Tender is the Night. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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       CHAPTER 4

      The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men—the man with the jockey cap and the tall blonde man, given to sawing waiters in two—left the group and came down toward her.

      “Good morning,” said Dick Diver. He broke down. “Look—sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yesterday? We worried about you.”

      She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed their intrusion.

      “We wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We go in, we take food and drink, so it’s a substantial invitation.”

      He seemed kind and charming—his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know easily that everyone knew who she was but were respecting the completeness of her private life—a courtesy that Rosemary had not met with save from professional people since her success.

      Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed—her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances—it was the cupid’s bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.

      “Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low, almost harsh.

      Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.

      “Not very long,” she answered vaguely. “We’ve been abroad a long time—we landed in Sicily in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recuperating.”

      “Mercy! How did that happen?”

      “Well, it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at embarking upon personal revelations. “One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it was no use—I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject determinedly before they could speak. “Do you like it here—this place?”

      “They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two Divers.

      “Oh, did you?”

      “This is only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained. “We persuaded Gausse to keep on a cook and a garçon and a chasseur—it paid its way and this year it’s doing even better.”

      “But you’re not in the hotel.”

      “We built a house, up at Tarmes.”

      “The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to clip a square of sunlight off Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places, like Deauville, were picked out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans come from tropical climates—that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”

      The young man of Latin aspect had been turning the pages of The New York Herald.

      “Well, what nationality are these people?” he demanded, suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, “‘Registered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey are Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Bonneasse’—I don’t exaggerate—‘Corinna Medonca, Mme. Pasche, Seraphim Tullio, Maria Amalia Roto Mais, Moises Teubel, Mme. Paragoris, Apostle Alexandre, Yolanda Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’ She attracts me most—Geneveva de Momus. Almost worth running up to Vevey to take a look at Geneveva de Momus.”

      He stood up with sudden restlessness, stretching himself with one sharp movement. He was a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but over-spare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance he seemed conventionally handsome—but there was a faint disgust always in his face which marred the full fierce lustre of his brown eyes. Yet one remembered them afterward, when one had forgotten the inability of the mouth to endure boredom and the young forehead with its furrows of fretful and unprofitable pain.

      “We found some fine ones in the news of Americans СКАЧАТЬ