Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby

Chapter 2

Tom Buchanan had a mistress^[24]. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her – but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped he jumped to his feet.

“We’re getting off!” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence. I saw a garage – Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold^[25] – and I followed Tom inside.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson. “When are you going to sell me that car?”

“Next week.”

Then I saw a woman. She was in the middle thirties^[26], and faintly stout^[27], but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom. Then she spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson and went toward the little office.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the news-stand.”

She nodded and moved away from him.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away^[28].”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. “

“Myrtle’ll^[29] be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment,” said Tom.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon. Some people came – Myrtle’s sister, Catherine, Mr. McKee, a pale feminine man from the flat below, and his wife. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

“Where do you live?” she inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s^[30]. That’s where all his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom.

The answer to this came from Myrtle.

“I made a mistake,” she declared vigorously. “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe^[31].”

Chapter 3

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. In the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce^[32] became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants toiled all day with mops and brushes and hammers, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

When I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited^[33]. People were not invited – they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island^[34] and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform gave me a formal note from his employer – the honor would be entirely Jay Gatsby’s^[35], it said, if I would attend his little party that night.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

I noticed Jordan Baker with two girls in yellow dresses.

“Hello!” they cried together.

“Are you looking for Gatsby?” asked the first girl.

“There’s something funny about him,” said the other girl eagerly. “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

“I don’t think it’s so much THAT^[36],” argued her friend. “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”

“Oh, no,” said the first girl. “I’ll bet he killed a man.”

I tried to find the host. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.

The moon had risen higher. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

The man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”