Ночь нежна

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93
          М 87

© КАРО, 2007
ISBN 9785992503296

Фицджеральд Ф. С.

Ф 66
Ночь нежна: Книга для чтения на английском языке — СПб.: КАРО, 2009. — 576 с. — (Серия «Classical Literature»)

ISBN 9785992503296

Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд (1896–1940) — писатель и
сценарист, классик американской литературы.
«Ночь нежна» (1934) — один из наиболее известных романов автора. Начинающая актриса Розмари Хойт знакомится с Диком и Николь Дайвер, которые кажутся ей идеальной
парой, воплощением «американской мечты». Розмари влюбляется в Дика и искренне восхищается Николь, но она даже не
догадывается, какие мрачные тайны скрываются под маской
внешнего благополучия...
Неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала снабжен
постраничными комментариями и словарем.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93

Book One

To Gerald and Sara many fêtes1

Already with thee! tender is the night…
…But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
Ode to a Nightingale2

Book One

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera3,
about half way between Marseilles and the Italian
border, stands a large, proud, rosecolored hotel.
Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it
has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted

ftes French Riviera4

Tender is the Night

 after its English clientele went north in April. Now,
many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas
rotted like water lilies among the massed pines
between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers1 and
Cannes, five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a
beach were one. In the early morning the distant
image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were
cast across the water and lay quavering in the
ripples and rings sent up by seaplants through the
clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to
the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly
water, and much grunting and loud breathing,
floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone,
beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys
shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the
pines. In another hour the horns of motors began
to blow down from the winding road along the low
range of the Maures, which separates the littoral
from true Provençal France.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to
dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence

Hôtel des Étrangers5

Book One

one June morning in 1925 a victoria1 brought a
woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hôtel.
The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that
would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to
her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms
and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the
evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to
where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield,
burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash
blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear,
wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real,
breaking close to the surface from the strong young
pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on
the last edge of childhood — she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.
As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin,
hot 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 — morevictoria 6

Tender is the Night

over, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prizewinning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.
“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll
wire right away for steamer tickets.”
At the hotel the girl made the reservation in
idiomatic but rather flat French, like something
remembered. When they were installed on the
ground floor she walked into the glare of the
French windows1  and out a few steps onto the
stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel.
When she walked she carried herself like a balletdancer, not slumped down on her hips but held
up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light
clipped close her shadow and she retreated — it
was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by
moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.
Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred
with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the
slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of
the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized

French windows7

Book One

as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons
kept house under striped umbrellas, while their
dozen children pursued unintimidated fish
through the shallows or lay naked and glistening
with cocoanut oil out in the sun. As Rosemary
came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her
and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she
took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated
face down for a few yards and finding it shallow
staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance
of the water. When it was about breast high, she
glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights1, his tufted chest thrown
out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her
attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the
man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and
poured himself a glass of something from a bottle
in his hand.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam
a choppy little fourbeat crawl2 out to the raft3. The

tights fourbeat crawlraft 8

Tender is the Night

water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into
the corners of her body. She turned round and
round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned
woman with very white teeth looked down at her,
and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw
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 was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke
English with a slow Oxford drawl1. “Yesterday they
devoured two British sailors from the flotte2  at
Golfe Juan.”
“Heavens!3” exclaimed Rosemary.
“They come in for the refuse from the flotte.”
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only
spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two
steps and poured himself another drink.
Not unpleasantly selfconscious, since there
had been a slight sway of attention toward her
during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a
place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the

with a slow Oxford drawl flotte Heavens! 9

Book One

strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella;
besides there was much visiting and talking back
and forth — the atmosphere of a community upon
which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles
and dead seaweed, sat a group with flesh as white
as her own. They lay under small handparasols
instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less
indigenous to the place. 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 and felt
their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she
could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and
hear the small exhausted wawaa of the expiring
waves. Presendy her ear distinguished individual
voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as “that North guy” had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night
in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a whitehaired woman in full evening dress,
obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a
tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged
orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions,
turned away.

Tender is the Night

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman
lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of
things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing
suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a
ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy
pearls, shone in the sun. 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 redstriped tights; then the woman
Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked
back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long
face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights
and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin1 young man in black tights, both of them
picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand. She
thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had
known of late.
After a while she realized that the man in the
jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance
for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake,
ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension
by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a
burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself,

Latin11

Book One

were too far away to hear, sent out antennae of attention until the only person on the beach not
caught up in it was the young woman with the
string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement
by bending closer over her list.
The man of the monocle and botlle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.
“You are a ripping swimmer.”
She demurred.
“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 concealed 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.”
They made a superfluous gesture of moving
over for her. The woman who had recognized her
was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one

Tender is the Night

of those elderly “good sports” preserved by an
imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.
“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
darn1 much formality on this beach that we didn’t
know whether you’d mind.”

“We thought maybe you were in the plot,” said
Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabbyeyed, pretty
young woman with a disheartening intensity. “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 — practically
the assistant hero.”
“The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”
“My dear, we don’t know,” said Mrs. Abrams,
with a convulsive, stout woman’s chuckle. “We’re
not in it. We’re the gallery2.”
Mr. Dumphry, a towheaded effeminate young
man, remarked: “Mama Abrams is a plot in herself,” and Campion shook his monocle at him, saydarn gallery 13

Book One

ing: “Now, Royal, don’t be too ghastly for words1.”
Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She
did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her
mother’s modest but compact social gift got them
out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But
Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months,
and sometimes the French manners of her early
adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.
Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckleandred man
of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea — now after a
swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and
demanded aggressively:
“Been here long?”
“Only a day.”
“Oh.”
Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly 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 unfold.”

don’t be too ghastly for words14

Tender is the Night

“For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s
sake!”
Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and
breathed audibly:
“He’s nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just
happens I’m not nervous at all.”
He was burning visibly — a grayish flush had
spread over his face, dissolving all his expressions
into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity Rosemary followed.
Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began a stiffarmed batting of the Mediterranean, obviously intended to
suggest a crawl — his breath exhausted he arose
and looked around with an expression of surprise
that he was still in sight of shore.
“I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite
understood how they breathed.” He looked at
Rosemary inquiringly.
“I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you roll your head
over for air.”
“The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall
we go to the raft?”

Book One

The man with the leonine head lay stretched
out upon the raft, which tipped back and forth with
the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached
for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly,
whereupon the man started up and 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, a long upper lip, and enormous deepset
dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side
of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would
reach Mrs. McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into
the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.
Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him.
When he had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely
a fleck of foam behind.
“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.
Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising
violence.
“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to
her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts
had managed to climb on the raft, and having
attained his balance was trying to make some kind

Tender is the Night

of compensatory flourish1, achieving only an extra stagger . “I was just saying that Abe North may
be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”
“Yes,” agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world, and allowed her
few liberties in it.
“Antheil’s2  my man.” Mrs. McKisco turned
challengingly to Rosemary, “Antheil and Joyce3.
I don’t suppose you ever hear much about those
sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote
the first criticism of Ulysses4 that ever appeared
in America.”
“I wish I had a cigarette,” said McKisco calmly. “That’s more important to me just now.”
“He’s got insides5  — don’t you think so, Albert?”
Her voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the
pearls had joined her two children in the water, and

flourishAntheil JoyceUlysses inside17

Book One

now Abe North came up under one of them like a
volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The
child yelled with fear and delight and the woman
watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.
“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.
“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” Her eyes, photographic, did not move from
the woman’s face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.
“Have you been abroad before?”
“Yes — I went to school in Paris.”
“Oh! Well then you probably know that if you
want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to
know some real French families. What do these
people get out of it?” She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. “They just stick around with
each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French
artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”
“I should think so.”
“My husband is finishing his first novel, you
see.”
Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether
her mother had got to sleep in this heat.
“It’s on the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs.
McKisco. “Only instead of taking twentyfour
hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes

Tender is the Night

a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in
contrast with the mechanical age —”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it
to get all around before the book’s published.”
Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she
threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders
and lay down again in the sun. The man with the
jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his
hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier
and closer together and now they were all under a
single assemblage of umbrellas — she gathered
that someone was leaving and that this was a last
drink on the beach. Even the children knew that
excitement was generating under that umbrella
and turned toward it — and it seemed to Rosemary
that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.
Noon dominated sea and sky — even the white
line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage
of what was fresh and cool; a robinbreasted sailing
boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer,
darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the
filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet
away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending

Book One

to be asleep; then she halfopened them and
watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs.
The man tried to edge his way into a sandcolored
cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot
sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.
She awoke drenched with sweat to find the
beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap,
who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay
blinking, he walked nearer and said:
“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not
good to get too burned right away.”
“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her
crimson legs.
“Heavens!”
She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk,
but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a
beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went
into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back
and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve,
stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced
up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary
asked.
“It’s about halfpast one.”
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
“It’s not a bad time,” said Dick Diver. “It’s not
one of the worst times of the day.”

Tender is the Night

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in
the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk
and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of
the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up
to the hotel.

It was almost two when they went into the diningroom. Back and forth over the deserted tables
a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with
the motion of the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when
they came in and brought them a tired version of
the table d’hôte1 luncheon.
“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.
“Who with?”
“First with a whole lot of people who looked
nice. Then with one man.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish
hair.” She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married
though — it’s usually the way2.”

table d’hôte it’s usually the way 21

Book One

Her mother was her best friend and had put
every last possibility into the guiding of her, not
so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but
rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not
recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She
had no personal bitterness or resentments about
life — twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry
officer and one an army doctor, and they both left
something to her that she tried to present intact
to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had
made her hard — by not sparing her own labor
and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in
Rosemary, which at present was directed toward
herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that
while Rosemary was a “simple” child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor
and her own — she had a mature distrust of the
trivial, the facile and the vulgar. However, with
Rosemary’s sudden success in pictures Mrs.
Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually
weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this
somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on something except herself.
“Then you like it here?” she asked.
“It might be fun if we knew those people. There
were some other people, but they weren’t nice.