«Великий Гэтсби» и другие лучшие произведения Ф.С. Фицджеральда

Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby, and I didn’t lay eyes on 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 had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often.

She went with a slightly older crowd – when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumours were circulating about her – how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more, but only with a few flat-footed, shortsighted young men in town, who couldn’t get into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress – and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of Sauterne[65 - Sauterne – natural sweet wine from the district of Sauterne in France] in one hand and a letter in the other.

�’Gratulate me,’ she muttered. �Never had a drink 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, deares’. She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. �Take ’em downstairs and give ’em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ’em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say: “Daisy’s change’ her mine!”’

She began to cry – she cried and cried.