The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (21 page)

Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laidout street back of the beach. There was no one there yet, so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate.

This house was the pride of the town. Faced with stone as far back as the dining-room windows, it was a house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches: it had the first port-cochere seen in that town.

Yossarian never went there to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with the large, fine, rambling shingled building.

The cottages were mostly rambling, shingled affairs, gabled, dormered, and turreted, with screened porches and wooden walls on the inside and big stone fireplaces. Each cottage was different, yet one seemed much like another. The Aldrich cottage, where the McGhees always stayed, was one of

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.

This palace was distinguished by a feature not very common in the architecture of Roman edifices; that is to say, a medieval tower, square, massive, lofty, and battlemented and ma- chicolated at the summit.

There was always a little grey street leading to the stage-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were, and rows of little houses with chimneys like the funnels of dummy steamers and smoke the same colour as the sky; and a grey stone promenade running hard, naked and straight by the side of the grey-brown or grey-green sea....

Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story.

We lived on the first floor of a three-story brownstone house that stood on a quiet street just off busy Lee Avenue. The brownstone row houses lined both sides of the street, and long, wide, stone stairways led from the sidewalks to the frosted-glass double doors of the entrances.

Judge Tyler’s house was one of the brick ones, with a Mansard roof and patterns in the shingles. There were dormer windows. It was three stories high, with a double-decker veranda, and with white painted stonework around all the windows, which were high and narrow. The whole house looked too high and narrow, and there were a lot of steps up to the front door.

We now come abreast of the gap on the right, and it ends the tedium of the reach upriver. It is a broad window into stands of cypress, their wide fluted bases attached to their reflections in still, dark water.

The coast for the fifty miles west of Bognor was full of pleats and tucks—harbors, channels, inlets, and Southampton Water, and the bays of Spithead.

We were at the edge of the New Forest, and the heather and gorse and its flatness gave it the look of a moor.