Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald / Chapter XIII

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 into their car and started back to toward Amiens. 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 six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffer to stop.

“There’s that girl – and still with her wreath.”

They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”

“Then if I were you I’d lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.

“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder. She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.

Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap – altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy – one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war, as some railroad stations were: - the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station in London. In the daytime one is deflated by such towns, with their little trolley cars of twenty years ago crossing the street gray cobble-stoned squares in front of the cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs. But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture – the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall enough to release the smoke and chatter and music upward and obligingly the orchestra launched into “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” – they clapped, because the leader looked so pleased with himself. The Tennessee girl forgot her sorrow and enjoyed herself, even began flirtations of tropical eye-rollings and pawings, with Dick and Abe. They teased her gently.

Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Wurtemburgers, Prussian Guards, Chausseurd Alpins, Manchester mill hands and old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris. They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais. Nicole was abstracted, biting her lip restlessly and reading over the guide-books to the battle-field that Dick had brought along – indeed, he had made a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to one of his own parties.

NOTES:

Newfoundland dead – павшие ньюфаундлендцы (жители канадского острова Ньюфаунленд).

Knoxville – Ноксвил, город в американском штате Теннеси.

Amiens – Амьен, город на севере Франции на реке Сомме; в 1918 г. в районе Амьена союзники провели операцию, положившую начало общему наступлению союзных войск в последней кампании первой мировой войны.

the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station – Северный железнодорожный вокзал в Париже; вокзал Ватерлоо в Лондоне.

arguing with a hundred Voilàs – пересыпающие свою речь бессчетными Voilà (фр. – «вот, так»).

Chasseurs Alpins – альпийские стрелки («фр.»)

Etonians – воспитанники Итона, одной из старейших привилегированных мужских школ в Англии.

mortadel sausage – болонская колбаса.

bel paese cheese – сорт итальянского сыра «Бель паезе».

Beaujolais – «Божолэ», сорт сухого красного бургундского вина, производящегося во Франции.

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