The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon and many more stories…. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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СКАЧАТЬ walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him … never in love…. She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying: “And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is … oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you——”

      She shook her head.

      “No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you—I like all clever men, you more than any—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man—” She broke off suddenly.

      “Amory.”

      “What?”

      “You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?”

      “It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as though I were speaking aloud. But I love you—or adore you—or worship you——”

      “There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”

      He smiled unwillingly.

      “Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you are depressing sometimes.”

      “You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal nay.”

      “There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”

      She dropped his arm.

      “You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month.”

      And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.

      “I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post. “These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city.”

      “Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”

      “Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”

      “And you are, too,” said he.

      They were walking along now.

      “No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in the convent without”—then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed—“my precious babies, which I must go back and see.”

      She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known as débutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said: “Oh, if I could only have gotten you!” Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!

      But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.

       “Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of water…. “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair…. Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it? … who could give such gold…”

      Amory is Resentful.

      Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.

      In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately that their deaths at least would be heroic. The literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department, seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.

      Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would be futile—Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines, a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause that would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.

      “When the German army entered Belgium,” he began, “if the inhabitants had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been disorganized in——”

      “I know,” Amory interrupted, “I’ve heard it all. But I’m not going to talk propaganda with you. There’s a chance that you’re right—but even so we’re hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch us as a reality.”

      “But, Amory, listen——”

      “Burne, we’d just argue——”

      “Very well.”

      “Just one thing—I don’t ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don’t count a picayune with you beside your sense of duty—but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren’t just plain German?”

      “Some of them are, of course.”

      “How do you know they aren’t all pro-German—just a lot of weak ones—with German-Jewish names.”

      “That’s the chance, of course,” he said slowly. “How much or how little I’m taking this stand because of propaganda I’ve heard, I don’t know; naturally I think that it’s my most innermost conviction—it seems a path spread before me just now.”

      Amory’s heart sank.

      “But think of the cheapness of it—no one’s really going to martyr you for being a pacifist—it’s just going to throw you in with the worst——”

      “I doubt it,” he interrupted.

      “Well, СКАЧАТЬ