«Великий Гэтсби» и другие лучшие произведения Ф.С. Фицджеральда

“They just stick around with each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”

“I should think so.”

“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

“It’s on the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs. McKisco. “Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years.

He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age —”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.”

Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas – she gathered that someone was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach.

Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that umbrella and turned toward it – and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.

Noon dominated sea and sky – even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea.

It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.

Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs.

The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.

She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank you.