LinguaBoosterlearning foreign languages

May Day

✒ Author
📖 Pages103
⏰ Reading time 3 hours 30 minutes
💡 Originally published1920
🌏 Original language English
📌 Type Stories

Table of contents

Expand

MAY DAY1
II16
III22
IV38
V53
VI60
VII65
VIII69
IX81
X90
XI102

Work in other languages

Read the book

MAY DAY

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose.
All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.
Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared — and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satin and cloth of gold.
So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them.
Some even of them flung up their hands helplessly, shouting:
"Alas!
I have no more slippers! and alas!
I have no more trinkets!
May Heaven help me, for I know not what I shall do!"
But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far too busy — day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway and all exulted because the young men returning were pure and brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the land were virgins and comely both of face and of figure.
So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and, of these, several — or perhaps one — are here set down. I
At nine o'clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr. Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr. Dean's rooms.
The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit.
He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever.
Page 1 of 103

You can use the left and right keys on the keyboard to navigate between book pages.

Suggest a quote

Download the book for free in PDF, FB2, EPUb, DOC and TXT

Download the free e-book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, «May Day» , in English. You can also print the text of the book. For this, the PDF and DOC formats are suitable.

You may be interested in

Be the first to comment

Add

Add comment