The Beautiful and Damned F. Scott Fitzgerald (top novels to read TXT) 📖

accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

“Here we go!” she yelled. “Whoo‑oop!”

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.

“Remember now!” he warned her nervously, “the man said we oughtn’t to go over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles.”

She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her speed. A moment later he made another attempt.

“See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” cried Gloria in exasperation, “you always exaggerate things so!”

“Well, I don’t want to get arrested.”

“Who’s arresting you? You’re so persistent⁠—just like you were about my cough medicine last night.”

“It was for your own good.”

“Ha! I might as well be living with mama.”

“What a thing to say to me!”

A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.

“See him?” demanded Anthony.

“Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn’t arrest us, did he?”

“When he does it’ll be too late,” countered Anthony brilliantly.

Her reply was scornful, almost injured.

“Why, this old thing won’t go over thirty-five.”

“It isn’t old.”

“It is in spirit.”

That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria’s appetite as one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the towns of Larchmont and Rye.

But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a discourteous streetcar persisted callously in remaining upon its track Gloria ducked down a side-street⁠—and thereafter that afternoon was never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt⁠—moreover, it narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs upon the long grass.

“We’re lost now,” complained Anthony.

“Read that sign!”

“ ‘Marietta⁠—Five Miles.’ What’s Marietta?”

“Never heard of it, but let’s go on. We can’t turn here and there’s probably a detour back to the Post Road.”

The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of stone. Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by. A town sprang up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.

Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission violently from the car.

It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray house. They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars. The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously deserting Washington in droves. Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a side-porch⁠—but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.

“How did you happen to come to Marietta?” demanded the real-estate agent in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them through four spacious and airy bedrooms.

“We broke down,” explained Gloria. “I drove over a fire-hydrant and we had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign.”

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months’ consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent’s car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country roadhouse. Half the night they lay awake planning the things they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical grandfather.⁠ ⁠… When the car was repaired they would explore the country and join the nearest “really nice” club, where Gloria would play golf “or something” while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony’s idea⁠—Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she lay indolently in the hammock.⁠ ⁠… The hammock! a host of new dreams in tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled and darkened with quiet summer rain.⁠ ⁠…

And guests⁠—here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be extraordinarily mature and farsighted. Anthony claimed that they would need people at least every other weekend “as a sort of change.” This provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him.⁠ ⁠… Eventually the conversation assumed its eternal monotone: “What then? Oh, what’ll we do then?”

“Well, we’ll have a dog,” suggested Anthony.

“I don’t want one. I want a kitty.” She went