Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“Where’ve you been?” demanded T. Cushmael.

“Nowhere,” answered Charles Stuart discreetly.

“Well, you’re fired.”

Stuart winced.

“Right now?”

Cushmael waved his hands apathetically.

“Stay two or three days if you want to, till I find somebody. Then”—he made a gesture of expulsion—“outside for you.”

Charles Stuart assented with a weary little nod. He assented to everything. At nine o’clock, after a depressed interval during which he brooded upon the penalty of spending a night among the police, he reported for work.

“Hello, Mr. Stuart,” said Edna Schaeffer, sauntering curiously toward him as he took his place behind the desk. “What become [became] of you last night? Get pinched?”

She laughed, cheerfully, huskily, charmingly he thought, at her joke.

“Yes,” he answered on a sudden impulse, “I was in the 35th Street jail.”

“Yes, you were,” she scoffed.

“That’s the truth,” he insisted. “I was arrested.”

Her face grew serious at once.

“Go on. What did you do?”

He hesitated.

“I pushed somebody in the face.”