© Матвеев С.А.

© Прокофьева О.Н.

© ООО «Издательство, АСТ», 2021

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

Chapter 1

In my younger years my father gave me some advice. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one^[1],” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”

A habit to reserve all judgments has opened up many curious natures to me. In college I was privy to the secret griefs^[2] of wild, unknown men.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform. I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart^[3]. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction – Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn^[4].

There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life^[5], as if he were related to^[6] one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people for three generations. The Carraways^[7] are something of a clan. I graduated from New Haven^[8] in 1915, then I decided to go east and learn the bond business^[9]. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two^[10].

I had an old Dodge^[11] and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast.

I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold.

I lived at West Egg^[12]. My house was between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was Gatsby's mansion.

Across the bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Buchanans^[13]. Daisy^[14] was my second cousin^[15]. Her husband's family was enormously wealthy – even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach^[16]. Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there.

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile. Tom had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth^[17] and a supercilious manner.

It was a body capable of enormous leverage^[18] – a cruel body.

“Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same Senior Society^[19], and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he wanted me to like him.

“I've got a nice place here,” he said. He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We'll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were lying. The younger of the two was a stranger to me. The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise. She murmured that the surname of the other girl was Baker.

My cousin began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth.

“You ought to see the baby,” she said.

“I'd like to.”

“She's asleep. She's three years old. Haven't you ever seen her?”

“Never.”

Tom Buchanan stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I'm a bond man^[20].”

“Who with?”

I told him.

“Never heard of them,” he remarked.

This annoyed me^[21].

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”

“Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me.

At this point Miss Baker said “Absolutely!” It was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. It surprised her as much as it did me.

I looked at Miss Baker, I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender girl, with an erect carriage^[22]. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”

“I don't know a single – ”

“You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”

Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced. We went out.

“Civilization's going to pieces,” said Tom. “We don't look out the white race will be submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved.”

The telephone rang and Tom left. Daisy suddenly threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house, too.

“Tom's got some woman in New York^[23],” said Miss Baker. “She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don't you think?”

Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

“We don't know each other very well, Nick,” said Daisy. “Well, I've had a very bad time, and I'm pretty cynical about everything. I think everything's terrible anyhow. I KNOW. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”

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?”

“Why, yes.”

“Oh! I knew I'd seen you somewhere before.”

He told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport^[37]?”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

“This is an unusual party for me. I haven't even seen the host. This man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I'm Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I'm afraid I'm not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across^[38] four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a servant hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow.

“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan.

“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”

“He's just a man named Gatsby.”

“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”

“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man^[39]. However, I don't believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know,” she insisted, “I just don't think he went there. Anyhow he gives large parties. And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.”

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever men. She was incurably dishonest^[40]. 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^[41],” 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. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”

At nine o'clock, one morning late in July Gatsby's gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door. It was the first time he had called on me though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.

“Good morning, old sport. You're having lunch with me today and I thought we'd ride up together.”

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the form- less grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

“It's pretty, isn't it, old sport.” He jumped off to give me a better view. “Haven't you ever seen it before?”

I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn't reached West Egg village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit.

“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly. “What's your opinion of me, anyhow?”

A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.

“Well, I'm going to tell you something about my life,” he said. “I don't want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear. I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways – and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford”, or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him after all.

“What part of the middle-west?” I inquired.

“San Francisco. My family all died and I came into a good deal of money^[42]. After that I lived in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting, painting a little.”

His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I was promoted to be a major^[43]. Here's a thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days.”

It was a photograph of young men. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger – with a cricket bat in his hand.

Then it was all true.

“I'm going to make a big request of you today,” he said, “so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody.”

The next day I was having dinner with Jordan Baker. Suddenly she said to me, “One October day in nineteen-seventeen – Gatsby met Daisy. They loved each other, but she married Tom Buchanan. Tom was very rich. I know everything, I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed. She had a letter in her hand. I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before. She began to cry – she cried and cried.

The next April Daisy had her little girl. About six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay. He wants to know, if you'll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over^[44].”

The modesty of the demand shook me.

“He's afraid. He's waited so long. He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”

“Does Daisy want to see Gatsby?”

“She's not to know about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You're just supposed to invite her to tea.”