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

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СКАЧАТЬ for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The prospect was revolting and left alone he would have been incapable of making the trip — but if his will had deteriorated in these past three years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his grandfather’s violent animosity time to cool — but to wait longer would be an error — it would give it a chance to harden.

      He went, in trepidation … and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said Shuttleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no one was to see him. Before the ex-”gin-physician’s” vindictive eye Anthony’s front wilted. He walked out to his taxicab with what was almost a slink — recovering only a little of his self-respect as he boarded the train; glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind.

      Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced his way in? That was what she would have done!

      Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered.

      Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the gray house, which had seen the flower of their love. Four trunks and three monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote, languorous, content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new brown dress edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony walked nervously to and fro smoking, as they waited for the truck that would take their things to the city.

      “What are those?” she demanded, pointing to some books piled upon one of the crates.

      “That’s my old stamp collection,” he confessed sheepishly. “I forgot to pack it.”

      “Anthony, it’s so silly to carry it around.”

      “Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last spring, and I decided not to store it.”

      “Can’t you sell it? Haven’t we enough junk?”

      “I’m sorry,” he said humbly.

      With a thunderous rattling the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls.

      “I’m so glad to go!” she cried, “so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!”

      So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled — her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed.

      “Don’t be cross,” begged Anthony piteously. “We’ve got nothing but each other, after all.”

      “We haven’t even that, most of the time,” cried Gloria.

      “When haven’t we?”

      “A lot of times — beginning with one occasion on the station platform at. Redgate.”

      “You don’t mean to say that—”

      “No,” she interrupted coolly, “I don’t brood over it. It came and went — and when it went it took something with it.”

      She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one — otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

      Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string.

      The Bronx — the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home — the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry.

      “I like these streets,” observed Anthony aloud. “I always feel as though it’s a performance being staged for me; as though the second I’ve passed they’ll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country.”

      Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes — eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York — he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people — the little stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk’s eyes and a bee’s attention to detail — they slathered out on all sides. It was impressive — in perspective it was tremendous.

      Gloria’s voice broke in with strange appropriateness upon his thoughts.

      “I wonder where Bloeckman’s been this summer.”

       THE APARTMENT

      After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain “impractical” ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future — so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships — and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task.

      Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There СКАЧАТЬ