Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“You—you can’t speak to him. He’s gone.”

There was a pause. Then the girl’s voice, suspiciously:

“He isn’t gone.”

Diana’s hands tightened on the telephone.

“I know who’s talking,” went on the voice, rising to a hysterical note, “and I want to speak to Mr. Abbot. If you’re not telling the truth, and he finds out, there’ll be trouble.”

“Be quiet!”

“If he’s gone, where did he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“If he isn’t at my apartment in half an hour I’ll know you’re lying and I’ll——”

Diana hung up the receiver and tumbled back on the bed—too weary of life to think or care. Out on the lawn the orchestra was singing and the words drifted in her window on the breeze.

“Lis-sen while I—get you tole:

Stop foolin’ ’roun’ sweet—Jelly-Roll——”

She listened. The negro voices were wild and loud—life was in that key, so harsh a key. How abominably helpless she was! Her appeal was ghostly, impotent, absurd, before the barbaric urgency of this other girl’s desire.

“Just treat me pretty, just treat me sweet

Cause I possess a fo’ty-fo’ that don’t repeat.”