THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

Chapter I


Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1873, when other people were
losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.
Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even
Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New
York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place.
Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland
town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost during the
period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland
dog.

In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew
all the other women who wore silk or velvet, and when there was a new
purchase of sealskin, sick people were got to windows to see it go by.
Trotters were out, in the winter afternoons, racing light sleighs on
National Avenue and Tennessee Street; everybody recognized both
the trotters and the drivers; and again knew them as well on summer
evenings, when slim buggies whizzed by in renewals of the snow-time
rivalry. For that matter, everybody knew everybody else's family
horse-and-carriage, could identify such a silhouette half a mile down
the street, and thereby was sure who was going to market, or to a
reception, or coming home from office or store to noon dinner or evening
supper.

During the earlier years of this period, elegance of personal appearance
was believed to rest more upon the texture of garments than upon their
shaping. A silk dress needed no remodelling when it was a year or so
old; it remained distinguished by merely remaining silk. Old men and
governors wore broadcloth; "full dress" was broadcloth with "doeskin"
trousers; and there were seen men of all ages to whom a hat meant only
that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a "stove-pipe."
In town and country these men would wear no other hat, and, without
self-consciousness, they went rowing in such hats.

Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers,
shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power,
found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion of the "Derby"
hat arrived: one season the crown of this hat would be a bucket; the
next it would be a spoon. Every house still kept its bootjack, but
high-topped boots gave way to shoes and "congress gaiters"; and these
were played through fashions that shaped them now with toes like
box-ends and now with toes like the prows of racing shells.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved that
the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made"; these
betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to the
shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were having
their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" was
invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-pointed shoes,
a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a "Chesterfield," with
short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical collar, laundered to a
polish and three inches high, while his other neckgear might be a heavy,
puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a doll's braids. With evening dress
he wore a tan overcoat so short that his black coat-tails hung visible,
five inches below the over-coat; but after a season or two he lengthened
his overcoat till it touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight
trousers into trousers like great bags. Then, presently, he was seen
no more, though the word that had been coined for him remained in the
vocabularies of the impertinent.

It was a hairier day than this. Beards were to the wearers' fancy,
and things as strange as the Kaiserliche boar-tusk moustache were
commonplace. "Side-burns" found nourishment upon childlike profiles;
great Dundreary whiskers blew like tippets over young shoulders;
moustaches were trained as lambrequins over forgotten mouths; and it
was possible for a Senator of the United States to wear a mist of white
whisker upon his throat only, not a newspaper in the land finding the
ornament distinguished enough to warrant a lampoon. Surely no more is
needed to prove that so short a time ago we were living in another age!

At the beginning of the Ambersons' great period most of the houses of
the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style, but
also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all has
style enough. They stood in commodious yards, well shaded by leftover
forest trees, elm and walnut and beech, with here and there a line of
tall sycamores where the land had been made by filling bayous from the
creek.