Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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The negroes’ voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them sing before.

“Time is a thief;

Gladness and grief

Cling to the leaf

As it yellows——”

“What was in the bags?” she asked softly.

“Florida mud,” he answered. “That was one of the two true things I told you.”

“Perhaps I can guess the other one,” she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.

— ◆ —

The Saturday Evening Post (22 May 1920)

The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow’s ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot—being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved—and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.