Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby

I graduated from New Haven[2 - New Haven – имеется в виду Йельский университет (который находится в городе Нью-Хейвен)] in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in the Great War. Then I decided to go East and learn the bond business[3 - bond business – кредитное дело]. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two[4 - in the spring of twenty-two – весной 1922 года].

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together it sounded like a great idea.

He found the house, a cardboard bungalow at eighty a month. I had an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast, and muttered Finnish words to herself over the electric stove.

One morning some man stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him.

I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. The life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read. 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. I rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York. 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. Daisy was my second cousin. Her husband’s name was Tom. I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Tom’s family was enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach[5 - was a matter for reproach – вызывала нарекания].

Why they came East I don’t know. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there, wherever people played polo and were rich together.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all.