account of the family and the way I do things, most likely.”

  Chapter IV

  WHEN MR. GEORGE Amberson Minafer came home for the holidays at Christmastide, in his sophomore year, probably no great change had taken place inside him, but his exterior was visibly altered. Nothing about him encouraged any hope that he had received his come-upance; on the contrary, the yearners for that stroke of justice must yearn even more itchingly: the gilded youth’s manner had become polite, but his politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In a word, M. le Due had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild amusement.

  Cards were out for a ball in his honour, and this pageant of the tenantry was held in the ballroom of the Amberson Mansion the night after his arrival. It was, as Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster said of Isabel’s wedding, “a big Amberson-style thing,” though that wise Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster had long ago gone the way of all wisdom, having stepped out of the Midland town, unquestionably into heaven — a long step, but not beyond her powers. She had successors, but no successor; the town having grown too large to confess that it was intellectually led and literarily authoritated by one person; and some of these successors were not invited to the ball, for dimensions were now so metropolitan that intellectual leaders and literary authorities loomed in outlying regions unfamiliar to the Ambersons. However, all “old citizens” recognizable as gentry received cards, and of course so did their dancing descendants.

  The orchestra and the caterer were brought from away, in the Amberson manner, though this was really a gesture — perhaps one more of habit than of ostentation — for servitors of gaiety as proficient as these impo
rtations were nowadays to be found in the town. Even flowers and plants and roped vines were brought from afar — not, however, until the stock of the local florists proved insufficient to obliterate the interior structure of the big house, in the Amberson way. It was the last of the great, long remembered dances that “everybody talked about” — there were getting to be so many people in town that no later than the next year there were too many for “everybody” to hear of even such a ball as the Ambersons’.

  George, white-gloved, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, stood with his mother and the Major, embowered in the big red and gold drawing room downstairs, to “receive” the guests; and, standing thus together, the trio offered a picturesque example of good looks persistent through three generations. The Major, his daughter, and his grandson were of a type all Amberson: tall, straight, and regular, with dark eyes, short noses, good chins; and the grandfather’s expression, no less than the grandson’s, was one of faintly amused condescension. There was a difference, however. The grandson’s unlined young face had nothing to offer except this condescension; the grandfather’s had other things to say. It was a handsome, worldly old face, conscious of its importance, but persuasive rather than arrogant, and not without tokens of sufferings withstood. The Major’s short white hair was parted in the middle, like his grandson’s, and in all he stood as briskly equipped to the fashion as exquisite young George.

  Isabel, standing between her father and her son caused a vague amazement in the mind of the latter. Her age, just under forty, was for George a thought of something as remote as the moons of Jupiter: he could not possibly have conceived such an age ever coming to be his own: five years was the limit of his thinking in time. Five years ago he had been a child not yet fourteen; and those five years were an abyss. Five years hence he would be almost twenty-four; what the girls he knew called “one of the older men.” He could imagine himself at twenty-four, but beyond that, his powers staggered and refused the task. He saw little essential difference between thirty-eight and eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman but wholly a mother. He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to himself, his mother; nor could he imagine her thinking or doing anything — falling in love, walking with a friend, or reading a book — as a woman, and not as his mother. The woman, Isabel, was a stranger to her son; as completely a stranger as if he had never in his life seen her or heard her voice. And it was to-night, while he stood with her, “receiving,” that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this stranger whom he thus fleetingly encountered for the first time.

  Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent. Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers; but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers; young people will not come to see such a play, because, for them, middle-aged lovers are a joke — not a very funny one. Therefore, to bring both the middle-aged people and the young people into his house, the manager makes his romance as young as he can. Youth will indeed be served, and its profound instinct is to be not only scornfully amused but vaguely angered by middle-age romance. So, standing beside his mother, George was disturbed by a sudden impression, coming upon him out of nowhere, so far as he could detect, that her eyes were brilliant, that she was graceful and youthful — in a word, that she was romantically lovely.

  He had one of those curious moments that seem to have neither a cause nor any connection with actual things. While it lasted, he was disquieted not by thoughts — for he had no definite thoughts — but by a slight emotion like that caused in a dream by the presence of something invisible. soundless, and yet fantastic. There was nothing different or new about his mother, except her new black and silver dress: she was standing there beside him, bending her head a little in her greetings, smiling the same smile she had worn for the half-hour that people had been passing the “receiving” group. Her face was flushed, but the room was warm; and shaking hands with so many people easily accounted for the pretty glow that was upon her. At any time she could have “passed” for twenty-five or twenty-six — a man of fifty would have honestly guessed her to be about thirty but possibly two or three years younger — and though extraordinary in this, she had been extraordinary in it for years. There was nothing in either her looks or her manner to explain George’s uncomfortable feeling; and yet it increased, becoming suddenly a vague resentment, as if she had done something unmotherly to him.

  The fantastic moment passed; and even while it lasted, he was doing his duty, greeting two pretty girls with whom he had grown up, as people say, and warmly assuring them that he remembered them very well — an assurance which might have surprised them “in anybody but Georgie Minafer!” It seemed unnecessary, since he had spent many hours with them no longer ago than the preceding August. They had with them their parents and an uncle from out of town; and George negligently gave the parents the same assurance he had given the daughters, but murmured another form of greeting to the out-of-town uncle, whom he had never seen before. This person George absently took note of as a “queer-looking duck.” Undergraduates had not yet adopted “bird.” It was a period previous to that in which a sophomore would have thought of the Sharon girls’ uncle as a “queer-looking bird,” or, perhaps a “funny-face bird.” In George’s time, every human male was to be defined, at pleasure, as a “duck”; but “duck” was not spoken with admiring affection, as in its former feminine use to signify a “dear” — on the contrary, “duck” implied the speaker’s personal detachment and humorous superiority. An indifferent amusement was what George felt when his mother, with a gentle emphasis, interrupted his interchange of courtesies with the nieces to present him to the queer-looking duck their uncle. This emphasis of Isabel’s, though slight, enabled George to perceive that she considered the queer-looking duck a person of some importance; but it was far from enabling him to understand why. The duck parted his thick and longish black hair on the side; his tie was a forgetful looking thing, and his coat, though it fitted a good enough middle-aged figure, no product of this year, or of last year either. One of his eyebrows was noticeably higher than the other; and there were whimsical lines between them, which gave him an apprehensive expression; but his apprehensions were evidently more humorous than profound, for his prevailing look was that of a genial man of affairs, not much afraid of anything whatever. Nevertheless, observing only his unfashionable hair, his eyebrows, his preoccupied tie and his old coat, the olympic George set him down as a queer-looking duck, and having thus completed his portrait, took no interest in him.

  The Sharon girls passed on, taking the queer-looking duck with them, and George became pink with mortification as his mother called his attention to a white-bearded guest waiting to shake his hand. This was George’s great-uncle, old John Minafer: it was old John’s boast that in spite of his connection by marriage with the Ambersons, he never had worn and never would wear a swaller-tail coat. Members of his family had exerted their influence uselessly — at eighty-nine conservative people seldom form radical new habits, and old John wore his “Sunday suit” of black broadcloth to the Amberson ball. The coat was square, with skirts to the knees; old John called it a “Prince Albert” and was well enough pleased with it, but his great-nephew considered it the next thing to an insult. George’s purpose had been to ignore the man, but he had to take his hand for a moment; whereupon old John began to tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time, during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he would live. The great-nephew, in a fury of blushes, dropped old John’s hand with some vigour, and seized that of the next person in the line. “Member you v’ry well ‘ndeed!” he said fiercely.

  The large room had filled, and so had the broad hall and the rooms on the other side of the hall, where there were tables for whist. The imported orchestra waited in the ballroom on the third floor, but a
local harp, ‘cello, violin, and flute were playing airs from “The Fencing Master” in the hall, and people were shouting over the music. Old John Minafer’s voice was louder and more penetrating than any other, because he had been troubled with deafness for twenty-five years, heard his own voice but faintly, and liked to hear it. “Smell o’ flowers like this always puts me in mind o’ funerals,” he kept telling his niece, Fanny Minafer, who was with him; and he seemed to get a great deal of satisfaction out of this reminder. His tremulous yet strident voice cut through the voluminous sound that filled the room, and he was heard everywhere: “Always got to think o’ funerals when I smell so many flowers!” And, as the pressure of people forced Fanny and himself against the white marble mantelpiece, he pursued this train of cheery thought, shouting, “Right here’s where the Major’s wife was laid out at her funeral. They had her in a good light from that big bow window.” He paused to chuckle mournfully. “I s’pose that’s where they’ll put the Major when his time comes.”

  Presently George’s mortification was increased to hear this sawmill droning harshly from the midst of the thickening crowd: “Ain’t the dancin’ broke out yet, Fanny? Hoopla! Le’s push through and go see the young women-folks crack their heels! Start the circus! Hoopse-daisy!” Miss Fanny Minafer, in charge of the lively veteran, was almost as distressed as her nephew George, but she did her duty and managed to get old John through the press and out to the broad stairway, which numbers of young people were now ascending to the ballroom. And here the sawmill voice still rose over all others: “Solid black walnut every inch of it, balustrades and all. Sixty thousand dollars’ worth o’ carved woodwork in the house! Like water! Spent money like water! Always did! Still do! Like water! God knows where it all comes from!”