The Magnificent Ambersons Booth Tarkington (reading like a writer txt) đ
- Author: Booth Tarkington
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They even had time to dance âsquare dances,â quadrilles, and âlancersâ; they also danced the âracquette,â and schottisches and polkas, and such whims as the âPortland Fancy.â They pushed back the sliding doors between the âparlourâ and the âsitting room,â tacked down crash over the carpets, hired a few palms in green tubs, stationed three or four Italian musicians under the stairway in the âfront hallââ âand had great nights!
But these people were gayest on New Yearâs Day; they made it a true festivalâ âsomething no longer known. The women gathered to âassistâ the hostesses who kept âOpen Houseâ; and the carefree men, dandified and perfumed, went about in sleighs, or in carriages and ponderous âhacks,â going from Open House to Open House, leaving fantastic cards in fancy baskets as they entered each doorway, and emerging a little later, more carefree than ever, if the punch had been to their liking. It always was, and, as the afternoon wore on, pedestrians saw great gesturing and waving of skintight lemon gloves, while ruinous fragments of song were dropped behind as the carriages rolled up and down the streets.
âKeeping Open Houseâ was a merry custom; it has gone, like the all-day picnic in the woods, and like that prettiest of all vanished customs, the serenade. When a lively girl visited the town she did not long go unserenaded, though a visitor was not indeed needed to excuse a serenade. Of a summer night, young men would bring an orchestra under a pretty girlâs windowâ âor, it might be, her fatherâs, or that of an ailing maiden auntâ âand flute, harp, fiddle, cello, cornet, and bass viol would presently release to the dulcet stars such melodies as sing through âYouâll Remember Me,â âI Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,â âSilver Threads Among the Gold,â âKathleen Mavourneen,â or âThe Soldierâs Farewell.â
They had other music to offer, too, for these were the happy days of Olivette and The Macotte and The Chimes of Normandy and GiroflĂ©-Girofla and Fra Diavola. Better than that, these were the days of Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance and of Patience. This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere, for the âaesthetic movementâ had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maidens sawed what-nots in two, and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs; they gilded the easels that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles. In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax flowers and wax fruit, and the protecting glass domes, out upon the trash-heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble-topped tables. They embroidered daisies (which they called âmargueritesâ) and sunflowers and sumac and cattails and owls and peacock feathers upon plush screens and upon heavy cushions, then strewed these cushions upon floors where fathers fell over them in the dark. In the teeth of sinful oratory, the daughters went on embroidering: they embroidered daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cattails and owls and peacock feathers upon âthrowsâ which they had the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas; they painted owls and daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cattails and peacock feathers upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They âstudiedâ painting on china, these girls; they sang Tostiâs new songs; they sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a basket phaeton, on a spring morning.
Croquet and the mildest archery ever known were the sports of people still young and active enough for so much exertion; middle-age played euchre. There was a theatre, next door to the Amberson Hotel, and when Edwin Booth came for a night, everybody who could afford to buy a ticket was there, and all the âhacksâ in town were hired. The Black Crook also filled the theatre, but the audience then was almost entirely of men who looked uneasy as they left for home when the final curtain fell upon the shocking girls dressed as fairies. But the theatre did not often do so well; the people of the town were still too thrifty.
They were thrifty because they were the sons or grandsons of the âearly settlers,â who had opened the wilderness and had reached it from the East and the South with wagons and axes and guns, but with no money at all. The pioneers were thrifty or they would have perished: they had to store away food for the winter, or goods to trade for food, and they often feared they had not stored enoughâ âthey left traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion: to save, even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline. No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either upon âart,â or upon mere luxury and entertainment, without a sense of sin.
Against so homespun a background the magnificence of the Ambersons was as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. Major Amberson bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue; and through this tract he built broad streets and cross-streets; paved them with cedar block, and curbed them with stone. He set up fountains, here and there, where the streets intersected, and at symmetrical intervals placed cast-iron statues, painted white, with their titles clear
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