The Magnificent Ambersons · Chapter 28 (2/2)

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 to admit that “it might,” and, retiring from what was developing into an oratorical contest, repeated a warning about not “putting too much into it.”

George Amberson also laid stress on this caution later, though the Major had “financed him” again, and he was “going in.” “You must be careful to leave yourself a ‘margin of safety,’ Fanny,” he said. “I’m confident that is a pretty conservative investment of its kind, and all the chances are with us, but you must be careful to leave yourself enough to fall back on, in case anything should go wrong.”

Fanny deceived him. In the impossible event of “anything going wrong” she would have enough left to “live on,” she declared, and laughed excitedly, for she was having the best time that had come to her since Wilbur’s death. Like so many women for whom money has always been provided without their understanding how, she was prepared to be a thorough and irresponsible plunger.

Amberson, in his wearier way, shared her excitement, and in the winter, when the exploiting company had been formed, and he brought Fanny her importantly engraved shares of stock, he reverted to his prediction of possibilities, made when they first spoke of the new light.

“We seem to be partners, all right,” he laughed. “Now let’s go ahead and be millionaires before Isabel and young George come home.”

“When they come home!” she echoed sorrowfully⁠—and it was a phrase which found an evasive echo in Isabel’s letters. In these letters Isabel was always planning pleasant things that she and Fanny and the Major and George and “brother George” would do⁠—when she and her son came home. “They’ll find things pretty changed, I’m afraid,” Fanny said. “If they ever do come home!”

Amberson went over, the next summer, and joined his sister and nephew in Paris, where they were living. “Isabel does want to come home,” he told Fanny gravely, on the day of his return, in October. “She’s wanted to for a long while⁠—and she ought to come while she can stand the journey⁠—” And he amplified this statement, leaving Fanny looking startled and solemn when Lucy came by to drive him out to dinner at the new house Eugene had just completed.

This was no white-and-blue cottage, but a great Georgian picture in brick, five miles north of Amberson Addition, with four acres of its own hedged land between it and its next neighbour; and Amberson laughed wistfully as they turned in between the stone and brick gate pillars, and rolled up the crushed stone driveway. “I wonder, Lucy, if history’s going on forever repeating itself,” he said. “I wonder if this town’s going on building up things and rolling over them, as poor father once said it was rolling over his poor old heart. It looks like it: here’s the Amberson Mansion again, only it’s Georgian instead of nondescript Romanesque; but it’s just the same Amberson Mansion that my father built long before you were born. The only difference is that it’s your father who’s built this one now. It’s all the same, in the long run.”

Lucy did not quite understand, but she laughed as a friend should, and, taking his arm, showed him through vast rooms where ivory-panelled walls and trim window hangings were reflected dimly in dark, rugless floors, and the sparse furniture showed that Lucy had been “collecting” with a long purse. “By Jove!” he said. “You have been going it! Fanny tells me you had a great ‘housewarming’ dance, and you keep right on being the belle of the ball, not any softer-hearted than you used to be. Fred Kinney’s father says you’ve refused Fred so often that he got engaged to Janie Sharon just to prove that someone would have him in spite of his hair. Well, the material world do move, and you’ve got the new kind of house it moves into nowadays⁠—if it has the new price! And even the grand old expanses of plate glass we used to be so proud of at the other Amberson Mansion⁠—they’ve gone, too, with the crowded heavy gold and red stuff. Curious! We’ve still got the plate glass windows, though all we can see out of ’em is the smoke and the old Johnson house, which is a counter-jumper’s boardinghouse now, while you’ve got a view, and you cut it all up into little panes. Well, you’re pretty refreshingly out of the smoke up here.”

“Yes, for a while,” Lucy laughed. “Until it comes and we have to move out farther.”

“No, you’ll stay here,” he assured her. “It will be somebody else who’ll move out farther.”

He continued to talk of the house after Eugene arrived, and gave them no account of his journey until they had retired from the dinner table to Eugene’s library, a gray and shadowy room, where their coffee was brought. Then, equipped with a cigar, which seemed to occupy his attention, Amberson spoke in a casual tone of his sister and her son.

“I found Isabel as well as usual,” he said, “only I’m afraid ‘as usual’ isn’t particularly well. Sydney and Amelia had been up to Paris in the spring, but she hadn’t seen them. Somebody told her they were there, it seems. They’d left Florence and were living in Rome; Amelia’s become a Catholic and is said to give great sums to charity and to go about with the gentry in consequence, but Sydney’s ailing and lives in a wheelchair most of the time. It struck me Isabel ought to be doing the same thing.”

He paused, bestowing minute care upon the removal of the little band from his cigar; and as he seemed to have concluded his narrative, Eugene spoke out of the shadow beyond a heavily shaded lamp: “What do you mean by that?” he asked quietly.

“Oh, she’s cheerful enough,” said Amberson, still not looking at either his young hostess or her father. “At least,” he added, “she manages to seem so. I’m afraid she hasn’t been really well for several years. She isn’t stout you know⁠—she hasn’t changed in looks much⁠—and she seems rather alarmingly short of breath for a slender person. Father’s been that way for years, of course; but never nearly so much as Isabel is now. Of course she makes nothing of it, but it seemed rather serious to me when I noticed she had to stop and rest twice to get up the one short flight of stairs in their two-floor apartment. I told her I thought she ought to make George let her come home.”

“Let her?” Eugene repeated, in a low voice. “Does she want to?”

“She doesn’t urge it. George seems to like the life there⁠—in his grand, gloomy, and peculiar way; and of course she’ll never change about being proud of him and all that⁠—he’s quite a swell. But in spite of anything she said, rather than because, I know she does indeed want to come. She’d like to be with father, of course; and I think she’s⁠—well, she intimated one day that she feared it might even happen that she wouldn’t get to see him again. At the time I thought she referred to his age and feebleness, but on the boat, coming home, I remembered the little look of wistfulness, yet of resignation, with which she said it, and it struck me all at once that I’d been mistaken: I saw she was really thinking of her own state of health.”

“I see,” Eugene said, his voice even lower than it had been before. “And you say he won’t ‘let’ her come home?”

Amberson laughed, but still continued to be interested in his cigar. “Oh, I don’t think he uses force! He’s very gentle with her. I doubt if the subject is mentioned between them, and yet⁠—and yet, knowing my interesting nephew as you do, wouldn’t you think that was about the way to put it?”

“Knowing him as I do⁠—yes,” said Eugene slowly. “Yes, I should think that was about the way to put it.”

A murmur out of the shadows beyond him⁠—a faint sound, musical and feminine, yet expressive of a notable intensity⁠—seemed to indicate that Lucy was of the same opinion.