• Пожаловаться

Paul Morand: Tender Shoots

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Paul Morand: Tender Shoots» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. год выпуска: 2011, категория: Классическая проза / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

любовные романы фантастика и фэнтези приключения детективы и триллеры эротика документальные научные юмористические анекдоты о бизнесе проза детские сказки о религиии новинки православные старинные про компьютеры программирование на английском домоводство поэзия

Выбрав категорию по душе Вы сможете найти действительно стоящие книги и насладиться погружением в мир воображения, прочувствовать переживания героев или узнать для себя что-то новое, совершить внутреннее открытие. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:

Paul Morand Tender Shoots

Tender Shoots: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Tender Shoots»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Clarissa, Delphine, and Auroraare the titles of three short stories that Paul Morand composed during the First World War and set in London, a city of constant fascination to him. Stylish, poetic, and highly original, these urbane and witty stories boast a foreword by Marcel Proust.

Paul Morand: другие книги автора


Кто написал Tender Shoots? Узнайте фамилию, как зовут автора книги и список всех его произведений по сериям.

Tender Shoots — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Tender Shoots», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

You do not say:

“What could we do this evening?”

But:

“We’re going to the Alhambra, box six.”

We are your prisoners. Everything draws us back to you. If we are far away, boredom; if we are walking down your street, everything entices us: the large flat button of the door-bell, pleasant to touch, the noise of our footsteps on the marble of the staircase, the parrot’s swear-words, the smell of tracing paper and palette that comes from your boudoir, the cameo on your signet-ring, the mauve veins that encircle your eyes.

None of us has any common bond but you. There is, however, a certain family resemblance between us. We are equally slim and youthful, with bright eyes and red lips. We laugh loudly, knock back our drinks, we never get up before breakfast, we dance farandoles all over the house, but we know how to keep quiet when you play music.

You enjoy bringing us together, paying no heed to staunch friendships, yet you nevertheless detect a different virtue in each one of us and you like him or her because of that — Pamela has mahogany hair, Tom slender wrists, Rafael a pretty face and a talent for playing the banjo; as for me, I go well, you say, with your Chinese drawing room.

Here we are, seated around a table, at Murray’s, for our common pleasure, which is hers. Clarissa dominates us all with her height; she has more sparkle than the women, more self-assurance than the men; the maître d’hôtel naturally goes over to her. We gather around her, happy to be here in this comfortable cellar, in this padded catacomb where pleasure presides. The women in this basement have their nails polished, their faces well painted; you can see their armpits. Couples are dancing, circling around an imaginary axis, wringing out the waltz as if it were a tea towel from which the melody oozes. The men in this basement have their arms in slings, bandaged heads; the Negro music tires them a little, takes them back to the indelible memory of the trench where they fell, of the first glass of water. The waiters, as they serve them, stumble over the crutches that are lying on the floor.

There are others, too, fatter, more florid, drinking Pommery in cider bottles, for it is after ten o’clock — the neutrals. They are Scandinavians, Dutchmen, Americans. They exchange knowing glances and under the tablecloth offer two hundred thousand Mausers which can be delivered straight away by sea off Barcelona, or they take out from their hip pocket samples of all the uniform materials worn by the warring armies. They buy back good-humouredly orders that have been rejected (the Russians will take them for sure), overdue contracts. All the tempests of machine-gun fire that will one day be unleashed on men stem from here. Tom sniggers at this interpretation:

“Very much the latest thing; the very last word,” he says. “The last word of the dying.”

Then, handing one of them a piece of shrapnel recently removed from his head:

“If this may be of use to you again? …” We are five, gathered around a small table on which elbows and plates are touching. Pamela remains wrapped up in her ermine coat, silent, her eyes tired from the beam of the footlights, rouge still on her cheeks, looking wretched. Then she eats her bacon and eggs, lights an amber-tipped cigarette and bursts like a camellia out of her coat, which slips down her arms. Narrow shoulders, what Rafael calls “being built like a soda-water bottle”. She is sad. She says:

“I can’t keep a cook.”

Tom, whose left eardrum was burst at La Bassée, raises his hand to his good ear to hear better and, thinking that she is joking, begins to laugh, which creases his shiny cheeks, chapped by the great Flanders winds.

Rafael orders himself a large supper and eats it phlegmatically. His face, that of an eighteen-year-old (although he was decorated in the Boer War), is perfectly calm; he himself is collected amid all the turmoil as he always has been during his life which was and is the most unstable, the most humdrum imaginable. He is stubbornly extravagant. You feel he has no connection with the rest of the world. Without obligations, without cares, without a home, without a bank account, without anything apart from the jewellery he wears. Nothing about him reveals his past — the nights partying in Montmartre or in Rome, the nights gambling in Deauville, the nights dancing in St Moritz, the nights of love in Poland or in Madeira have skimmed over his well-bred face without leaving a trace.

Neither insolent, nor obsequious, he goes through life, indolent as a pet animal, with, like all old Etonians, those somewhat spineless mannerisms of the dandy who does not enjoy working.

Clarissa keeps him near her like a pretty cat; like a cat he expects and receives much respect for the kindness of which he is the object, mitigating the condition of dependency in which he places himself by a show of affected indifference.

Clarissa watches him eat.

From time to time, in between two dances, Louisa comes to sit down with us. She is really beautiful, but it is a beauty that is indigestible; we derive no pleasure from it. She does not radiate and at close range she fades.

Louisa is about to speak, her eyes move slowly (she must have been brought up near a line on which only slow trains went by); her mouth opens. She says:

“I …”

But Rafael interrupts her. She closes her mouth again, opens her handbag, peers into it as if into the bottom of a well; then: cigarette-case, cigarette-holder, cigarette, cotton thread, lighter; then: powder-puff, rouge; she readjusts her beauty-spot.

She is about to speak; her mouth opens again in the shape of a lozenge; she declares:

“I …”

She is so surprised that she does not continue. She wipes her mascara. She thinks.

“This war is very boring,” she says. “They must get very bored in the trenches. The dentist, too, is very boring. I spent two hours at my dentist’s this morning — and so this evening I’ve got headaches, and how … To think that I’ve waited twenty years to know what toothache’s like. Look, I wanted to have a filling in this one — no this one; the bottom molar … ’

But she only receives polite interest. She lacks confidence when she is with us. She sees Clarissa whose expression seems to be saying:

“Will you never understand?”

She gets up and goes and shows her bottom tooth to the Duc d’Orléans who places his finger on it.

It is four o’clock. We climb up to ground level, leaving the heavy cigar smoke, the smell of perfume and foie gras beneath us. Outside, it is still night, in the dark street the lampposts wreathed in shadows cast down a circle of furtive light like that of a dim lantern; the policeman checks the locks; some dustmen are reading the French communiqué in the glimmer of a lamplight.

I suggest a taxi, but Clarissa prefers to return home on foot.

“Take my arm,” she says. “I so love the night. Why squander half our precious life in slumber? Why, as children, were we sent to bed so early just because it was nighttime — is it not for children? Used you to get up at night? Tell me!”

“Yes, Clarissa. As soon as my mother had kissed me and tucked me up, I would get out of bed. The open window gave onto the balcony and the street below. This balcony was my delight. I can still feel my bare feet on the lead warmed by the sun that used to linger there till evening; I can still recall the fresh taste of the iron railing which I used to lick; I had planted some nasturtiums in tubs into which some real earth bought in the Cours-la-Reine market had been put for me. From the window next to mine, I could see my father in the shade of the studio. He used to draw standing up, with an easy motion of his fine pale hand, beneath the lamp. A grey and violet July dusk was falling over gentle and languid Paris. The horses were pawing the cobbles in the stables, the concierges were smoking at their doorways, in the soft air, the Eiffel Tower did not yet have its necklace of light waves, but sported an emerald on its forehead, menservants were gulping down their liqueurs in tarts’ apartments, and as for the tarts, I used to see them at the end of the street, in muslin dresses, in carriages drawn by rose-coloured horses, making their way up the Champs-Elysées, towards the Arc de Triomphe. The sun was going home to bed at Neuilly; they were dining at the Chalet du Cycle.”

Читать дальше

Шрифт:

Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Tender Shoots»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Tender Shoots» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё не прочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Tender Shoots»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Tender Shoots» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.