Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby - страница 18

“We will drive slowly,” he said.

“But the WHEEL'S off!”

He hesitated.

“We will try,” he said.

I turned away and went toward home. I glanced back once. A moon was shining over Gatsby's house.

I began to like New York. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and watch romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives. For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. I liked to walk with her because she was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of curiosity.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever men. She was incurably dishonest. But dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply. Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore everybody returned to Gatsby's house.

“He's a bootlegger[4],” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was second cousin to the devil. Give me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that crystal glass.”

Once I wrote down the names of those who came to Gatsby's house that summer. I can still read the names and they will give you a good impression of those who accepted Gatsby's hospitality.

From East Egg came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck, who always gathered in a corner. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie's wife), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair turned white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once and had a fight with a man named Etty in the garden. From farther side of the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the jail, he was lying drunk on the gravel drive, and Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came, too, and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga's daughters.