Сборник лучших произведений американской классической литературы. Уровень 4

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 - He was an Oxford man.

 – Он учился в Оксфорде.]. 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 - incurably dishonest – неисправимо бесчестна].

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 - bootlegger – бутлегер (подпольный торговец спиртным во время сухого закона в США)],” 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.