Tales of the Jazz Age. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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      “I reckin maybe after Aunt Mamie dies I could sink that money of mine in the farm and make somethin’ out of it. All my people originally came from that part up there. Had a big place.”

      Clark looked at him curiously.

      “That’s funny,” he said. “This—this sort of affected me the same way.”

      The Jelly-bean hesitated.

      “I don’t know,” he began slowly, “somethin’ about—about that girl last night talkin’ about a lady named Diana Manners—an English lady, sorta got me thinkin’!” He drew himself up and looked oddly at Clark, “I had a family once,” he said defiantly.

      Clark nodded.

      “I know.”

      “And I’m the last of ’em,” continued the Jelly-bean his voice rising slightly, “and I ain’t worth shucks. Name they call me by means jelly—weak and wobbly like. People who weren’t nothin’ when my folks was a lot turn up their noses when they pass me on the street.”

      Again Clark was silent.

      “So I’m through, I’m goin’ to-day. And when I come back to this town it’s going to be like a gentleman.”

      Clark took out his handkerchief and wiped his damp brow.

      “Reckon you’re not the only one it shook up,” he admitted gloomily. “All this thing of girls going round like they do is going to stop right quick. Too bad, too, but everybody’ll have to see it thataway.”

      “Do you mean,” demanded Jim in surprise, “that all that’s leaked out?”

      “Leaked out? How on earth could they keep it secret. It’ll be announced in the papers to-night. Doctor Lamar’s got to save his name somehow.”

      Jim put his hands on the sides of the car and tightened his long fingers on the metal.

      “Do you mean Taylor investigated those checks?”

      It was Clark’s turn to be surprised.

      “Haven’t you heard what happened?”

      Jim’s startled eyes were answer enough.

      “Why,” announced Clark dramatically, “those four got another bottle of corn, got tight and decided to shock the town—so Nancy and that fella Merritt were married in Rockville at seven o’clock this morning.”

      A tiny indentation appeared in the metal under the Jelly-bean’s fingers.

      “Married?”

      “Sure enough. Nancy sobered up and rushed back into town, crying and frightened to death—claimed it’d all been a mistake. First Doctor Lamar went wild and was going to kill Merritt, but finally they got it patched up some way, and Nancy and Merritt went to Savannah on the two-thirty train.”

      Jim closed his eyes and with an effort overcame a sudden sickness.

      “It’s too bad,” said Clark philosophically. “I don’t mean the wedding—reckon that’s all right, though I don’t guess Nancy cared a darn about him. But it’s a crime for a nice girl like that to hurt her family that way.”

      The Jelly-bean let go the car and turned away. Again something was going on inside him, some inexplicable but almost chemical change.

      “Where you going?” asked Clark.

      The Jelly-bean turned and looked dully back over his shoulder.

      “Got to go,” he muttered. “Been up too long; feelin’ right sick.”

      “Oh.”

      The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling—perhaps inarticulate—that this is the greatest wisdom of the South—so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes—the ones he knew.

      The Camel’s Back

       I suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement. As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wrist watch which cost six hundred dollars. I began it at seven in the morning and finished it at two o’clock the same night. It was published in the “Saturday Evening Post” in 1920, and later included in the O. Henry Memorial Collection for the same year. I like it least of all the stories in this volume.

       My amusement was derived from the fact that the camel part of the story is literally true; in fact, I have a standing engagement with the gentleman involved to attend the next fancy-dress party to which we are mutually invited, attired as the latter part of the camel—this as a sort of atonement for being his historian.

      I

      The glazed eye of the tired reader resting for a second on the above title will presume it to be merely metaphorical. Stories about the cup and the lip and the bad penny and the new broom rarely have anything, to do with cups or lips or pennies or brooms. This story Is the exception. It has to do with a material, visible and large-as-life camel’s back.

      Starting from the neck we shall work toward the tail. I want you to meet Mr. Perry Parkhurst, twenty-eight, lawyer, native of Toledo. Perry has nice teeth, a Harvard diploma, parts his hair in the middle. You have met him before—in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and so forth. Baker Brothers, New York, pause on their semi-annual trip through the West to clothe him; Montmorency & Co. dispatch a young man post-haste every three months to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his shoes. He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if he lives long enough, and doubtless a Chinese tank if it comes into fashion. He looks like the advertisement of the young man rubbing his sunset-colored chest with liniment and goes East every other year to his class reunion.

      I want you to meet his Love. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men, and the White Pine Man, and the Brass Man, they look very much as you and I do, only more so, if you know what I mean.

      Now during the Christmas holidays of 1919 there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized the, forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons, male and female, twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings, and thirteen bridge parties. It was the cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth СКАЧАТЬ