Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby. Френсис Скотт Фицджеральд

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of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

      ‘I don’t think it’s so much that,’ argued Lucille sceptically; ‘it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.’

      One of the men nodded in confirmation.

      ‘I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,’ he assured us positively.

      ‘Oh, no,’ said the first girl, ‘it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.’ As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. ‘You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.’

      She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

      The first supper – there would be another one after midnight – was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside – East Egg condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gaiety.

      ‘Let’s get out,’ whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half-hour; ‘this is much too polite for me.’

      We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

      The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic[46] library, paneled with carved English Oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

      A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

      ‘What do you think?’ he demanded impetuously.

      ‘About what?’

      He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

      ‘About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.’

      ‘The books?’

      He nodded.

      ‘Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and – Here! Lemme show you.’

      Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures[47].

      ‘See!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco[48]. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect? ’

      He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

      ‘Who brought you?’ he demanded. ‘Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.’

      Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.

      ‘I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,’ he continued. ‘Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.’

      ‘Has it?’

      ‘A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re – ’

      ‘You told us. ’

      We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

      There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners – and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and between the numbers people were doing ‘stunts’ all over the garden, while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes[49] on the lawn.

      I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. 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.

      At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

      ‘Your face is familiar,’ he said, politely. ‘Weren’t you in the First Division during the war?’

      ‘Why, yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.’

      ‘I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’

      We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for 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? Just near the shore along the Sound.’

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