Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“It’s father!” cried Yanci.

And now a voice drifted out to them, drunken and murmurous, taking the long notes with attempted melancholy:

Sing a song of cities,

Ridin’ on a rail,

A niggah’s ne’er so happy

As when he’s out-a jail.

“How terrible!” exclaimed Yanci. “He’ll wake up everybody in the block.”

The chorus ended, the guitar jangled again, then gave out a last harsh spang! and was still. A moment later these disturbances were followed by a low but quite definite snore. Mr. Bowman, having indulged his musical proclivity, had dropped off to sleep.

“Let’s go to ride,” suggested Yanci impatiently. “This is too hectic for me.”

Scott arose with alacrity and they walked down to the car.

“Where’ll we go?” she wondered.

“I don’t care.”

“We might go up half a block to Crest Avenue—that’s our show street—and then ride out to the river boulevard.”

As they turned into Crest Avenue the new cathedral, immense and unfinished, in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghosts of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white, dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cochères which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with huge circular windows that corseted the second stories.