The F. Scott Fitzgerald MEGAPACK ®. F. Scott FitzgeraldЧитать онлайн книгу.
shouted in her deep bass voice.
“Yo! Jemina Tantrum. Gosh ding yo’!” he returned.
She continued her way to the cabin.
The stranger was talking to her father. Gold had been discovered on the Tantrum land, and the stranger, Edgar Edison, was trying to buy the land for a song. He was considering what song to offer.
She sat upon her hands and watched him.
He was wonderful. When he talked his lips moved.
She sat upon the stove and watched him.
Suddenly there came a blood-curdling scream. The Tantrums rushed to the windows.
It was the Doldrums.
They had hitched their steers to trees and concealed themselves behind the bushes and flowers, and soon a perfect rattle of stones and bricks beat against the windows, bending them inward.
“Father! father!” shrieked Jemina.
Her father took down his slingshot from his slingshot rack on the wall and ran his hand lovingly over the elastic band. He stepped to a loophole. Old Mappy Tantrum stepped to the coalhole.
A MOUNTAIN BATTLE
The stranger was aroused at last. Furious to get at the Doldrums, he tried to escape from the house by crawling up the chimney. Then he thought there might be a door under the bead, but Jemina told him there was not. He hunted for doors under the beds and sofas, but each time Jemina pulled him out and told him there were no doors there. Furious with anger, he beat upon the door and hollered at the Doldrums. They did not answer him, but kept up their fusillade of bricks and stones against the window. Old Pappy Tantrum knew that just as soon as they were able to affect an aperture they would pour in and the fight would be over.
Then old Heck Doldrum, foaming at the mouth and expectorating on the ground, left and right, led the attack.
The terrific slingshots of Pappy Tantrum had not been without their effect. A master shot had disabled one Doldrum, and another Doldrum, shot almost incessantly through the abdomen, fought feebly on.
Nearer and nearer they approached the house.
“We must fly,” shouted the stranger to Jemina. “I will sacrifice myself and bear you away.”
“No,” shouted Pappy Tantrum, his face begrimed. “You stay here and fit on. I will bar Jemina away. I will bar Mappy away. I will bar myself away.”
The man from the settlements, pale and trembling with anger, turned to Ham Tantrum, who stood at the door throwing loophole after loophole at the advancing Doldrums.
“Will you cover the retreat?”
But Ham said that he too had Tantrums to bear away, but that he would leave himself here to help the stranger cover the retreat, if he could think of a way of doing it.
Soon smoke began to filter through the floor and ceiling. Shem Doldrum had come up and touched a match to old Japhet Tantrum’s breath as he leaned from a loophole, and the alcoholic flames shot up on all sides.
The whiskey in the bathtub caught fire. The walls began to fall in.
Jemina and the man from the settlements looked at each other.
“Jemina,” he whispered.
“Stranger,” she answered,
“We will die together,” he said. “If we had lived I would have taken you to the city and married you. With your ability to hold liquor, your social success would have been assured.”
She caressed him idly for a moment, counting her toes softly to herself. The smoke grew thicker. Her left leg was on fire.
She was a human alcohol lamp.
Their lips met in one long kiss and then a wall fell on them and blotted them out.
“As One.”
When the Doldrums burst through the ring of flame, they found them dead where they had fallen, their arms about each other.
Old Jem Doldrum was moved.
He took off his hat.
He filled it with whiskey and drank it off.
“They air dead,” he said slowly, “they hankered after each other. The fit is over now. We must not part them.”
So they threw them together into the stream and the two splashes they made were as one.
THE OFFSHORE PIRATE
I
This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.
The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.
“Ardita!” said the gray-haired man sternly.
Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.
“Ardita!” he repeated. “Ardita!”
Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Ardita!”
“What?”
“Will you listen to me—or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?”
The lemon descended very slowly and scornfully.
“Put it in writing.”
“Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?”
“Oh, can’t you lemme alone for a second?”
“Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore—”
“Telephone?” She showed for the first time a faint interest.
“Yes, it was—”
“Do you mean to say,” she interrupted wonderingly, “’at they let you run a wire out here?”
“Yes, and just now—”
“Won’t other boats bump into it?”
“No. It’s run along the bottom. Five min—”
“Well,