Читать книгу Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby онлайн

“I was having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.”

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen – (said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel) – I was walking along from one place to another. I saw the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses. The largest of the banners belonged to Daisy Fay's house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She was wearing white dresses, and the telephone rang in her house all day long.

When I came opposite her house that morning, she was sitting in her automobile with a lieutenant I had never seen before.

“Hello Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”

She was speaking, and the officer was looking at Daisy while she was speaking. The officer's name was Jay Gatsby and I had not seen 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 began to play in tournaments, so I didn't see Daisy very often. Wild rumors were circulating about her – how she was packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a military man who was going overseas, and so on.

By the next autumn she was happy again, happy as ever. She was engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago. He came with a hundred people and hired a whole floor of the hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner. She was lying on her bed – and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and a letter in the other.

“Gratulate me,” she muttered. “I was never drunk 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.