The Magnificent Ambersons

by Booth Tarkington

  Georgie had muttered various interruptions, and as she concluded the reading he said: “He’s an ole liar!”

  “Georgie, you mustn’t say ‘liar.’ Isn’t this letter the truth?”

  “Well,” said Georgie, “how old am I?”

  “Ten.”

  “Well, look how he says I’m older than a boy eleven years old.”

  “That’s true,” said Isabel. “He does. But isn’t some of it true, Georgie?”

  Georgie felt himself to be in a difficulty here, and he was silent.

  “Georgie, did you say what he says you did?”

  “Which one?”

  “Did you tell him to—to—Did you say, ‘Go to hell?”

  Georgie looked worried for a moment longer; then he brightened. “Listen here, mamma; grandpa wouldn’t wipe his shoe on that ole story-teller, would he?”

  “Georgie, you mustn’t—”

  “I mean: none of the Ambersons wouldn’t have anything to do with him, would they? He doesn’t even know you, does he, mamma?”

  “That hasn’t anything to do with it.”

  “Yes, it has! I mean: none of the Amberson family go to see him, and they never have him come in their house; they wouldn’t ask him to, and they prob’ly wouldn’t even let him.”

  “That isn’t what we’re talking about.”

  “I bet,” said Georgie emphatically, “I bet if he wanted to see any of ‘em, he’d haf to go around to the side door!”

  “No, dear, they—”

  “Yes, they would, mamma! So what does it matter if I did say somep’m’ to him he didn’t like? That kind o’ people, I don’t see why you can’t say anything you want to, to ‘em!”

  “No, Georgie. And you haven’t answered me whether you said that dreadful thing he says you did.”

  “Well—” said Georgie. “Anyway, he said somep’m’ to me that made me mad.” And upon this point he offered no further details; he would not explain to his mother that what had made him “mad” was Mr. Smith’s hasty condemnation of herself: “Your mother ought to be ashamed,” and, “A woman that lets a bad boy like you—” Georgie did not even consider excusing himself by quoting these insolences.

  Isabel stroked his head. “They were terrible words for you to use, dear. From his letter he doesn’t seem a very tactful person, but—”

  “He’s just riffraff,” said Georgie.

  “You mustn’t say so,” his mother gently agreed “Where did you learn those bad words he speaks of? Where did you hear any one use them?”

  “Well, I’ve heard ‘em several places. I guess Uncle George Amberson was the first I ever heard say ‘em. Uncle George Amberson said ‘em to papa once. Papa didn’t like it, but Uncle George was just laughin’ at papa, an’ then he said ‘em while he was laughin’.”

  “That was wrong of him,” she said, but almost instinctively he detected the lack of conviction in her tone. It was Isabel’s great failing that whatever an Amberson did seemed right to her, especially if the Amberson was either her brother George, or her son George. She knew that she should be more severe with the latter now, but severity with him was beyond her power; and the Reverend Malloch Smith had succeeded only in rousing her resentment against himself. Georgie’s symmetrical face—altogether an Amberson face—had looked never more beautiful to her. It always looked unusually beautiful when she tried to be severe with him. “You must promise me,” she said feebly, “never to use those bad words again.”

  “I promise not to,” he said promptly—and he whispered an immediate codicil under his breath: “Unless I get mad at somebody!” This satisfied a code according to which, in his own sincere belief, he never told lies.

  “That’s a good boy,” she said, and he ran out to the yard, his punishment over. Some admiring friends were gathered there; they had heard of his adventure, knew of the note, and were waiting to see what was going to “happen” to him. They hoped for an account of things, and also that he would allow them to “take turns” riding his pony to the end of the alley and back.

  They were really his henchmen: Georgie was a lord among boys. In fact, he was a personage among certain sorts of grown people, and was often fawned upon; the alley negroes delighted in him, chuckled over him, flattered him slavishly. For that matter, he often heard well- dressed people speaking of him admiringly: a group of ladies once gathered about him on the pavement where he was spinning a top. “I know this is Georgie!” one exclaimed, and turned to the others with the impressiveness of a showman. “Major Amberson’s only grandchild!” The others said, “It is?” and made clicking sounds with their mouths; two of them loudly whispering, “So handsome!”

  Georgie, annoyed because they kept standing upon the circle he had chalked for his top, looked at them coldly and offered a suggestion:

  “Oh, go hire a hall!”

  As an Amberson, he was already a public character, and the story of his adventure in the Reverend Malloch Smith’s front yard became a town topic. Many people glanced at him with great distaste, thereafter, when they chanced to encounter him, which meant nothing to Georgie, because he innocently believed most grown people to be necessarily cross-looking as a normal phenomenon resulting from the adult state; and he failed to comprehend that the distasteful glances had any personal bearing upon himself. If he had perceived such a bearing, he would have been affected only so far, probably, as to mutter, “Riffraff!” Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs. Amberson’s funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his indignant voice had become audible: “Well, who is the most important person at my own grandmother’s funeral?” And later he had projected his head from the window of the foremost mourners’ carriage, as the undertaker happened to pass.

  “Riffraff!”

  There were people—grown people they were—who expressed themselves longingly: they did hope to live to see the day, they said, when that boy would get his come-upance! (They used that honest word, so much better than “deserts,” and not until many years later to be more clumsily rendered as “what is coming to him.”) Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there! But Georgie heard nothing of this, and the yearners for his taking down went unsatisfied, while their yearning grew the greater as the happy day of fulfilment was longer and longer postponed. His grandeur was not diminished by the Malloch Smith story; the rather it was increased, and among other children (especially among little girls) there was added to the prestige of his gilded position that diabolical glamour which must inevitably attend a boy who has told a minister to go to hell.

  Chapter III

  * * *

  Until he reached the age of twelve, Georgie’s education was a domestic process; tutors came to the house; and those citizens who yearned for his taking down often said: “Just wait till he has to go to public school; then he’ll get it!” But at twelve Georgie was sent to a private school in the town, and there came from this small and dependent institution no report, or even rumour, of Georgie’s getting anything that he was thought to deserve; therefore the yearning still persisted, though growing gaunt with feeding upon itself. For, although Georgie’s pomposities and impudence in the little school were often almost unbearable, the teachers were fascinated by him. They did not like him—he was too arrogant for that—but he kept them in such a state of emotion that they thought more about him than they did about all of the other ten pupils. The emotion he kept them in was usually one resulting from injured self-respect, but sometimes it was dazzled admiration. So far as their conscientious observation went, he “studied” his lessons sparingly; but sometimes, in class, he flashed an admirable answer, with a comprehension not often shown by the pupils they taught; and he passed his examinations easily. In all, without discernible effort, he acquired at this school some rudiments of a liberal education and learned nothing whatever about hims
elf.

  The yearners were still yearning when Georgie, at sixteen, was sent away to a great “Prep School.” “Now,” they said brightly, “he’ll get it! He’ll find himself among boys just as important in their home towns as he is, and they’ll knock the stuffing out of him when he puts on his airs with them! Oh, but that would be worth something to see!” They were mistaken, it appeared, for when Georgie returned, a few months later, he still seemed to have the same stuffing. He had been deported by the authorities, the offense being stated as “insolence and profanity”; in fact, he had given the principal of the school instructions almost identical with those formerly objected to by the Reverend Malloch Smith.

  But he had not got his come-upance, and those who counted upon it were embittered by his appearance upon the down-town streets driving a dog- cart at criminal speed, making pedestrians retreat from the crossings, and behaving generally as if he “owned the earth.” A disgusted hardware dealer of middle age, one of those who hungered for Georgie’s downfall, was thus driven back upon the sidewalk to avoid being run over, and so far forgot himself as to make use of the pet street insult of the year: “Got ‘ny sense! See here, bub, does your mother know you’re out?”

  Georgie, without even seeming to look at him, flicked the long lash of his whip dexterously, and a little spurt of dust came from the hardware man’s trousers, not far below the waist. He was not made of hardware: he raved, looking for a missile; then, finding none, commanded himself sufficiently to shout after the rapid dog-cart: “Turn down your pants, you would-be dude! Raining in dear ole Lunnon! Git off the earth!”

  Georgie gave him no encouragement to think that he was heard. The dog-cart turned the next corner, causing indignation there, likewise, and, having proceeded some distance farther, halted in front of the “Amberson Block”—an old-fashioned four-story brick warren of lawyers offices, insurance and realestate offices, with a “drygoods store” occupying the ground floor. Georgie tied his lathered trotter to a telegraph pole, and stood for a moment looking at the building critically: it seemed shabby, and he thought his grandfather ought to replace it with a fourteen-story skyscraper, or even a higher one, such as he had lately seen in New York—when he stopped there for a few days of recreation and rest on his way home from the bereaved school. About the entryway to the stairs were various tin signs, announcing the occupation and location of upper-floor tenants, and Georgie decided to take some of these with him if he should ever go to college. However, he did not stop to collect them at this time, but climbed the worn stairs—there was no elevator—to the fourth floor, went down a dark corridor, and rapped three times upon a door. It was a mysterious door, its upper half, of opaque glass, bearing no sign to state the business or profession of the occupants within; but overhead, upon the lintel, four letters had been smearingly inscribed, partly with purple ink and partly with a soft lead pencil, “F. O. T. A.” and upon the plaster wall, above the lintel, there was a drawing dear to male adolescence: a skull and crossbones.

  Three raps, similar to Georgie’s, sounded from within the room. Georgie then rapped four times the rapper within the room rapped twice, and Georgie rapped seven times. This ended precautionary measures; and a well-dressed boy of sixteen opened the door; whereupon Georgie entered quickly, and the door was closed behind him. Seven boys of congenial age were seated in a semicircular row of damaged office chairs, facing a platform whereon stood a solemn, red-haired young personage with a table before him. At one end of the room there was a battered sideboard, and upon it were some empty beer bottles, a tobacco can about two-thirds full, with a web of mold over the surface of the tobacco, a dusty cabinet photograph (not inscribed) of Miss Lillian Russell, several withered old pickles, a caseknife, and a half-petrified section of icing-cake on a sooty plate. At the other end of the room were two rickety card-tables and a stand of bookshelves where were displayed under dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Maupassant’s stories, “Robinson Crusoe,” “Sappho,” “Mr. Barnes of New York,” a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment,” “Studies of the Human Form Divine,” “The Little Minister,” and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds in such articles upon a doctor’s ante-room table. Upon the wall, above the sideboard, was an old framed lithograph of Miss Della Fox in “Wang”; over the bookshelves there was another lithograph purporting to represent Mr. John L. Sullivan in a boxing costume, and beside it a halftone reproduction of “A Reading From Horner.” The final decoration consisted of damaged papiermache—a round shield with two battle-axes and two cross-hilted swords, upon the wall over the little platform where stood the red-haired presiding officer. He addressed Georgie in a serious voice:

  “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.”