Титан

УДК 
372.8
ББК 
81.2 Англ-93
      Д 72

ISBN 978-5-9925-0202-2

Драйзер Т.
Д 72 Титан: Книга для чтения на английском языке. — СПб.: КАРО, 2008. — 576 с.

ISBN 978-5-9925-0202-2

«Титан» — вторая книга «Трилогии желания» известного американского писателя Теодора Драйзера (1871–
1945). Взлеты и падения в деловой сфере преследуют главного героя романа Фрэнка Каупервуда, а пренебрежение 
нормами поведения общества становится еще более ярко 
выраженной чертой его характера.
В книге представлен неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала с сокращениями, снабженный комментариями и словарем.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2008

Chapter I

The New City

W
hen Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from 
the Eastern District Penitentiary in Philadelphia 
he realized that the old life he had lived in that city since 
boyhood was ended. His youth was gone, and with it had 
been lost the great business prospects of his earlier manhood. He must begin again.
It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a tremendous failure — that of Jay Cooke & Co. — 
had placed a second fortune in his hands. This restored 
wealth softened him in some degree. Fate seemed to have 
his personal welfare in charge. He was sick of the stock 
exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would get 
in something else — street-railways, land deals, some of 
the boundless opportunities of the far West. Philadelphia 
was no longer pleasing to him. Though now free and rich, 
he was still a scandal to the pretenders, and the financial 
and social world was not prepared to accept him. He must 
go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so, while his 
quondam friends watched his career from afar. So, thinking of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, 
now only twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off. 
He looked at her quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of feminine beauty.
“By-by, dearie,” he smiled, as the train-bell signaled 
the approaching departure. “You and I will get out of this 

THE TITAN

shortly. Don’t grieve. I’ll be back in two or three weeks, 
or I’ll send for you. I’d take you now, only I don’t know 
how that country is out there. We’ll fix on some place, and 
then you watch me settle this fortune question. We’ll not 
live under a cloud always. I’ll get a divorce, and we’ll 
marry, and things will come right with a bang1. Money 
will do that.”
He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, 
and she clasped his cheeks between her hands.
“Oh, Frank,” she exclaimed, “I’ll miss you so! You’re 
all I have.”
“In two weeks,” he smiled, as the train began to move, 
“I’ll wire or be back. Be good, sweet.”
She followed him with adoring eyes — a fool of love, 
a spoiled child, a family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, 
the type so strong a man would naturally like — she tossed 
her pretty red gold head and waved him a kiss. Then she 
walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy strides — the type 
that men turn to look after.2

“That’s her — that’s that Butler girl,” observed one 
railroad clerk to another. “Gee!3 a man wouldn’t want anything better than that, would he?”
It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy 
invariably pay to health and beauty. On that pivot swings 
the world.

1 things will come right with a bang — (разг.) все наладится, 
все будет хорошо
2 Then she walked away with rich, sinuous, healthy 
strides — the type that men turn to look after. — Она шла широким, уверенным шагом, слегка покачивая бедрами, — походкой, 
на которую заглядываются мужчины.
3 Gee! — (разг.) Вот это да! (возглас, выражающий удивление или восхищение)

THE NEW CITY

Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood 
been farther west than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant as they were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull, staid world of Philadelphia, 
with its sweet refinement in sections, its pretensions to 
American social supremacy, its cool arrogation of traditional leadership in commercial life, its history, conservative wealth, unctuous respectability, and all the tastes and 
avocations which these imply. He had, as he recalled, almost mastered that pretty world and made its sacred precincts his own when the crash came. Practically he had 
been admitted. Now he was an Ishmael1, an ex-convict, 
albeit a millionaire. But wait! The race is to the swift, he 
said to himself over and over. Yes, and the battle is to the 
strong. He would test whether the world would trample 
him under foot or no.
Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a 
rush on the second morning. He had spent two nights in the 
gaudy Pullman2 then provided — a car intended to make up 
for some of the inconveniences of its arrangements by an 
over-elaboration of plush and tortured glass — when the 
first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began to appear. The side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was 
speeding became more and more numerous, the telegraphpoles more and more hung with arms and strung smokythick with wires. In the far distance, cityward, was, here and 
there, a lone working-man’s cottage, the home of some 
adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out 

1 Ishmael — (библ.) сын Авраама и его египетской любов-
ницы Агари, она вместе с сыном была изгнана в пустыню, (зд., 
перен.) отверженный, изгнанник
2 Pullman — (пульмановский) спальный вагон

THE TITAN

in order to reap the small but certain advantage which 
the growth of the city would bring.
The land was flat — as flat as a table — with a waning 
growth of brown grass left over from the previous year, 
and stirring faintly in the morning breeze. Underneath 
were signs of the new green — the New Year’s flag of its 
disposition. For some reason a crystalline atmosphere enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding the 
latter like a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety 
which touched him. Already a devotee of art, ambitious 
for connoisseurship, who had had his joy, training, and 
sorrow out of the collection he had made and lost in 
Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a 
delightful picture in nature.
The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more 
numerous. Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the country — yellow, red, blue, 
green, white. (Chicago, he recalled, already had thirty 
railroads terminating here, as though it were the end of 
the world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite 
new as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already 
smoky — in places grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were, how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically — 
here a flight of steps, a veritable platform before a house, 
there a long stretch of boards laid flat on the mud of the 
prairie itself. What a city! Presently a branch of the filthy, 
arrogant, self-sufficient little Chicago River came into 
view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its black, oily water, 
its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its immense 
black coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.

THE NEW CITY

Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in the making.1 There was something dynamic in 
the very air which appealed to his fancy. How different, 
for some reason, from Philadelphia! That was a stirring 
city, too. He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite 
a world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, 
was better. It was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare 
of morning sunlight pouring between two coal-pockets, 
and because the train had stopped to let a bridge swing 
and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go by — a 
half-dozen in either direction — he saw a group of Irish 
stevedores idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall 
skirted the water. Healthy men they were, in blue or red 
shirt-sleeves, stout straps about their waists, short pipes 
in their mouths, fine, hardy, nutty-brown specimens of 
humanity. Why were they so appealing, he asked himself. This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose 
itself into stirring artistic pictures. Why, it fairly sang! The 
world was young here. Life was doing something new. 
Perhaps he had better not go on to the Northwest at all; 
he would decide that question later.
In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished Chicagoans, and these he would present. He 
wanted to talk to some bankers and grain and commission men. The stock exchange of Chicago interested him, 
for the intricacies of that business he knew backward 
and forward, and some great grain transactions had been 
made here.
The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses 
into a long, shabbily covered series of platforms — sheds 

1  Here was a seething city in the making. — Строящийся 
город бурлил и кипел.

THE TITAN

having only roofs — and amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam, and passengers 
hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal Street 
and hailed a waiting cab — one of a long line of vehicles 
that bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on the 
Grand Pacific as the most important hotel — the one with 
the most social significance — and thither he asked to be 
driven. On the way he studied these streets as in the 
matter of art he would have studied a picture. The little 
yellow, blue, green, white, and brown street-cars which he 
saw trundling here and there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at their throats, touched him. They were flimsy 
affairs, these cars, merely highly varnished kindling-wood 
with bits of polished brass and glass stuck about them, but 
he realized what fortunes they portended if the city grew. 
Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even more 
than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more 
than stock-organization he loved the thought of streetcars and the vast manipulative life it suggested.

A RECONNOITER

Chapter II

A Reconnoiter

T
he city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank Algernon Cowperwood was soon to 
be definitely linked! To whom may the laurels as laureate 
of this Florence of the West yet fall? This singing flame of 
a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, 
this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering 
yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among 
cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic 
force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, 
singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans 
buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, 
Greece! Italy, do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the 
Troy, the Nineveh of a younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see. Here hungry men, 
raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their 
minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.
From New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine 
had come a strange company, earnest, patient, determined, unschooled in even the primer of refinement, hungry for something the significance of which, when they 
had it, they could not even guess, anxious to be called 
great, determined so to be without ever knowing how. 
Here came the dreamy gentleman of the South, robbed of 
his patrimony; the hopeful student of Yale and Harvard 
and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California and 

THE TITAN

the Rockies1, his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here 
was already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech 
confounding him — the Hun2, the Pole, the Swede, the 
German, the Russian — seeking his homely colonies, fearing his neighbor of another race.
Here was the negro, the prostitute, the blackleg, the 
gambler, the romantic adventurer par excellence 3. A city 
with but a handful of the native-born; a city packed to the 
doors with all the riffraff of a thousand towns. Flaring 
were the lights of the bagnio; tinkling the banjos, zithers, 
mandolins of the so-called gin-mill; all the dreams and the 
brutality of the day seemed gathered to rejoice (and rejoice they did) in this new-found wonder of a metropolitan life in the West.
The first prominent Chicagoan whom Cowperwood 
sought out was the president of the Lake City National 
Bank, the largest financial organization in the city, with 
deposits of over fourteen million dollars. It was located 
in Dearborn Street, at Munroe, but a block or two from 
his hotel.
“Find out who that man is,” ordered Mr. Judah 
Addison, the president of the bank, on seeing him enter 
the president’s private waiting-room.
Mr. Addison’s office was so arranged with glass windows that he could, by craning his neck, see all who entered his reception-room before they saw him, and he had 
been struck by Cowperwood’s face and force. Long familiarity with the banking world and with great affairs generally had given a rich finish to the ease and force which 

1 the Rockies — the Rocky Mountains — Скалистые горы
2 Hun — Hungarian — венгр
3 par excellence — (фр.) в высшей степени