【有声英语文学名著】夜色温柔 Book 1（1）

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

BOOK I

Chapter 1

ON the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential¹ 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 deserted² after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows³ cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas⁴ rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers 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 ripples⁵ and rings sent up by sea-plants 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 chilly⁶ water, and much grunting⁷ and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward⁸ 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 winding⁹ road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral¹⁰ from true Provençal France.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated¹¹ railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria 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 veins¹²; her expression was both tranquil¹³ and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eyes 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 high 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 hovered¹⁴ 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 spoke¹⁵ cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact—moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating¹⁶ jaded¹⁷ nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning 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 idiomatic¹⁸ but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda¹⁹ that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped²⁰ down on her hips²¹ 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 Mediterranean²² yielded up its pigments²³, moment by moment, to the brutal²⁴ 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 tune²⁵ of gossip as formalized 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 glistening²⁶ 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 exultant²⁷ cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny²⁸ 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 plodded²⁹ 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 tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively³⁰. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious³¹ 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 four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped³² 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 Oxford³³ drawl. “Yesterday they devoured³⁴ two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe-Juan.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Rosemary.

“They come in for the refuse from the flotte.”

Glazing³⁵ his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced³⁶ off two steps and poured himself another drink.

Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed³⁷ the 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 presumptuous³⁸ to intrude³⁹. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles⁴⁰ and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous⁴¹ 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 inquisitive⁴² dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling⁴³ a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted⁴⁴ wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished⁴⁵ 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 white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic⁴⁶ of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid⁴⁷ expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy⁴⁸ to her and her companions, turned away.

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 red-striped 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 Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of sea-weed 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 gravel⁴⁹ and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque⁵⁰ held in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification⁵¹ had become hilarious⁵², until whatever he said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennae⁵³ 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 modesty⁵⁴ of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list.

The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“You are a ripping swimmer.”

She demurred⁵⁵.

“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 concealed⁵⁶ annoyance⁵⁷ 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 perfectly⁵⁸ marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

They made a superfluous⁵⁹ gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly “good sports” preserved by an imperviousness⁶⁰ to experience and a good digestion⁶¹ 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 darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.”

分享到：