The Great Gatsby / Великий Гэтсби. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Фрэнсис Скотт Фицджеральд

to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know. I wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.”

      The door of the coupe opened slowly. The crowd – it was now a crowd – stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale individual stepped out.

      “Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run out of gas?79”

      “Look!”

      Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel – he stared at it for a moment. A pause. Then he remarked in a determined voice:

      “Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?80” At least a dozen men explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined.

      The beeping had reached its culmination and I turned away toward home. I glanced back once. The night was fine as before, but a sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, giving the impression of complete loneliness to the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

      Reading over what I have written so far, I see it seems that the events of three nights were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs81.

      Most of the time I worked. In the early morning I hurried down the streets of lower New York. I knew the other clerks and young bond salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so I broke up with her.

      I began to like New York, the adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives. At the city twilight I felt loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – poor young clerks, wasting the best moments of night and life.

      For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I liked to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and everyone knew her name. Then it was something more.

      I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house party, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down82, and then lied about it – and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had come to my mind that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a scandal that nearly reached the newspapers – a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad position in the semifinal round. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

      Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer in a company where no one would think that it’s possible to break the rules. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and I suppose she had begun doing her tricks when she was very young. So she managed to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard young body.

      It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply – I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workman that our fender flicked a button83 on one man’s coat.

      “You’re a bad driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

      “I am careful.”

      “No, you’re not.”

      “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “They’ll keep out of my way.”

      “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

      “I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”

      Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately changed our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself out of that story back home. I understood that I had to break up with that girl tactfully before I was free.

      Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal goodness, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Exercises

      1. Read the chapter and answer if these statements are true, false or there is no information in the text.

      1. Gatsby’s guests liked spending time on his beach.

      2. Gatsby personally invited all his guests.

      3. Jordan had a yellow dress on.

      4. Jordan lost the last golf tournament.

      5. When one of the guests tore her dress at a Gatsby’s party he sent her a new one, but it was very cheap.

      6. There were only imitations of books in Gatsby’s library.

      7. Nick understood immediately that the man sitting at his table was Gatsby himself.

      8. Nick and Gatsby were in the same division during the War.

      9. Gatsby wanted to speak with Jordan in private about her plans for future.

      10. After the party a car lost one wheel and blocked the driveway.

      11. Jordan Baker was a dishonest person.

      12. Jordan liked fast driving.

      2. Practice the pronunciation of these words.