Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby

One October day in nineteen-seventeen – (said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel) – I was walking along from one place to another. I saw the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses. The largest of the banners belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She was wearing white dresses, and the telephone rang in her house all day long.

When I came opposite her house that morning, she was sitting in her automobile with a lieutenant I had never seen before.

“Hello Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”

She was speaking, and the officer was looking at Daisy while she was speaking. The officer's name was Jay Gatsby and I had not seen him again for over four years – even after I'd met him on Long Island I didn't realize it was the same man.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often. Wild rumors were circulating about her – how she was packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a military man who was going overseas, and so on.

By the next autumn she was happy again, happy as ever. She was engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago. He came with a hundred people and hired a whole floor of the hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner. She was lying on her bed – and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and a letter in the other.

“Gratulate me,” she muttered. “I was never drunk before but oh, how I do enjoy it.”

“What's the matter, Daisy?”

I was scared, I can tell you; I'd never seen a girl like that before.

“Here, dear.” She took a waste-basket and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take it downstairs and give it back to him. And tell them that Daisy has changed her mind. Say 'Daisy has changed her mind!'”

She began to cry – she cried and cried. I rushed out and found the maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She had the letter all the time. She took it into the tub with her and then it came to pieces like snow.

But she didn't say another word. We put ice on her forehead and dressed her and half an hour later when we walked out of the room the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o'clock she married Tom Buchanan.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I'd never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she'd look around uneasily and say “Where's Tom gone?” She liked to sit on the sand with his head in her lap looking at him with delight. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a van on the road one night. The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken – she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then they came back to Chicago. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. Her reputation is absolutely perfect. Perhaps because she doesn't drink. It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue.

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you – do you remember? – if you knew Gatsby. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said “What Gatsby?” and when I described him – I was half asleep – she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she knew. And I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white automobile.”

When Jordan Baker had finished her story we had left the Plaza. We were driving through Central Park.

“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.

“But it wasn't a coincidence at all.”

“Why not?”

“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.”

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger.

Something worried me.

“Why didn't he ask you to arrange a meeting?”

“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”

“Oh!”

“I think he was expecting her to one of his parties, some night,” went on Jordan, “but she never came. Then he began to ask people if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. When I said you were a particular friend of Tom's he wanted to cancel the whole idea. He doesn't know very much about Tom, though he says he's read a Chicago paper for years just to see Daisy's name.”

It was dark now, I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner.

“And Daisy must have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.

“Does she want to see Gatsby?”

“She doesn't know anything about it. Gatsby doesn't want her to know. You'll just invite her to tea.”

Chapter 5

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and everything was blazing with light. Turning a corner I saw that Gatsby's house was lit from roof to cellar.

At first I thought it was another party. But there wasn't a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires. My taxi went away and I saw Gatsby. He was walking toward me across his lawn.

“Your place looks like the world's fair,” I said.

“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my automobile.”

“It's too late.”

“Well, then maybe a swimming pool? I haven't used it all summer.”

“I've got to go to bed.”

“All right.”

He waited, looking at me.

“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I'm going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”

“Oh, that's all right,” he said carelessly. “I don't want to put you to any trouble.”

“What day would suit you?”

“What day would suit YOU?” he corrected me quickly. “I don't want to put you to any trouble, you see.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?” He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:

“I want to get the grass cut,” he said.

We both looked at the grass. I suspected that he meant my grass.

“There's another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

“So maybe later?” I asked.