Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby - стр. 12
A man in a long coat had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the automobile to the observers and from the observers to the automobile.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
I recognized the man – I met him in the Gatsby's library.
“How did it happen?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.
“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”
“Don't ask me,” said he. “I know very little about driving – next to nothing. It happened, and that's all I know.”
“Well, if you're a poor driver why did you drive at night?”
“But I wasn't driving,” he explained, “I wasn't even trying.”
“Do you want to commit suicide?”
“You don't understand,” explained he. “I wasn't driving. There's another man in the automobile.”
The door of the automobile slowly opened. The crowd – it was now a crowd – stepped back and when the door had opened wide there was a pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a man appeared.
“What's the matter?” he inquired calmly.
“Look!”
Half a dozen fingers pointed at the wheel.
“It came off,” someone explained.
He nodded.
“At first I didn't notice we had stopped.”
A pause. Then he remarked in a determined voice:
“Could you tell me where is a gas station?”
At least a dozen men explained to him that wheel and automobile were no longer joined.
“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.
Chapter 4
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.