Читать книгу Сборник лучших произведений американской классической литературы. Уровень 4 - Джек Лондон, Френсис Фицджеральд - Страница 10

Most of those reports were a nightmare – grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. But all this seemed remote.

I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.

“Left no address?”

“No.”

“Say when they'd be back?”

“No.”

“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”

“I don't know. Can't say.”

I wanted to get somebody for him[70]. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: “I'll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don't worry. Just trust me and I'll get somebody for you.”

When the phone rang that afternoon I thought this would be Daisy at last. But I heard a strange man's voice. The name was unfamiliar.

“Young Parke's in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up[71].”

“Hello!” I interrupted. “Look here – this isn't Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby's dead.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the wire… then the connection was broken.

On the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It was Gatsby's father.

“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.”

“I didn't know how to reach you. We were close friends.”

“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here.”

“That's true,” I said.

That was all. Daisy hadn't sent a message or a flower. “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on[72].”

Nobody came to Gatsby's house, but they used to go there by the hundreds.

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. Suddenly he saw me and walked back holding out his hand.

“What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”

“Yes. You know what I think of you.”

“You're crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “I don't know what's the matter with you.”

“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”

“I told him the truth,” he said. “He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car.”

I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the future that year by year recedes before us. We try to swim against the current, taken back ceaselessly into the past.