akorn - Mighty Old Tales Retold

Whose Body? - Ch 2 - Dorothy L Sayers

Whose Body? - Ch 2
Dorothy L Sayers
“Excellent, Bunter,” said Lord Peter, sinking with a sigh into a luxurious armchair. “I couldn’t have done better myself. The thought of the Dante makes my mouth water—and the ‘Four Sons of Aymon.’ And you’ve saved me £60—that’s glorious. What shall we spend it on, Bunter? Think of it—all ours, to do as we like with, for as Harold Skimpole so rightly observes, £60 saved is £60 gained, and I’d reckoned on spending it all. It’s your saving, Bunter, and properly speaking, your £60. What do we want? Anything in your department? Would you like anything altered in the flat?”

Whose Body? - Ch 1 - Dorothy L Sayers

Whose Body? - Ch 1
Dorothy L Sayers
“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus. “Hi, driver!”The taxi man, irritated at receiving this appeal while negotiating the intricacies of turning into Lower Regent Street across the route of a 19 ’bus, a 38-B and a bicycle, bent an unwilling ear.“I’ve left the catalogue behind,” said Lord Peter deprecatingly. “Uncommonly careless of me. D’you mind puttin’ back to where we came from?”“To the Savile Club, sir?”“No—110 Piccadilly—just beyond—thank you.”“Thought you was in a hurry,” said the man, overcome with a sense of injury.“I’m afraid it’s an awkward place to turn in,” said Lord Peter, answering the thought rather than the words. His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 9 - THE END - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 9 - THE END
F Scott Fitzgerald
After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard, and there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression “madman.” as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 8 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 8
F Scott Fitzgerald
I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress — I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late.Crossing his lawn, I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”

The Great Gatsby - Ch 7 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 7
F Scott Fitzgerald
It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night — and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over. Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out — an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”“Nope.” After a pause he added “sir.” in a dilatory, grudging way.“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.”“Who?” he demanded rudely.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 6 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 6
F Scott Fitzgerald
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.“Why — any statement to give out.”It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 5 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 5
F Scott Fitzgerald
When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into “hide-and-go-seek.” or “sardines-in-the-box.” with all the house thrown open to the game. But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the trees, which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 4 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 4
F Scott Fitzgerald
On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages alongshore, the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 3 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 3
F Scott Fitzgerald
There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

The Great Gatsby - Ch 2 - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby - Ch 2
F Scott Fitzgerald
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.