Tender is the Night / Ночь нежна. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

road stop, where one June morning in 1925 a train brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel[3]. The mother’s face was rather pretty; her expression was quiet in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her cheeks lit to a lovely flame. Her fine forehead went gently up to where her hair burst into lovelocks and waves of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, and shining. She was almost eighteen, her body was nearly complete, but the dew was still on her[4].

      As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin line the mother said:

      “Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

      “I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

      They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact. They wanted high excitement.

      “We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll call right away for steamer tickets.”

      At the hotel the girl made the reservation in French. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked through the French windows and out onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer. Out there the hot sun was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean melted in the sunshine.

      Indeed, of all the region only the beach was alive with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting sweaters and socks; closer to the sea a dozen persons stayed under umbrellas, while their dozen children chased fish through the shallows or lay naked out in the sun.

      As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea. Feeling the looks of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She swam face down for a few yards and finding it shallow stood on her feet and went forward. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man put the monocle aside and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

      Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam out to the raft. Reaching it, she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

      “I say – they have sharks out behind the raft.” He spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they ate two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan[5].”

      “Heavens![6]” exclaimed Rosemary.

      Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth – the atmosphere of a community. Farther up, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

      Lying so, she first heard their voices. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes[7]

      last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously of the previous evening. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

      Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back. On the neck she was wearing pearls. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to a Latin young man[8] in black tights. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known.

      The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

      “You are a ripping swimmer[9]. Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

      Glancing around with annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

      “Mrs. Abrams – Mrs. McKisco – Mr. McKisco – Mr. Dumphry —

      “We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

      “We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily, “because YOUR skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind[10].”

      Chapter 2

      “We thought maybe you were in the plot[11],” said Mrs. McKisco, a pretty young woman. “We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man, my husband had been particularly nice to, turned out to be a chief character.”

      “The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”

      “My dear, we don’t KNOW,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery.”

      Mr. McKisco, a skinny, freckled man of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea – now he turned to Rosemary and asked:

      “Been here long?”

      “Only a day.”

      “Oh.”

      Evidently feeling that the subject had been changed, he looked in turn at the others.

      “Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. “If you do you can watch the plot develop.”

      “For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s sake!”

      Mrs. McKisco bent toward Mrs. Abrams and said:

      “He’s nervous.”

      “I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”

      He got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity[12] Rosemary followed.

      Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began swimming in the Mediterranean— soon he was short of breath, looked around with an expression of surprise that he could still see the shore.

      “I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He looked at Rosemary.

      “I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you lift your head over for air.”

      “The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”

      The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which moved back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it, the man pulled her on board.

      “I was afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. In a minute he had pushed off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

      Rosemary

3

отель Госса

4

но ещё в утренней росе

5

Гольф-Жуан – курорт на Лазурном берегу.

6

О, боже!

7

Канны – курорт на Лазурном берегу.

8

молодой человек, похожий на итальянца

9

Вы отлично плаваете.

10

не будете ли вы возражать

11

участвуете в заговоре

12

пользуясь случаем