The Last Tycoon / Последний магнат. Книга для чтения на английском языке

”

He made me sit down with him on the couch and tell about the quake again.

“You look tired,” I said, cute and motherly.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I’ve got no place to go in the evenings, so I just work.”

“I’ll arrange some evenings for you.”

“I used to play poker with a gang,” he said thoughtfully, “before I was married. But they all drank themselves to death.”

Miss Doolan, his secretary, came in with fresh bad news.

“Robby’ll take care of everything when he comes,” Stahr assured Father.

He turned to me. “Now there’s a man – that Robinson. He was a trouble-shooter – fixed the telephone wires in Minnesota blizzards – nothing stumps him[40 - nothing stumps him – (разг.) для него нет проблем (он все умеет)]. He’ll be here in a minute – you’ll like Robby.”

He said it as if it had been his life-long intention to bring us together, and he had arranged the whole earthquake with just that in mind.

“Yes, you’ll like Robby,” he repeated.

“When do you go back to college?”

“I’ve just come home.”

“You get the whole summer?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go back as soon as I can.”

I was in a mist. It hadn’t failed to cross my mind that he might have some intention about me, but if it was so, it was in an exasperatingly early stage – I was merely “a good property.” And the idea didn’t seem so attractive at that moment – like marrying a doctor. He seldom left the studio before eleven.

“How long,” he asked my father, “before she graduates from college. That’s what I was trying to say.”

And I think I was about to sing out eagerly that I needn’t go back at all, that I was quite educated already – when the totally admirable Robinson came in. He was a bowlegged young redhead, all ready to go.

“This is Robby, Cecilia,” said Stahr. “Come on, Robby.”

So I met Robby. I can’t say it seemed like fate – but it was.

For it was Robby who later told me how Stahr found his love that night.

* * *

Under the moon the back lot[41 - the back lot – (кино) съемочные павильоны] was thirty acres of fairyland – not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire.