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

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all – except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight, and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.

�It’s the funniest thing, old sport,’ he said hilariously. �I can’t – When I try to —’

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity.

Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an over-wound clock.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

�I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.’

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many coloured disarray.

While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

�They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.

�It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’

* * *

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers – but outside Gatsby’s window it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.

�If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,’ said Gatsby.