THE COMPLETE WORKS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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СКАЧАТЬ no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge — it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the temperature of warm blood…. The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

      Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the tracks over the river.

      There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now — the treetops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

      “Gloria!”

      Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping, jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him come now — she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat, snatched off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.

      “Here I am!” she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. “Here I am,. Anthony, dear — old, worried Anthony.”

      “Gloria!” He reached the platform, ran toward her. “Are you all right?”. Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.

      “Yes.”

      “What was the matter? Why did you leave?” he queried anxiously.

      “I had to — there was something” — she paused and a flicker of uneasiness lashed at her mind— “there was something sitting on me — here.” She put her hand on her breast. “I had to go out and get away from it.”

      “What do you mean by ‘something’?”

      “I don’t know — that man Hull—”

      “Did he bother you?”

      “He came to my door, drunk. I think I’d gotten sort of crazy by that time.”

      “Gloria, dearest—”

      Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.

      “Let’s go back,” he suggested.

      She shivered.

      “Uh! No, I couldn’t. It’d come and sit on me again.” Her voice rose to a cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. “That thing—”

      “There — there,” he soothed her, pulling her close to him. “We won’t do anything you don’t want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?”

      “I want — I want to go away.”

      “Where?”

      “Oh — anywhere.”

      “By golly, Gloria,” he cried, “you’re still tight!”

      “No, I’m not. I haven’t been, all evening. I went upstairs about, oh, I don’t know, about half an hour after dinner …Ouch!”

      He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.

      “It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don’t know — somebody picked me up and dropped me.”

      “Gloria, come home. It’s late and damp.”

      “I can’t,” she wailed. “Oh, Anthony, don’t ask me to! I will tomorrow.. You go home and I’ll wait here for a train. I’ll go to a hotel—”

      “I’ll go with you.”

      “No, I don’t want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep — oh, I want to sleep. And then tomorrow, when you’ve got all the smell of whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and Hull is gone, then I’ll come home. If I went now, that thing — oh — !” She covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to persuade her.

      “I was all sober when you left,” he said. “Dick was asleep on the lounge and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn’t seen you for several hours, so I went upstairs—”

      He broke off as a salutatory “Hello, there!” boomed suddenly out of the darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.

      “It’s Maury’s voice,” she cried excitedly. “If it’s Hull with him, keep them away, keep them away!”

      “Who’s there?” Anthony called.

      “Just Dick and Maury,” returned two voices reassuringly.

      “Where’s Hull?”

      “He’s in bed. Passed out.”

      Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.

      “What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?” inquired Richard Caramel with sleepy bewilderment.

      “What are you two doing here?”

      Maury laughed.

      “Damned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if there was a search-party we’d better be on it. He slowed me up by sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club.”

      There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.

      “How did you track us, really?”

      “Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you. Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us and asked us if we were looking for СКАЧАТЬ