Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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When tourists come to such last-century landmarks they stop their cars and gaze for awhile and say: “Well, of course, that house is mostly halls and has a thousand rats and one bathroom, but there’s a sort of atmosphere about it——”

The tourist doesn’t stay long. He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop—because this is the twentieth century and Victorian houses are as unfashionable as the works of Mrs. Humphry Ward. He can’t see the hammock from the road—but sometimes there’s a girl in the hammock. There was this afternoon. She was asleep in it and apparently unaware of the aesthetic horrors which surrounded her, the stone statue of Diana, for example, which grinned idiotically under the sunlight on the lawn.

There was something enormously yellow about the whole scene—there was this sunlight, for instance, that was yellow, and the hammock was of the particularly hideous yellow peculiar to hammocks, and the girl’s yellow hair was spread out upon the hammock in a sort of invidious comparison. She slept with her lips closed and her hands clasped behind her head, as it is proper for young girls to sleep. Her breast rose and fell slightly with no more emphasis than the sway of the hammock’s fringe. Her name, Amanthis, was as old-fashioned as the house she lived in. I regret to say that her mid-Victorian connections ceased abruptly at this point.