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

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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] 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], 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]. 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] 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] and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence[112] and beer gardens in Unter den Lindenand[113] weddings at the mairie[114], and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

      “General Grant[115] invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.”

      “No, he didn’t – he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine[116], and country deacons bowling and marraines[117] in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia[118]. Why, this was a love battle – there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

      “You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence[119],” said Abe.

      “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently. “Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”

      “I don’t know,” she answered with a grave face. “You know everything.”

      They dropped behind the others. Suddenly a shower of earth gobs and pebbles came down on them and Abe yelled from the next traverse:

      “The war spirit’s getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I’m going to bomb out this trench.” His head popped up over the embankment. “You’re dead – don’t you know the rules? That was a grenade.”

      Rosemary laughed and Dick picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.

      “I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically. “The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken[120] and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it.”

      “I’m romantic too.”

      They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battle-field in a thrilling dream.

      After that they got in their car and started back toward Amiens[121]. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned

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