《了不起的盖茨比》

IV

On a Sunday morning, while church bells tolled along the shore, the world and its straying mistresses returned bleary-eyed to Gatsby’s mansion, where the lawn still glittered with the debris of another night. Between the cocktails and the hothouse roses, the young ladies whispered that he was a bootlegger, that he had killed a man, that he was the nephew of Von Hindenburg and a distant cousin to the devil. None of it could be proved, and none of the partygoers much cared to try.

Nick Carraway, the neighboring observer, later transcribed the names of those who had passed through Gatsby’s house that summer onto an old timetable dated July fifth, nineteen twenty-two. From East Egg came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, Doctor Webster Civet (recently drowned in Maine), the Hornbeams, the Willie Voltaires, a clan of Blackbucks, Clarence Endive in his white knickerbockers, and the reckless Ripley Snell, who was so drunk he let Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s car run over his hand three days before he was carted off to the penitentiary. From West Egg came movie people, the Catlips and the Bembergs, gamblers like Ed Legros and James B. “Rot-Gut” Ferret, and a Mr. Klipspringer, who haunted the place so persistently he had been nicknamed “the boarder.” Benny McClenahan, Nick noted, always arrived with four interchangeable girls whose first names ran to flowers and months, and whose surnames they confessed, if pressed, to be the surnames of great American capitalists.

A morning late in July, Gatsby’s gorgeous cream-colored car lurched up Nick’s drive with a three-noted greeting, the first time Gatsby had called upon him. He invited Nick to lunch, and they set off through West Egg village in a rolling glass conservatory on wheels. Nick had spoken with Gatsby perhaps half a dozen times and had begun to find him disappointingly thin of conversation, a man reduced to the role of proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse. Then, before they had gone a mile, Gatsby began to lose the endings of his elegant sentences and to slap his knee in agitation.

“Look here, old sport, what’s your opinion of me, anyhow?”

Nick offered polite evasions, but Gatsby cut him off. He was the son of wealthy Midwesterners, all dead. He had been educated at Oxford, by family tradition. He came into money. He had lived like a young rajah in Paris and Venice and Rome, collecting rubies and hunting big game. In the war he had been a major, had led a hundred and thirty men in the Argonne Forest, and had won a decoration from Montenegro itself. He produced the medal, and a photograph taken in Trinity Quad that looked authentic enough to make Nick wonder whether the whole improbable tale might not be true. Then Gatsby announced that he had a request to make, and that it concerned a Miss Baker, and that he would rather have Jordan speak of it than speak of it himself.