Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Страница 83

Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye—and the jaw?”

Amory laughed.

“That’s a mere nothing.”

He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.

“Look here!”

Tom emitted a low whistle.

“What hit you?”

Amory laughed again.

“Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Who was it?”

“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground—then they kick you.”

Tom lighted a cigarette.

“I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”

Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.

“You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.

“Pretty sober. Why?”

“Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home and live, so he——”

A spasm of pain shook Amory.

“Too bad.”

“Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”

“Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”

Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went back into the study.

“Got a cardboard box?”

“No,” answered Tom, puzzled. “Why should I have? Oh, yes—there may be one in Alec’s room.”

Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love’s soap, finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum “After you’ve gone” … ceased abruptly …

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the lid returned to the study.

“Going out?” Tom’s voice held an undertone of anxiety.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“Couldn’t say, old keed.”

“Let’s have dinner together.”

“Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I’d eat with him.”

“Oh.”

“By-by.”

Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

“Hi, Amory!”

“What’ll you have?”

“Yoho! Waiter!”