The Great Gatsby
At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several
hundred feet of canvas and enough coloured lights to make a Christmas
tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with
glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of
harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark
gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and
stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that
most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair,
but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and
cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have
come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from
New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and
salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in
strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is
in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden
outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual
innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic
meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and
now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of
voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute,
spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups
change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the
same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp,
joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph,
glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under
the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail
out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like
Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the
orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a
burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda
Gray’s understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.
I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one
of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not
invited—they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out
to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there
they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they
conducted themselves according to the rules of behaviour associated
with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having
met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that
was its own ticket of admission.
I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s-egg
blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly
formal note from his employer: the honour would be entirely Gatsby’s,
it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen
me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a
peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Jay
Gatsby, in a majestic hand.
Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after
seven, and wandered around rather ill at ease among swirls and eddies
of people I didn’t know—though here and there was a face I had noticed
on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of
young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little
hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous
Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or
insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the
easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few
words in the right key.
As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host, but the two or
three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an
amazed way, and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements,
that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table—the only place
in the garden where a single man could linger without looking
purposeless and alone.
I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when
Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble
steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous
interest down into the garden.
Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone
before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passersby.
“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally
loud across the garden.
“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up.
“I remembered you lived next door to—”
She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me
in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses, who
stopped at the foot of the steps.
“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”
That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week
before.
“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we
met you here about a month ago.”
“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started,
but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to
the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a
caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine, we
descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of
cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a
table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced
to us as Mr. Mumble.
“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl
beside her.
“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an
alert confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for
you, Lucille?”
It was for Lucille, too.
“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always
have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and
he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from
Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”
“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.
“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the
bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two
hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,”
said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with
anybody.”
“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.
“Gatsby. Somebody told me—”
The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.
“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”
A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and
listened eagerly.
“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille sceptically; “It’s
more that he was a German spy during the war.”
One of the men nodded in confirmation.
“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in
Germany,” he assured us positively.
“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in
the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to
her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes
when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”
She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned
and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic
speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those
who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this
world.
The first supper—there would be another one after midnight—was now
being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party, who were
spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were
three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate
given to violent innuendo, and obviously under the impression that
sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a
greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling, this party had
preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function
of representing the staid nobility of the countryside—East Egg
condescending to West Egg and carefully on guard against its
spectroscopic gaiety.
“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and
inappropriate half-hour; “this is much too polite for me.”
We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host: I
had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The
undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.
The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded, but Gatsby was not
there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t
on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and
walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak,
and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.
A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was
sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with
unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he
wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.
“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.
“About what?”
He waved his hand toward the bookshelves.
“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I
ascertained. They’re real.”
“The books?”
He nodded.
“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice
durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages
and—Here! Lemme show you.”
Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and
returned with Volume One of the Stoddard Lectures.
“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed
matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a
triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop,
too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf,
muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable
to collapse.
“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought.
Most people were brought.”
Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully, without answering.
“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud
Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been
drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit
in a library.”
“Has it?”
“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour.
Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re—”
“You told us.”
We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.
There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing
young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples
holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the
corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individually or
relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the
traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had
sung in Italian, and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz, and
between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden,
while happy, vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A
pair of stage twins, who turned out to be the girls in yellow, did a
baby act in costume, and champagne was served in glasses bigger than
finger-bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was