The Complete Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Unabridged). Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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СКАЧАТЬ muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious lump and exploring the cold sheets cautiously. “Damn!”

      Carnival.

      Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs, finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him, and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with unorthodox remarks.

      “Oh, let me see—” he said one night to a flabbergasted delegation, “what club do you represent?”

      With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the “nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy” very much at ease and quite unaware of the object of the call.

      When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder.

      There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown men were elevated into importance when they received certain coveted bids; others who were considered “all set” found that they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and deserted, talked wildly of leaving college.

      In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats, for being “a damn tailor’s dummy,” for having “too much pull in heaven,” for getting drunk one night “not like a gentleman, by God,” or for unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the wielders of the black balls.

      This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and voices.

      “Hi, Dibby—‘gratulations!”

      “Goo’ boy, Tom, you got a good bunch in Cap.”

      “Say, Kerry——”

      “Oh, Kerry—I hear you went Tiger with all the weight-lifters!”

      “Well, I didn’t go Cottage—the parlor-snakes’ delight.”

      “They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid—Did he sign up the first day?—oh, no. Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a bicycle—afraid it was a mistake.”

      “How’d you get into Cap—you old roué?”

      “‘Gratulations!”

      “‘Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd.”

      When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed, singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do what they pleased for the next two years.

      Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

      Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the window.

      “Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front of Renwick’s in half an hour. Somebody’s got a car.” He took the bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small articles, upon the bed.

      “Where’d you get the car?” demanded Amory cynically.

      “Sacred trust, but don’t be a critical goopher or you can’t go!”

      “I think I’ll sleep,” Amory said calmly, resettling himself and reaching beside the bed for a cigarette.

      “Sleep!”

      “Why not? I’ve got a class at eleven-thirty.”

      “You damned gloom! Of course, if you don’t want to go to the coast——”

      With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover’s burden on the floor. The coast … he hadn’t seen it for years, since he and his mother were on their pilgrimage.

      “Who’s going?” he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.‘s.

      “Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and Jesse Ferrenby and—oh about five or six. Speed it up, kid!”

      In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick’s, and at nine-thirty they bowled happily out of town, headed for the sands of Deal Beach.

      “You see,” said Kerry, “the car belongs down there. In fact, it was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got permission from the city council to deliver it.”

      “Anybody got any money?” suggested Ferrenby, turning around from the front seat.

      There was an emphatic negative chorus.

      “That makes it interesting.”

      “Money—what’s money? We can sell the car.”

      “Charge him salvage or something.”

      “How’re we going to get food?” asked Amory.

      “Honestly,” answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, “do you doubt Kerry’s ability for three short days? Some people have lived on nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly.”

      “Three days,” Amory mused, “and I’ve got classes.”

      “One of the days is the Sabbath.”

      “Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a month and a half to go.”

      “Throw him out!”

      “It’s a long walk back.”

      “Amory, you’re running it out, if I may coin a new phrase.”

      “Hadn’t you better get some dope on yourself, Amory?”

      Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.

      “Oh, winter’s rains and ruins are over,

      And all the seasons of snows and sins;

      The days dividing lover and lover,

      The light that loses, the night that wins;

      And СКАЧАТЬ