Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“We were so happy,” he intoned dramatically, “so very happy.” Then he gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head half-buried in the pillow.

“My own girl—my own—Oh——”

He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from his eyes.

“Oh … my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted! … Oh, my girl, come back, come back! I need you … need you … we’re so pitiful … just misery we brought each other…. She’ll be shut away from me…. I can’t see her; I can’t be her friend. It’s got to be that way—it’s got to be——”

And then again:

“We’ve been so happy, so very happy….”

He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to Lethe….

At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as “Captain Corn, of his Majesty’s Foot,” and he remembered attempting to recite “Clair de Lune” at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost five o’clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson’s for a play that had a four-drink programme—a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must have been “The Jest.” …