Tender is the night / Ночь нежна. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“No, I wasn’t.”

“All right, then, you weren’t.”

“Why would it make any difference if I had a drink or so?” As his confidence mounted he looked resentfully at Abe.

“What difference does that make?” he repeated.

“If you can’t see it, there’s no use going into it.”

“Don’t you know everybody was drunk all the time during the war?”

“Well, let’s forget it.”

But the episode was not quite over. There were urgent footsteps in the heather behind them and the doctor drew up alongside.

“Pardon, Messieurs,” he panted. “Voulez-vous régler mes honoraires? Naturellement c’est pour soins médicaux seulement. M. Barban n’a qu’un billet de mille et ne peut pas les régler et l’autre a laissé son porte-monnaie chez lui.[96 - (фр.) Простите, господа. Я хотел бы получить причитающийся мне гонорар. Только за медицинскую помощь, естественно. Господин Барбан не смог рассчитаться, так как у него есть только тысячефранковая купюра. А другой господин забыл кошелек дома.]“

“Trust a Frenchman to think of that,” said Abe, and then to the doctor. “Combien?[97 - (фр.) Сколько?]”

“Let me pay this,” said McKisco.

“No, I’ve got it. We were all in about the same danger.”

Abe paid the doctor while McKisco suddenly turned into the bushes and was sick there. Then paler than before he strutted on with Abe toward the car through the now rosy morning.

Campion lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel, while Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her espadrille. She did this persistently until she roused him – the only matter of importance to her now was that in a few hours she would see the person whom she still referred to in her mind as “the Divers” on the beach.

XII

They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose – Dick said no American man had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking example to confront him with. Things looked black for them – not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the only man with repose —”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

“ – but he may be the only sober man with repose.” A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered un-self-consciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched – whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.

A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point[98 - West Point – Вест-Пойнт, американская военная академия; в военных заведениях первый курс обычно посвящается преимущественно строевой подготовке] – that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers – made a bet with Dick of five dollars.

His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again – the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair…

With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.

“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.” Rosemary was quite sure of it and Dick, realizing that he never had a better audience, made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard for all who were not at their table. They had been two days in Paris but actually they were still under the beach umbrella. When, as at the ball of the Corps des Pages[99 - Corps des Pages – Пажеский корпус, привилегированное военное учебное заведение в Париже] the night before, the surroundings seemed formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few people, a sort of selection – the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you keep yourselves?” – and then re-create the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with an ironic coup de grâce[100 - coup de grâce – (фр.) завершающий смертельный удар]. Presently Rosemary seemed to have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to them, rejected them, discarded them.

Their own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all. It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.

Into the dark, smoky restaurant, smelling of the rich raw foods on the buffet, slid Nicole’s sky-blue suit like a stray segment of the weather outside. Seeing from their eyes how beautiful she was, she thanked them with a smile of radiant appreciation. They were all very nice people for a while, very courteous and all that. Then they grew tired of it and they were funny and bitter, and finally they made a lot of plans. They laughed at things that they would not remember clearly afterward – laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles of wine. The trio of women at the table were representative of the enormous flux of American life. Nicole was the granddaughter of a self-made American capitalist and the granddaughter of a Count of the House of Lippe Weissenfeld. Mary North was the daughter of a journey-man paperhanger and a descendant of President Tyler[101 - President Tyler – Джон Тайлер (1790–1862), десятый президент США (1841–1845)]. Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world – they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

So Rosemary found it a pleasant party, that luncheon, nicer in that there were only seven people, about the limit of a good party. Perhaps, too, the fact that she was new to their world acted as a sort of catalytic agent to precipitate out all their old reservations about one another. After the table broke up, a waiter directed Rosemary back into the dark hinterland of all French restaurants, where she looked up a phone number by a dim orange bulb, and called Franco-American Films. Sure, they had a print of “Daddy’s Girl” – it was out for the moment, but they would run it off later in the week for her at 341 Rue des Saintes Anges – ask for Mr. Crowder.

The semi-booth gave on the vestiaire[102 - vestiaire – (фр.) гардероб] and as Rosemary hung up the receiver she heard two low voices not five feet from her on the other side of a row of coats.

“ – So you love me?”

“Oh, do I!”

It was Nicole – Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth – then she heard Dick say:

“I want you terribly – let’s go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary – but the tone did. The vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.

“I want you.”

“I’ll be at the hotel at four.”

Rosemary stood breathless as the voices moved away. She was at first even astonished – she had seen them in their relation to each other as people without personal exigencies – as something cooler. Now a strong current of emotion flowed through her, profound and unidentified. She did not know whether she was attracted or repelled, but only that she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as she went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look in upon, and the passionate gratitude of Nicole’s “Oh, do I!” echoed in her mind. The particular mood of the passage she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was from it her stomach told her it was all right – she had none of the aversion she had felt in the playing of certain love scenes in pictures.

Being far away from it she nevertheless irrevocably participated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much more conscious of the assignation than Nicole herself. She looked at Nicole in a new way, estimating her attractions. Certainly she was the most attractive woman Rosemary had ever met – with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties, and a certain elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now through her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with her attitude about money. Rosemary spent money she had earned – she was here in Europe due to the fact that she had gone in the pool six times that January day with her temperature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°[103 - 99°F = 37,2°C, 103°F = 39,5°C], when her mother stopped it.

With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures[104 - miniatures – (зд.) миниатюрная мебель, предметы интерьера] for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush[105 - burning bush – (зд.) огненного цвета: burning bush – (библ.) неопалимая купина] from Hermes[106 - Hermes – «Гермес», дорогой магазин в Париже] – bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance – but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed tooth-paste in vats and drew mouth-wash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens[107 - Five-and-Ten – (амер., уст.) магазин, где продаются различные товары по цене не более пяти или десяти центов] on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors – these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.

It was almost four. Nicole stood in a shop with a love bird on her shoulder, and had one of her infrequent outbursts of speech.

“Well, what if you hadn’t gone in that pool that day – I sometimes wonder about such things. Just before the war we were in Berlin – I was thirteen, it was just before Mother died. My sister was going to a court ball and she had three of the royal princes on her dance card[108 - dance card – книжечка, где записывалось, с кем девушка танцует каждый из танцев], all arranged by a chamberlain and everything. Half an hour before she was going to start she had a side ache and a high fever. The doctor said it was appendicitis and she ought to be operated on. But Mother had her plans made, so Baby went to the ball and danced till two with an ice pack strapped on under her evening dress. She was operated on at seven o’clock next morning.”

It was good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves. But it was four o’clock and Rosemary kept thinking of Dick waiting for Nicole now at the hotel. She must go there, she must not make him wait for her. She kept thinking, “Why don’t you go?” and then suddenly, “Or let me go if you don’t want to.” But Nicole went to one more place to buy corsages for them both and sent one to Mary North. Only then she seemed to remember and with sudden abstraction she signalled for a taxi.

“Good-by,” said Nicole. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Loads of fun,” said Rosemary. It was more difficult than she thought and her whole self protested as Nicole drove away.

XIII

Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval[109 - Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval – места восточнее Амьена, где во время Первой мировой проводилась крупная наступательная операция англо-французских войск]. Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness.

He went on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse. He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he had not.

“This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary. She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to do – she wanted to talk to her mother.

“There are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe consolingly.

Rosemary waited tensely for Dick to continue.

“See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne[110 - Marne – здесь идет речь о битве на Марне, крупном сражении (5–12 сентября 1914 г.) между англо-французскими и немецкими войсками во время Первой мировой войны] again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince[111 - the Crown Prince – видимо, речь идет о наследнике австрийского престола эрцгерцоге Франце Фердинанде, который был убит 28 июня 1914 г. в Сараево, что послужило поводом к началу Первой мировой войны] and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence[112 - Valence – Валанс, город на юго-востоке Франции] and beer gardens in Unter den Lindenand[113 - Unter den Lindenand – Унтер-ден-Линден, одна из центральных улиц Берлина] weddings at the mairie[114 - mairie – (фр.) мэрия], and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”