Kitobni o'qish: «Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby», sahifa 3

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table – the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

I noticed Jordan Baker with two girls in yellow dresses.

“Hello!” they cried together.

“Are you looking for Gatsby?” asked the first girl.

“There’s something funny about him,” said the other girl eagerly. “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

“I don’t think it’s so much THAT³⁶,” argued her friend. “It’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”

“Oh, no,” said the first girl. “I’ll bet he killed a man.”

I tried to find the host. Champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls.

The moon had risen higher. I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

The man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”

“Why, yes.”

“Oh! I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

He told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport³⁷?”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

“This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. This man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly – much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across³⁸ four or five times in life. It faced – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on YOU with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. 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 man³⁹. 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 dishonest⁴⁰. 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.