Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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This request was a shock to the prisoner and for a moment he looked as though he would have preferred the order of condemnation. Then after one nervous look around the room he put his hands on the edge of the desk, like the paws of a fox-terrier just being trained to sit up, and began to speak in a quivering voice.

“Well, I’m a night cashier, your honor, in T. Cushmael’s restaurant on Third Avenue. I’m not married”—he smiled a little, as if he knew they had all guessed that—“and so on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons I usually go to the matinee. It helps to pass the time till dinner. There’s a drug store, maybe you know, where you can get tickets for a dollar sixty-five to some of the shows and I usually go there and pick out something. They got awful prices at the box office now.” He gave out a long silent whistle and looked feelingly at the judge. “Four or five dollars for one seat—”

The judge nodded his head.

“Well,” continued Charles Stuart, “when I pay even a dollar sixty-five I expect to see my money’s worth. About two weeks ago I went to one of these here mystery plays where they have one fella that did the crime and nobody knows who it was. Well, the fun at a thing like that is to guess who did it. And there was a lady behind me that’d been there before and she gave it all away to the fella with her. Gee”—his face fell and he shook his head from side to side—“I like to died right there. When I got home to my room I was so mad that they had to come and ask me to stop walking up and down. Dollar sixty-five of my money gone for nothing.