The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Episode 2

Welcome back to Southern Slumber, bedtime stories for sleep. Tonight, we continue F. Scott Fitzgerald's enchanting and mysterious Novella, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. 

As young John Unger settles into the incredible world of Percy Washington, he learns the history behind the family's unimaginable wealth and the secrets hidden deep within the Montana mountain. 

Fitzgerald's novella unfolds like a dream. His writing is so exquisite --  in some sections it makes you want to hold that sentence, hold those words, as you cease to think anymore, but instead dream and give way to sleep. 

So settle into your fluffy pillows and let your thoughts drift as you gently fall asleep. 

Sweet dreams

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Southern Slumber Bedtime Stories for Sleep I'm glad you're here tonight. I'm Holly, and each week we visit a corner of the American South where the air is warm, the aroma of gardeni linger from the garden, and everything moves in slow motion. You can simply drift in and out tonight, letting the sound of my voice carry you. And if sleep comes, you can let it. I'll be right here as you rest. So close your eyes if you haven't already. Take a slow breath in and let it fall away. Tonight we continue our journey into F. Scott Fitzgerald's strange and dreamlike tale The diamond as big as the Ritz. When we left young John Unger, he had arrived in a hidden world tucked deep within the Montana Mountains. Tonight the mystery deepens. We'll learn about secrets and we'll wander beneath through sunlit gardens where roses bloom beneath a shadow of a mountain. Sh be quiet about the secrets you'll learn. Let them whisper to you as you drift off to lovely deep sleep tonight. I hope you enjoy episode two of the diamond as big as the Ritz. Good morning. As he woke, he perceived drowsily that the room had at the same moment become dense with sunlight. The ebony panels of one wall had slid aside on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half open to the day. A large servant in a white uniform stood behind beside his bed. Good evening, muttered John, summoning his brain from wild places. Good morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath, sir? Oh don't get up. I'll put you in if you'll just unbutton your pajamas there. Thank you, sir. John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed. He was amused and delighted. He expected to be lifted like a child by this black gargantua who was tending him, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he felt the bed tilt up slowly on its side. He began to roll, startled at first in the direction of the wall. When he reached the wall, its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards farther down, a fleecey incline. He plumped gently into water, the same temperature as his body. He looked around him. The runway or rollway on which he had arrived had folded gently back into place. He had been projected into another chamber and was sitting in a sunken bath, with his head just above the level of the floor. All about him lining the walls of the room and sides of the bottom of the bath itself was a blue aquarium, and gazing through the crystal surface on which he sat, he could see fish swimming among amber lights and even gliding without curiosity past his outstretched toes, which were separated from them only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead sunlight came down through sea green grass. I suppose, sir, that you'd like hot rose water and soaps soap suds this morning, sir, and perhaps cold salt water to finish. The servant was standing beside him. Yes, agreed John, smiling inanely. As you please. Any idea of ordering this bath according to his own meager standards of living would have been priggish and not a little wicked. The man pressed a button and a warm rain began to fall, apparently from overhead. But really, so John discovered after a moment, from a fountain arrangement nearby. The water turned to a pale rose color, and jets of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature walrus heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment, a dozen little paddle wheels fixed asides adjurned the mixture into a radiant rainbow of pink foam, which enveloped him softly with its delicious lightness, and burst in shining rosy bubbles here and there about him. Shall I turn on movin' pictures machine, sir? suggested the servant, deferentially. There's a good one real comedy in this machine today, or I can put in a serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it. No thanks, answered John. He was enjoying his bath too much to desire any distraction. But distraction came. In a moment he was listening intently to the sound of flutes from just outside, flutes dripping a melody that was like a waterfall, cool and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy piccolo, in play more fragile than the lace of suds that covered and charmed him. After a cold salt water bracer and a cold fresh finish, he stepped out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch covered with the same material he was rubbed with oil, alcohol and spice. Later he sat in a voluptuous chair while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed. Mr Percy is waiting in your sitting room, said the servant, when these operations were finished. My name is Gypsum, Mr Unger, sir. To see Mr Unger every morning. John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living room, where he found breakfast waiting for him, and Percy, gorgeous and white kid knickerbockers smoking in an easy chair. This is a story of the Washington family, as Percy sketched it for John during breakfast. The father of the present mister Washington had been a Virginian, a direct descendant of George Washington and Lord Baltimore. At the close of the Civil War, he was a twenty five year old colonel with a played out plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold. Fitznorman Culpepper Washington, for that was the young colonel's name, decided to present the Virginia estate to his younger brother and go west. He selected two dozen of the most faithful servants who, of course, worshipped him, and bought twenty five tickets to the west, where he intended to take out land and their names and start a sheep and cattle ranch. When he had been in Montana for less than a month, and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding in the hills and after a day without food he began to grow hungry. As he was without rifle, he was forced to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole, for Providence did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate his hunger, it dropped its burden. Sitting down to consider the situation, Fitznorman's eye was caught by a gleam in the grass beside him. In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused with annoying persistence to become food, had made him a present of a large and perfect diamond. Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve hours later all the males among the servants were back by the squirrel hole, digging furiously at the side of the mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone mine, and as only one or two of them had ever seen even a small diamond before, they believed him without question. When the magnitude of his discovery became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary. The mountain was a diamond. It was literally nothing else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full of glittering samples and started on horseback for Saint Paul. There he managed to dispose of half a dozen small stones. When he tried a larger one, a storekeeper fainted, and Fitznorman was arrested as a public disturber. He escaped from jail and caught the train for New York, when he sold a few medium sized diamonds and received in exchange about two hundred thousand dollars in gold. He did not dare to produce any exceptional gems. In fact, he left New York just in time. Tremendous excitement had been created in jewelry circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds as by their appearance in the city from mysterious sources. Wild rumors became current that a diamond mine had been discovered in the Catskills on the Jersey coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square. Excursion trains packed with men carrying picks and shovels began to leave New York hourly, bound for various neighboring El Dorado. But by that time young Fitz Norman was on his way back to Montana. By the end of a fortnight, he had estimated that the diamond in the mountain was approximately equal in quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular computation. However, for it was one solid diamond, and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also if the value should vary with its size and the usual mathematical progression, there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth part of it. And what could anyone do with a diamond that size? It was an amazing predicament. He was in one sense the richest man that ever lived, and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire, there was no telling to what measures the government might resort in order to prevent a panic. In gold as well as in jewels, they might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly. There was no alternative. He must market his mountain in secret. He sent south for his younger brother and put him in charge of his servants following who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he had composed which announced that General Forrest had reorganized the shattered southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle. The servants believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services immediately. Fitznorman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk, and six months after his departure from Montana, he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweler, announcing that he had a diamond for the Tsar. He remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks in constant danger of being murdered, living from lodging to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or four times during the whole fortnight. On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he left, however, the court treasurers had deposited to his credit in American banks the sum of fifteen million dollars under four different aliases. He returned to America in eighteen sixty eight, having been gone a little over two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shawl and a sultan. At that time Fitznorman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of a secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested, with a history of enough fatalities, armors, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire. From eighteen seventy until his death in nineteen hundred, the history of Fitznorman Washington was a long epoch in gold. There were side issues, of course. He evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son, and he was compelled due to a series of unfortunate complications to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor, had several times endangered their safety, but very few other murders stained these happy years of progress and expansion. Just before he died, he changed his policy and with all but a few million dollars of his outside wealth, bought up rare minerals in both, which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world, marked as brickabrac. His son, Graddock Tarleton Washington, followed this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted into the rarest of all elements, radium, so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box. When Fitznorman had been dead three years, his son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact computation. He kept a notebook and cipher in which he set down the approximate quantity of radium in each of the thousand banks he patronized and recorded the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very simple thing. He sealed up the mine. He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of it would support all the Washingtonians yet to be born in unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with all the property holders in the world to utter poverty. This was the family among whom John T. Unger was staying. This was the story he heard in his silver walled living room the morning after his arrival. After breakfast, John found his way out the great marble entrance and looked curiously at the scene before him, the whole valley, from the diamond mountain to the steep granite cliff five miles away still gave off a breath of golden haze, which hovered idly above the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade, contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark blue green. Even as John looked, he saw three fawns in single file patter out from one clump about half mile away and disappear with awkward gay into the black ribbed half light of another. John would not have been surprised to see a goat foot piping his way among the trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph skin and flying yellow hair between the greenest of green leaves. In some such fool hope he disappeared. descended the marble steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds at the bottom, and he set along a walk of white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular direction. He was enjoying himself as much as he was able it is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future. Flowers and gold, girls and stars they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream. John rounded a soft corner where the massed rose bushes filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees. He had never lain upon moss and he wanted to see whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees and a wreath of mignettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came she was younger than John, not more than sixteen Hello I'm Kissimmee She was much more than that to John already he advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near, lest he should tread on her bare toes You haven't met me, said her soft voice. Her blue eyes added Oh but you've missed a great deal You met my sister, Jasmine last night I was sick with lettuce poisoning went on her soft voice, and her eye continued and when I'm sick I'm sweet and when I'm well I'm well You have made an enormous impression on me, said John's eyes. How do you do? said his voice. I hope you're better this morning You darling added his eyes tremendously John observed that they had been walking along the path. On her suggestion they sat down together upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine he was critical about women a single defect a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye was enough to make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection. Are you from the East? she asked with charming interest. No, answered John simply I'm from Hades. Either she had never heard of Hades or she could think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she did not discuss it further. I'm going to East this ball, she said. Do you think I'll like it? I'm going to New York to Miss Bulges It's very strict, but you see over the weekends I'm going to live at home with the family in our New York house, because father heard that the girls had to go walking two by two. Your father wants you to be proud, observed John. We are she answered, her eyes shining with dignity none of us has ever been punished. Father said we never should be once my sister Jasmine was a little girl she pushed him downstairs and he just got up and limped away Mother was well a little startled she said when when she heard that you were from where you are from, you know, she said that when she was a young girl, but then you see she's a Spaniard and old fashioned Do you spend much time out here? asked John, to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism Hercy and Jasmine and I are here every summer. Next summer Jasmine is going to Newport she's coming out in London a year from this fall. She'll be presented at court Do you know? began John hesitantly you're much more sophisticated than I thought you were when I first saw you Oh no I'm not she exclaimed hurriedly oh wouldn't think of being sophisticated. I think that sophisticated young people are terribly common don't you? I'm not at all really if you say I am I'm going to cry. She was so distressed that her lip was trembling. John was impelled to protest. I didn't mean that I only said it to tease you 'cause I wouldn't mind if I were, she persisted, but I'm not I'm very innocent and girlish. I never smoke or drink or read anything except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress very simply in fact I scarcely dress at all. I think sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way. I do too said John heartily Kissman was cheerful again. She smiled at him and a stillborn tear dripped from the corner of one blue eye I like you she whispered intimately. Are you going to spend all your time with Percy while you're here? Or will you be nice to me? Just think I'm absolutely fresh ground. I've never had a boy in love with me in all my life I've never been allowed even to see boys alone, except Percy I came all the way out here into this grove hoping to run into you where the family wouldn't be around Deeply flattered John bowed from the hips as he had been taught at dancing school in Hades We'd better go now, said Kisman sweetly. I have to be with mother at eleven. You haven't asked me to kiss you once I thought boys always did that nowadays. John drew himself up proudly some of them do, he answered but not me. Girls don't do that sort of thing in Hades Side by side they walked back toward the house and that ends episode two tonight we'll leave them there and I'll leave you now quietly and I'll return next time with episode three good night for now