The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington (top novels of all time TXT) 📗

dirty as ever, but was a little less distressed because it no longer looked so dirty as it was.

These were bad times for Amberson Addition. This quarter, already old, lay within a mile of the centre of the town, but business moved in other directions; and the Addition’s share of Prosperity was only the smoke and dirt, with the bank credit left out. The owners of the original big houses sold them, or rented them to boardinghouse keepers, and the tenants of the multitude of small houses moved “farther out” (where the smoke was thinner) or into apartment houses, which were built by dozens now. Cheaper tenants took their places, and the rents were lower and lower, and the houses shabbier and shabbier⁠—for all these shabby houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get “farther out” where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, “farther out” was now as close to business as the Addition had been in the days of its prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.

The five new houses, built so closely where had been the fine lawn of the Amberson Mansion, did not look new. When they were a year old they looked as old as they would ever look; and two of them were vacant, having never been rented, for the Major’s mistake about apartment houses had been a disastrous one. “He guessed wrong,” George Amberson said. “He guessed wrong at just the wrong time! Housekeeping in a house is harder than in an apartment; and where the smoke and dirt are as thick as they are in the Addition, women can’t stand it. People were crazy for apartments⁠—too bad he couldn’t have seen it in time. Poor man! he digs away at his ledgers by his old gas drop-light lamp almost every night⁠—he still refuses to let the Mansion be torn up for wiring, you know. But he had one painful satisfaction this spring: he got his taxes lowered!”

Amberson laughed ruefully, and Fanny Minafer asked how the Major could have managed such an economy. They were sitting upon the veranda at Isabel’s one evening during the third summer of the absence of their nephew and his mother; and the conversation had turned toward Amberson finances.

“I said it was a ‘painful satisfaction,’ Fanny,” he explained. “The property has gone down in value, and they assessed it lower than they did fifteen years ago.”

“But farther out⁠—”

“Oh, yes, ‘farther out’! Prices are magnificent ‘farther out,’ and farther in, too! We just happen to be the wrong spot, that’s all. Not that I don’t think something could be done if father would let me have a hand; but he won’t. He can’t, I suppose I ought to say. He’s ‘always done his own figuring,’ he says; and it’s his lifelong habit to keep his affairs: and even his books, to himself, and just hand us out the money. Heaven knows he’s done enough of that!”

He sighed; and both were silent, looking out at the long flares of the constantly passing automobile headlights, shifting in vast geometric demonstrations against the darkness. Now and then a bicycle wound its nervous way among these portents, or, at long intervals, a surrey or buggy plodded forlornly by.

“There seem to be so many ways of making money nowadays,” Fanny said thoughtfully. “Every day I hear of a new fortune some person has got hold of, one way or another⁠—nearly always it’s somebody you never heard of. It doesn’t seem all to be in just making motor cars; I hear there’s a great deal in manufacturing these things that motor cars use⁠—new inventions particularly. I met dear old Frank Bronson the other day, and he told me⁠—”

“Oh, yes, even dear old Frank’s got the fever,” Amberson laughed. “He’s as wild as any of them. He told me about this invention he’s gone into, too. ‘Millions in it!’ Some new electric headlight better than anything yet⁠—‘every car in America can’t help but have ’em,’ and all that. He’s putting half he’s laid by into it, and the fact is, he almost talked me into getting father to ‘finance me’ enough for me to go into it. Poor father! he’s financed me before! I suppose he would again if I had the heart to ask him; and this seems to be a good thing, though probably old Frank is a little too sanguine. At any rate, I’ve been thinking it over.”

“So have I,” Fanny admitted. “He seemed to be certain it would pay twenty-five percent the first year, and enormously more after that; and I’m only getting four on my little principal. People are making such enormous fortunes out of everything to do with motor cars, it does seem as if⁠—” She paused. “Well, I told him I’d think it over seriously.”

“We may turn out to be partners and millionaires then,” Amberson laughed. “I thought I’d ask Eugene’s advice.”

“I wish you would,” said Fanny. “He probably knows exactly how much profit there would be in this.”

Eugene’s advice was to “go slow”: he thought electric lights for automobiles were “coming⁠—some day but probably not until certain difficulties could be overcome.” Altogether, he was discouraging, but by this time his two friends “had the fever” as thoroughly as old Frank Bronson himself had it; for they had been with Bronson to see the light working beautifully in a machine shop. They were already enthusiastic, and after asking Eugene’s opinion they argued with him, telling him how they had seen with their own eyes that the difficulties he mentioned had been overcome. “Perfectly!” Fanny cried. “And if it worked in the shop it’s bound to work any place else, isn’t it?”

He would not agree that it was “bound to”⁠—yet, being pressed, was driven