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 Riviera

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 Étrangers

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 

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 windows

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 

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! 

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,

Latin