The Great Gatsby
“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.” He walked around the
room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in
just a minute.”
He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he
would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in
a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted
nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all,
thanks … I’m sorry—
“Did you have a nice ride?”
“Very good roads around here.”
“I suppose the automobiles—”
“Yeah.”
Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom, who had
accepted the introduction as a stranger.
“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”
“Oh, yes,” said Tom, gruffly polite, but obviously not remembering.
“So we did. I remember very well.”
“About two weeks ago.”
“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”
“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.
“That so?”
Tom turned to me.
“You live near here, Nick?”
“Next door.”
“That so?”
Mr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation, but lounged back
haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either—until
unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.
“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she suggested.
“What do you say?”
“Certainly; I’d be delighted to have you.”
“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. “Well—think ought
to be starting home.”
“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself
now, and he wanted to see more of Tom. “Why don’t you—why don’t you
stay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people dropped
in from New York.”
“You come to supper with me,” said the lady enthusiastically. “Both of
you.”
This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.
“Come along,” he said—but to her only.
“I mean it,” she insisted. “I’d love to have you. Lots of room.”
Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn’t see
that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn’t.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.
“Well, you come,” she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.
Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.
“We won’t be late if we start now,” she insisted aloud.
“I haven’t got a horse,” said Gatsby. “I used to ride in the army, but
I’ve never bought a horse. I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse
me for just a minute.”
The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady
began an impassioned conversation aside.
“My God, I believe the man’s coming,” said Tom. “Doesn’t he know she
doesn’t want him?”
“She says she does want him.”
“She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.” He
frowned. “I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be
old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to
suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”
Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted
their horses.
“Come on,” said Mr. Sloane to Tom, “we’re late. We’ve got to go.” And
then to me: “Tell him we couldn’t wait, will you?”
Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod, and they
trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage
just as Gatsby, with hat and light overcoat in hand, came out the
front door.
Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on
the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s
party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of
oppressiveness—it stands out in my memory from Gatsby’s other parties
that summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of
people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-coloured,
many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a
pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had
merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete
in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to
nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was
looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening
to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your
own powers of adjustment.
They arrived at twilight, and, as we strolled out among the sparkling
hundreds, Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.
“These things excite me so,” she whispered. “If you want to kiss me
any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad
to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card.
I’m giving out green—”
“Look around,” suggested Gatsby.
“I’m looking around. I’m having a marvellous—”
“You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.”
Tom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.
“We don’t go around very much,” he said; “in fact, I was just thinking
I don’t know a soul here.”
“Perhaps you know that lady.” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely
human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-plum tree. Tom
and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies
the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.
“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.
“The man bending over her is her director.”
He took them ceremoniously from group to group:
“Mrs. Buchanan … and Mr. Buchanan—” After an instant’s hesitation he
added: “the polo player.”
“Oh no,” objected Tom quickly, “not me.”
But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained “the
polo player” for the rest of the evening.
“I’ve never met so many celebrities,” Daisy exclaimed. “I liked that
man—what was his name?—with the sort of blue nose.”
Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.
“Well, I liked him anyhow.”
“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly,
“I’d rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.”
Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful,
conservative foxtrot—I had never seen him dance before. Then they
sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour,
while at her request I remained watchfully in the garden. “In case
there’s a fire or a flood,” she explained, “or any act of God.”
Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper
together. “Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?” he
said. “A fellow’s getting off some funny stuff.”
“Go ahead,” answered Daisy genially, “and if you want to take down any
addresses here’s my little gold pencil.” … She looked around after a
moment and told me the girl was “common but pretty,” and I knew that
except for the half-hour she’d been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t
having a good time.
We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault—Gatsby had
been called to the phone, and I’d enjoyed these same people only two
weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air
now.
“How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?”
The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my
shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.
“Wha’?”
A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf
with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker’s defence:
“Oh, she’s all right now. When she’s had five or six cocktails she
always starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it
alone.”
“I do leave it alone,” affirmed the accused hollowly.
“We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: ‘There’s somebody
that needs your help, Doc.’ ”
“She’s much obliged, I’m sure,” said another friend, without
gratitude, “but you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in
the pool.”
“Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” mumbled Miss
Baedeker. “They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.”
“Then you ought to leave it alone,” countered Doctor Civet.
“Speak for yourself!” cried Miss Baedeker violently. “Your hand
shakes. I wouldn’t let you operate on me!”
It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with
Daisy and watching the moving-picture director and his Star. They were
still under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except
for a pale, thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he
had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this
proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate
degree and kiss at her cheek.
“I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.”
But the rest offended her—and inarguably because it wasn’t a gesture
but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented
“place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing
village—appalled by its raw vigour that chafed under the old
euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants
along a shortcut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in
the very simplicity she failed to understand.
I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car.
It was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet
of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow
moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow,
an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an
invisible glass.
“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big
bootlegger?”
“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.
“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are
just big bootleggers, you know.”
“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.
He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under
his feet.
“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie
together.”
A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar.
“At least they are more interesting than the people we know,” she said
with an effort.
“You didn’t look so interested.”
“Well, I was.”
Tom laughed and turned to me.
“Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under
a cold shower?”
Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper,
bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and
would never have again. When the melody rose her voice broke up
sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change
tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.
“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said
suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way
in and he’s too polite to object.”
“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I
think I’ll make a point of finding out.”
“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some drugstores, a
lot of drugstores. He built them up himself.”
The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.
“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.
Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps, where
“Three O’Clock in the Morning,” a neat, sad little waltz of that year,
was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of
Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from
her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling
her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?
Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare
and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with
one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would
blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.
I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free,
and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had
run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights
were extinguished in the guestrooms overhead. When he came down the