The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington [best android ereader .TXT] 📗

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!”

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.

A few people, who always foresaw everything, claimed that they were not surprised, because though Wilbur Minafer “might not be an Apollo, as it were,” he was “a steady young business man, and a good churchgoer,” and Isabel Amberson was “pretty sensible⁠—for such a showy girl.” But the engagement astounded the young people, and most of their fathers and mothers, too; and as a topic it supplanted literature at the next meeting of the Women’s Tennyson Club.

“Wilbur Minafer!” a member cried, her inflection seeming to imply that Wilbur’s crime was explained by his surname. “Wilbur Minafer! It’s the queerest thing I ever heard! To think of her taking Wilbur Minafer, just because a man any woman would like a thousand times better was a little wild one night at a serenade!”

“No,” said Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. “It isn’t that. It isn’t even because she’s afraid he’d be a dissipated husband and she wants to be safe. It isn’t because she’s religious or hates wildness; it isn’t even because she hates wildness in him.”

“Well, but look how she’s thrown him over for it.”

“No, that wasn’t her reason,” said the wise Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. “If men only knew it⁠—and it’s a good thing they don’t⁠—a woman doesn’t really care much about whether a man’s wild or not, if it doesn’t affect herself, and Isabel Amberson doesn’t care a thing!”

“Mrs. Foster!”

“No, she doesn’t. What she minds is his making a clown of himself in her front yard! It made her think he didn’t care much about her. She’s probably mistaken, but that’s what she thinks, and it’s too late for her to think anything else now, because she’s going to be married right away⁠—the invitations will be out next week. It’ll be a big Amberson-style thing, raw oysters floating in scooped-out blocks of ice and a band from out-of-town⁠—champagne, showy presents; a colossal present from the Major. Then Wilbur will take Isabel on the carefulest little wedding trip he can manage, and she’ll be a good wife to him, but they’ll have the worst spoiled lot of children this town will ever see.”

“How on earth do you make that