The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

“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 a young girl. Well, we came up and found it was a little shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like somebody in a fairy tale. ‘She turned down here,’ he said, ‘and most steppud on me, goin’ somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golfin’ pants come runnin’ along and went after her. He throwed me this.’ The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around⁠—”

“Oh, the poor old man!” ejaculated Gloria, moved.

“I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell him what it was all about.”

“Poor old man,” repeated Gloria dismally.

Dick sat down sleepily on a box.

“And now what?” he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.

“Gloria’s upset,” explained Anthony. “She and I are going to the city by the next train.”

Maury in the darkness had pulled a timetable from his pocket.

“Strike a match.”

A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.

“Let’s see. Two, two-thirty⁠—no, that’s evening. By gad, you won’t get a train till five-thirty.”

Anthony hesitated.

“Well,” he muttered uncertainly, “we’ve decided to stay here and wait for it. You two might as well go back and sleep.”

“You go, too, Anthony,” urged Gloria; “I want you to have some sleep, dear. You’ve been as pale as a ghost all day.”

“Why, you little idiot!”

Dick yawned.

“Very well. You stay, we stay.”

He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.

“Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.”

“Let’s see.” Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her. “Let’s sit out here,” she suggested. “I like it much better.”

Anthony and Dick converted a long box into a backrest and found a board dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and with some effort Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.

“Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock,” he remarked. “We carried him in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to the skin.”

“That awful little man!” sighed Gloria.

“How do you do!” The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above, and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now brilliant sky.

“It must be for such occasions as this,” he began softly, his words having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling softly upon his auditors, “that the righteous of the land decorate the railroads with billboards asserting in red and yellow that ‘Jesus Christ is God,’ placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that ‘Gunter’s Whiskey is Good.’ ”

There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted upward.

“I think I shall tell you the story of my education,” continued Maury, “under these sardonic constellations.”

“Do! Please!”

“Shall I, really?”

They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.

“Well,” he began, “as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred ‘Now I lay me’s.’ ”

“Throw down a cigarette,” murmured someone.

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command:

“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.”

Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice resumed:

“I was adept at fooling