Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

20 страница из 1457

— ◆ —

St. Paul Academy Now and Then (June 1911)

It was ominous-looking enough in broad daylight, with its dull, brown walls, and musty windows. The garden, if it might be called so, was simply a mass of overgrown weeds, and the walk was falling to pieces, the bricks crumbling from the touch of time. Inside it was no better. Rickety old three-legged chairs, covered with a substance that had once been plush, were not exactly hospitable-looking objects. And yet this house was part of the legacy my grandfather had left me. In his will had been this clause: “The house, as it now stands, and all that is inside it, shall go to my grandson, Robert Calvin Raymond, on his coming to the age of twenty-one years. I furthermore desire that he shall not open the room at the end of the corridor on the second floor until Carmatle falls. He may fix up three rooms of the house as modern as he wishes, but let the others remain unchanged. He may keep but one servant.”

To a poor young man with no outlook in life, and no money, but a paltry eight hundred a year, this seemed a windfall when counted with the twenty-five thousand dollars that went with it. I resolved to fix up my new home, and so started South to Macon, Georgia, near which my grandfather’s house was situated. All the evening on the Pullman I had thought about that clause, “He shall not open the room at the end of the corridor on the second floor until Carmatle falls.” Who was Carmatle? And what did it mean when it said, “until Carmatle falls?” In vain I supposed and guessed and thought; I could make no sense of it.