The Great Gatsby
a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny
drip of the banjoes on the lawn.
I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man
of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the
slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying
myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene
had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and
profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
“Your face is familiar,” he said politely. “Weren’t you in the First
Division during the war?”
“Why yes. I was in the Twenty-eighth Infantry.”
“I was in the Sixteenth until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen
you somewhere before.”
We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France.
Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had just
bought a hydroplane, and was going to try it out in the morning.
“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”
“What time?”
“Any time that suits you best.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked
around and smiled.
“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.
“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an
unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over
there—” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and
this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”
For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.
“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.
“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”
He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one
of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that
you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to
face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on
you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you
just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you
would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had
precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to
convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an
elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate
formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he
introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his
words with care.
Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler
hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him
on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of
us in turn.
“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me.
“Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”
When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan—constrained to assure
her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid
and corpulent person in his middle years.
“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”
“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”
“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”
“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile.
“Well, he told me once he was an Oxford man.”
A dim background started to take shape behind him, but at her next
remark it faded away.
“However, I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”
Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he
killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would
have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from
the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That
was comprehensible. But young men didn’t—at least in my provincial
inexperience I believed they didn’t—drift coolly out of nowhere and
buy a palace on Long Island Sound.
“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject
with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties.
They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra
leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are
going to play for you Mr. Vladmir Tostoff’s latest work, which
attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the
papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial
condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody
laughed.
“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladmir Tostoff’s
Jazz History of the World!’ ”
The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it
began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and
looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin
was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as
though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about
him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him
off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as
the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World”
was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a
puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into
men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their
falls—but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched
Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s
head for one link.
“I beg your pardon.”
Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon, but Mr. Gatsby would
like to speak to you alone.”
“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, madame.”
She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and
followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her
evening-dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a
jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk
upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.
I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and
intriguing sounds had issued from a long, many-windowed room which
overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate, who was now
engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who
implored me to join him, I went inside.
The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was
playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady
from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of
champagne, and during the course of her song she had decided, ineptly,
that everything was very, very sad—she was not only singing, she was
weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with
gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering
soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks—not freely, however, for
when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they
assumed an inky colour, and pursued the rest of their way in slow
black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes
on her face, whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair, and
went off into a deep vinous sleep.
“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a
girl at my elbow.
I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights
with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet
from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was
talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after
attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent
way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks—at intervals
she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed:
“You promised!” into his ear.
The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall
was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly
indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in
slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly.
“The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond
credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives
were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and
Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last
word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into
formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.
Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she
lingered for a moment to shake hands.
“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long
were we in there?”
“Why, about an hour.”
“It was … simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I
wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully
in my face. “Please come and see me … Phone book … Under the name of
Mrs. Sigourney Howard … My aunt …” She was hurrying off as she
talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her
party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I
joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I
wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to
apologize for not having known him in the garden.
“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another
thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity
than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t
forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning, at nine
o’clock.”
Then the butler, behind his shoulder:
“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”
“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there … Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant
significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired
it all the time. “Good night, old sport … Good night.”
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite
over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a
bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side
up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had
left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall
accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting
considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However,
as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant din
from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to
the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in
the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tyre and from the
tyre to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
The fact was infinitely astonishing to him, and I recognized first the
unusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was the late patron of
Gatsby’s library.
“How’d it happen?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.
“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole
matter. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It
happened, and that’s all I know.”