Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog – at least I had him for a few days until he ran away – and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

�How do you get to West Egg village[6 - West Egg village – жилой район Лонг-Айленда]?’ he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.

He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas[7 - Midas – в греко-римской мифологии, глупый и жадный царь Фригии, который хотел, чтобы все, к чему он прикасался, превращалось в золото] and Morgan[8 - Morgan – Джон Пирпонт Морган (1837–1913), выдающийся американский финансист и промышленник, прославившийся своей благотворительной деятельностью, собиранием картин и книг] and Maecenas[9 - Maecenas – Гай Меценат (70 до н.

э.– 8 до н.э.), римский дипломат и государственный деятель, покровитель выдающихся древнеримских поэтов – Вергилия и Горация] knew.